My Story: Trauma Healing and Survival

My Story  
By Amanda Kill ©

This is not a story about healing beautifully.  

This is not a story wrapped in inspirational quotes, soft endings or perfectly worded lessons designed to make people comfortable.  

This is the truth about trauma.  
The real kind.  
The kind that follows you long after the abuse ends.  
The kind that changes the way your body reacts to touch, love, fear, silence and survival.  
The kind that rewires your nervous system so deeply that even years later, safety still feels unfamiliar.  

People think trauma is a single event.  
A moment.  
A memory.  

Mine was a lifetime of them.  

I was sexually abused as a child.  
Raised around violence, fear and emotional chaos.  
I learned survival long before I ever learned safety.  

At thirteen years old, a nineteen-year-old man convinced me he loved me because he wanted my body.  
And like so many traumatised little girls searching for safety in the wrong places, I mistook being wanted for being loved.  

By sixteen I was a teenage mother.  
Still a child myself while trying to raise one.  
Trying to survive while carrying wounds nobody else could see.  
Trying to become a mother while still desperately needing one myself.  

I became a single mum.  

After having my first daughter, but before I entered the domestic violence relationship that would later consume years of my life, another kind of fear entered my world.  

This time it came from someone who was meant to feel safe.  

My stepfather, my mother’s husband, the father of my youngest sister, slowly destroyed the feeling of safety inside my own home.  
The way he behaved around me.  
The way he watched me.  
The things he exposed me to.  
The constant feeling that I was never truly safe when he was near.  

And people often ask survivors why they did not scream, fight harder or tell someone immediately.  

But trauma does not always make you fight.  
Sometimes trauma makes you freeze.  

So I froze.  

Or I would quietly leave rooms pretending I had not noticed anything at all.  
I learned how to avoid certain spaces in the house.  
How to stay alert.  
How to listen for footsteps.  
How to constantly calculate where people were around me.  
How to never fully relax, even inside my own home.  

And the worst part was, it did not stop once I moved out.  

Every time I visited my mum, every time I needed somewhere to stay, somewhere that should have felt safe, the fear returned with me.  
That horrible hyper-awareness.  
Wondering if I was being watched again.  
Wondering if I could safely walk through the house without feeling trapped or unsafe.  
Always uncomfortable in a place that was supposed to feel like home.  

He was meant to be a father figure.  
A safe adult.  
Someone I should have been protected by, not protected from.  

But trauma has a way of teaching you that safety can disappear anywhere.  
Even inside your own family.  
Even inside your own home.  

And like so many things survivors carry, I buried it.  
I stayed quiet.  
I convinced myself surviving it silently was easier than speaking it out loud.  

Until now.  

Then I found myself trapped in a domestic violence relationship of my own.  

And this is the part people struggle to understand about trauma:  

When chaos is all you have ever known, abuse stops feeling abnormal.  
It feels familiar.  

The violence grew slowly.  
The control.  
The manipulation.  
The emotional abuse.  
The fear.  
The sexual abuse behind closed doors while life on the outside pretended everything was normal.  

Then came the gang rape.  

The unwanted pregnancy.  
The decision that shattered pieces of me no matter which path I chose.  
The grief.  
The shame.  
The silence.  

And still… I stayed alive.  

I continued living beside the same man who was hurting me.  
The violence escalated.  
The emotional abuse deepened.  
The fear became normalised.  

Then I fell pregnant again.  

And if I am completely honest, when I found out, I was terrified.  

Not because I did not love my baby.  
But because I was already drowning inside fear, control and survival mode.  

My partner had made it very clear that I was not to fall pregnant again.  
He did not want another child with me.  
Another “piece of me.”  

So instead of joy, I felt panic.  
Fear.  
Survival mode.  

And then I lost him.  

My son.  

The baby I never got to bring home.  

For years I carried unbearable guilt around losing him.  
Not just grief.  
Guilt.  

The kind that destroys you slowly from the inside because trauma teaches you to blame yourself for everything painful that happens to you.  

I convinced myself my body had failed him.  
That maybe even my own body was too broken to keep him alive.  

