Healing trauma, grief, hurt and pain inside — depression does not discriminate.

I’m better than I ever was before. I’m so strong. I have beaten my alcoholism and am now completely sober….that’s weird. I try so hard to keep my emotions under wrap, and then I realise I am still so far from my best friend and my parent and moments when you are just that little bit drained, or just feeling like you want some kind of adult conversation that isn’t the coffee shop guy or your husband and you start to crave those relationships that are so deep, you don’t have to say anything, they just know you inside out. I miss that so much and I can’t wait for that again when I see them.

I’ve had to really look internally to bridge through so much of whatever I was covering up with alcohol for so many years and I am such a better person for it, and I still have those emotional days where I just miss that spark with my fam or my bestie.

Being in Melbourne was a choice we had to make and I am glad we did…..we had to be away from Adelaide for many reasons and I am a better person for it, but being a family person, I really do just love that.

There were days in Adelaide where I had my fam, people who I considered my fam, friends who I knew for 10 years, many of who I either fell out with when I “changed”, when I stopped drinking and going out and partying. When our friend died, in 2010, I had to pull myself out of the depressive hole I was in. I had been so close to being in that same position, so many times I wanted to take my own life, and I had to get out of that space.

I did not want to live like that anymore. When I stopped drinking, my friends turned on me, those friends of 10 years, who I thought knew me so well. They were angry because I was isolating myself and I didn’t want to drink anymore. They were angry because I had stopped drinking and I had taken my anxiety to my bedroom and I was comforting it, telling it that I wanted to heal the spaces that were causing me to act out with alcohol.

Those friendships became broken and slowly as we moved in and out of seeing each other, the realisation that those friendships were made on depression, drinking and literally so self hating was confronting. How could friendships of 10 years, be so empty? How could they truly mean nothing?

But the truth of it is, those people did not want to change, they were not moving anywhere, they were staying in the same space. In the end, they weren’t angry at me, they were angry at themselves and the easiest way to deal with that is to take it out on others, who were changing.

I changed so much, I started to go on my own journey, with my partner. We decided for his career to move any further he had to move to Melbourne, so he did. I stayed in Adelaide and I partied so hard that I was so depressed and unwell. I think about one of the last nights I partied so hard with my best friend we got so sick for the next 2 weeks that we thought we were dying. The alcoholism had truly taken hold. I had become sober and I had jumped right back into it, to console myself, to comfort the inner me that was still hurting, in pain for so many years.

Moving to Melbourne meant extreme isolation, loneliness and craving that friendship again. I kept a few friends around from Adelaide, but they all get busy and it’s harder to keep in contact and stay in a space of close friendship once you have moved, especially when you can’t go back as much as you’d like.

I have spent the past 3 years healing from all my pain and hurt that I did not cope with healthily, things from being a baby, to the death of my grandfather which I grieved over for 12 years. If anyone looked at my life they’d think I was just a lazy 20 something who did not want to bother with anything in life.

No. I was living trauma. I was in pain. I was grieving.

Then we experienced a death in the friendship, then another and it was like the friends were being split apart. People were breaking to their own isolation, hurt, pain and who knew where to go from there. Some are still in that space and some have been healing. Because when people die in your life, the grieving time has no limit and that is okay.

People act out in different ways, mostly defensively, either selfishly or selflessly. Sometimes we don’t even know people are in pain as they still put the smile on and pretend it is all okay and then when they are at home they unleash the pain, self punishment. Sometimes people are really noticeably in pain and we can see it, and sometimes we don’t even ask them if they are okay. Sometimes people are really hurting in the way they act and they don’t even know it. In the end, we can’t be selfish in the way we react, because this is their pain, and they are not meaning to act this way, but they are sad, hurt and grieving something traumatising for them.

If only we had a better way to talk through mental health in this country. We are always on the understanding that a GP will always fix the problem and be the solution, or even a psychologist. But in the end, it’s a friend, or family, someone who is close to you, who can realise that the acting out, inwardly or outwardly is not an attention seeking act, that they are in pain and maybe it’s time to work through it? Sometimes it’s our family or friends who are hurting us, and in the end, that’s okay, it’s human nature to hurt each other, we are so individual, even family, where in society we are expected to always be happy happy, hurt each other.

It’s time to start realising that someone is not acting a specific way to hurt you, it’s to hurt themselves, because they don’t know what else to do. It could be something they saw or heard during their childhood, and this is all they know, the environment they grew up in is all they know how to behave.

I have seen huge changes in many people around me, slowly as well, this is not a fast process. My first experience of grief was when I was 15 and it took until I was 25 to be able to heal from that. Grief has no time limit. Trauma has no time limit. Recovery from depression, anxiety, grief, trauma has no time limit, it needs no expectations, but it needs to be looked into on a more long term basis.

The moral of the story? Be kind to each other, don’t take someone elses actions, words or behaviour as an attack on you, it is an attack on themselves, it is their defense mechanism, they are sad, they are grieving and they have been traumatised and this is their ONLY reaction they know, to shut away, hide and keep it to themselves, or to act out and hurt. It doesn’t make them any less a person. The sooner this is realised, the sooner we can mend and bridge relationships and love each other.

All mental health, grief, trauma can be healed, it’s not easy, but most of the time we experience things in life that are not our fault, but society has this idea that it is our fault and we must constantly punish ourselves for it. If you look at it from a spiritual space, every reaction creates another action, so it is about becoming still within your space to be able to start healing for you, not someone else.

Also, we cannot heal others before we heal ourselves, I’d heard it so many times before, and then I realised it when I hit rockbottom. I truly cannot help anyone until I am on my road of healing.

It’s important to remember that anyone can experience trauma, we seem to think some people are exempt and there are only specific people who experience this kind of trauma, grief, loss, pain and hurt, but truly anyone can experience it, even those who look like they have everything successful in their life. Your mother, father, grandma, grandpa, daughter, son, niece, nephew, uncle, aunt, friend, cousin, boss, workmate, they could all be experiencing some kind of trauma, depression does not discriminate.

The reason we are so ready to push people when they are down, saying things like, “Just get yourself outside, into the fresh air, then you will be okay.” But truly, they are feeling DEEP pain and they need to be ready to get outside and smell that fresh air, otherwise they will only feel the deep hurt and pain they are feeling. You can’t push anyone out of this kind of hurt, but if they are ready, you can listen.

My biggest lesson from being an alcoholic for so long, is that it’s okay to be in that space, you will never move past that hurt until you forgive yourself and seperate the experience and can understand you merely reacted from a circumstance that really hurt you and put you in immense pain. Your coping mechanism was not healthy and it’s okay, are you ready to move on? I don’t believe we ever truly fully move on from some of the traumatic events we have been through, but we can start to forgive ourselves, forgive others and heal from the experience, to see a brighter future for ourselves.

Only you truly know.

And relapse is normal, it’s all about your own time and your own journey.