Trauma-Inspired: 50 Survivors, One Shared Path Through Trauma, Transformation and Triumph... With a Twist

By Linda Spellman

Who would have thought that survivors of child abuse, domestic violence, overdose, illness, combat, and other trauma would follow the same path to healing... and that they would all develop spiritual gifts?

Trauma-Inspired follows the trauma healing journey of one survivor - together with the compelling input of 50 o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Spellman
• Release date: Jul 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985751451

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Trauma-Inspired-cover.jpg

Copyright @2022 by Linda Spellman

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without permission in writing from the author, except by reviewers, who may quote brief excerpts in a published review.

ISBN 979-8-9857514-4-4 Print Edition

ISBN 979-8-9857514-9-9 Kindle Edition

ISBN 979-8-9857514-5-1 EPub Edition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022907055

The events and conversations in this book have been relayed to the best of the author’s ability. Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

The content in this book is not intended to be a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment from a mental health professional or other qualified health provider. Don’t postpone seeking help or disregard professional guidance based on what you read here.

Interior design by KUHN Design Group | kuhndesigngroup.com

Cover design by Dana Bree, StoneBear Publishing & Design | stonebearpublishing.com

First Edition Published by Linda Spellman June 2022 Raleigh, NC

www.lindaspellman.com

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www.lightofthephoenix.com

Table of Contents

Foreword: Catelynn Baltierra

Introduction: Take It from the Top

Chapter 1: Time Stops

Chapter 2: Trauma Transition

Chapter 3: Take It In

Chapter 4: Take a Stand

Chapter 5: Take It Off

Chapter 6: Take It Away

Chapter 7: The Twist – Trauma and Intuition/Psychic Gifts

Chapter 8: Tenets

Chapter 9: Trauma Testimonies

Chapter 10: Trailing Thoughts

Tributes

Thank You to Musicians Everywhere

Foreword

Catelynn Baltierra

I’m Catelynn Baltierra from MTV’s Teen Mom OG . On our twelve seasons and counting on the show, my husband Tyler and I have shared our lives, starting with our adoption story when we got pregnant at 16. Since then, we’ve had three more amazing little girls, and we’ve had cameras there for all the ups and downs that go with life, including our family’s struggles with mental health and addiction. We chose to be open about these issues because it’s important to us to help remove the stigma around them. We want to help more people feel comfortable speaking up so they can get help and heal.

After my second daughter, Nova, was born, I found myself struggling with a pretty severe case of postpartum depression, though it was months before I realized I had it. It got to the point where it was so bad, I needed to get help for my family, and for me before I did something to myself. I struggled again after suffering a miscarriage. We were so excited to have the baby, and it was really hard to deal with the loss. I’m not ashamed to admit that I needed help. Nobody should be. There are so many people who have experienced loss or other trauma in their lives. When you’re at a low point like that, it’s easy to feel like you’re alone and wonder where to turn.

Reading Trauma-Inspired made me realize that I was never alone in how I was feeling, how I was struggling, and in the different stages of healing. It helped me understand that through my healing, I was not only surviving, I was coming out a better version of myself. As I read the book, I kept thinking, Yep, that was me, especially when Linda talked about how people react to trauma and how important it is to take time to heal. It would have been so helpful to have this book when I was going through my own trauma and healing. Understanding what is happening and having hope for the future is everything when you’re going through it. I think it would have helped Tyler understand as well. It’s hard for people who love you to comprehend what’s happening and how they can help.

Linda is a good person who genuinely cares about helping people. She shared very personal details in this book because she believes, just like Tyler and I do, that we need to talk more. We need to let people know that trauma is real. It can cause real mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It can also make things more challenging to deal with, even our everyday lives. And, most importantly, there is no shame or blame in that.

There are a lot of other books, movies, and podcasts about trauma, but this book shows you how to heal from trauma, and talks about the positive things that can happen, instead of just the negative parts.

Whether you believe in extrasensory abilities or not, the book is really helpful, but I found it so interesting to learn that people gain new or stronger intuitive or psychic abilities after experiencing trauma! Linda interviewed more than 50 people who have had this happen to them – so there’s definitely something to it. It’s fascinating to read more about how she discovered her spiritual gifts, as she calls them, and to hear how other people experienced theirs. I met Linda before she had discovered those gifts. Since then, she has done readings for me, and has blown me away with her abilities.

