30 Years Later, I Finally Faced What My Brother Did to Me

Unfiltered Stories

Maria Socolof shares her powerful trauma recovery story, 30 years after repressed memories of childhood abuse resurfaced. This is a raw, emotional story about healing, memory, and facing the truth.   #traumahealing  #repressedmemories #childhoodtrauma   Thank you for watching Unfiltered Stories! We offer a platform for our guests to speak openly about their life stories and journeys, shedding light on the challenges they faced and the resilience they've shown.  Our mission is to raise awareness about survivors by delving into their stories, exploring the impact of their experiences, and how they've managed to heal and rebuild their lives.  By sharing these stories, we aim to break the silence surrounding those challenging memories and create a compassionate environment.    More about Maria Socolof:  Website: https://healingfromchronicpain.com/  Co-founder of: https://www.5waves.org/  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Key-Unlocking-Mystery-Chronic/dp/1734518901   🌅 FOLLOW US 🌅  Facebook ➮ https://tinyurl.com/UnfilteredFB  Tiktok ➮ https://tinyurl.com/UnfilteredTT  Snapchat ➮ https://tinyurl.com/UnfilteredSN

Transcript

00:00My brother had me when I was 10. At that point I was really, I don't know if I was

00:04suicidal per se,

00:05but I was dreaming of just driving myself a bridge and not having to be here in this kind of

00:10pain

00:10anymore. My childhood was, as far as I remembered, really charming. Loving parents, father's a doctor,

00:22mom's a psychologist, did gymnastics. I loved gymnastics. I graduated from high school,

00:28I graduated from college. My college sweetheart became my husband, had two beautiful girls,

00:33a successful career. Then when I was 40 years old, I ruptured a disc in my neck. Now it wasn't

00:39doing

00:39gymnastics. It was rolling over in my sleep, which is pretty crazy. I heard this pop and that's what

00:44woke me up. It hurt, but not as bad as it did a few hours later. I went to work

00:48and I couldn't sit in my

00:49chair after a few minutes. Finally, I was leaning back on the back of the chair trying to lean my

00:53head. Finally, I went home that day and then just lay down and hoped it would just resolve and get

00:59better because it was really starting to get really bad. Over the next three weeks, I was in

01:02such excruciating pain. I was starting to lose function of my left arm. It was nerve pain that

01:10was just shooting from my neck down my arm. Finally, it took three weeks before I even got an MRI

01:14for them

01:15to diagnose the ruptured disc. If I wanted the use of my arm back, that I really needed surgery. I

01:21was a

01:21little freaked out. I'd never had any major injuries. The only thing in gymnastics I did once

01:25in high school, I broke my finger. I was pretty freaked out about having to have surgery, but I

01:30was in so much pain that I couldn't imagine not doing something. I had the surgery in October of

01:362005. After the surgery, the shooting nerve pain subsided, the numbness in my fingers. It took

01:42maybe a month, at least a month for that to resolve. My arm works now, but I still had this

01:48pain on the

01:49right side of my neck. Just a different kind of pain. It was this burning, jabbing, this stabbing

01:55sensation like a hot soldering iron was stabbing me in the back. It felt like my head was about 500

02:00pounds, and just holding my head up for 10 minutes at a time was just so painful. I would just

02:06have to

02:06lie down. My kids at the time were four and ten, and I was still working, so I was still

02:10trying to do

02:11everything. For a good nine months, I was just in this horrible pain that was not going away, and my

02:17surgeons kept saying, oh, another month. It'll be okay, another month, and it wasn't getting better,

02:21so finally I found another doctor who diagnosed me with myofascial pain, chronic myofascial pain,

02:25which I hadn't really heard of, and I went to the school of public health. My dad's a doctor.

02:30Why hadn't anyone told me about this? It's not commonly known. I think now that this was 20 years

02:35ago, but it's basically when the fascia is the lining around your muscles. It's normally fluid and

02:41surrounds your muscles and kind of holds them in place, but when they get tightened, it's kind of

02:45clamping down on your muscles, and then it restricts your movement, and it can cause pain.

