Pain changes people. Physical pain. Emotional pain. Verbal pain. Loneliness pain. Separation pain. Pain comes from many places.

My life has been riddled with pain that began when I was five years old. That’s when my older sister died of leukemia. She was seven. I was five. The pain was so deep I learned to put walls up around my heart to protect me. Little did I know, my little INTJ self was developing a coping mechanism that would serve me well throughout my life.

I do not have a lot of childhood memories, but there are two memories forever etched in my mind. The first being I had been sent to an aunt’s house for a few days so my parents could spend time with my sister. She died while I was gone.

The second memory I have of my sister is from her funeral. I remember her lying in her coffin. I had a pale green dress on. She had her Thumbalina doll and I had mine. That’s all I have. My memories are buried deep in the recesses of my heart, locked away.

At the time of her death people didn’t go to grief counseling. I’m not sure it even existed. I was a good child. I faded into the woodwork and no one noticed my grief. I never trusted after that. I kept my innermost thoughts tucked deep inside, inaccessible to the outside world. To this day people must prove they can be trusted before I give them a chance at friendship. And true to my personality, the “door slam” is second nature.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the term “door slam”, it is used by introverts when they have been deeply hurt or betrayed by someone given the deepest of trust. When I’ve reached my breaking point, I turn and walk away. You no longer exist to me. No more chances. You are done. And that is a door slam. I purge toxic people from my life in order to survive.

I experienced the pain of parental abuse from my mother growing up. At the time I didn’t realize it for what it was. I lived in a small community and it wasn’t something you heard about, certainly not as a child so I had no word for it. It wasn’t until I reached adulthood and married an abusive person that I became versed in what abuse was. There was a tug of war over who was going to control me, my mother or my ex, and I disconnected emotionally from both, although it would take another twenty years until I walked away.

It wasn’t strength that made me walk away, it was brokenness. I would describe it in the way that if you cut me open and looked inside, you would find nothing. I was a shell of a person. I was struggling to survive. There wasn’t physical abuse; there was mental, emotional, and verbal abuse. As bad as physical abuse is, the scars heal. It’s the emotional scars, the unseen scars, that haunt you. The abuse left me with PTSD.

One day I will write about the pain of abuse. I’ve shared my journey with some. The turning point in coping came a few years ago when I found out he had done the same thing to another woman. You doubt yourself sometimes, your thoughts, your feelings, your memories. You can be doing something and it sneaks up on you, a memory you pushed down inside, and the doubt creeps back in that maybe you could have done something different. I was in a bad place and I was speaking to a friend, who revealed that a mutual friend had gone through the same thing with him. We talked for a long time. It gave me the validation I needed that there was nothing I could have done to change the outcome and that it wasn’t me. He is a narcissist and you can’t fight a narcissist. You have to walk away.

Strangely enough, it was my face that revealed the answer they needed. From the time I was a child when my dad would correct me, he would say, “Don’t get that look on your face.” I don’t feel my face change but obviously, it does and my face is revealing at times. Ironically, it was the morning of one of my daughter’s weddings and my husband and I were at a friend’s house for pictures. When I walked into the house, the ex made a comment on how I looked. My two friends saw my face and one told me later it was at that time, they knew why I left. When I left him, I dropped out of sight. It has taken a long time to learn to cope with the abuse. I changed jobs because of his harassment. I dropped out of the organizations I belonged to. I disappeared. I was broken. I was empty. I was emotionally distraught. I didn’t tell anyone about the abuse so people didn’t know the whole story, only the story he wanted people to know which was a lie. He had already ruined my reputation and I just didn’t have the energy or mental stability to fight. He alienated my daughters from me and I was struggling to keep my head above the water line.

I have documented a different type of pain in my health journey and will continue to. I will elaborate on other parts of my life. There are many types of pain in the world and some cross over; emotional pain can cause physical pain. When the heart hurts emotionally, it can also hurt physically.

I think I will end this post here and save the rest for another day. Thanks for following, and take care. God bless.