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I was destroyed by his torture, but managed to escape with my son three years later (1986). Thus began a long, arduous road to recovery. I have always been a creative person and use writing and art as a means to work through the horror to carve out a way of life. As I began working with fabric, I became intrigued with using women’s faces as symbols for those whose lives had been shattered just like mine. I found myself gradually moving toward a representation of healing and thus, in 2005, I used face templates and patched them back together with different types of fabric to represent my inner healing and that of others so that a new picture formed. The new face was different from the original which is the way things are with all people healing from trauma. We piece our lives back together to form a new persona. I worked on this table runner (or wall hanging) for about 3 months as a Christmas gift for my mother. It was completed in December 2005. It is the first work of art that I completed using the idea of faces.
This essay began as an e-mail I wrote to someone who asked me how she could identify triggers from past traumas so that she could put a stop to “acting out” kinds of behavior. The e-mail made me examine this question more deeply. I decided at last to explore this issue using concrete examples of how I dealt with triggers. I had read about this subject in self-help books, but always it seemed like vague theories or psycho-babble. I wanted to be concrete and precise about the events of my life in hopes that other people who were victims of trauma could relate to it in a way that was not just theory. I wrote the e-mail in 2002, but began the essay in 2004. This draft was completed in November of 2005.
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