Hi, my name is Rachel. This will be the first time I’ve really shared my story in detail, it takes a lot to do. I share things and talk about these subjects because shame can often dissipate once spoken about and survivors don’t deserve to feel shame for the things that happened to them. I hope by sharing my own story others will feel they can share theirs. Surviving the desolation of my childhood and adolescence gifted me many things such as resilience and a deep understanding of people and how they work. Before going into this I’ll add I wrote this in 2020 and many many things have happened to me since then, at some point maybe I’ll add more.

I’m going to start writing from the beginning and see where it takes me.

I was born into a violent household. Both of my parents had serious mental health issues, one an alcoholic, one with numerous other mental illnesses. My parents divorced when I was two and my brother was four. Around that time we were homeless for roughly six months. The place we were staying the living conditions were terrible, there were lots of drug addicts and I kept getting infections, my mum had been pregnant at the time but ended up miscarrying. While there my mum met my stepfather. He had two children from a previous relationship. We moved a couple of times. They went on to have my two younger sisters, between them when I was eight years old I had a baby brother but he died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when he was three weeks old.

I grew up seeing the people I was supposed to rely on and seek comfort from as traumatised children themselves, I remember seeing that so clearly even as a tiny child. I felt so desperately like I wanted to parent them, if I could just do this, be perfect, take on this responsibility for them, maybe there could be a moment of calm? I spent my entire life attempting to love pain away from people.

The day that my brother died we left the house we lived in and never returned there again. We stayed with my grandparents for a fortnight until we found a new place. After his death I started getting bullied at school, beforehand I had been invisible and a loner. Then when I suddenly had all this attention on me some of the other girls didn’t like that. One girl continued to bully me the whole way through the rest of my school life.

At home, what had already been an extremely dysfunctional family was plunged even further into darkness. My mother was grief stricken on top of her illnesses. My stepfather was increasingly violent and did not have the mental capacity to deal with things. Everything that had already been built on a crumbling foundation just went into collapse.

We eventually moved to another house with more room. I was about ten when we moved there. Everything became even worse. There was a clear divide in the family, my brother and I were made to feel that we weren’t welcome there. We couldn’t really “live” in the house. It wasn’t really a family. There was always lots of horrible people in our house, my mum couldn’t cope properly and she just sort of let people stay at our house all the time but they were scary and I hated them being there.

As time went by the family relationships continued to devolve. I started getting mentally abused extremely severely, every single day, unrelentingly. This worsened at around age twelve and went on until I was seventeen. I became the punching bag, after exhaustive research trying to make sense of the things that happened to me I found that some of the stuff I went through is classed as psychological torture. I lived my whole life in fear. I had also been hit, knocked across rooms. I was screamed at. I was so terrified to leave my room, I had to have a lock on my door that locked from the inside and the outside, during the time at that house I had to have my door replaced six times due to
it being kicked in. I became a shell of a person, completely detached from myself. I just felt hollow and empty and numb. I couldn’t feel pain anymore.

I wanted to protect my sisters, I was so scared my youngest sister would die the way my brother had. I became a mother figure for my sisters growing up. I was parentified and carrying everybody’s secrets. I was my mothers confidante. I felt like I had to take care of everyone whilst myself being mentally attacked constantly without reprieve.

I feel its important here to mention that during this entire time, on and off I was also experiencing sexual abuse. I don’t know when it started, it only happened when I saw one particular person. I have a few crystal clear memories that I had repressed that I uncovered when I was nineteen. I have a lot of broken memories, so many. A flash of just before something happened, or just after. The first strange memory which I can’t quite make out is from when I was around four years old. I had always been objectified, I don’t remember a time that that wasn’t a message being programmed in my head. That my only worth was my appearance. That I could do nothing, be nothing.

