Before I was a Sober Autism Mom, I was just a fucked up chick! I dealt with different types of trauma throughout my whole life and it affected me in many ways. So many stories that I could tell and at a pretty young age, I started thinking about writing them down. I often thought that people would be shocked by some of these stories coming from a small town girl.

I know now that some would be surprised but many would relate, and that others would have stories far worse than mine. Lately, I’ve felt like it might be time to share some of these stories. They contributed to who I am today and I started this page to tell my personal stories so, here we go.

At some point in my youth I had developed a stone faced stance that ended up using as a coping mechanism quite often. I have some ideas as to where it started to come from but I can’t say for sure. What I can say for sure is that I used it constantly when I got to the age where I started dating.

It’s so sad when I look back at how young I was. At 14/15 years old, I had become so used to boyfriends screaming in my face that they could be inches away from me, spitting as they screamed, and I could hold my composure, stone faced without the slightest twitch.

I wish I could say that things got better but it took a lot of years to break out of that toxic cycle. I experienced this same thing from one relationship to the next, but my protective armor that I had built came crumbling down one unexpected day.

I had broken up with my boyfriend not too long before, but he wanted to talk. I agreed to go for a walk and chat with him. It was an uncomfortable conversation but very calm. He was asking about the guy who I was interested in and I remember we both kind of looked at the ground in front of us as we spoke. He asked if I had kissed this new guy. I told him that I had, and then the sudden blow to the back of my head almost knocked me to the ground.

I caught myself before I could fall and caught a glimpse of him running across the road as I found my balance again. It was such an unbelievable shock to my system because it seemed to come out of nowhere. No screaming or tension beforehand…just a punch from behind that there was no way to see coming before feeling the impact.

I’m sure you can imagine that an incident like that would have a negative impact on a girl. I was 15 at the time and I wasn’t hearing much about others my age getting smacked around, so it ended up being an incident that caused me a lot of pain and confusion and I dealt with it alone.

The impact that this moment had on me would soon become very obvious when the next toxic relationship started and I once again had someone screaming in my face. My usual stone faced armor would go up, no doubt because this was this was how I was instinctively programmed by this point…..but I quickly realized that something had changed. There was now a chink in that armor and I was only able to keep my composure for so long until I was overcome with this overwhelming fear that I was about to get hit.

I eventually would start to cry and the more they screamed, the more anxious I got. I would later explain why I had freaked out during these incidents but them knowing how I was feeling didn’t help at all. More occurrences happened and I got more freaked out every time. I never understood why they couldn’t just stop. Instead they would scream at me more, treating me like I was being unreasonable. For some reason, I just couldn’t find any comfort in them yelling, “ I’m not going to fucking hit you!” as I was curled up in a ball on the floor while they punched the walls or whatever was in front of them.

Every new incident just made me more anxious though I had wished I could build that armor back up. The intense fear didn’t stop until I stopped experiencing these things and it unfortunately took me a long time to break out of that cycle.

Is this something that still affects me now? No, not so much. I feel very sad for that girl that stayed in such toxic situations but I know that these are things that I would never tolerate now. Could I keep my composure if it did happen once again? I think I would be good for a bit, but then they’d have to deal with the wrath that would come from me in return. I’m guessing it wouldn’t be pretty!