And because trauma twists grief into self-punishment, I tortured myself wondering if somehow he felt my fear before he died.  
If maybe I had already failed him before he even had the chance to live.  

That guilt nearly destroyed me.  

For a long time, the cemetery felt unbearable.  
Like standing in front of proof that I was never enough.  
Not enough to protect myself.  
Not enough to save him.  
Not enough to survive life without breaking apart.  

But somewhere along the way, something changed.  

Now I go there for comfort instead of shame.  

I sit beside him and talk to him.  
I still grieve him.  
I always will.  
But now I also feel love there instead of only guilt.  

That is the complicated truth about healing.  

Sometimes healing does not mean the pain disappears.  
Sometimes it simply means the pain no longer owns every part of you.  

People love talking about survivors as though strength is beautiful.  

But they rarely talk about what survival actually looks like while you are living it.  

It looks like dissociation.  
Like panic attacks.  
Like hypervigilance so severe your body never fully relaxes.  
Like becoming numb just to survive another day.  
Like crying in bathrooms where nobody can hear you.  
Like convincing yourself abuse is not “that bad” because admitting the truth would destroy the tiny piece of stability you have left.  

PTSD is not just remembering something painful.  

It is reliving it.  

It is flashbacks that hijack your body without warning.  
Nightmares that leave you waking up shaking.  
Fear living inside your nervous system every second of the day.  
The exhaustion of carrying memories your body refuses to forget.  

And the worst part?  

You can become so used to suffering that you stop believing you deserve to escape it.  

The moment that finally changed my life was not even for myself.  

If it had only been me, I probably would have stayed.  

But one day, during another violent attack, the man abusing me threw me from a verandah while I sat in a rocking chair.  

I remember hitting the ground.  

And then I remember my little girl.  
Still in primary school.  
Screaming over my body while I lay motionless on the concrete.  

“You killed my mum.”  
“You killed my mum.”  

Those words never left me.  

My daughter’s screams became the thing that finally broke through years of fear, manipulation and survival mode.  

Because in that moment, it stopped being only about what I could survive.  
It became about what my children were surviving too.  

Her voice gave me a fight I did not know I still had left inside me.  

That was the moment I finally understood something:  

If I stayed, there was a chance my children would watch their mother die.  

So I left.  

But leaving abuse is not the same as escaping trauma.  

Nobody tells you that part.  

Nobody tells you that healing is ugly.  
That sometimes healing means sitting alone with memories you spent years trying to outrun.  
That healing means flashbacks, grief, rage, shame and rebuilding yourself from absolute psychological destruction.  
That some nights still feel impossible.  
That trauma does not disappear just because the violence stopped.  

Healing did not save me overnight.  

Healing was learning how to survive the nights that almost destroyed me.  
Learning boundaries.  
Learning coping skills.  
Learning that I was never responsible for the abuse inflicted upon me.  
Learning how to exist in a body and mind shaped by trauma without allowing it to completely consume who I am.  

Amanda Kill became more than a name.  

It became the voice I found after a lifetime of silence.  
The voice built from every dark thing I survived.  
The voice that finally stopped hiding the ugly truth about trauma, PTSD, abuse, grief and survival.  

Everything you will read here is real.  

Every poem.  
Every photograph.  
Every breakdown hidden inside beautiful words.  
Every piece of darkness I spent years trying to bury.  

This space was not created to make trauma look poetic.  

It was created to tell the truth about what survival actually costs a person.  

The darkness.  
The rage.  
The grief.  
The self-destruction.  
The healing.  
The setbacks.  
The moments of hope.  
The moments where hope disappeared completely.  

This is not the polished version of my story.  

This is the real one.  

And maybe that is exactly why you will not be able to stop thinking about it.  

FOLLOW MY JOURNAL  

Ride the waves of healing, survival and truth with me.  

I will tell my stories.  
My trauma.  
My past.  
My present.  
And the dreams of my future.  

The darkness.  
The healing.  
The becoming.  

You do not have to face it alone.  

Amanda Kill ©