2023 was a year of extraordinary loss for me. By the end of the year, I had lost my Mom, my romantic partner, my job/academic career, and a choir community that had been home to me for 10 years. To say that 2023 was completely life altering is not an overstatement.

2023 was also a year of extraordinary liberation. I left my academic career for good. I learned to give voice to what wasn’t working for me. And I healed my relationship with my mom, something that had haunted me and had a dampening effect on my life for as long as I’ve been alive. 

In mid-January last year, my sweetheart and I were in a bad car accident en route to a show in Colorado Springs. We walked away totally unscathed, which seemed quite miraculous given the sad state of the car, so initially the accident really reaffirmed my self-confidence and my trust in the world. Look how protected we were!

However, the nature of the accident—hitting black ice and losing control of the car, getting blindsided from behind—awoke my childhood trauma from growing up with a borderline mom. Such a familiar feeling: Everything was great, but now everything feels scary. It reactivated the hypervigilance from knowing that any situation could turn dangerous at any time without warning so always needing to be on guard.  

This feeling was reinforced in me a week later when I was attending a community meeting for the program that I teach for at University of Colorado. During the meeting I learned that the program was on administrative pause for the year, as the university decided its fate. Nobody had informed me of this, so I learned during a public meeting that a major source of my livelihood, and identity, had now disappeared. Blindside.

It was as though an alarm went off inside me. Some part of me knew that this would be the year that my mom would pass away, so dealing with the impact of growing up with her rose to the top of my priority list and my entire 2023 ended up being devoted to full time trauma healing.

Growing Up with Mom

My attachment wounds from my mom are twofold: intrusion and abandonment. When my sweetheart first met my mom—early on during Covid—my mom was bedbound from Parkinson’s and my sweetie marveled at the psychic control she was able to exert over the whole house even in her weakened state (even exerting pressure in people’s psyches when they were away from the house). In thinking about the impact my mom had on me, it has been very illuminating watching my mom’s caregiver heal after my mom’s passing. Months later, Claudia still rushes while in the bathroom or out on errands, and still nervously continuously checks her phone, in anticipation of upset from my mom. And this is a grown adult who only knew my mom for 40 hours a week for 5 years so it gave me great compassion for my kid self being raised in that stressful environment.

There was no having your own experience with my mom. My grandma told me that when I was a baby, if I was on the floor playing by myself, my mom would get jealous and come interrupt me to monopolize my attention. Growing up, if I was on the phone, my mom would just come stand in front of me until I got off the phone. She would regularly stand in the kitchen and scream my name—it didn’t matter whether I was in the bathroom, asleep, or even in the house! When I would run to see what she needed, body surging with panic and adrenaline, she would quietly ask me to get her a pan from a cabinet 2 feet away from her. Loyalty tested, readiness tested.   

Once having your attention, however, proving you were on call for her, then my mom would ignore you, the abandonment side of the cycle. My mom’s inability/unwillingness to face her childhood trauma meant she wasn’t able to actually be present with someone else very often. When she was, it was so delightful, the intermittent reinforcement kept you hooked, working hard to please to try to get that mom to show up again.

Her inner pain, and trying to keep it at bay, was very preoccupying (and managing it required a lot of frantic control) so being around her often felt quite lonely, stressful, unsafe, and unpredictable. Once I bought her a get to know your Mom book for Mother’s Day and sat down to ask her the first question: Where did you grow up? Without acknowledging my question, she got up and left the room—something that happened on a regular basis—closed her bedroom door, put on the tv, and disappeared for a couple days. Connection and intimacy rejected. Message conveyed—don’t try that again. And be perfect because if you say the wrong thing, people will abandon you (a theme that has repeated painfully over my life).

When I was a kid, at the grocery store with my mom, if I got absorbed looking at something based on my own interest, she would leave not just the aisle but the entire store. My sister and I regularly had to seek out store employees to make a lost child announcement. I learned clearly that if I did not keep my full attention on my mom at all times, something bad would happen.    

