From Shame to Empathy: A Story of Trauma and Survival

Trigger Warning: This piece contains discussions of trauma, suicide, self-harm, and sexual violence. Please take care while reading.

1. The A-Team

I was 20 when I dropped out of college. I was so stressed out and in such a dark place I tried to OD on a swath of pills that likely would not have killed me but seriously screwed up my liver. And just in case that didn’t work, I had a backup method.

My left forearm was lined with cuts from self-harm. After the pills, I was going to finish myself off with one deep meaningful cut and bleed out onto my dorm room bed, at least that was the fantasy — how romantic. I remember sipping orange flavored vodka and building the nerve to cut deeper than I had in the past.

I was slouched up against the wall with the rest of my body sprawled out across my bed. I lay there like a cast-aside rag doll on the bottom bunk of a double bunk setup. I lived alone, though the room was built for two, so my laptop was my roommate — a trusted friend that never argued and connected me to the outer world.

I frequently talked to strangers on the internet, a child of the wild west internet days when it felt like there were no laws. I had made lots of online friends in my youth, entertaining myself over the hours I spent home alone while my immigrant parents worked themselves to the bone.

I took another sip of vodka and looked at the laptop screen blankly, watching a text cursor blink slowly back at me. I had been chatting with an online friend who didn’t live in the state. We’d never met in person, but we bonded over our mutual love of web design and technology. I leaned over, drunk at this point, but I managed to line up my fingers on the keyboard well enough to type in a short message. I said he was a good friend, and that life was just too much sometimes, or something equally despondent. That kind of saccharine melancholy was out of character for me, which must have tipped him off that something was wrong. He tried to get me to engage, and told me I was frightening him, but I logged off. I slammed my laptop shut and I mentally prepared myself to finish the job.

Spoiler alert, I’m still here.

Unbeknownst to me, my friend had made the bold decision to call campus security on my behalf. Ten minutes later, an intervention team showed up knocking on my door. Confused, I waited for the knocking to go away, but it continued. I heard a muffled voice behind the door asking to be let in followed by keys shuffling. Annoyed that my grand exit had been interrupted, I finally reanimated, dragged myself off the bed, and walked to the door.

I slowly opened the wooden door, revealing a group of adults in matching red vests, crowded in my doorway, staring at me with concern. Apparently, the A-team had arrived. They stepped in and sat me back down on the bed to chat. In the background, a lady in a red vest swept all the pills on my desk into a waste basket. The clinking sound as they hit the bottom of the trash can was the sound of my salvation slipping away. I barely registered the words coming from the man kneeling in front of me. He spoke in a low, soft tone, as if anything more would risk shattering me. I nodded or shook my head to questions I don’t even remember. Eventually, they asked me to go to the hospital. I had a choice, go with them, or go on my own, but they would be expecting me either way. There was no third choice. “I can go my own”, I conceded.

When I would think about that memory, for a long time, all I would feel is searing embarrassment. But I should have felt gratitude, because my friend, and that eager team of adults, likely saved my life.

What happened afterwards was a whirlwind. It was hard to feel anything but intense shame and guilt because I felt like I had failed everyone. My parents were sickeningly proud I received a scholarship to attend college, so I’m sure they were beside themselves when they got a call from the hospital that I had been admitted for a suicide attempt in the middle of my second year. Had I known my parents would be informed, I probably would have made a run for it. At the time, I was in shock at what was happening. Like it was happening to a version of me, that wasn’t me. Like, I was watching a movie that wasn’t my own story. I would come to know this as a form of dissociation, something I would become intimately aware of during therapy many years later.

2. A Backpack Full of Bricks

My parents had no idea how much I struggled with depression for years before I even reached this point. How could they know? I didn’t know what depression was either. My parents were poor immigrants, who found success in America through sheer grit and sacrifice. It meant they were constantly in survival mode, no room for feelings, no room for my feelings. We had very little understanding of mental health. Other than joy, gratitude, and occasionally my father’s anger, emotions were not accepted in our household. Emotions were looked down upon as weakness or laziness. Emotions were something you could just work yourself out of feeling.

