An Act of Witnessing: Trauma, Neurodivergence, and Healing

Finding Wholeness in the Fragments

Part I: The Unseen Foundation—Echoes and Shadows

There's a weight I carried long before I understood its name. It felt like echoes in my bones—a kind of matrilineal pain resonating from stories I didn't fully know, hinting at complexities that started even before my own traumatic birth, where I entered the world literally holding onto my own lifeline, already marked by a fight for existence. Maybe it connects, too, to the ghost limb of the twin I absorbed in utero, that primordial loss leaving a quiet sense of 'two-ness', a subtle feeling of incompleteness I couldn't articulate but always felt.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about witnessing. It was while I was listening to Intentional Oversharing by Neely that I decided it was time to partake in my own process of witnessing. For me, telling this story is an act of shedding – letting go of burdens and old narratives I've carried for too long. It’s an attempt to transmute the weight of these experiences into something new—perhaps understanding, perhaps simply release. It's a way to fully witness my own path, in all its complexity and contradictions. And perhaps, just perhaps, my witnessing can resonate with or support someone else navigating their own tangled threads, feeling unseen or misunderstood. It feels crucial to say this upfront: While everything I share is a significant part of my story, deeply informing how I move through the world today, it does not define the entirety of who I am. My story is still being written, by me.

With that understanding, I want to try and map the complex territory I emerged from. Part of that foundational weight undoubtedly came from my mother's history. Adopted, with Indigenous siblings hinting at a heritage lost to us—perhaps connected to the harsh realities of the Sixties Scoop era here in Canada – she was raised in a religious household herself. While the specifics remain fragmented, the felt sense of this matrilineal pain—an inherited grief, the ache of unknown roots, the ancestral weight of displacement or assimilation's shadow—lived in my body, contributing to a foundational sense of searching, of carrying unspoken sorrow.

Within my immediate family, the complexities intensified. My younger brother's arrival when I was six, after a risky birth, brought new dynamics. His life has been incredibly challenging, marked by disability, a lack of adequate support despite my parents' tireless efforts, and later, substance abuse. For me, growing up alongside him meant navigating chaos, becoming an unwilling expert in forecasting emotional weather. The environment often felt wired for crisis, charged with potential disruption. It also meant experiencing the specific trauma of sibling abuse, a violation that left me feeling unsafe in my own home, wrestling with a toxic cocktail of love for the brother I knew, fear of his actions, guilt over my resentment, and the profound confusion of holding his vulnerability alongside his harm. In this turbulent atmosphere, I became the "quiet girl," lost in puzzles, finding refuge in a deep inner life. My own needs often faded into the background noise; learning that being 'low maintenance' was the safest way to exist meant my silence was often mistaken for contentment, leaving me feeling like a secondary character in my own home, bearing silent witness to suffering I couldn't alleviate.

Layered over all of this was the pervasive influence of a puritanical culture, filtered through Catholic school and church. I was shrouded in a shame so deep it felt like part of my skin—shame for existing, shame for having a body, shame for any thought or feeling deemed 'impure.' The air felt thick with unspoken rules and the constant threat of moral scrutiny, of divine judgment. My body was taught to be a source of temptation and sin, not wisdom or joy. And within this suffocating dogma, navigating my burgeoning queer identity felt like harboring a dangerous, potentially damning secret. It was a forbidden selfhood, forcing me to meticulously police my thoughts and feelings, deepening the sense of being fundamentally 'wrong' and profoundly isolated.

And underneath all of that, unrecognized for decades, my brain was simply wired differently. I was living the unnamed reality of AuDHD. Social interactions felt like trying to solve complex equations in real-time. My senses were often overwhelmed – the world too loud, too bright, too demanding. I masked constantly, performing 'normalcy' with an intensity that led to bone-deep exhaustion. This neurological otherness made navigating the family chaos and the rigid religious rules even harder, amplifying the feeling of being fundamentally out-of-sync, perpetually misunderstood, like I’d received the wrong instruction manual for being human. My deep inner life became both a refuge and a point of disconnection from a world I couldn't seem to navigate intuitively.

Part II: The Storms Gather—Compounding Trauma & Systemic Failures

This complex foundation—the inherited echoes, the unsafe family dynamics, the religious shame, the hidden queerness, the unnamed neurodivergence—inevitably shaped how I experienced the world and, unfortunately, left me vulnerable to further harm as I moved into adulthood. The storms gathered.

A significant turning point came in 2016. The news cycle was dominated by the infamous "grab 'em by the pussy" remarks, a stark public display of misogyny. I was with a friend in a hotel joking about how that could never be a reality. Later that night, he sexually assaulted me. The personal violation felt hideously amplified by the public discourse, igniting a desperate need to understand the power dynamics at play. This propelled me towards feminism as a framework, seeking language and analysis, and led me to pursue a Master's degree, hoping academia could offer some clarity or refuge.

