Oh no, here comes the wave…

Sandra Long
November 26th, 2025
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Trigger warnings: Suicidal ideation, violence to animals, CPTSD, drug use, AIDS, healing

I want to share something which is very personal. Few people know about this aspect of my life, but it is a significant part of my life experience, which has shaped and formed my experience in the world.

When I was at the tender age of 16, I started experiencing acute bouts of anxiety. I now realise that this was in fact a trauma response (CPTSD) from years of an unpredictable, stressful and alienating family life. The bouts would come in waves and progressively got worse. At the age of 17, I stopped going home and to school. I stayed at my boyfriend’s house in the inner city, and hung out with my friends. He introduced me to a lot of new things, especially arthouse films and independent music. I felt like I was learning a lot more than if I had of stayed at school doing year 12. I was having a lot of fun actually, but when a bout of anxiety and paranoia came on it would sometimes overwhelm me for days or weeks at a time. Different things could trigger it; loud sounds, unsafe feeling environments, and especially paranormal themes in films. When it happened I didn’t tell anyone. I kept it a secret because I felt ashamed. I was afraid that by telling someone, I might be stigmatised or labelled in some way as being mentally unwell, and that I would never be free of the stigma. I was also incredibly afraid of it getting worse, which was another reason I didn’t want to say anything. I just kept it quiet and tried my best to drown it out when it came on, and always felt a huge relief when a wave of this intense anxiety subsided.

AI therapy: the prompt – a curly haired teenager faces a wave of anxiety.

About halfway through what should have been my year 12 at high school, my boyfriend and I left Melbourne, and hitch hiked up the east coast, to Brisbane where my brother had just moved from Sydney. Now I think about it, it was odd that my brother moved to Brisbane from Sydney. He was a gay man, and homosexuality was still illegal to QLD at the time. I was really looking forward to seeing him, as I hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to see him as a teenager. He was 9 years older than me and had cut communication with the family for a number of years at one point. Still, I absolutely adored him. He loved dancing and theatre, and was obsessed with Abba. We had many things in common. I missed him.

But once in Brisbane, it became pretty obvious that something wasn’t right. He was highly strung and angry and highly critical at me a lot of the time. I am pretty sure now that he already knew he was HIV positive, but wasn’t saying anything. He may also have had a relationship breakup in Sydney. I probably wasn’t the most supportive as I was grappling with my PSTD symptoms, which he mirrored back to me. Also, looking at it now, I am pretty sure he was neurodivergent, very much like my mother, which of course none of us understood at the time. I realise now that my brother’s behaviour was retraumatising me, as it was similar to my experience of my mother.

As things progressed, the anxiety and paranoia I was experiencing was coming in increasingly overwhelming waves, and could be triggered by anything. During these bouts I felt an intense dread of everything. Nothing felt safe. It seemed that danger lurked everywhere, in the walls, in the radio, the TV, and no one was trustworthy. I didn’t tell anyone what was happening inside my brain, even my boyfriend, who was really a sweet young man. At my worst moments I secretly suspected he was evil, like Satan. The walls were watching. It was really terrifying.

I recall very clearly watching The Wizard of Oz with my brother, a movie which I had loved as a child, and when the witch with the green face appeared, I felt a sense of dread come over me. I remember thinking ‘Oh no, here it comes again’. And it did, a huge wave of overwhelm triggered by that witch. I went to bed that night in deep anxiety. And this wave got very bad. It lasted a couple of months. There was no way to escape it. I held a deep terror that it was getting worse, and that I might be in this state forever. I couldn’t imagine how I could stay living in this state forever. I started to think that perhaps death might be the only way out. I shared this with no one.