It’s an encouraging perspective that trauma can be a gift, and not just something that tears apart your life for a little while.

If you have experienced trauma, or love someone who has, you should read this book. It will be so worth your time.

Catelynn Baltierra

MTV’s Teen Mom OG

Introduction

Take It from the Top

Trauma has been planting its seeds in my life since I can remember. I was subjected to ongoing sexual abuse as a child, then I was raped shortly after I arrived at college when I was 17. I didn’t talk about it; I didn’t realize the trauma was taking root and influencing every area of my life – at least not yet. By the time I was in my twenties, I thought I had left those events behind me. I thought they were safely locked away in the recesses of my mind. I was wrong.

In 2015, I was raped again. For months I tried to pretend it was no big deal and went on with my life. But all of the unhealed pain, fear, and betrayal from the earlier assaults came flooding back and completely overwhelmed me. I was ultimately diagnosed with severe PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and realized that if I wanted to survive, I needed to seek treatment. I had to leave behind everything I had worked for my entire life; everything and everyone I knew. It was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever done.

But I found that even though trauma can drain you of all hope, passion, safety and self-worth, the ashes of your pain and fear can become the foundation from which you rise. It hurts, and it takes time, but healing brings gifts of renewal, insight, confidence and yes, even joy again. And sometimes, the gifts healing brings are extrasensory in nature. Shortly after I arrived at the treatment center, I started seeing and communicating with people who had passed. Just like that, I went from an MBA and Marketing Exec to a psychic medium. Definitely NOT what I was expecting. This was going to be hard to explain at church!

I started wondering if other people had experienced something similar. So, I interviewed over 50 people who have a history of trauma and have spiritual gifts, i.e. The Twist. I was able to identify a strong connection between experiencing trauma and developing what I call spiritual gifts, but it became so much more than that. As these trauma-inspired survivors shared their stories of rising above, becoming stronger, healthier and more connected, all in the aftermath of their trauma, I started drawing similarities between their journeys. As you’ll see from their comments and experiences woven throughout the book, our traumas were different, yet most of us followed a similar path for this journey. As a result, I was able to put together a path to healing, transforming, and rising above trauma to share with you.

This Book is For You

I wrote this book to give you a path to healing from trauma and to tell you about the gifts you receive along the way. All of the survivors I interviewed and I were, and are, Trauma-Inspired in some way. We were given gifts on this path, not just spiritual in nature, that were a silver lining behind a whole lot of clouds. These gifts of trauma are there for you, too as you go through your own healing journey.

I shared the very personal struggles, bad decisions and behaviors that were part of my trek through trauma so you can relate, despite the fact that some may judge me or think less of me. But that’s okay, because you know what? I didn’t write this book so people would like me. I wrote it so people would start loving themselves again. I wrote this book for you.

For Trauma Survivors

You are not alone. Not by a long shot. There are a lot of us who have experienced trauma, and I know it sucks. But I truly believe this book will help you.

You are not weak. You are strong and courageous. Do not compare yourself with others who have gone through trauma who seem fine. People are great actors. I hid my trauma and pain behind a smile for decades. I’m still waiting for my Oscar®.

Light always wins. I know it’s hard to believe sometimes, but your light will outshine their darkness any day. The light is still there inside you, so let’s bring it out again.

You may have gifts waiting for you. Keep reading, follow the path, and you’ll be surprised how much lighter your spirit can feel. You too can be trauma-inspired.

Trauma isn’t the end; it’s a beginning. You CAN triumph over your trauma and rise as a better, happier version of yourself.

You are my heroes, each and every one of you. You are still here, reading this, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in a great place or you’re feeling vulnerable and lost as hell. You’re still trying, and that’s hard. I see you; I feel you. You’ve got this.

For Friends and Family of Trauma Survivors – Yes, You Too

I want you to understand family, friends, relatives, or co-workers who may be suffering. Many of them hurt beyond measure from wounds you can’t see. Be kind.

I want you to learn from the survivors I interviewed. They’ve been through so much, yet have such beautiful things to say. They chose to give me, and now you, a peek at their trauma, transformation and triumph so you can learn from and be inspired by them. Please listen.

I want to help you understand how to help the trauma survivors in your life. Without an understanding, your help can do more harm than good.