But the environments I sought for understanding became sites of further trauma. While working as a Teaching Assistant during my Master's, I was sexually assaulted again, this time by a professor—a devastating violation of trust in a mentor relationship. Compounding this was the institutional betrayal: when I sought support, my supervisor engaged in gaslighting, minimizing the professor's actions, suggesting he "wasn't a bad guy." Being dismissed, disbelieved, and told my reality wasn't real felt like a second assault. Gaslighting chipped away at my sanity, leaving me questioning my own memory, my judgment. My trust in systems meant to help, already fragile, was shattered.

The cumulative weight of these experiences—layered onto the existing complexities of my upbringing, my still-unnamed AuDHD, and the festering shame—began to manifest physically and mentally in debilitating ways. Extreme anxiety became my constant companion. Agoraphobia took hold, my world shrinking until my own front door felt like a cliff edge. The outside world registered as a sensory and social minefield. Masking became less a strategy and more a desperate, exhausting performance required for even basic interactions, taking all my energy just to appear 'okay'. I felt profoundly disconnected from myself and others, trapped in a cycle of fear and isolation. Adding to this perfect storm, my father faced a major health crisis in 2019—a liver transplant and cancer—plunging the family into another layer of intense stress just as I felt I was reaching my own breaking point.

Part III: The Turning Point—Seeking Healing & Revelation

By 2019, amidst my father's health crisis and my own internal collapse, I knew something had to change fundamentally. This period, stretching back perhaps to 2017 with the initial assault and feminist awakening, wasn't just a breaking point; it also marked the beginning of what I can only call an awakening—the start of a profound and ongoing expansion of my consciousness. The crises cracked open my old worldview, pushing me to seek deeper answers beyond the surface.

I made a conscious choice to embark on a dedicated healing journey. It felt less like seeking simple solutions and more like acknowledging the need for a complete overhaul, a therapeutic excavation. Tentatively, hoping to find frameworks that could hold the sheer complexity of my experience, I began exploring tools like Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). IFS started to offer a way to meet the wounded, exiled parts of myself with curiosity. EMDR offered a path to gently process some of the frozen moments of trauma. Feminism continued to provide a vital lens for understanding power and systemic harm. And exploring kink, for me, became a space related to cautiously reclaiming bodily autonomy and exploring power dynamics on my own terms, pushing back against the deep shame instilled by my upbringing.

And then, in 2020, within this crucible of active healing work, came the key I hadn't known I was missing: the AuDHD revelation. The realization landed with the force of an earthquake, shaking the foundations of my entire life narrative. It was the 'Aha!' moment that echoed through decades of confusion. Suddenly, the 'whys' behind my sensory sensitivities, my social struggles, my intense inner world, my exhaustion from masking – they had an answer that wasn't about being flawed or broken, but about being differently wired.

The relief was immense, overwhelming, bringing tears for the child, teen, and young adult who had struggled so much without this crucial understanding. But relief mingled sharply with grief for those lost years, and anger at the systems and professionals who had applied ill-fitting labels like Bipolar or Borderline, pathologizing me instead of recognizing my neurotype. This AuDHD lens didn't just explain things; it re-wrote everything. It was like finding a map for my own existence, the beginning of truly meeting myself. And importantly, this revelation wasn't separate from the awakening process; it was a massive expansion of conscious self-awareness, a critical piece of the larger puzzle I was beginning to comprehend.

It’s important to emphasize that this whole process was, and absolutely still is, one of learning by trial and error. There was no pre-written manual for healing from this specific constellation of experiences, especially while navigating late-diagnosed AuDHD. It meant experimenting—cautiously, sometimes messily—with different strategies, therapeutic tools, communication methods, and boundaries. It involved seeing what actually resonated with and supported my unique nervous system, accepting that some things wouldn't work, learning from setbacks without spiraling into shame, and having the courage to adjust course, again and again.

Part IV: Integration & Active Reclamation—Carving the Path

The AuDHD diagnosis wasn't an end point, but a crucial lens through which the real work of integration could happen, fueling the ongoing expansion of consciousness. Armed with this understanding, the healing work deepened. Knowing about AuDHD informed how I approached trauma processing with EMDR, recognizing how sensory sensitivities might impact triggers, or how masking might have been a trauma response itself. Using IFS, I could now differentiate parts holding trauma from parts reflecting AuDHD traits, parts carrying religious shame, and parts fiercely protecting my queer identity. It allowed for more targeted, compassionate internal work.

A huge part of this integration became getting to intimately know, understand, and even learn to love my nervous system. This wasn't just theoretical; it was about deep, somatic listening. It meant finally recognizing the specific ways my AuDHD wiring showed up, identifying the deep imprints left by trauma, and understanding my body's patterns of hyper-arousal—the anxiety, the panic, the feeling of being perpetually 'on'—and hypo-arousal—the shutdowns, the dissociation, the feeling of checking out. It involved learning about my window of tolerance, often narrower due to these intersections, and discovering what truly helped me regulate – moving beyond just white-knuckling through, towards genuine somatic understanding and care.