02:50So this is what was going on. I was relieved to some level to know that it was something,

02:54and so his solution was to give me and go to physical therapy, so that helped temporarily,

03:00but then the pain kept coming back. I felt like nobody knew how to help me. The theory sort of

03:04in

03:04this intensive is that your body keeps at it and keeps at it and then gets used to that pattern,

03:09gets out of the old patterns of being tense and being tight. So I went to this intensive,

03:13so it was a big deal for me to leave for two weeks, to leave my kids and leave my

03:17job.

03:18So I went away for the two weeks. Every session, emotions started coming up. So the morning of the

03:24last day, I had a dream. When I woke up, I lay there. I opened my eyes. I literally had

03:30a tingling

03:30sensation circling my body as if I was like a crime scene when they draw a chalk around the body.

03:37That's what I felt like. I felt like somebody was drawing a chalk line around my body.

03:41What happened was I had a recovered memory. I remembered about something that had happened

03:45to me when I was likely 10, and this was something I had no recollection of. But when I remembered,

03:51it was the clearest memory I've ever had.

03:59And essentially, my brother had me when I was 10. It's hard to describe how bizarre that feels when

04:06you think you have this perfect life and then have the realization that this did happen. It

04:12was so clear. At that point, I was really, I don't know if I was suicidal per se, but I

04:16was dreaming of,

04:17you know, just driving myself on a bridge and not having to be here in this kind of pain anymore.

04:22So I did end up writing to my brother and he confirmed it. The truth is your body holds it

04:27in no matter what. Trauma stays in your body until you really process it. And this was the beginning

04:32of me being able to process it. My older daughter was the age, was 10 when I ruptured the disc

04:37in my

04:37neck. I've read since that that's common, that trauma memories can come back when your child is

04:42the age you were. We found notes that I wrote to my mother in 1975 when I was 10, and

04:48it was a very

04:49nasty note to my mother. And I had no memory of ever disliking my mother, being angry at my mother.

04:54So it appears to me that I think I ruptured my disc 30 years to the day of when he

04:59me, which is just

05:00bizarre to me because I, you know, had no conscious memory of that and that my body may have known

05:05that

05:06was the time to bring it up to me. So that now opened my eyes to what had happened and

05:10now started

05:11to make sense with my pain, my chronic pain. But I still, I couldn't even say the words. Like,

05:16I couldn't, it was so hard to speak these words, but I could, you know, feel it coming up. And

05:20I,

05:20but I did finally say it to the therapist, what the dream reminded me of. And as I was filling

05:25out

05:25some paperwork at the end of this two weeks session, um, I started feeling a little bit

05:30of it creeping back. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Go away. Go back. I had control

05:34over

05:34reducing my pain and I knew I had the capacity to get better. So it was a one-time thing.

05:40I had fallen

05:40asleep in my brother's room. We were all close in age. I have two brothers and they shared a room.

05:45I remember vividly waking up to be, and thinking to myself that I'm going to pretend I'm waking up.

05:52So I like started stretching. And so I was going through this whole thing in my head. I was confused

05:57and I didn't know what was going on really, but I, I didn't want to be there. And I got

06:01up and I left

06:02and went into my room and that was it. And that's all I remember. I don't remember what happened after,

06:07but we have the evidence of these notes that I wrote to my mother the next day. And my dad

06:11wrote in

06:11the corner. He said, when, when mother wouldn't sleep with daughter. So it looks like I asked her

06:16if I could sleep with her, with them in their room. So I was scared, presumably. And she, as I

06:21would

06:22have said to my 10 year old, who would, might've come into my room, if she wanted to sleep in

06:25my bed,

06:26like go to your own room. The note said, hate you. You're just these awful, you know, mean things,

06:31but wasn't anything about what happened. It was just how much I hated her. She's a psychologist

06:36who had even worked with families of, so it was really hard for her when I remembered and told her

06:42that she had no clue. She said there were no signs. And I did find out about nine months later,

06:48like I said, I wrote to my brother to make sure I wasn't crazy and that this had happened. And

06:53he

06:53said, yes, he disclosed nine months after I did that he had been as a child outside of the home.