It’s time to heal, to release the burdens that trauma leaves behind, so many of which are hidden, even from you. You deserve to finally free yourself from the limitations that trauma’s legacy of lacking self-worth, living small and living in fear, shame or sadness create. It’s time to go from trauma-tired to trauma-inspired.

Chapter 1

Time Stops

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Nelson Mandela

No one gives you notice before your life falls apart. There’s no heads-up, no time to get your affairs in order. Even if you see trauma coming, no one can prepare you for the aftershock. One day everything changes and you’re left with the fallout. You’re searching through the rubble of your life as you knew it, looking for something familiar that’s still left behind. But everything feels different. It’s as if you’re looking at your life, but none of it feels like yours anymore. You will never be quite the same.

Yet discomfort and pain, by their nature, spark a need for change. They bring forward the ingenuity we all have to fix things and make them better than before. Because when all else fails and we stop trying to run, we find the answers in ourselves.

•••

My trauma story started a long time ago, too long ago, when you consider how young I was. But I’ve learned so much about it all recently, and it’s changed everything for me. I hope it can for you too.

I experienced child sexual abuse for years. I was too young to understand it, realize the impact it was having, or even process it. I didn’t talk then. I didn’t have anyone who understood and could see the self-blame and shame that I was carrying. I didn’t see it. Those feelings became reality for me and became the foundational belief system on which I lived my life. From that point on, the doubt in myself and my value created an almost compulsive need to over-correct by being better, nicer, more intelligent and so on. I wasn’t conscious of the cause of this desperate drive, I just knew that when I failed, it felt more like life and death than that’s how we learn. But that’s not the only damage that childhood assault began inflicting on my life. I didn’t know it at the time, but that experience created the foundation for future sexual assaults.

When I was raped at 17, shortly after I got to college, I didn’t tell anyone what happened. I had asked myself so many times as a child if my abusers chose me because I deserved it, because I was somehow less than. To be abused again, when I still hadn’t reached my 18th birthday, seemed to answer that question for me. I went into a free-fall. I couldn’t get myself to go to class, and withdrew from college shortly thereafter. In just a few months, I went from an Illinois State Scholar, who graduated at the top 10% of her class, to a college drop out.

After a few years of terrible decisions and floundering, I got my life back on track. I ultimately got married, had my daughter and then divorced. In the meantime, I found a good job and started making plans for my future. I went back to college and got my undergraduate degree and MBA while working full-time as a single mom. Yes, Type A. Remember that need to achieve from earlier? It was part of my everyday life.

In the fall of 2014, I was a busy VP of Marketing for a multibillion-dollar company in Atlanta. My career had always been my comfortable place in life. That’s where I knew I could succeed; that’s where I was confident. It was the primary focus of my energy and resources. Yet my social life was nearly non-existent. Since getting my degree, my life was spent raising my daughter, working and… eating. The highlight of my week was when my granddaughters came and stayed with me every Saturday and Sunday. They were my dose of joy. But, other than those magical days, I was living in a routine without much thought. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Then one night, a light bulb turned on. I was probably sitting on the couch with a plate of pizza rolls watching another episode of The Biggest Loser, when I suddenly realized I couldn’t live like this anymore. I was morbidly obese, somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 lbs. overweight. I used to be a competitive athlete for crying out loud! One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is to call a few trainers and say, I need help. Walking into those gyms as big and out of shape as I was, felt like I had a gigantic spotlight on me. I could almost hear people saying, Look at the fat-ass, She’ll never make it, or better yet, Is she going to break the machine? But I did it. I picked a trainer that I resonated with, and I lost more than 85 pounds in about seven months by eating right and exercising – at 53 years old.

As I shed the weight, I started to realize that I had been eating to hide. Due to the childhood sexual abuse and following rape, I had subconsciously decided that if people couldn’t see me, they wouldn’t hurt me. This was my first indication that there was an entire narrative going on in my subconscious that had been influencing my life choices. As I lost weight, I started feeling more confident, and I started actually going out with friends after work. That may not seem like a big deal, but it was brand new for me. My day had previously ended when my workday did. In the past, I would go home, do some more work, or watch TV, and, of course, eat. After losing the weight, I started believing that maybe I could be seen and be safe at the same time. Maybe I didn’t have to hide behind obesity. Maybe.

