The Witch Inside Me: A Journey from Trauma to Medicine - Storytelling Part 1

Growing Up with the Wicked Witches

In my youngest years, I truly believed I was being raised by the wicked witches of the east. If I wasn't alone wandering in the yard—seeking solace in the quiet spaces between chaos—I was surrounded by women cackling and calling each other names, talking about their misdeeds, and gossiping about others in the family or beyond.

Their energy was big and exhausting, filling every corner of our home with a kind of electric tension that made my small body feel constantly on edge. I would wake up at night to hear them playing cards or reading the tarot, their voices carrying down the hall to my room like some kind of midnight ritual. An echo would sound: "You bitch!" followed by hoots, cackles, and slaps on the table that punctuated their late-night sessions.

They always had exceptionally tall glasses of blood-red wine, their hands gripping the stems while their nails—painted a dark ruby color or bright red like dripping flesh wounds—caught the dim light. Even as a child, I was struck by how theatrical they seemed, how their very presence felt like a performance of something dark and mysterious.

I remember moments where I wondered if I should be concerned for my safety, or if what I was witnessing was simply normal family life. At one point in my early childhood, I lived with three of them simultaneously. They drank liquor like starving raccoons, and somehow that alcohol brought out something evil in each of them. There was something so very wrong with their reaction to drinking—a transformation that I still don't understand to this day.

The alcohol didn't just lower their inhibitions; it seemed to unlock something sinister that lived beneath their everyday personas. They became different people entirely, as if the wine was a key that opened doors to rooms in their psyches that should have remained locked.

The Sweetest Monster

My mother was the sweetest of them all, they said—a favorite, a younger sister who was taken care of as much as possible after enduring what sounded like some of the worst trauma. To this day, I am still unsure how she survived the emotional, verbal, and physical abuse she endured during her own childhood. The stories I overheard in fragments painted a picture of suffering that would have broken most people completely.

Although she survived, what grew inside her from it all was something darker than I could ever have imagined. My mother—the woman everybody liked and adored, the one they all protected fiercely—had the deepest, most powerful monster within. It was as if all that protection and love from her sisters had created a shell around something wounded and dangerous, allowing it to grow unchecked in the shadows.

The contradiction was devastating to witness as a child. During the day, she could be charming, even sweet. People spoke of her with genuine affection, and I could see glimpses of the person she might have been under different circumstances. But I also knew the other side—the one that emerged when the sun went down and the wine came out.

Past Life Revelations

One day in my thirties, I was listening to someone who had done past-life regression work with my mother. She spoke about a past life I had shared with both her and my mother hundreds of years ago—a story that, while others might think incredibly strange, suddenly helped me make sense of some things.

In that life, it was I who died first—a bad death, almost cursed-like, that left a deep grief wound in my village that was never truly mended. Ceremony was performed to protect my soul as I passed through to the light, but my mother in that life turned down a darkened path. She chose to give away her power in that lifetime, despite having tremendous medicine power as a true medicine person.

She relinquished this gift—maybe because of grief, rage, anger, or anguish—I will never know. But hearing this story helped me understand something fundamental about the patterns between us. It gave context to the feeling I'd always had that our relationship was entangled with something much larger and older than this current lifetime.

Whether or not one believes in past lives, the story offered a framework for understanding the deep, inexplicable dynamic between my mother and me—the way our pain seemed to feed off each other, the way healing felt both necessary and dangerous.

The Dream That Revealed Everything

I once had a dream as a teenager about my mother that was particularly terrifying. In the dream, I was standing at the base of her bed, watching her sleep. It looked like she was having a nightmare, but it was unlike anything I'd ever witnessed.

She tossed back and forth, wretched in and out of her body, battling some kind of internal monster. One side was demonic—twisted and dark—while the other was her authentic self, beautiful and broken. She fought back and forth with all her might, as if her very soul was the battleground for this cosmic war between light and shadow.

I was so freaked out that I woke myself up and sat in bed with a cold shiver running down my arms. I felt I had seen what was hidden in the recesses of her spirit—what had become of the power she had given away, and what was feeding off of it. The dream felt like a revelation, a glimpse behind the veil of her everyday persona to the spiritual battle that raged within her.

This dream would stay with me for years, helping me understand that my mother wasn't simply "bad" or "evil," but rather someone whose soul had been compromised by forces beyond her conscious control.

The Night I Knew I Wasn't Safe

I didn't actually realize I wasn't safe until one late night when my mother woke me from sleep. I must have been only six or seven years old. She dragged me to the car in a fuss, angrily searching for her keys while muttering and cursing under her breath.

She wouldn't stop complaining about something and made a terrible racket that shattered the quiet of the night. I sat in the passenger seat, eyes widened, with a deep anxiety in my chest rising higher and higher. I didn't understand what was happening, but my body knew something was very wrong.

Suddenly, her two sisters emerged from the house with disturbed looks in their eyes and made their way carefully over to me. One opened the passenger door and reached for me with gentle but urgent hands. That's where my memory stops, as if my mind simply couldn't process what came next.

I will never forget the concerned look on my aunts' faces—the deep worry in their eyes, the way they moved with such careful deliberation. Something about their expression made me realize, for the first time consciously, that I was not safe. My body had always known this truth, but in that moment, something just clicked in my mind.

This was the moment my childhood innocence died. The moment I understood that the person who was supposed to protect me was actually the source of danger.

Living in Survival Mode

In the years after that disturbing late night, what I didn't know then—and wouldn't understand until my late thirties—was that I was inexplicably in a state of survival mode all the time. My nervous system knew my environment and acted accordingly, trained well by the chaos and instability that plagued me for years.