During this, things were escalating with my brother. He was constantly angry at me, and I deliberately avoided him which made him more angry. A particularly stressful thing was he got a puppy, only a few months old, and he would discipline it by belting it. I would hear him repeatedly hitting this poor little dog, the dog crying out. I think he may have done this to get attention from me. It worked. I intervened, standing in-between him and the dog, which lead to him threatening to hit me. I remember it so clearly, standing on the landing of the stairs between him and the little puppy. He said that no one in our family had ever supported him. I guess he was holding me responsible for his experience, not realising that I had also experienced violence as a child. I was still unpacking my own experience from my childhood and had no way of articulating yet what I had experienced. But I know he was doing to the dog what had been done to him. We weren’t aware of it but we had both absorbed a lot of self hatred and shame, and we reflected that back to each other very strongly.

I tried to generate to some images in AI to capture this moment. Of course, none of them could. But somehow putting it into images like this also feels healing.

Luckily there were other people who lived in the house who were kind and who became a sort of buffer for me. There was a gay couple in one of the rooms, the youngest was the same age as me, just 17, and also would have been in year 12 if he had stayed at school. We became good friends, and they tried to offer me a safe space from my brother. They were using heroin, and I am pretty sure they deliberately kept it away from me. They were perhaps the people I felt safest with. And there was a young family, a man and woman with their 2-year-old daughter. I spent a lot of time with the child and her mother, and particularly loved playing with the little girl. The mother had been friends with my brother previously in their workplace in Sydney. But then there were a number of domestic violence incidents where we intervened. The household was full of drama which must have exacerbated my anxiety. And I didn’t mention it to anyone.

Even when I was smiling in the company of others, the anxiety was crippling. I barely slept, laying awake at night, frozen in terror. Evil was everywhere. The terror of it getting worse consumed me. I started to think about dying more and more. My terror and dread was so crippling this felt like the only way out. I lay in bed praying that something would kill me. I fantasised about a bank robber coming into a bank and shooting me in the head from behind. Oh what a relief that would be! Please, please let that happen.

AI prompt; a teenaged girl lays in bed afraid as death looms around her

Or a truck would turn the corner as I was crossing the road and hit me. Yes, yes, please. If I had of been diagnosed with cancer I would have jumped for joy. The obsession with dying was getting more overwhelming. I couldn’t think about anything else. Every morning I would wish that today would be the day that I died. Even as I spent the day with a happy face playing with the child or going to visit places with my boyfriend, I longed for death. I was so full of constant dread about everything around me, and the intense fear that my condition getting worse, that dying seemed the only way out.

I tell you, if someone takes their own life, it is not an easy decision. It is a terrible, lonely experience.

But I was warding off the next step, to plan myself how to do it. Something in me told me there was a way through this. I started to realise that I needed to get help before I went to that next step.

But my rational mind told me, if I tell anyone what I am going through, I am at risk of being forcibly hospitalised, diagnosed, labelled, medicated, and I will lose control and be stuck with stigma forever. There was a lot of stigma around mental illness back then, more so than now. I was terrified of being judged and defined. Of letting others down. I knew I could not continue like I was, living in constant fear and thinking about death as a way to escape. But reaching out for help was terrifying also. It meant a loss of control. Still, I knew I had to do something.

I had a conversation with myself. I told myself, ‘This is getting pretty bad. If it’s worse tomorrow, I’ll call lifeline, and get help.’

Somehow, making this decision for myself calmed me. Making this decision gave me an action plan. A cut off point. A safety net. A structure. And the next day, it wasn’t worse. It still wasn’t better. But it wasn’t worse.

This was a relief. My safety net worked.

Again that night I told myself, ‘if it’s worse tomorrow, I’ll get help’. And the next day, although it wasn’t better, it wasn’t worse. Which felt like a small win. Knowing I had given myself permission to reach out for help helped me catch my breath. And so it went on, each day, I stepped myself through this minefield. One day at a time I reinforced myself with this promise that I would get help if it got worse. Even though the thought of getting help terrified me, for reasons I stated above, I made that commitment to myself. I think even having that dialogue with myself helped. It was like I was taking my well being seriously where it had never been taken seriously before. I was giving myself the support and attention I desperately needed, and had needed my whole life.