06:58And essentially he said, that's why it happened. He did admit that he realized after he did it,

07:04that it probably wasn't the right thing to do. I found some talk therapy. So I went to a psychologist.

07:09It was good for me, I think, to start to be able to speak it, but I found the myofascial

07:12release

07:13was still much more effective for me because you don't have to talk. Your body just does what it

07:18needs to do. I continued with the myofascial release. I did talk therapy. Then I also tried

07:22other things like tapping, sometimes called emotional freedom technique. I did something called an inner

07:27journey and it was a weekend retreat. And it was for anybody who has any issues they're trying to

07:32resolve or work through. Mine was my chronic pain. Really, I was still trying to get rid of the pain.

07:36And I thought once I get through all this trauma, my pain will go away. At this inner journey,

07:41there was this breathing exercise and we were lying on the ground and there was a moderator and she

07:45was saying, okay, we're going to try to get our breathing to a hundred percent capacity. So we're

07:50going to start, start slowly. Okay, let's go 10%, 20%. And the last thing I heard was 40%.

07:58I started screaming, like hyperventilating and screaming at the top of my lungs. Like somebody

08:03was attacking me. I was completely in this panic. One of the moderators or one of the workers there

08:08came running over to me. She turns out she was trained in trauma and she said, look at me, look

08:12at me. She's like, it's not happening now. She just kept saying that to me. And I finally, I came

08:17out of

08:18that panic, but I kept going back and forth into it. So she had to keep repeating that because I'd

08:22look at

08:22there. I'd be okay. I'd realize where I was and I knew nothing was attacking me right then, but I

08:27all of a sudden my eyes would close again and I'd start screaming again. That was pretty powerful.

08:31And that was when I really realized the level of trauma that was in me. So I did things like

08:37that.

08:37So I kept continuing to try different things. I even tried for the pain to oil that gave me heart

08:44palpitations, which was just another symptom that has come up. My heart flipping in my chest really

08:48is like me trying to do something. And once I realized I can't do anything, it's not happening

08:52now. Those kinds of symptoms go away. So I've had symptoms, different symptoms come and go

08:57through all this time. So I keep trying different therapies. I just, one day I was driving. It was

09:02late at night. It was raining. I had my two girls in the car and I had to drive home

09:07and my body was

09:08like starting to shut down and I'm driving. And I felt like I didn't know how to drive anymore.

09:13I was thinking like my foot doesn't know what to do. Pulled over to a rest stop in the middle

09:16of the night,

09:16in the middle of nowhere, scared to death. And I made it home, but it was very frightening

09:21driving. But ever since then, I've had these issues driving. And sometimes if I would drive

09:25anywhere more than 45 minutes, that would happen. Our brains are neuroplastic. We can change the way

09:30they process things, but it takes time and it takes work. And the other thing was, I really felt like

09:37just processing this trauma was really important. It took me a long time to get to the point where I

09:43could speak about it out loud. And it took me 12 years, but I published my memoir after 12 years

09:48of writing. And then it was not till another year later that I finally started looking online,

09:55maybe for other people who might have experienced some type of, or I didn't even like know what to

10:01look for, but it took a long time to even be able to say those words. You know, my brother,

10:06I couldn't, I couldn't, I would choke on that before if I tried to say that. My advice is first,

10:12believe in yourself. You know the truth and don't let others try to tell you otherwise.

10:17If you are not met with support, come to, there is five waves.org. We have a website and there's,

10:23we have an associated information hub called siblings trauma.com. And it's got a whole lot of

10:29information. You can go there. There are hotlines there to other resources as well. Sooner you

10:35start processing it, the less severe often the impacts down the line might be, but also you have

10:40to do it when you're ready. Don't push yourself, trust in yourself, find others like us at who have

10:46been through it too, and we get it and we can talk to you.

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