My body had learned to exist in a constant state of hypervigilance, always scanning for threats, always ready to fight or flee. This wasn't a conscious choice; it was an adaptive response to an environment where safety was never guaranteed and danger could erupt at any moment.

As I grew older, I became more aware of the fact that my memory of childhood was like a room with all the lights turned out. I simply had very little to no memory before the age of eight years old. It was as if my mind had locked away entire years of experience, protecting me from memories too traumatic to process.

I was put in therapy as a teenager and resisted it like hell. Giving dirty looks was like a superpower, and withholding information was a form of my own resistance. I hated everyone and almost everything. The only thing that brought me peace of any kind was nature—trees, sky, earth, and water became my true family, the only constants I could trust.

My body had learned to tighten and resist. Whenever I was in the presence of my mother, I either avoided her, insulted her, or crossed my legs and arms with an immense tightening of every muscle in my body. It was as if I was trying to create a physical barrier between us, knowing instinctively that she posed a threat to my very essence.

The Monster Unleashed

You see, during the time where my memories are black, my mother drank heavily. She was most certainly an alcoholic and has been attempting to recover ever since. But the thing was, when she was wasted, that monster came forward in its full, authentic form.

She would tear you apart with words so sharp they felt like physical blows. She would assault you emotionally, or come at you in an attempt to destroy your wholeness, your sense of self, your very soul. This is something her monster almost succeeded at with me. The attacks weren't just about anger or frustration—they felt intentional, as if something inside her was feeding off the destruction of innocence.

I think back to the small moments that kept me alive during those years. The people who came and went—neighbors, teachers, friends' parents—who spoke to me in ways that reminded me of who I truly was. The parents who gave me a glimmer of what healthy parenting looked like. The teachers who saw through my pain and stayed with me through it, refusing to give up on the wounded child hiding behind my armor of defiance.

Those are the individuals that I owe my goodness to. My grandfather was one of them—in all his imperfections and many mistakes as a parent himself, he somehow managed to show me the light along the way. He became proof that not all adults were dangerous, that some could be trusted with the tender parts of a child's heart.

The Grief of a Motherless Child

My grief over identifying as a motherless child in many ways has been with me always. Yes, my mother was physically there, and she managed to keep me alive despite her own state of degrading mental health—which is a miracle in itself. But our relationship was broken early on.

She became the unsafe person from a very early age—in fact, dangerous. To me, she was an evil wolf disguised as a sweet, innocent lady who would eat you alive as soon as you let your guard down. The Jekyll and Hyde nature of her personality meant I could never relax, never know which version of her I would encounter.

Although I am not here to intentionally shame or badmouth my mother, this is my story, my experience. It's very real and valid to me, and after decades of it being denied by my own family over and over again, I am here to speak my truth. Maybe this is not anyone else's truth but my own, and that is okay.

I am fully aware of only a fraction of what my mother has endured, and there is a part of me that understands the monster inside. The suppressed feminine rage, the lost soul, the tormented little girl who was told her body was disgusting and she would never be worthy of anything. The generational trauma that carved out pieces of her humanity before she ever had a chance to fully develop them.

It was the worst for her, and I see that. I understand that she was both perpetrator and victim, both the monster and the one devoured by it. But for me, there is also a story of my own, and trauma is unfortunately passed forward from generation to generation. The harm continues in various ways, even when we desperately want to break the cycle.

Choosing the Medicine Path

Because of this experience, I became fiercer about my medicine path in this life at an early age. I learned to own the witch inside of me that maybe the women in my family could not. I dove headfirst into many therapies and alternative modalities in an attempt to dismantle what was carried in my ancestry.

I have never been more certain and determined about anything in my life. The healing work became my religion, my calling, my reason for existing. I understood on a cellular level that I had been given these experiences not as punishment, but as preparation for something larger.

At some point in my late twenties, I realized I was living in unhealthy patterns I had learned. I was in a very narcissistic, abusive relationship and had just had my first child. Not long after he was born, it hit me like a tsunami in my chest—an absolute emergency to unbind myself from the toxicities in my life.

Becoming a mother myself was the catalyst that changed everything. Looking at my innocent child, I realized I would rather die than pass on the generational trauma that had been handed down to me. The buck would stop with me, whatever it took.

I began with talk therapy, signed up to receive biofield tuning sessions, and began my journey with Reiki. Each modality opened new doors of understanding and healing. I learned that trauma lives in the body, that healing requires more than just talking about pain—it requires releasing it from our very cells.

The Lifelong Journey

Now in my forties, I understand that I may be unbinding myself for the rest of my life and even into the next. But I am here to do this work, and even to walk with others on their own path for a time—to empower them, to remind them that the fear is the most important catalyst.

Most importantly, I want people to know that their most horrific experiences are there to teach us just how powerful we really are. That we are master medicine people walking the shamanic journey, whether we realize it or not. Every person who has survived trauma and chosen healing over perpetuation is a warrior of light.

This is NOT an easy or beautified path by any means. The healing journey is messy, non-linear, and often excruciating. There are days when the old patterns feel stronger than your commitment to change. There are moments when you wonder if you're strong enough to break cycles that have existed for generations.

But it's also the most lucid and miraculous journey there is. To transform poison into medicine, to turn your wounds into wisdom, to become the adult you needed when you were a child—this is the most sacred work a human being can undertake.

This is the beginning of my story—a journey from surviving a toxic family system to claiming my power as a healer and medicine woman. In Part 2, I'll explore how these early experiences shaped my adult relationships and led me down a path of continued healing and self-discovery.