The Impact of Complex PTSD

Over 2023 I began to see all the ways this trained hypervigilance impacted my life: difficulty sleeping, difficulty settling (whether putting myself to bed or landing on the right task for the day), difficulty energetically leaving the room when on a shamanic or psychedelic journey. Any small sound or disruption would immediately pop me out of my own experience, and I’d be wide awake and sober, at the ready to cope with impending disaster. I noticed the ways I neglect self-care to prioritize attending to the needs of others.

I saw the ways I could be both slow to react—needing time for my emotions and my experience to register internally—and quick to react, whenever a present moment experience overlapped with the unprocessed pain from my upbringing. I saw the ways I could lose myself in intimacy with another, and the ways I could keep others at bay in my attempts to not lose myself in connection. When my partner got an exciting new job and I feared being left behind, I saw the ongoing impact of all those times being left in the grocery store. And I saw how I’d replicated in my professional life the painful experience of not being received that I’d had with my mom, and the devastating impact of this misattunement, most acutely faced every day as a nonbinary person living in a binary world.

When my sweetheart brought me to my first Enlightenment Intensive in the spring, I was asked 40 times a day to give my full undivided attention to my own experience—something I’d never done before. What I discovered were things in my life that didn’t work for me, needs that were going unmet—things that for my entire life had been far too threatening to allow myself even to be aware of, much less to say out loud. My main coping strategy in life was simply to not have needs and wants—they could only lead to disappointment—so I engaged in a lot of spiritual bypass to override even basic needs like eating and sleeping, ignoring the underlying unconscious belief that I somehow don’t deserve to have my needs met.

So throughout 2023 I struggled to combat this internal belief and to free myself from my coping strategies by practicing with my partner, my secure attachment context where I felt safe and valued. It was hard for me to stay aware of my childhood trauma because of the ways I had buried it to have a decently functional life, but I could notice it when my partner would act in ways that overlapped with my childhood wounds. And with my partner I felt safe enough to say how it impacted me, something that could never be uttered to my mom.    

Initially this was welcomed, but as the months of tumultuousness dragged on, as my childhood trauma continued to surface and the impact of a lifetime of misattunement revealed itself more and more, I exhausted my partner. Sharing what wasn’t working for me understandably became experienced as critique. Asserting that my needs deserved to be met understandably became read as entitlement and demand. I was legitimately self-absorbed as it was hard for me to hang on to my own experience and I couldn’t really maintain that awareness while holding another’s experience at the same time. I was practicing very new awarenesses and vulnerable choices, ones that were deeply taboo in my psychology and so carried a great deal of charge, and so I was not very skillful in utilizing them.  

The Path to Healing

I spent much of the spring and summer feeling all those submerged feelings: laying awake in the middle of the night feeling the agony of my former self in her 20s, lost and alone wandering in the wilderness without community or even the language to understand herself; feeling my baby self for the first time and the utter despair of the familiar giving up place, the resignation that I won’t be met and my needs will go unattended, and the isolated self-reliance I cultivated as a result.  

I spent a lot of 2023 disentangling myself from my mom, sorting out what was simply her that I had carried for my whole life, what was the version of her that lived within me, what was the me that had been shaped and impacted by growing up with her, and what was the essential me that was whole and intact separate from my mom’s influence. My second ketamine journey helped to clarify those boundaries. The journey itself consisted of floating around in my mom’s tortured psyche, which was quite distressing, but when I was coming back to the room, my guide asked me “Who’s here?” and I said “Sam’s here and Sam is good.”

After that journey, during an online enlightenment intensive over the summer, I had a vision of dredging up an old car covered in gunk from my solar plexis which felt like my mom. Once that was removed, I could feel the energy of my solar plexis, my will center, for the first time! And the channel that had once contained the old car became a bubbling well of nourishment replenishing me. Currently I feel myself being led forward in life from my solar plexis, pulled ahead as though there were a hook in my belly button—an odd sensation when I’m so accustomed to being led by my heart.