Through the mental abuse I was told daily I was worthless, a failure, that I would never be anything. Everything I was going through made me incredibly unwell. I was physically ill all the time, I was exhausted, I had severe stomach aches, headaches, I felt nauseous all the time. I could hardly drag myself out of bed and there didn’t seem to ever be an end to any of it. I was sure I’d be dead by seventeen. I first started missing a lot of school when my brother died and I had problems with school all the way through. By fifteen I had started drinking to cope, I was drinking every single day, the doctors gave me Prozac for my depression and I would crack open the capsules and take the powder straight with whatever alcohol I had that day. I took an overdose of sleeping pills at fifteen years old in a suicide attempt. I woke up on the childrens ward the next day because I wasn’t old enough to be on a normal ward. The school was worried it was their fault because of the pressure I was under about my terrible attendance record. Before this for a couple of months they had separated about seven of us with bad attendance to be in a class together to force us to attend more. They would pull us out of lessons and have people come talk to us. Once they had a cop come in and give us a talk and then we had to fill out fake job application forms (because of course none of you losers are going into higher education! – was the message) she told us don’t put anything unrealistic like brain surgeon, so I asked her why not, why can’t we be brain surgeons? She was flustered and annoyed at that question and said whatever. So I wrote my fake job application to be a brain surgeon. The other kids in that class always called me the brain surgeon after that. That’s my favourite memory from school and I always hope those other kids grew up to be okay. We were all suffering.

After my suicide attempt the teachers were a lot nicer to me. They wanted to try to integrate me back in, I turned up drunk on my first day back at school, nobody knew except my two close friends, I was really good at hiding it. The second day I was meant to be back in my mum caught me stealing alcohol at seven am and I just went and hid. The school took that as me not going back so they said they would set me up with distance learning and I had to sit my exams externally. I didn’t know that was going to be my last ever day at school. It still makes me really sad. Despite everything I was
going through, academically I always did extremely well and had good grades, I was in the higher sets, I was especially good at English and the creative subjects, I loved drama. In this country leaving school at fifteen makes things very difficult. It took so many years to let go of the shame I felt around that. I know there was nothing I could’ve done differently, I was barely surviving, I just wanted to die. I was so so ill and carrying so much. I never thought it would matter anyway, I had no plans to live past seventeen. At home I spent most of my teenage years locked in my room, drunk, writing stories and poetry. Painting and drawing. I did get accepted on an art course at a college but I was too ill to take it up.

After I left school I started hanging out with a man, he was a family friend. I think he was around forty, he was transgender and living as a woman at the time but has since gone back to being a man which is why I refer to him here as he. We would go for long walks in the middle of the night together, to the middle of nowhere, just walking around and chatting. He took me out on trips, we went to the beach one night in January and it was freezing, a full moon out, it was so beautiful. We walked many times until the sun came up, once we were in the middle of a field and the grass was all the way up to my thighs, covered in dew and the most amazing sunrise happened right in front of us. We saw glow worms once, we laughed and joked. He helped me with preparing for my maths GCSE and drove me to take the exam. In retrospect I see that this friendship was really weird, he did used to buy me alcohol a lot, but it did afford me some nice memories, and a lot of funny stories. It was always one hundred percent platonic even if it sounds odd.

At the same time as that, on the day I had my distance learning set up, I met a counsellor. This was shortly after my suicide attempt. At first I could see he was a strange man, but we did seem to connect in many ways very quickly. He was extremely well respected, everybody loved him and he was well known in our area. My mum had heard about him and how great he was, she asked if I wanted to meet him, so I said yes, I had nothing to lose. 

I started going to see him for counselling once a week, it didn’t take long for him to develop an uncomfortable obsession with me. He was married with children, I think he was mid thirties. He was the first man that had ever been “nice” to me in that way. As time went by he eventually told me he loved me, that he thought about me all the time. He would stare at me for ages no matter where we were. He seemed to get jealous sometimes, I could see he was volatile. I was looking at this man and thinking he was insane but I was the only person that could see it. Other women fell at his feet, he was extremely charismatic. People knew I spent time with him alone and I ended up being ostracisedall the time by the other women in certain groups. I had his attention and they wanted it themselves. I feel like this is a theme that runs through my whole life. As soon as I first really understood how he was feeling about me I put up walls to protect myself. I hadn’t had the opportunity to be naïve, I had already been and still was being sexually abused I just didn’t know it yet, so I froze him out. I continued to see him because I had nothing else, nobody else. He was so intelligent and he was the only person I knew like that, the only person that cared about the things I had to say. Overall the main feeling I remember was fear. Obsession is romatisiced in the media a lot but when you’re a fifteen year old girl, suicidal, abused, nobody in your corner and an extremely powerful man in an authority position is making it known that you are all he thinks about, its very intimidating. When he left, he made it purposefully so I would feel abandoned, he easily could’ve spared me that. It was a decision he made because he wanted to see me in pain for his ego, he wanted to know it hurt me that he was leaving. He did leave. After two and a half years of this game. It hurt a lot. I spent many years so confused about what happened. It was the same message I had from one of my abusers since birth – this is your fault. 

