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For a very long time, I didn’t ‘do’ anger. In the family I grew up in, the adults were allowed to be angry with me, but as a child I wasn’t allowed to be angry with them. Nothing much changed when I myself became an adult, and mostly I just accepted it as the way it was.

When bad things happen, what do our thoughts do? Self-blame, paranoia, overwhelm, meaning-making, catastrophising? These thought patterns were my loyal companions until well into my thirties.

Real hope isn’t cheap. Real hope is born out of a bloody struggle. Hope has guts. Hope is what you’re left with when you’ve stared down the despair. So what changed? How did I get from hopelessness to hope?

Years ago, when I first started therapy, I was invited to imagine a safe place. I didn’t understand the concept at all. I didn’t have anywhere that I could summon to mind and feel positive about. Bummer.

Self-care is entirely counter-intuitive to survivors of abuse. To me as an abused child it is obvious that I am bad. I am being hurt because I am bad. And I am bad because I hurt. It’s a never-ending cycle of self-evident obviousness.

At the moment of trauma, one of the most traumatising, life-shattering parts of it is that we are entirely alone. We call out in the universe for someone to be there for us, and our call returns to us empty. We’re on our own. That's a tough gig.

I’m not comfortable with the term ‘mental illness’. I know there’s a lot of rhetoric around ‘parity of esteem’ for physical illness and mental illness, and that’s why the term has been pushed to the fore. But for me, mental illness and being traumatised are two different things.

My therapist is retiring next year. I’ve worked with her for nearly five years and I’m not ready to finish therapy yet, so this is a difficult issue for me. I’ve realised that many other people face the same or similar situations, so I thought I’d write about how it’s impacting me and how I’m dealing with it.