The Backward Plank

I always thought I was building the bridge forward.

One plank at a time. Identity. Grief. Career pivots. Permission.

The slow architecture of a life that finally belongs to us.

Then I learned that some planks do not go down in front of us.

They go down behind us.

This is the plank I did not plan for - the one that required me to return for the woman I once was and make space for what she still needed to say to the person who hurt her.

A personal reflection on trauma, abuse, and the way old memories can enter a life that is now safe.

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
—Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

Two weeks ago, I wrote a letter to my younger self after learning that my ex-husband was getting remarried.

In it, I offered compassion and tenderness to the younger version of me—the woman who needed to understand that she had made the best choices she could based on who she was and what she knew at the time.

I thought that might be the end of it.

It wasn’t.

This week, I continued to be triggered by memories from my first marriage that frankly surprised me. I thought I had done the work years ago to move through the betrayals and abuse.

I had built another life.

I was happy.

I was safe.

Why was I being affected again now?

“Once you have been wounded, those wounds can sometimes become loud again,” my longtime friend and therapist told me when I reached out to her in tears this week, asking her, “What the f*ck is going on? I thought I did the work around this”

Of course I knew what triggers were. I have experienced them before. I just had not experienced them this vividly in many years, and I had forgotten how intense they could be.

For those who have never experienced one, here is the quick-and-dirty explanation: when you are triggered, your nervous system can respond to an old danger as though it is happening in the present.

Your mind may know where you are.

Your body may not.

Working through one painful memory two weeks ago apparently gave way to many more flooding my consciousness, and I was not prepared for this.

I could feel something building. There was more tension in my body. More anger rising that I could not quite place… a feeling that I needed to defend myself against something, although I could not have told you what that something was.

That’s the thing about past trauma resurfacing in your consciousness after many years. Something feels oddly familiar, but the timeline is confusing to your mind.

Then, this week, while I was getting dinner out of the oven, my husband touched me.

It was an innocent touch from the most loving, gentle, and respectful man I have ever known.

And I lost it.

A wave of anger and pain rose from an old memory of being touched in a very different way, by a very different man.

I yelled at him.

No, if I am being honest, I came undone.

For one disorienting moment, my body could not distinguish between the touch happening in my safe kitchen and the one it remembered from another life. I reacted as though something were being taken from me - as though his affection were a violation rather than the safe, loving gesture it was.

I ended up saying to him what I had never been able to say to my ex-husband.

That was the powder keg that had been brewing. I can see it now with perfect clarity. I could not see it in the moment, when I was telling the safest man I have ever known that his touch did not feel safe.

That is the thing about trauma responses. When fight-or-flight takes over, we do not always fully understand what we are doing or why we are doing it. The body reacts before the present-day mind can explain that this is a different room, a different man, and a different life.

Opening the door to the memory of my wedding day seemed to invite a dozen other memories I had not expected to encounter again.

Suddenly, I was no longer remembering them.

I was in the middle of them.

I felt as if I were drowning in flashbacks.

So I reached out for help.

I texted two therapist friends the next day and said, “I need to talk some things through.”

The next morning, I was on the phone with one of my closest friends, who is also a therapist. She reminded me that wounds do not always disappear simply because they have been quiet for a long time. With the right conditions - and the right trigger - they can become loud again.

She told me I needed more time to clear this.

Then she gave me some homework.

Write, she said, which is convenient because writing is already how I make sense of almost everything.

She also reminded me to ground myself after allowing a memory to surface - to touch something tangible, notice a familiar scent, stand near a tree, feel the earth beneath my feet, and remind my body:

I am here. This is now. I am safe.

Then she asked me a question:

“Did you ever actually say to your ex-husband the things you accidentally said to your husband?”

No.

I hadn’t.

And apparently it was high time I did.

There is a therapeutic practice called the empty-chair technique. You imagine that the person to whom you need to speak is sitting in an empty chair across from you. Then you say what you were unable to say when they were actually there.

That was another part of my homework.

I had done it before with other people in my life. When my mom died, I had things I needed to say. I had recommended clients do it. I hadn’t thought I needed to do it now. But clearly, I had some things I needed to get out of me.

But first, I went to the gym.

I needed to sweat, grunt, and lift heavy things. I needed to open my throat chakra and remind my body that I was strong.

Then I came home, showered, and put on a new dress I had bought the day before. I did my hair and poured myself a glass of something friends had brought over for game night weeks earlier, called Bianco.

They had said to serve it over ice with a lemon peel, so that is what I did.

