My Childhood Trauma and my Path to Healing
Our stories are important; they inform who we become. Here is the story of how I was traumatized at a very early age and the story of my personal journey through healing the trauma and finding peace.
(The first part of this story took place before I had memory recall. I wrote it down the way it was told to me by various family members, as they remembered it.)
I was born in Budapest, Hungary on November 18th 1954. Hungary was under Russian occupation at the time. The Russians were in Hungary because during World War 2, Germany invaded Hungary and the Russians came in to “save us” from the Germans. But then the Russians never left; they became the new occupiers.
Nobody wanted them there and in October 1956, Hungarian university students staged a revolution and drove the Russian occupants out. There was lots of celebrating until Russia retaliated by sending hoards of tanks and a large army into Budapest. They went on a rampage, killing wantonly. Many horrors occurred during that war that my father later told me about. When the fighting finally stopped, government officials and anyone who opposed the communist party were executed, with bodies dumped into the Danube River. Feeling unsafe, my parents decided to get out of Hungary right away and move to America, but the boarders were closed. However, there were people who took advantage of the situation and became paid guides for those who wanted to get out. I don’t know how, but my parents found out about a guide who was taking emigrants into Austria.
My grandmother lived close to the Austrian border. So we~ my parents, my siblings who were 9, 8 and 5 years old and I, who had just turned 2, took a train to my grandmother’s house. From there, an uncle took us to the place where the refugees were meeting with the guide.
It was November 22. After night fell, we set off on foot for the nine mile journey. I was given a sleeping pill and was carried by my father; everyone else walked. They walked through corn fields and on railroad tracks, moving ever closer to the border, where we had to cross a bridge over a stream to get into Austria. Shortly before we got there, it started sleeting.
Then, right as we got very close to the border, the group saw that there were two Russian tanks stationed by the bridge to intercept anyone trying to leave the country and that’s when I woke up. The sleeve of my coat had crept up exposing my arm to the elements. I awoke from my drugged delirium to find that I was outside in the night with freezing rain falling on me and I started wailing!
I couldn’t stop my frantic bawling. According to my mother, I was crying so hard that there was no way that the Russian soldiers, in their tanks, didn’t hear me. She thought that they felt sorry for us and let us go. But I think that it’s probably more likely that the sound of the ice pellets falling on the metal tanks made such a racket that the soldiers couldn’t hear anything else.
Everyone in our group panicked, certain that the baby was going to get them all killed. My sister remembers that there were two young men who were in possession of a hand gun and they wanted to hit me over the head with it so I’d pass out. The guide intervened and instructed the group to keep moving while we were to stay behind until I settled down. He told us that once we got across the border, we were to keep walking until we got to the first village and saw a light in the church steeple. At the church, they were taking in refugees and we’d be taken care of. My mother sent my brothers along with the rest of the refugees while she, my father, my sister and I stayed behind.
I finally settled down and we made it across the border to safety. Once we were on Austrian soil, my mother sat down on the railroad tracks and started sobbing uncontrollably. She refused to go any further. My father took my sister and me to the church where we were reunited with my brothers and my father went back for my mother.
We made our way to Vienna and my mother arranged for us to get a flight to Iceland and from there to the United States. When we arrived in the U.S. we were taken to Camp Kilmer, an Army base in New Jersey, where we stayed until we were sponsored by a church in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
The church people found us a nice three bedroom house and fully furnished it with everything we needed. There was even a playroom, with a checkerboard linoleum floor, full of toys, Little Golden Books and a rocking horse.
We were safe now, out of harm’s way; but all of us were emotionally damaged. My older brother bit his nails down to nubs. My other brother continually acted out and got into fights. My sister was getting bullied in school. My mother had regular fits of uncontrollable screaming and my father went into rages often. He had been the one I could count on to keep me safe, but with time, I grew afraid of him.
I liked our new house. My father set up his painting studio in the attic where there was a stained glass window that created a colorful pattern on the floor when the sun hit it. To me, it was magical. The backyard had flowers in the summer that were as tall as I was. These were the little things that brought me great joy.
But then, I would be playing peacefully and suddenly, out of nowhere, I’d start yelling, in Hungarian, that the Russians were coming! I’d have to hide, under the bed, in the fireplace, in the closet, whatever hiding place was closest to me and I’d stay there until I calmed down. I didn’t talk to anyone outside of my family; I bit my fingernails, pulled out my hair and worst of all, I had nightmares, night after night, unending.
I was afraid to go to sleep, because when I did, the “bad man” would always come to get me. Two years later, we moved to New Jersey and it was there that, after living with constant nightmares, a miracle occurred. My mother told me about guardian angels. She said that all of us have angels who protect us when we ask for help, and I needed help badly. When I went to bed that night, I visualized my guardian angels flying around the ceiling of my room and I asked them to make the nightmares stop.
I did have a nightmare that night, but I was determined, and the next night I asked the angels for help again, and again visualized them flying around the ceiling of my room. This time, it worked. I slept through the night without disturbing dreams. It was the end of the constant nightmares and I am forever grateful for the help I received from the angelic realm.
But life continued to be challenging for me. I had a hard time with people. Animals have always been easy. They respond to us energetically in accordance with the energy we put out toward them. So animals and I always got along beautifully. But people are complex. They can be manipulative and dishonest and they can also be kind hearted. As a child, I could feel the difference and knew who I could trust and who I couldn’t. There were very few people in my orbit who I felt safe with.
By young adulthood, it became harder for me to be discerning and I got into some compromising situations. Life felt very confusing, like this line from a Neil Young song~ “My life is changing in so many ways. I don’t know who to trust anymore.” I made some bad choices, sometimes being in so much emotional pain that I felt suicidal. But deep down, in my core, I knew that I was here, on Earth, for a reason and I needed to persevere and heal so I could fulfill my destiny. I started reading self-help books, going to workshops and retreats, doing therapy, but none of it seemed to help, until I attended a 5 day workshop called Domain Shift.
By the time I found Domain Shift, I was 32 years old. Here’s what happened. During an intense exercise we did there, I had a memory recall. I found myself back at the boarder between Hungary and Austria on the night we left. And suddenly I had a huge revelation. What I remembered was this. That night, when I started wailing and everyone panicked, their terror was projected right onto and into me. They were exhausted, having walked 9 miles and now, when they were so close to freedom, this damned baby was going to get them all killed. I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt it. All those people were fearing for their lives and their fear was directed toward me. The energy of the group’s terror was so powerful that it penetrating my whole being. I felt MY life being threatened. I was traumatized.
It wasn’t something I figured out intellectually. It was visceral. During this exercise at the retreat, I re-experienced the deep terror I felt that night. As I was reliving that whole experience, my throat hurt so badly that I literally thought I was dying. And I knew in my gut that my father had put his hand over my mouth to silence my cries and the fear in me that needed to be expressed got stuck in my throat. All through childhood, I suffered from sore throats and belly aches~ all stuck energy.
As life progressed, I kept pursuing knowledge and healing. I wanted to stop being in so much emotional pain. I wanted to stop crying so much. I wanted peace. So whenever I felt attracted to a healing modality, I studied it.
Further reading:
What Astrology says about Current Events