What does it mean to come home to yourself?

when in the body/brain of someone with PTSD

I’m working my way through Dr. Thema Bryant’s book, Homecoming: Overcome Fear and Trauma to Reclaim your Whole Authentic Self.

In this piece she gives us tips on how to come home to ourselves, despite or perhaps in commune with/among our own past experiences and trauma.

I mulling over this: what does this mean—to come home to myself?

What does “home” mean?

Especially for someone for whom has grown up knowing ‘home’ as a volatile and unstable place. My home and my family were both highly dysfunctional. They were not safe spaces. My childhood home was a shell with many cracks. Coming home often felt like walking across eggshells that I could not help but crack. The sheer weight of my body would shatter them, no matter how softly I tried to tiptoe a-top of them.

For some, home means stable and secure, a safe place. A happy place. A functional place.

This was never true for me as a child.

My mother was the closest ‘home’ that I had—but even she would frequently retreat into her hole of depression, giving me the silent treatment for days when she was in a bad place mentally, or felt hurt by me, or to punish me.

My father was a constant in that he was a short fuse and frequently—multiple times a week—he would be explosive, letting torrents of verbal assaults and streams of profanity, directed at any and everyone who crossed his path. (Which meant all of us and often. Our house was small.)

What does “home” mean for someone who grew up like that? How can I now learn to create my own safe home as an adult?

What does home mean for someone who has lead a nomadic adult existence? Despite being almost 40 years old—my home has always been transitionary, shifting, moving often, whether to a state over, a town over, or to another country, on the other side of the world.

I have had to make my family and make my home wherever I land.

Along the way, with the recent years trauma and the effects of PTSD on my body and mind, I have also lost myself, no longer seeing me as “home” or safe, not trusting my body and my mind.

This book has challenged me to think about how I may create my own safe space, being ‘at home’ in my own skin, my own body.

I find one of the first ways is to name my home, to be honest about what happens in my body, to others and to myself, to acknowledge at what I’m working with-

I name my cortisol heights, my constant hyper-vigilant state— my jumpiness when someone catches me off guard and simply says “hello,” my anxiety and sleep disturbances, because this is me, my body, the ‘home’ that I have to work with.

I don’t have a home base: I have very little family left, no immediate family.

But I had no ‘home’ even when my family was here—not in the traditional, secure, safe sense of the word.

I am starting to reflect on the ways that this has formed my adult sense and my identity. I am learning to trust myself, and to take care of myself, grooming my own ‘home’, my own body, and my small home space.

Because when I sought ‘home’ outside of myself, it wasn’t great—

The alternative was that I made a ‘home’ with someone who was not safe to/for me, who was too self-involved and damaged himself, so that he reacted by over-compensating with narcissism and/or lashing out with emotional abuse when he felt small and insecure.

The alternative ‘home’ is drowning with a grippling survivor’s guilt: a heavy weight of floods of intense emotions and intrusive, all-compensating thoughts of—why did I survive all of this loss while Jeremie had to die, succumbing to mental illness, depression and grief—why did he have to be one to die while he was the one with the small child looking to him for love? Looking at him as ‘home’?

I sought my home by way of comfort in the desperate need love from others, companionship of friends—I have run from being alone with myself, constantly preoccupying myself with work or studies or my students or socialization online.

In this way, I gave up myself as my home.

Now—I am learning to just…be.

To be alone.

To be safe in my own skin.

To be at home within myself.

I am learning to come home to and be home within myself.