Amanda Rolfe

From early childhood through early adulthood, I faced many extreme challenges in the forms of mental, verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

 

My father suffered severely with drug addictions, pedophilia, violent rage, and mental illness. My mother taught my sister and I to respond by staying small, silent, submissive, subservient, subordinate, and out of the way. While she immersed herself in her career and obsession with maintaining an outward appearance of success and happiness, we suffered in silence behind closed doors and the fake smiles we wore to church every Sunday.

 

At church we were told to meet hardships, even abuse, with prayer to a God that we could never be as good as, who loved us but also punished us to hell for eternity for being the sinners we innately were, and that may or may not save us. Ironically enough, it just so happened that the major accomplices in my father's extracurricular activities were the same mothers and fathers of the families we worshipped next to each Sunday.

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As a result of these experiences and as I got older, my life became a visual representation of the conditioning I took with me from my family and the church.

 

• I cycled through one toxic relationship after another; abusers, narcissists, and addicts. Men just like my father, sometimes worse.

• I became extremely sexually promiscuous.

• I jumped from one obsession and addiction to another.

• I earned the mental illness diagnoses of Major Depression, Generalized Anxiety, PTSD, and, my favorite, Borderline Personality Disorder of which I was told "had no cure".

• I was committed to the psych ward on multiple occasions.

• I suffered from severe insomnia and nightmares that medication couldn't help, and so survived on only a couple of hours a sleep a night.

• I self-harmed, fantasized daily about suicide, and even attempted it once.

• I tried therapist after therapist, medication after medication, and I just kept getting worse.

 

Until the day I met the individual that changed everything.

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I attended my first session with yet another new therapist. He started off by asking about my childhood - something previous therapists had told me wasn't important and that I should move on from because "you can't change the past".

 

After reluctantly sharing my story, he looked me in the eyes and gently said, "No wonder. Of course you experience life the way you do now. How else could you?"

In that very moment, I finally saw a glimmer of light in the immense darkness I had been surrounded by for my entire life. A light I had failed to find for many, many years. Through one offering of witnessing and validation, of seeing me, hearing me, and meeting me just where I was, I finally felt like there was hope for me.

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I continued one to two sessions a month with him. As if he were the nourishing and rejuvenating season of Spring itself, my healing, growth, and flourishing happened at a rapid pace. Before I knew it, I was off of all of my medications, I was experiencing restful, undisturbed sleep for the first time in my life, I no longer met the criteria for any of my diagnoses, I say a prayer of gratitude every single day, the anxiety I used to wake up to every day is nowhere to be found, and I have an amazing, loving husband.

 

My entire experience with life has changed.

 

Our very last session was of my giving him a gift. It was a canvas print I found on Etsy that summed up the ultimate lesson I took away from my work with him.

 

"I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become."

 

His parting words were that he was handing me the baton to carry on his work. I accepted it with confidence and vigor, and am now going out into the world to pass on his work and the gift he gave to me.

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The gift of unbecoming everything the world taught you to be so the womxn you were meant to be can finally emerge.​