There is something magical about trauma survivors that people who haven’t experienced trauma might not understand. Trauma survivors are like lotus flowers in that we stretch, grow, and thrive based on our murky, muddy past. Once we emerge from the muck, we are pristine, whole, and complete.
If one woman is resilience personified, her name is Lockey Maisonneuve. A horrific childhood fraught with neglect and abuse and a breast cancer diagnosis as an adult gave Lockey every reason to be angry and walled off from the world. And in fact she was—but through therapy, yoga, and a lot of hard work, she defied the odds and grew beyond her trauma.
Her memoir, A Girl Raised By Wolves, tells the story of her unlikely journey from victim to survivor. Born to alcoholic, disinterested parents, Lockey and her sister share a room in a cockroach-infested apartment, learn to grocery shop on their own, and lose sleep on school nights caring for their mother who comes home blacked out drunk, hurling insults and fists their way.
Tiring of being a “parent,” Lockey’s mother ships the girls to Florida to live with their father. Billy, also a drunk, can’t hold down a job or a girlfriend, so he and the girls float from motel to motel.
He rapes her, regularly, and a bad situation turns worse when he realizes he can sell her preteen body to his leering friends for drinking money.
One day, Leon, one of my father’s drinking buddies, came into my bedroom explaining to me that my father had sent him over to see me. Apparently, my father owed Leon money and I was the payment.
In an extraordinary display of determination and hard work, Lockey manages to liberate herself from her living arrangement. She finds gainful work, a home, and even love. With time, she puts her childhood behind her, finding a comfortable disassociation, a state of being emotionally checked out from her traumatic past. And then, she learns she has breast cancer.
Healing from trauma is like healing from cancer treatment. I know, because I’ve healed from both.
How do you heal when life keeps dealing you blows? Maisonneuve finds her recovery in yoga. She is a self-admitted “asshole” when she starts the practice, interested only in post-mastectomy shoulder mobility, but she later finds that “healing my trauma was an unexpected and life-transforming benefit of yoga.”
She arrives at that transformation by exploring the mind-body connection. Being in the moment, noticing and experiencing feelings and emotions, is the opposite of the disassociation she’s relied upon to get this far. And at first, it’s difficult and scary. But Lockey reflects that the yoga mat is a place to practice coping tactics: “We learn this skill on our mat, in a safe environment, so that when life goes sideways, we have the tools to bring ourselves back to the present moment.”
We learn this skill on our mat, in a safe environment, so that when life goes sideways, we have the tools to bring ourselves back to the present moment.
This is the takeaway from A Girl Raised By Wolves: that healing is a process requiring time, practice, and commitment. Maisonneuve once considered herself broken. She realizes, now, that she is not what happened to her, and that finding meaning in her experience means it wasn’t for nothing. “I admit, I really like who I’ve become. The culmination of my experiences—good, bad, and ugly—made me into the badass I am today.”
Badasses and badasses-in-progress will see parts of themselves reflected in Maisonneuve’s memoir, and we can all draw inspiration from Lockey’s strong and spirited resilience.