When I was seventeen, the first time in my life that the universe smiled on me, I met a boy. I threw a house party and my friend brought her friend who brought his friend, his name was Harry. He was sixteen when we met, he walked into my kitchen and we looked at each other and it was just pure electricity. We were crazy about each other from the beginning. I so desperately didn’t want to fall in love, I had already had my heart eviscerated, but it was no use, I did love him. Luckily he loved me too, in a way I hadn’t experienced ever before. I’d had a couple of boyfriends before but I didn’t like them and I’d been pushed into the relationships, I always appealed to boys who were controlling or acted like stalkers. As a bisexual girl I had many same sex experiences but never had a girlfriend.

Harry loved me honestly, unconditionally. He saw me at my absolute worst, my ugliest sides, all that trauma and he still loved me. The sort of love that says I’ll stay even when you’re covered in sick and collapse in my bed, even when you make mistakes, even when you’re triggered and screaming, no matter how many times I have to pick you up in pieces off the floor and put you back together again – I’ll stay.

He had a nightmare of a life too, some parts of his own story echo parts of mine. We both played the same role in our families as the emotionally mature one. It was like we both finally felt understood when we met.

We grew up together and away from it all and made our own path. We met a lot of resistance but knew we were meant to be together. We’ve now been together eleven years. At one point when I was twenty one we ended up going to do a work placement in Canada for two months and there we met the most amazing woman and her family. Meeting her changed the course of my life completely, she had been abused herself, and she spoke openly about it, she had five children and through all the pain she had dealt with her kids loved her so much. I knew that I wanted that. Before I thought I could never have children, I was too sick, I couldn’t do it. Before that for me family had been synonymous with hell, or nightmare. I started to see things in a new light.

We returned home and only a couple months later had moved out into our own little house, it was a beautiful place. I started planning our wedding. The thing is when I finally had that time alone in peace and quiet, a completely safe haven, all this trauma started spilling out. I was trying desperately to make sense of my memories, all the pain I was carrying. Harry worked a lot to pay for our wedding and our bills, I worked on and off when I could. I did some more waitressing, a bit of customer service, I did some voluntary work for a homelessness charity. Between that and wedding planning I was getting more and more ill. I started looking for therapy after one particularly bad incident
including self harm but ended up with a terrible therapist who did more harm than good.

Our Canadian friends had planned a trip to Europe and timed it so they could attend our wedding. They stayed with us for the days before it and after on their trip around the UK they took us with them, we stayed in Edinburgh, Aberystwyth and travelled through Bath. It was such a special time.

When we were home and I could finally stop focusing on the things that had before taken up my time, I started again seeking therapy. This time I found a brilliant therapist, she heard my whole story and helped me so much. I was diagnosed with C-PTSD. Through therapy I started getting my creativity back, I started painting again. I had started seeing her at the end of summer and by the beginning of the new year I had begun changing so much, having felt heard and validated. I had just turned twenty four. A few lucky things happened for me then, I got an email saying I could learn to ice skate for free on this initiative, I don’t know how or why I got that email but I signed up, I
had always wanted to try ice skating since I was little. I did a six week learn to skate course and passed, it made me so happy and I was excited to try lots more things.

