Before I Could Say Trauma

Content note: This is a personal reflection that includes childhood illness, body memory and trauma

I was in 7th grade.

My journal was filled with lines like:

I could scream intensely and no one would hear me.

Buried within.

My cries will remain unheard.

My brown-paper-covered schoolbooks were layered with doodles and lyrics.

“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” — Bob Marley

“Hello… hello… hello… is there anybody out there? Nod if you can hear me.” “Hey you—don’t help them to bury the light. Don’t give in without a fight.” — Pink Floyd

And words I held onto without fully understanding why:

“If you can’t fly, then run; if you can’t run, then walk; if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means, keep moving.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

Early that school year, I got "sick".

It began as bone-deep exhaustion.

A sore throat.

Sensitivity to light.

Pain when I walked too far.

Joints aching so badly it was hard to hold a pencil.

I stopped going to school.

Tutors came to the house.

My grandparents brought me lunch every day.

Eventually, I returned

and then left school again in 9th and 10th grade.

The doctors didn’t know what was wrong.

They said I was fine.

One doctor from Philadelphia suggested maybe it was in my head.

Eventually, they named it chronic fatigue syndrome.

My journal from those years was full of dark poetry and stories.

I thought that was just who I was.

I thought the stories were fiction.

Until- just shy of 16-

someone asked if what happened in my stories had happened to me.

I stared blankly and said,

“I thought they were just nightmares.”

I truly believed they were bad dreams.

Grooming is strange like that.

I can’t say exactly when it began.

I can’t say exactly when it ended.

Only fragments. Only guesses.

The worst happened at night.

While I was asleep in my bed.

When I woke in the morning, everything looked normal.

Everyone seemed fine.

Just dreams, I told myself.

Bad ones.

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As an adult, I learned how to function.

Years later, doctors added another word

—fibromyalgia—

to try to explain what my body carried.

They told me I managed it better than anyone they’d seen.

I sat alone in my car and cried.

Managing was the best answer they had?

Occasionally, a doctor would ask

bluntly, clinically

“Any history of trauma?”

I always said no.

I had learned how to forgive.

How to spiritualize.

How to maintain relationships with those who harmed me.

I covered what my body carried with spiritual language-

forgiveness, endurance, gratitude, purpose.

This is what spiritual bypassing looks like.

Outwardly, I managed.

Most people never noticed.

But my body remembered.

Getting out of bed felt like inhabiting a disconnected skeleton.

I felt bruised deeply, everywhere.

I pushed.

Overrode signals.

Kept going.

Until I crashed with

multi-day migraines.

Light sensitivity.

Vomiting.

Movement becoming impossible.

At first, I didn’t even know to call them migraines.

I didn’t know to take medication.

And when I did, I resisted.

I can manage, I told myself.

I didn’t seek professional, trauma-informed help until my 40s.

Not because the pain wasn’t real

but because I had learned to survive without naming it.

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Here’s what I know now:

The body often holds what the mind cannot.

Research now shows clear links between childhood abuse and conditions like migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia; how prolonged trauma reshapes the nervous system, immune response, and pain pathways over time.

But I didn’t need a study to tell me this.

My body knew long before I did.

It held the truth from the beginning.

Today, I have language.

Today, I have a voice.

This is where they meet.

Welcome to Rebecca | Unedited.

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NOTES & SOURCES

1. Heim et al., 2009 — JAMA PsychiatryChildhood trauma has been identified as an important risk factor for the development of chronic fatigue syndrome, with links to long-term dysregulation of stress-response systems.

2. Häuser et al., 2015 — Pain Research & ManagementResearch indicates a higher prevalence of traumatic experiences, including childhood adversity, among people with fibromyalgia, suggesting altered pain processing and nervous-system sensitization.

3. Tietjen et al., 2010 — Neurology (AMPP Study)Epidemiological evidence supports associations between childhood abuse and increased risk, severity, and chronicity of migraine and other headache disorders in adulthood.