Another significant part of this integration involved actively dismantling the layers of internalized shame. Through therapy, feminist understanding, and conscious effort, I began challenging the puritanical dogma and Catholic guilt that had made my body feel like enemy territory. I started the process of unlearning the deep-seated belief that my embodiment was wrong, slowly, tentatively, beginning to embrace it as an integral and valid part of who I am. Reclaiming my body—through somatic work, through exploring consensual experiences like kink, through simply learning to listen to its signals without judgment—became central. It was about cultivating radical self-compassion, defining my own values separate from dogma, and finding authentic belonging in communities that celebrated, rather than condemned, complexity and difference. It was about learning that my self-worth was inherent, not conditional.

This growing sense of self-worth and the non-negotiable right to safety culminated in a painful but necessary decision in 2022. After my brother attacked me and my dog, I made the choice to become estranged. It was an act of radical self-preservation, born from the clarity that emerged through years of healing work. While incredibly difficult, wrestling with the paradox of his own profound struggles and disabilities, choosing estrangement was ultimately about honoring my need for physical and emotional safety above the toxic, ingrained patterns of our relationship. It was a boundary drawn in the sand, upheld with quiet strength despite the grief and complexity involved.

And this awakening, this expansion of consciousness, it keeps going. It wasn't a one-time event. It continues now, in the daily work of navigating the world with this integrated awareness. Carving my path today means consciously choosing how I engage, honoring my AuDHD needs, managing PTSD triggers with learned tools, advocating for myself, and continuing to lean into ongoing learning and self-reflection. It means choosing relationships and environments that align with my hard-won values of authenticity, compassion, and safety. This process of sharing, this act of witnessing, is part of processing not just the deep past but these immediate challenges. It’s part of shedding the weight of these experiences, part of transmuting that pain, and part of finding and building that essential community.

Crucially, underpinning all this difficult excavation and rebuilding was the slow, often challenging, and utterly revolutionary practice of learning to be gentle with myself. After decades steeped in religious shame, internalized criticism for not meeting neurotypical standards, and the harsh self-judgment that often follows trauma, cultivating genuine self-compassion felt like learning a new language. It meant consciously choosing to offer myself kindness instead of critique. It meant allowing myself rest when my AuDHD brain or trauma-taxed body demanded it, acknowledging my limits without judgment, forgiving myself for 'unproductive' days, and offering myself the consistent, gentle understanding I had so rarely received from the world or from myself.

Part V: Witnessing & Moving Forward—The Living Miracle

Looking back, I see a complex tapestry woven with threads of profound, often painful, experiences: the echoes of matrilineal pain and unknown heritage touching the legacy of the Sixties Scoop; the volatile environment of my upbringing, marked by sibling abuse and the challenges of disability and addiction; the suffocating shame of a puritanical religious background clashing with my queer identity; the decades spent masking undiagnosed AuDHD; the violating impacts of sexual assault and institutional betrayal; the confusion of misdiagnosis; the depths of anxiety and agoraphobia. But woven just as strongly through that tapestry are threads of resilience, of seeking, of active healing, of finding frameworks that fit, of awakening consciousness, and of reclaiming agency.

Sharing this story is my act of bearing witness. Bearing witness to the validity of unseen struggles—like AuDHD, like intergenerational trauma, like the insidious effects of shame. Bearing witness to the devastating impact of personal and systemic violence and betrayal. Bearing witness to the messy, non-linear, often grueling reality of healing from complex trauma. Bearing witness to the vital importance of integrating all parts of oneself—the neurodivergence, the queerness, the trauma, the heritage, the strengths, the vulnerabilities. Bearing witness to the possibility of carving a path towards wholeness, even when starting from fragments. And so, carving my path today involves a continued commitment: to listen compassionately to my nervous system, to embrace the imperfect, ongoing process of learning by trial and error, and, perhaps most importantly, to meet myself, in every moment, with unwavering gentleness. That, for me, is a vital part of what being resilient and alive means.

If there's anything I hope resonates from my experience, it's perhaps the importance of trusting your inner knowing, even when the world tries to gaslight or pathologize you. It's about the power of finding the right language, the right frameworks, the right support to finally understand yourself. It's about the non-negotiable necessity of boundaries for survival and thriving. And it's about the profound strength found not in being undamaged, but in embracing the full complexity of your lived reality. This is why finding my people matters so incredibly much now. It's about seeking and co-creating spaces where vulnerability is met with understanding, where neurodivergence isn't merely tolerated but accepted, where queerness is celebrated, where trauma-informed means more than just a buzzword, and where genuine belonging can finally take root outside of neurotypical, corporate, or shaming structures.

These experiences, this history, they absolutely inform me. They've shaped my lens, my empathy, my needs. But they do not define the entirety of who I am. Today, I stand strong and proud not because I am 'fixed' or 'perfect,' but because I survived, because I sought understanding, because I engaged in the deep work of healing, and because I continue, consciously, to carve my own path forward, embracing all the intersecting parts of myself. My story, like my awakening, is still unfolding, still being written, by me.

If you made it all the way through, thank you for taking part in bearing witness.