Around that same time I ended up getting another email from a website I’d signed up to when I was a teenager and used to do artist modelling. It was about a job in my area that sounded cool so I just put a photo on my account and applied. I didn’t hear anything about that but I randomly got a message asking if I wanted to attend an audition in London. I couldn’t believe it, I just had one photo of myself and no information on my account at all. I checked and verified everything and it was real. I was so nervous, but I was trying to do new things and take risks so I thought I should go for it. I went up to London on the train with my mum and husband. They waited for me and I went into this big place with loads of actors waiting to audition. There were a lot of people and I couldn’t believe or understand why I was there. My turn came and I did a cold read with the director while a producer and another crew member watched. He liked it! He asked about how I’d never acted before and said I’d done a great job for it being my first time. I didn’t go on to get that part but in my head I was so happy, I was thinking to myself “maybe this is something I can do!”

So then I started applying for acting jobs myself, I got cast in a short film as a supporting role, a small theatre production and then another small role in a feature film all in quick succession. Acting gave me so much self confidence and helped me with my self esteem. By the end of that summer I had been asked to do a really cool photoshoot and that was my first return to modelling since I’d been a teenager. I was feeling a lot better inside and Harry and I had been married about a year by then and decided to try for a baby.

I became pregnant and had my son, Josiah, when I was twenty five. Motherhood was the hugest catalyst for change and far deeper healing. I had felt I was ready to have a baby after having had therapy for about a year but parenting a baby as an abuse survivor was at times hard and painful in a way that couldn’t have been predicted. My son has brought so much happiness to my life but the pains of parenting forced me to face many things from my past. Its harder to stand up for yourself when its just for yourself, but when I looked at my baby I thought of all the things I’d been through, what I’d do if any of those things happened to him. How I couldn’t even bare the thought of him being hurt that way. So I started standing up for myself.

The urgency to heal and be better is so strong when there is a little person looking up to you, I want to be a good role model to him and show him no matter what you can be who you want to be. He deserves a mother who is well and secure, I want to give him that.

I continued acting as well after my son was born. I got a lot more work and I did the crash course at the International School of Screen Acting, which was nerve wracking but exciting since it was my first step back into an educational setting since I left school. I’ve even ended up working at Warner Bro’s studios on a set with two Hollywood A listers. Although I feel very lucky that this was the path I was put on, I’ve also experienced some of the bad sides of the industry. I frequently get asked to do sexualised roles, which I don’t mind and have done a bit of, but I turn down more work like that than I take.  

I’m so excited to now be working on my own project. Film has always been a passion of mine and growing up I was always identifying with the messed up characters of indie movies and art movies. I am looking forward to expressing these parts of myself on a set that I am in control of, with a message I really want to put out to the world. I feel like I’m returning to my artistic roots and combining that with the career path I found. I hope that Complex can help others who have suffered trauma the way art and film have helped me over the years.

I’m so grateful to everyone who has helped me along my path, whether personally or professionally. My school friends who are still my best friends to this day. The friends I’ve made along the way on sets and shoots, the directors who’ve cast me in the past. My therapist, my Canadian friend who did so much for me and the people I’ve connected with so far whilst reaching out about C-PTSD. Of course, I’m deeply grateful for my husband and son.

To end this long story, at this point in my life, I have had full apologies from nearly all the people who hurt me when I was a child. I’m working on healing myself, I’ve gone down some strange roads in the name of healing. I’m still very much in the process and frequently making mistakes along the way, as humans are apt to do. I’m a very long way from the person I used to be though, that fills me with pride.

I’m not angry, I don’t wish ill on anyone that hurt me. I do wish things might’ve been different for them when they were children so they hadn’t gone on to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. But I have the power to do that now. I have moments of resentment of course. A sudden rageful feeling when I think of how much easier it may have been for some people.

But mostly I feel love. The only thing I want is for everyone to heal as much as they can now we’re in a different world. In this day and age everyone knows so much more about trauma and the impact our actions have on others. Everyone who hurt me was hurting inside themselves, unheard children in adult bodies screaming for love they so desperately needed in a way they had never experienced. I hope I can share as much unconditional love as I can while still protecting myself.

I hope that if I have a legacy I can leave my son, its love.