Will I ever lose my baggage?

[alittlebroken]

Not sure why I'm posting this really but I've been struggling a little with anxiety lately and I'm not sure if I'm a bit depressed. I'm okay but I keep going back to struggles I've had in the past and I really do wonder if I've permanently scarred from them.

People go through so much worse than what I have so I feel awful for even having a moan but basically my 'traumas' are:

Having the sole parent who could care for me die when I was young.
The remaining parent was bipolar and and unable to care for me properly.
I was badly bullied throughout school.
I was sexually assaulted by a stranger who was a lot older as a teenager and told no one for years, I still have flashbacks and panic attacks as a result.
I made rotten life choices, got myself pregnant and had an abortion, also as a teenager.

Fast forward many years and I'm in a very loving marriage and have children whom I love more than anything. My life now is exactly as I always hoped, I love my career and my family and am so very lucky to have that. So why do I find myself going back to that dark place of my past?

Sorry to be so miserable, I just don't feel like talking to anyone I know about this right now in case they worry about me. Anyone else been through anything similar?

I would say that the frightened, traumatised child/teenager in you hasn't healed.
You adult self carries on with life.
Self-love, kindness to yourself and I would talk to that inner child telling them they're safe now.

I’m so sorry you had such a rough childhood. Plenty of people don’t have to experience even one of the things you’ve mentioned, let alone all of them you sound like you’re minimising you’re experiences- I’m wondering if maybe that’s why you’ve found it difficult to deal them? In my experience, in order for me to recover from a difficult situation I need to go through all the processes of anger and hurt in order to properly accept what I’ve been through so that I can heal from it.

You’ve had some really traumatic experiences OP. Im glad to hear your life is good now, you really and truly deserve it after all you’ve been through. But reaching a positive stage in your life doesn’t automatically heal horrible wounds from the past, so it’s completely normal that you revisit things that have happened to you. Have you had any experience of counselling?

Thank you so much for your replies, it means so much.
I definitely think I need to try and process what I've been through and revisit it in some way. My coping mechanism is to act like everything is fine, I definitely think your rigjt about me minimising my experiences. As daft as it sounds, it's been my way of dealing with it all, telling myself it's not a big deal.
It's still just so painful to think about my past, I just live in denial. I know it sounds ridiculous. I did go to counselling briefly but that was after the death of my parent and before the rest of it happened. At the time I didn't find it helpful, I just couldn't open up. This post is my first time opening up about my past in many years. To some extent I think I still blame myself for most of it.

Having had years of therapy you are probably getting these memories because you have your own dc and also feel secure enough to allow them to surface, your not fighting fires anymore. Been in a place like you.

It’s completely understandable that denying it is your coping mechanism and that doesn’t sound silly at all- it’s much easier to deal with things by not acknowledging them because acknowledging them tends to bring you so much more pain.

Allowing these feelings to surface and speaking about them on this thread is a really good step- by writing everything down you’re getting rid of some of that denial and acknowledging how your experiences have made you feel

It’s not for everyone, but something that has really helped me to cope with a trauma I’ve experienced has been writing. Journaling about how I feel, writing letters to the person that had caused me the trauma to express all the things I wasn’t able to say to them in real life. Maybe this could be something you find helpful? And now that you’re in a better place and you’re starting to acknowledge your experiences you might have a more positive experience of therapy if you were to revisit it

Some kind of counselling would prob help but it may take a while. Sadly you seem to have achieved so much but the weight of your past is dragging you back. What could you have changed? Hindsight is a wonderful thing but a trained counsellor would help you move on from that past

I’ve found having kids very triggering. Just in general and also when they reach the ages I was when things happened to me.
I’m not sure therapy would do any good as I know why I feel like this. I can logically understand my past and the effect it’s had on me, I just don’t know how to get past that!