During this same enlightenment intensive, I allowed myself to really feel and to grieve the 30 years of my life that I lost—as a transgender person—not being in my body. And it gave me a sense of conviction to take action regarding my academic career. I received my Ph.D. just days before my 40^th birthday—and went on testosterone 9 months later—so I saw clearly the way that my Ph.D. was the culmination—and the reward—for living all those years disconnected from my body. And so I must now close that door for good and not reopen it (I left the academic world twice already, but always went back due to my love for teaching).

I found my boundaries and self-respect also in the fall when I was suddenly exiled from the gospel choir I’d sung with for the past 10 years. After another nonbinary singer and I had noticed misgendering and unconscious gendered language habits intruding in rehearsals, I’d offered to do a trans awareness training with them (something I do professionally with choirs all over the country through my work with GALA Choruses). While the broader community was very responsive and appreciative, the leadership became very defensive and hostile, even sending me personal attacks over text after rehearsals. I was reminded of all the experiences I’d had in groups as a trans person where I’d felt harmed and unsafe, but had to extend myself to create repair and build bridges with the very people who had harmed me (while nobody created repair with me, even accusing me of being the aggressor while I was the one being attacked). When the leadership pointedly decided to make my offering specifically a non choir sanctioned event, I decided not to go back.

All this happened over 3 short weeks, in the midst of my mom dying, so it felt very surreal. This community that had been stable home and family to me for a decade, and a big part of my joy in life, suddenly gone, swept away as I began the descent into the underworld with my mom. I was reminded again of the impermanence of everything when, a week before my mom’s memorial, my sweetheart broke up with me, my Beloved spiritual ally and spiritual playmate. I felt myself being stripped down, my life further emptied out, at the time I most needed support.  

Transformation

Immediately after my mom passed in October, I learned of a heartbreaking family secret she took to her grave. I’d always felt that the reason my mom was borderline was because she’d been molested by her father. Though it was NEVER something that could be spoken aloud, all the signs were there: childhood kidney infections, being the “special” one who escaped the emotional and physical abuse her father inflicted on her siblings, my mom’s refusal to see her father when he was dying and her absence at his funeral, my own weirdness about sex that I’d absorbed from all the unspoken undercurrents of my childhood.

After my mom’s passing I learned from her sister that my mom had gotten pregnant in high school (presumably by her father) and had been rejected by the family and sent away to a Catholic girl’s home to have the baby and give it up for adoption. This was about 2 years before I was born and so during my birth my mom would have been reliving her very worst trauma, a secret I’m certain she kept even from my dad. It explains a lot about why she had trouble attaching to me and how her psyche got shattered. I wish I could have a final conversation with her now to tell her how sorry I am that that happened to her, how it wasn’t her fault, and how much I respect and appreciate her for her ability to survive all that.  

It’s amazing how a little piece of information can change the whole entire context for your life, making you revisit and rethink even the most basic aspects of your identity (I strongly identify as a first born, for instance, but apparently I am technically a middle child). I felt so struck by the ways that my mom and I had been swimming in sexual shame our entire lives: my mom in the sexual shame common for her era and me in the sexual shame common for mine—being queer. When I came out in college—in the midst of a fundamentalist Christian fellowship—my very first lover (unfortunately my Bible study leader) and I had to go through a very humiliating confession and were told that what we’d done was so shameful we couldn’t talk to anyone about it. It made me wonder how that landed for my mom, watching me go through something that had so much resonance with her own traumatic experience.

