Trapped in Relationships: The Cost of Abuse and Neglect
The Night Sea Journey
Stephen Cope described the night sea journey as the painful, often brutal process of confronting the disowned parts of ourselves, the shame, terror, and buried memories we’ve exiled to survive. For Marilyn, a nurse in her thirties, that journey began with an outburst she couldn’t explain. After inviting Michael, a firefighter she trusted, to stay over, she woke up in a blind rage, attacking him when he accidentally brushed against her in his sleep. She screamed, “You bastard!” as if he were someone else entirely. The humiliation afterward was unbearable, but the terror wasn’t new, it had been living in her body for decades, long before her mind could make sense of it.
Terror and Numbness
Marilyn had avoided intimacy for years. When she wasn’t dissociating during dates, floating outside her body like a spectator, she was cutting herself just to feel something. Alcohol was too close to her father’s addiction, so she ran instead, playing tennis until exhaustion numbed the pain. Work in the operating room was the only place she felt in control. When asked about her childhood, she’d shrug: “Must’ve been happy.” But her family portrait told a different story, a caged child surrounded by monstrous figures, one with no eyes, and a grotesque, looming penis. Yeah. Totally happy.
A Torn Map of the World
Children who grow up in abuse don’t learn trust, they learn survival. Marilyn’s inner map was a warped blueprint of danger:
- Men? Predators who took what they wanted.
- Women? Weak, complicit, or indifferent.
- Herself? A “bad seed” who ruined everything she touched.
Early therapy tried to “fix” her thinking with logic, “You were just a child; it wasn’t your fault.” But trauma isn’t stored in rational arguments. It’s in the body, the immune system, the way her muscles locked up at a stranger’s touch. Her nervous system was stuck on danger mode, attacking itself like her immune system did when lupus eroded her vision.
Learning to Remember
Memories didn’t return as stories, they came in fragments. A flash of her childhood bedroom wallpaper, the pattern she’d fixated on during her father’s assaults. A nightmare of choking, a tea towel twisted around her neck.
Trauma doesn’t file neatly in the brain like a memoir; it hijacks the present with sensations, panic rising in her chest, her body thrashing like a fish on land while she brushed her teeth. Healing meant learning to stay present, to breathe through the terror instead of fleeing it.
Hating Your Home
Children can’t escape abusive families; they adapt, even if it means splitting themselves in two. Marilyn’s loyalty to her parents warred with her rage. “It’s like hating your own house,” she said, every room, every object tainted. Her body didn’t feel like hers either. Survivors often cling to their abusers, not out of love, but because terror amplifies the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of pain.
Replaying the Trauma
Nightmares reenacted the abuse: gasping for air, her father’s laughter ringing in her ears. Trauma doesn’t fade, it loops. For Marilyn, healing meant finally confronting what she’d buried: the truth that none of it was her fault. Not the assaults, not her mother’s silence, not the way her body still reacted to touch decades later. The real journey wasn’t just remembering, it was reclaiming safety in a world that had taught her she didn’t deserve it.
Final Thought:
Trauma isn’t a life sentence, but breaking free demands more than time. It requires facing what was exiled, not just the memories, but the grief, the rage, and the stolen sense of self. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget, and healing begins when we stop running.