Authoritarian parenting in the form of physical discipline is somewhat common in Hispanic culture. But I like to call what happened in our family what it is — physical abuse. Watching my dad beat my 14 year old brother into a corner with a belt until he was wailing for him to stop, did not look like discipline to my six year old eyes, it looked like terror.

It wasn’t just the physical abuse that informed my perception of self. Unfortunately, I also experienced sexual abuse as a young child from a close relative. My parents had no idea it had occurred, and I had no desire to stir it up, ever. The intensity of shame around the event kept me silent, as it often does for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

I once had a therapist ask me when I remembered feeling safe as a child, and I honestly can’t remember. The confusing thing is, I did feel loved, or what I perceived as love, but it was conditional. I felt loved, in the way a child “loves” a favorite stuffed animal. I was a possession, to provide comfort or joy, but I wasn’t to talk, to be perceived, or to have needs. I was meant to be taken off the shelf and played with, and then tossed aside when finished. I grew up feeling like my body was not my own, it belonged to my dad, who policed it and kept an eye on it, like it was dangerous. Like I was the dangerous one. So I learned to shrink, to make myself small enough to survive.

But that kind of survival comes at a cost.

By the time I turned 18, my childhood traumas were stacked up in tall piles all around me, with nowhere to put them. When I moved away to college, I packed it all up and carried it around campus like a backpack full of bricks. There wasn’t much room for my college textbooks.

3. Salt & Shame

Those first two years in college, I put myself in dangerous situations without concern because I felt nothing for my body or myself. I had many sex partners — more than felt good, more than I even wanted. It was a compulsion, an attempt to fill a void that only seemed to get bigger.

So when my parents received that phone call about my suicide attempt, they didn’t know that, only a few months earlier, I had been raped by a friend during an alcoholic binge. They didn’t know how I swept it under the rug, trying to ignore it happened at all, feeling like it was my fault. It eerily echoed what happened when I was five and the only tools I had to deal with it were avoidance and silence.

I tried to work myself out of all the emotions, like I had been taught. But the inability to recognize and care for my own needs led to a spiraling cascade of depression, anxiety, and eventually suicidality.

Prior to my attempt, I was enjoying living alone as it was the first time I was allowed to actually feel and express emotions freely — to be, human. I struggled to understand myself and my place in the world like most college students. But with the emotional gates suddenly wide open, I flooded, hard and fast. Every emotion, painful body memory, and trauma exploded out of me. It was as if someone suddenly turned the music up and blew out my eardrums. And I soaked all of that pain in alcohol until that too came flooding out uncontrollably. By the time I tried to commit suicide, I was already drowning.

From the outside I just looked like an irresponsible party-girl. I drank myself into failing out. That’s what my dad thought too. I’m sure it never occurred to him that his behavior was a part of the problem.

That semester, when I dropped all my classes because of my mental health, he was furious. College was about 45 minutes away from home and he refused to help me move my stuff back. When I finally saw him, he wouldn’t even look at me. He just kept eating his dinner, like I wasn’t worth more than the lentils in his bowl of soup. He was so disappointed and all I felt was intense shame for failing out of college, just like my brothers had.

“I never had any problems with you, why all of a sudden?” Those were his first words to me as he stared unflinchingly at the wall.

“Why would you want to do this [suicide]?” He said, in a low voice, anger in his brows. “For what reason? I could do that too, you know. You think my life has been easy? And I never think about that, so why would you?” He was upset. He was frustrated with my choice. In his own way, he was trying to understand why his daughter would give up her life. I remember starting to panic, years of fear racked my nervous system and my body trembled. I tried to hide it and hold back tears as I was lectured on the idiocy of my choices and the stinging reminder that I was an ungrateful piece of crap.

“What are you going to do now? You shouldn’t tell anyone you have these issues. How will you get a job if this is on your record?” I don’t know what imaginary record he was talking about, but I did my best to interpret, as I always did, cutting through his thick accent. How would my future employer see dropping out of college? What would people say about a diagnosis of depression or bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder? These were foreign and powerful words the hospital had sent home, neatly tucked away into pamphlets, and slapped onto me like poorly sewn labels. Armed with these sharp new words, his questions hit like strikes from his belt.