Initially when my mom passed, I wasn’t sure if I’d want to remain connected with her. I have a very strong spiritual connection with my dad (he leaves me dimes on a regular basis), but I didn’t trust my mom and mostly I just wanted to be finally free of her disruptive influence. However, that dramatically shifted after her memorial. I’d spent the entire year deeply immersed in the trauma of my upbringing; the gathering for the memorial reminded me of the incredible beauty and goodness of my family, and all the ways the love, warmth, and generosity of my family had impacted me and others. It allowed me to really turn towards family, instead of the habitual turning away from family I’d cultivated as a defensive strategy. I saw in my parent’s delightful marriage the beautiful role modeling I’d had of the joys of long-term partnership. Feeling my parents reunited (my dad passed unexpectedly in 2005) has been immensely stabilizing for me, feeling them again as a unit fulfilling a need in me I didn’t know I had. I feel them both with me now, at my shoulder blades like wings—offering support and stability, giving me strength and lifting me up, and enfolding me in love and protection.  

As the defensiveness I’d cultivated to protect myself from my mom began to recede, I started to have greater access to the positive memories of my mom, of which there were so many. In many ways the positive memories were the most buried and deeply threatening because within them was interwoven so much longing and hopefulness that had become too painful to allow myself. Releasing this inner barrier has been so incredibly healing and I marvel at the companionship and comfort that I can now feel so easily with my mom.   

Now—as I embark on a new year and a new life—my mom feels like an amazing ally and friend and resource. I have a framed photo of her in my bedroom (welcoming her into my inner sanctuary in ways that never would have felt safe or advisable previously) that feels immensely comforting, especially as I go through this break up. As I wrap myself up in a comforter that she’d gotten me the last time she was physically able to go shopping, I can really feel what it feels like to have a mother’s support around me. Unlike with my choir, I did stay in process with my sweetheart–when she broke up with me for a second time last month, the next morning I got a text from my mom’s caregiver saying that my mom had come to her in a dream saying that I wasn’t ok and showing her my eyes. When I got that text I wept because it was concrete evidence of our new spiritual connection and I felt so incredibly cared for.

When I look into her eyes, now I just see the kindness and deep care that has always been there. I feel safe with my mom, something I never could have imagined at the opening of 2023!! I remember the painful stuff, but it is not active in my nervous system in the same way. I feel a sense of peaceful resolution and inner order, an intactness and wholeness I’ve never felt before. And she is free as well, free from the anguish and torment that haunted her personality and created so many barriers between us.

I feel anxious about publishing this, as my mom was so very protective of her secrets. I don’t want to disrespect her in any way, or break the mirage that she so carefully constructed. I feel again that familiar pull and tension: will I choose to be loyal to my mom or to myself? This year I embarked on a new path of choosing loyalty to myself, of choosing truth over and over and over again in each enlightenment intensive, knowing that this choice not only frees me but my entire family.

I’ve recently been watching the Oprah produced show Black Cake, about a brother and sister who learn of their mother’s secrets after her death. The similarities are eerie: a child conceived in sexual assault, given away for adoption in a Catholic girl’s home, a secret first sibling—and an explanation for the remoteness of the mother, unable to free herself of her grief and her secrets. The brother is even dumped by his partner just before their mom’s memorial! Like the siblings in the miniseries, my sister and I are tentatively forging new bonds of family with one another, without the dominant presence of my mom. Foundational is our agreement: no more secrets.

The path to enlightenment, to a direct experience of reality, involves clearing anything that is not truth out of the way. So I spent most of 2023 scooping the inner boulders impeding my flow. It was very exhausting at times, but at this point I’ve developed some serious spiritual muscle from again and again pulling myself out of the inner quicksand, hand over fist, powered by sheer determination and commitment. It’s been empowering to see the degree to which I have control over my own inner experience and the ways I can change my energy due to my own focus.

I’m very optimistic about where I will go next, what will unfold for me, having so many obstacles—inner and external—removed from my path. Being laid bare this year—as I entered my second Saturn return (the day before our accident last January!)—has freed me and from this place of lightness, self love, and empowerment, the possibilities do seem endless. I still have to do the actual labor of rebuilding my life, but the path is clear now so the way will be a lot easier.

*I asked my mom for her consent in publishing this and she said yes!