Cassandra LeClair - Being Whole

I am the person I need to be for this stage of my life.

Silence will no longer hold me hostage.

This is my journey to reclaiming my voice.

This was never a story I planned to tell, and for many years, I worked hard not to tell it. I pushed it away, built walls, and developed a number of strategies to ensure it would stay safely hidden away. But life circumstances eventually jolted me into the realization that I could no longer contain this experience. I felt propelled by a force larger than myself to tell my story, and one day, I started writing.

As a child, I endured years of sexual abuse. And I did not tell. For decades, I kept that secret hidden from everyone, including my parents. Consequently, I bore not only the deep emotional scars from the abuse but also the profound burden of this terrifying and devastating secret and its accompanying, gut-wrenching shame. Recognizing, acknowledging, and dealing with the abuse and its fallout seemed insurmountable for many years.

Ironically, most people would describe me as a very open personmaybe even too openand its true. I was an open book in many ways. I spoke freely about my infertility, emotional abuse, lupus, disability, and divorce. With all of that, what else could there be? Im sure no one guessed there was more, but I had carefully edited my story, and there were missing chapters that I had, essentially, locked away in a vault. A vault that resided deep inside of me. These stories would never see the light of dayor so I thoughtand remained hidden for more than thirty years.

During the time I carried this burden, I was constantly paralyzed by fear and panic. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, the debilitating fear seized me and overwhelmed my emotional and physical resources. All it took was one word, an event, or a memory, to hurl me through time and space, forcing me to relive the worst of my abuse while my body tried, desperately, to protect me by launching into a surreal fight-or-flight state that left me emotionally drained and physically exhausted.

This fight-or-flight response combined with my inadequate means of coping left me feeling mentally weak, unstable, and out of control. I hated myself every time it happened. I learned to retreat and withdraw from relationships to avoid burdening others with my troubles. I often isolated myself, in part out of self-protection, but also to shield others from what I perceived as my weaknesses and flawed character. Keeping many relationships on a surface level helped me avoid any emotional space where my patterns might become noticeable to others. This dysfunctional dance helped me cope, while I desperately tried every available form of therapy, medication, and healing modality to break the patterns and deal with the emotional fallout I was experiencing.

After going to school, reading, researching, teaching others, and going to therapymore times and varieties than I can countI understood that not talking about my abuse, and my utter brokenness, kept me from being free. A virtual prisoner of my secrets and shame, I expended enormous amounts of mental energy reliving and being re-traumatized by these horrible memories and their accompanying feelings. The concept of wholeness did not exist for me. In a desperate attempt to cope, I developed many disordered thought patterns and behaviors. I was getting by, but in no way, did I feel healed and whole.

Ultimately, I had to move away from seeing myself as messy, broken, chaotic, and flat-out unstable to realize my own value and self-worth. Of course, the multitude of challenges I have experienced changed me and altered my course, but I learned that I could be free from my old thought patterns and actions. Confronting life-long destructive behaviors and disordered thinking required enormous effort. But every bit of that hard work was worth it for the result of finally seeing myself as whole. Being Whole. That is what this book is all about.

Being Whole tells the story of how I gathered up all the broken pieces and worked toward wholeness. I am not broken. I am whole. All the bad things that have ever happened to me have shaped me as a person, but they do not define me. I refuse to be defined by fear, hate, or shame.

I have arrived at a place where I recognize and appreciate that we can take whatever has made us feel broken and build something stronger, and something more beautiful and resilient, with all those broken pieces. So many of us, maybe all of us, in ways great and small, have the potential to be like the beautiful kintsugi pottery that graces the front cover of this book. Once broken, now whole, but in a stronger, more beautiful form.

This is a story about my life but, in these pages, I chose not to explore the abuse and other events in great detail. My goal is not to trigger readers or get overly graphic. It is about coming to a place of healing that is so profound to me that I want to use my story and my experiences to inspire others along their own healing paths. It is my belief that we can gather the broken pieces and move forward to a life that no longer feels shattered beyond repair.

There may be people who feel they bear responsibility for not recognizing some of the crushing events described in these pages. There may also be individuals who think I have recalled things in a way that is inaccurate. There might even be those who believe I am being overly dramatic and attention-seeking. Concerns like these once prevented me from sharing my truth. That time is gone.