Surprisingly, I was able to accomplish this while my world was beginning to unravel around me. You see, I was in the middle of one hell of a year.

The problems started about 6 months earlier, when my daughter woke up one day with double vision and difficulty moving her arms. After an extended ER visit, a battery of tests, and a visit with a best-in-class neurologist, she was diagnosed with a rare, debilitating, and incurable auto-immune disease called Myasthenia Gravis. She couldn’t walk upstairs (and still can’t), or even brush her own hair. This happened completely out of nowhere. We weren’t sure what the outcome would be at that point, but we knew her life would never be the same.

Within the next few months, my daughter’s doctors discovered she had a Thymus tumor which had to be surgically removed. The surgery was not insignificant, but like the warrior she is, she pushed through it, only to find out a short time later, that she had thymus cancer. She was already trying to figure out how to deal with her myasthenia gravis diagnosis and symptoms; now she had cancer on top of it.

Then one weekend, a few months later, my granddaughters were on their way to spend the night at my house. I was waiting for them to arrive when I received a call from an unknown number. I never answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize, but something told me to answer this one. When I answered, an unfamiliar voice identified herself as a nurse from the Emergency Room of a hospital halfway between my daughter’s house and mine. She told me that my granddaughters and their father had been in an accident. I flew out the door in a rush to get to the hospital, but traffic was terrible for some reason for a Saturday afternoon. Out of desperation, I called a friend that lived near the hospital, and she helped me with directions via backroads so I could finally get there. I didn’t know at the time that the traffic problems were because my granddaughters’ accident had shut down four lanes of traffic on one of the busiest highways in Atlanta. They had been in a head-on collision. Thank God some good Samaritans had pulled them out of the car just before it burst into flames. I walked into the hospital and found both of the girls in hospital beds hooked up to IVs and wearing neck braces. They were alone and scared and when our eyes met, we all started crying. I stood between them, these girls that were my life, holding their hands and hoping my love would ease their fears. The youngest was released later that night, but the oldest, just 11 years old at the time, broke her back in two places and had to be transported to the children’s hospital.

My daughter and my grandchildren are my everything, so what was happening to them was heartbreaking. I felt helpless, because I couldn’t make it better. And the burgeoning hope that I could be seen and be safe at the same time? I was wrong. Somewhere, in the midst of my daughter’s illness, surgery and cancer diagnosis and my granddaughter’s accident, I was drugged and raped.

I had decided to go out after leaving the office one night. I was stressed from work and everything else going on in my life and just wanted to spend some time with my best friend. We always laughed together and I really needed that. We called it a relatively early night because we had to work the next day. She went back to her hotel, and I went to grab one last drink at a pub across the street from my house where I knew some friends would be.

My friend doesn’t remember anything from the time she got on the hotel shuttle until waking up at her hotel the next morning. She even had fruit in her room that she would have had to get from a completely different floor. She had no recollection of arriving at her hotel, much less leaving her room in search of a piece of fruit. We had both been drugged. I vaguely remember someone walking/carrying me across the street to my apartment. I don’t remember going in. I have a foggy recollection of waking up or at least becoming alert for a second, hearing myself screaming because I was being sodomized. As if from a dream, I have vague snippets of memories of trying to stop him but not being able to raise my arms. My muscles wouldn’t respond to my brain. Do I remember more in my subconscious? Maybe. But I’ve become an expert over many years at burying things, putting them in a box and hiding them in my subconscious, never to be acknowledged again. For the record, that can work for a long time, but they’re not gone. Those memories are still affecting us in ways we won’t realize until we take the time to heal.

The next morning, I woke up to a world that was both too familiar and unrecognizable. It had happened again. I felt like a sexual vessel; void of the spirit and soul that differentiates an inanimate object from a living being. I felt interchangeable and empty. My home, my life, it all seemed different as if a film had been laid across it and left it distorted and distant.

After that, my life slowly, or not so slowly, fell apart. Every day I was just trying to put one foot in front of the other. I tried to ignore what happened and go on with my life, but my subconscious had other plans. I was sad and angry, and the child in me was so tired of trying to be good enough so the bad things would stop happening to me. The devastating emotions from what was going on with my family, from this rape, and from the previous sexual assaults flooded my system.