MHM Magazine

Issue 4 | 2022 | MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS | 39 MHM I felt that I had lost me and there was nothing left to lose, nothing to preserve as the most important thing was gone. The emotional pain forced me to give my mental health my best shot and fight and refuse to accept that this is my life. In varsity I experienced a neuroplasticity where an external stimuli caused a synapse in my brain and one emotion was awakened giving me hope that I could feel again - but after that I couldn’t tap into it beyond that. During the years of working, I found mental health specialists and was admitted to a mental health clinic. There I was able to recover from the emotional shutdown completely, my skin pigment that looked like vitiligo disappeared within two weeks, the nodal point was found and the traumatic experience uprooted and all the effects of the trauma just fell away. I’d developed a schizoid personality and that too disappeared after the uprooting of the trauma. I felt like I’d just woken up from a coma that took place at the age of five years and now I’ve healed completely it’s as if the trauma never happened. I’m seeing myself as I was before the incident when the world seemed brand new. I have a completely new personality and now I know peace, living in the present not the past. Because I’ve personally experienced this childhood trauma and felt its impact and effects on all aspects of my life and I wish I could have read about someone like me who had made a full recovery sharing how they did it, so that I could have also healed earlier. Sadly I didn’t find such information, for many reasons including stigma around mental health and sexual abuse issues. Today childhood trauma receives attention, particularly involves scholars, highlighting the adverse effects on an individual’s life. I decided to write about my experience detailing the impact and effects of childhood trauma and how my healing took place with different interventions, hoping my experience of neuroplasticity in reversing the impact of childhood trauma could be looked into as a possible non-invasive approach. I believe it’s important for individuals who experienced childhood trauma to understand what really happened to them psychologically and the scientific names for those complicated emotions, so they can understand and find complete healing. The epidemic of sexual abuse is something an individual can recover from and have their life back as soon as possible. I did heal and recover twenty eight years after the traumatic event, almost three decades, the psychological trauma was reversed. The aim of my book is also to contribute to the prevention of this social ill through education of society as a whole, as well as perpetrators, on the devastating impact and effects to hopefully discourage people from engaging in it. THE COURAGE TO HEAL By Boitumelo Mabele Where to BUY THE BOOK https://www.btcth.co.za/ product/the-courage-to-heal/