Blog Post: My Tattoos, Part 3. Healing From Trauma

PART THREE: What Goes Around Comes Around

Trigger Warning Childhood abuse

So for quite a few years, I had a major P!nk obsession. I discovered (or maybe rediscovered) her music while I was working through some major childhood trauma shit. Although she didn’t necessarily write music that spoke to my exact situation, something very real and strong about her resonated with me Deeply.

It also happened around that time that I got my first short haircut in 20 years.

Then, as I was going through massive changes in my own personal healing journey (dealing with PTSD & DID whilst working through all kinds of childhood shit WHILST raising children of my own) I really just somehow took strength from this woman and her music and just her whole persona of ‘take no shit’.

I first remember noticing her wrist tattoo around this time and the “What Goes Around, Comes Around” really made me take notice.

Honestly, I was probably clinging to that as ‘fact’ to reassure myself that those people in my life who abused me and destroyed a good chunk of who I felt like I could have been… that they would get what was coming to them just on a level of karma. I knew that exposing my own abuse (much less the generations of abuse in my extended family) wasn’t going to change much, if anything and I guess I wanted a bit of a reminder that healing myself even if JUST for my own peace of mind, for the health of my marriage, for the health of my own parenting and breaking the damn cycle.

For me, that is what this tattoo stands for. It is me, making changes. Working through painful, agonizing, awful shit. Wading through the muck of all the bullshit that I had been through. All of the abuse that was so ingrained in my family that it took me years to recognize that it wasn’t even just the traumatic parts that changed me/my life, but there was just an invasive attitude of abuse that we all thought was normal.

Needless to say, those years weren’t easy and caused so much more pain that I then had to work through. My children had to live through those months (years?) of having a mom who wasn’t capable of being there 100%. My husband who stood by me and worked through all of this shit with me, pretty much just him and little old me after being turned away by therapists who just wanted to ‘pray it away’ or who simply didn’t have the knowledge or expertise to deal with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

This little bracelet of words tattooed around my wrist didn’t solve any of it… but still, it was born out of a need to feel like it was true. That some how, in some way, those who abused not only me, but anyone abusing those weaker and smaller than themselves… that those people would get what was coming to them. This was the tiniest act of rebellion towards them, for myself, to remind myself that I was stronger than all of it.

So I guess… this is a tattoo that is very meaningful to me.

I apologize now if this is disjointed and at all hard to understand. It all just poured out of me without thought when I sat down to write about this tattoo. I didn’t expect it and it is still apparently raw and full of all sorts of feelings… so I don’t feel up to editing or making it sound ‘pretty’ or polished.

This is what you get. My truth.

And now I need a break from writing and thinking and purging my past, as it were.

Other posts of mine that you may be interested in:

My Real Life Stories:

My First Tattoo (and other stupid decisions)