My mind drifted back to the intake guy at the hospital. He sat across from me in a small room, his body casually draped over a chair like it was any boring Tuesday afternoon for him. He asked me what I wanted to do next, as if I had at all been thinking clearly during one of the lowest moments of my life. As if I had a plan for ‘afterwards’. He pressed, did I still want to take my life? Am I sure? Am I really sure? Then, what did I want? I wanted to go hide under a rock. I wanted to tear everything down and start over. I wanted to run.

They finally let me out on the condition I would attend weekly therapy for a few months. I then went through the process of explaining to all my teachers (and eventually friends) that I was struggling with depression and had decided to drop all of my classes and go home to recover. It was the worst kind of tour. By the time I had explained it to everyone, I felt like I failed myself and embarrassed my friends and family. I did not need my dad to berate me. I already felt completely humiliated and worthless. At the time, it made sense to me. I thought, I should feel like that.

The reaction I received after coming home, the concern, was not for me, in my current state. The concern, common in migrant-families, was about whether I would be able to get a good job one day. Not empathy, not care, not love. Disappointment. I was an open wound and instead of bandages and care, all I got, was salt and shame.

4. Rewriting the Story

A couple months later, as summer wound down and classes wrapped up, a friend of mine came to visit me at home. We talked about where I was at, and she listened. After a long pause, she told me not to worry about any of it. That it didn’t matter that I had a “setback”. That I just needed to get better, get back out there, and get my degree.

It was the simplest advice, and it meant the world to me. It showed belief in me as a person and non-judgment for what I had been through.

Many years later, I brought this up to my friend, and hilariously, she doesn’t even remember saying it. I have to imagine it’s because it was such obvious advice — so simple it could have been mistaken for a canned platitude, or even an infomercial for a technical school: “Just get your degree!”

Yet, my own parents couldn’t give me that kindness. They simply didn’t have the capacity. I was so starved for emotional support that a phrase as ordinary as “You’ll be fine, just try again” felt like a downpour on my scorched heart.

I eventually went back and did earn my degree. I even went on to get a master’s degree and cultivate a successful career. But there was still a part of me that felt the pain of that experience and if I allowed it, the sense of shame would well up inside me, escaping my body in tremors and crocodile tears. Every time I might disappoint someone, those feelings were there to remind me of what it felt like to “fail”.

Shame made a home in that memory — and in many others. It got comfortable. It got vocal. It cast doubt on every decision to prioritize my own self-care rather than stretch myself thin or bury my emotions just to maintain appearances.

Remember what it feels like to disappoint those around you because you are too weak and inadequate? Do you really want to go there again? You should be ashamed of yourself — asking for help. Why can’t you ever do anything on your own? Why are you so useless? You are pathetic, you ungrateful piece of crap.

That was the voice of my shame. A voice that many of us with childhood trauma have to endure. I carried it with me for decades, and it shaped everything — what careers I believed I was capable of, who I thought I was worthy of, and what I allowed myself to say.

Slowly over time, I learned to silence this voice because I started to realize something both paradoxical and powerful:

That voice was trying to protect me.

This inner voice shamed me into behavior change — warning me away from anything it perceived as dangerous. Career changes that might overwhelm me. Relationships with people who might reject me. Cautioning me against speaking, in case it made me a target. This voice used the only playbook it knew — my childhood. That was the blueprint for everything it recognized as unsafe. And once I realized this, the story flipped.

I started to recognize the patterns. I pushed back. I got comfortable in my own head. And my voice — my real voice — grew louder. Until one day, I realized how quiet the other had become.

Now when I look back on this memory, my suicide attempt in college, I don’t look back at it with shame. I don’t think I failed anyone. I struggled because of very real, deeply painful experiences in my life that were too much for any child to carry alone.

I did my best.

I used my short, but strong, legs to carry me as far as they could before I collapsed, and there is absolutely no shame in that. When I think about that version of me, sipping orange vodka on my dorm room bed, thinking about a peaceful release from suffering, I have nothing but empathy. And I smile, because I made it to the other side. That suffering is nearly gone, and I didn’t have to kill myself to get there.