Meet Jill

I was three years old when my father beat me, and then I could hear my mother’s screams as he beat her upstairs. For decades, I carried the belief that I was a mean person because I hadn’t gotten up to help her. When I went back to that moment, I found a three-year-old in survival mode, frozen with fear. She wasn’t mean. She was doing the only thing a child that age could do. That was the first layer of a traumatic moment that I had to return to many times for different survival responses.

I had to heal my mother’s suicide attempts. Specifically, her shotgun attempt. For years, I carried it as abandonment, as evidence that I wasn’t enough to make her stay. When I went back, I found something different. She wasn’t leaving me. She was trying to escape my father. She was desperate in a way I finally understood as an adult. Her desperation had nothing to do with me.

My entire adult life, I organized around safety and security. I thought it was just the way I was wired. Then I went back to a winter afternoon when I was ten years old. My father had thrown me out of the house without a coat. He stood in the yard chopping wood with an ax while we waited for my mother to pick me up. I was terrified. When I went back as an adult and stepped into that memory, I could finally give that child what she needed. Protection. Presence. The fear that had been running my decisions for forty years began to lose its charge.