Alcohol may not have been the recommended accompaniment to a therapeutic exercise, but apparently this particular reclamation required a new dress, a good pen, and a well-placed lemon peel.

The first sip was just sweet enough. Perhaps, I thought, to temper some of the spit and vinegar that was about to come out of me.

Then I sat down, picked up my pen, and began to write what I would say. Instead of a barrage of verbal attacks, I wanted to write down what I would say first.

An old-fashioned pen on paper, which for me is far more therapeutic than typing. I let the pen move without stopping for ten minutes.

What came out was not the hate-filled venom I expected.

It was something much more powerful.

What did I want to say to the person who had vowed to love me but instead pillaged me, controlled me, demeaned me, and betrayed me?

I am not scared of you anymore.

That was the first thing I wrote.

I am not the young woman who was naïve and trusting. I am a full-grown woman now. I can run circles around the insecure, fragile ego that required constant reinforcement to feel steady and strong.

I wrote that I had been the best thing that ever happened to him and that he had pissed it away.

I wrote that deceit and a double life have a shelf life. That perhaps the knowledge of what he had done still met him sometimes when he laid his head down at night.

But I did not have any more anger to give him. That asked too much from me now. I had done that years ago.

What I had was pity. Not fear. Not hate. Not any more energy to give.

I also had half his pension.

I had decided to take that pension early and earmark it for things that bring me joy and make me feel beautiful and strong…new dresses, new investments, fancy dinners with my hot, handsome husband, and now, apparently, some occasional lemons to put in my new favorite Bianco cocktail, so I could toast to the woman I am today.

So instead of fuck you, I found myself writing thank you.

But not thank you for the pain.

Not thank you for the betrayal, the control, or the parts of myself I had to recover after you were gone.

You do not get credit for my strength. I built that from what you tried to take from me.

But thank you for revealing that the woman standing here now is stronger than the man who once tried to make her small.

Thank you for teaching me the difference between control and love. Between fear and safety. Between surrendering myself and being fully seen.

I would never choose what happened to me. I would never call it a gift.

But I will claim everything I made from the wreckage.

The scars left by walking through hot coals do not mean I was broken by the fire. They show me what I endured without allowing it to destroy me.

They are reminders of who I became, not because of the thousand wrongs done to me, but because I eventually refused to let those wrongs define me.

And thank you for the pretty new dresses I will buy with your pension and wear to dinner with my strikingly handsome husband.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a letter and then spoke to the woman who had been hurt.

This week, I wrote a letter and spoke to the empty chair… to the person who hurt her.

I believe that both letters can be necessary in the work of reclaiming an identity.

The first says:

I understand why you made the choices you made. You did not deserve what happened to you. I forgive you for what you could not yet see.

The second says:

I see clearly now what was done to you. I will no longer protect the person who hurt you by remaining silent. I will say what you could not safely say then.

Compassion without truth can become another form of silence.

Anger without compassion can leave the younger self carrying blame that was never hers.

Perhaps healing asks us to hold both.

Tenderness for the person we were.

And a fierce refusal to let the person who hurt us continue defining who we are.

What happened to me changed me. I do not need to deny that to be healed.

But being changed by something is not the same as being reduced to it.

I am not only the woman who was betrayed, controlled, or abused.

I am also the woman who eventually recognized love without control. The woman who built a safe life. The woman who is continuing to push the limits of what I can accomplish.

The woman who went back for her own voice and brought it home.

I have been writing about building a bridge between the life we have lived and the life we still want to create.

But we cannot build a life that truly belongs to us while allowing the beliefs forged in an old one to keep determining what we fear, what we accept, or how safe we feel inside our own bodies.

Sometimes building the next life means going back for the parts of ourselves that were not yet free to cross -taking her by the hand and gently bringing her forward.

The memories may still find me occasionally.

But this backward plank did not take me back to him.

It brought her forward to me.

And now we cross together.

If this stirred something in you, perhaps there is a part of you that still has something she needs to say before she can move forward.

You might begin by asking:

What did I need to say then that I could not safely say?

What does the person I am now understand that the person I was could not yet see?

What would she want me to know about what she survived?

You do not have to confront anyone, send a letter, offer forgiveness, or find gratitude for what happened. The purpose is not for the person who hurt you to hear your words.

It is for you to finally hear your own voice.

Move gently. If writing brings up more than you feel able to hold, stop, ground yourself in the present, and consider returning to it with someone safe or with a trauma-informed professional beside you.

If you are somewhere between the life you have lived and the one that is beginning to feel like your own, welcome.

We are building these Bridge Years here in real time - forward when we can, backward when we must, one honest plank at a time.

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