Events unfolded. Our house got raided for drugs, and the police found my brother’s gay porn magazines. They bullied and humiliated him and I stood up in his defence against the senior sergeant: ‘Don’t you talk about my brother like that!’. The sergeant smirked, but it didn’t go any further. The young gay couple who I felt safe with in the house, packed their bags and left for Northern NSW after the police found a needle and took it away for testing. My brother’s dog got out and got hit by a car. Everything felt chaotic and crazy. And I slowly stepped myself through it, one day at a time. The waves of anxiety slowly calmed down a little even as drama was unfolding externally. And then my boyfriend and I decided to leave, which again upset my brother. We paid the next month’s rent then caught a train further north. I regret abandoning him, but I was not able to support him in my condition. And I absolutely hated him at that point for hitting his puppy. That was really very distressing for me. I had to get out of there.

AI prompt: a teenaged girl with curly hair is telling an old police sergeant off for humiliating her gay brother during a house raid– seriously, AI therapy could be a thing!

We headed up to Northern QLD and lived in a caravan park by a river for 3 months. There I swam each day and played with children who lived at the caravan park. And that was enormously healing. I can say that healing has been ongoing for me. It has come in bouts and waves. I have actually reached out for help at times. But it has only been the past 3 years that I have really acknowledged the impact of trauma on me, and getting a diagnosis for CPTSD and ADHD. I was raised to pretend everything was OK even though it wasn’t. To keep it in the family. To present a happy successful image. I was so busy trying to stay afloat, and to maintain this image, I couldn’t see how trauma actually had impacted on every aspect of my life.

Remembering this experience reminds me to be compassionate to myself. It reminds me that I have come a long way, and that I should be proud of myself, rather than be hard on myself for what I haven’t yet been able to achieve or for my challenges. And in recent times I have come back to talking to myself again, when there is something bothering me, now I listen to myself about what is going on. This has been life changing. It is better than any therapist I have ever had.

People are sometimes dismissive of the term ‘trauma’ nowdays, because it gets used so much. And trauma is not a place we want to get stuck in. We are so much more than our trauma. We are shining light, pure love in our essence. I really believe that. But recognising the impact of trauma is important for everyone, because as long as we are caught in trauma responses, we are stuck in our mind, and never get to know our pure innocent selves. And as long as society is stuck in it’s trauma, we will continue to perpetuate trauma for generations to come, through continual cycles of reactivity. I believe that understanding and releasing trauma is perhaps the best thing we can do towards creating world peace.

Everyone experiences trauma, it is how our brains are formed and neurologically wired. Trauma is the brain’s response to situations which it perceives as unsafe in some way- emotionally, spiritually, physically. So it is a gift which keeps us alive by preparing us for best chances of survival and success within an ‘unsafe’ situation. But it becomes mal-adaptive once we no longer need it. We can stay stuck in the loop which we have wired for our survival, letting it control us and our responses to things. And it arises in terrifying ways sometimes. Healing trauma takes a lot of focus. It’s a lot of work. So please acknowledge yourself for the work you have done to heal. Even if it doesn’t seem your trauma is as ‘bad’ as another’s, it is still important to acknowledge it. By acknowledging it, you naturally make space for it to heal. Like allowing a child to speak about how they feel, it is such a relief to stop gaslighting yourself, and allow your experience to be seen and validated fully by yourself. This is more important that anyone else’s validation in my experience.

I am now so thankful for all of my experience, even as I still am uncovering and healing more.

RE my brother, It took us a few years after this incident to reconnect, but we did, and I spent a lot of time with him during the last year of his life before he died of AIDS related illnesses. During this time he opened up to me about our childhood which was also healing for our relationship. We never talked about what happened in Brisbane again, and I never did tell him about what I was going through at that time. It wasn’t necessary for me that he know. I was just glad that I could be there for him during that time.