A Trauma-Informed Reflection on the Morning Everything Finally Snapped
June 7, 2024
There are moments in trauma recovery that don’t look like healing at all.
They don’t look strong.
They don’t look empowered.
And they definitely don’t look like clarity.
They look like collapse.
For me, that moment was June 7th, 2024 — the morning I was supposed to leave the Missouri house for good.
To understand why that day hit like a freight train, you have to know the weeks leading up to it. Mother’s Day — May 12th — was The Mom-pocalypse. The day I realized my now known to have been step-father didn’t know I wasn’t his son, that he wasn’t “in on it.” The day my mother’s mask didn’t just slip — it shattered. The day decades of confusion finally clicked into a single horrifying picture.
From that moment to June 7th, my nervous system had been living in a hurricane.
Shock → grief → anger → clarity → guilt → hope → fear → numbness → resolve → collapse.
A full cycle of emotional seasons in just over three weeks.
And then June hit.
- My son flew to Seattle on June 4th to help my mother move back — something she’d manipulated and financially drained everyone into enabling.
- My daughter and her fiancé left on June 6th, headed back to Texas.
- The house was empty.
- The truth was loud.
- And the silence was even louder.
By the morning of June 7th, the emotional storm had nowhere left to go except through me.
The Moment of Collapse
I went into the basement that morning to grab the last of my things before I hit the road to follow my daughter back to Texas — a first step toward the journey that would become Judgment Day later that summer.
But I didn’t make it to the truck.
Somewhere between the staircase and the concrete floor, my knees buckled.
My chest constricted.
My body finally said what my mind had been avoiding:
“I can’t do this anymore.”
It wasn’t dramatic.
It wasn’t cinematic.
It wasn’t brave.
It was human.
I folded onto the floor and sobbed harder than I had in decades — full-body shaking, gasping for air, the kind of cry your nervous system saves for when it finally believes you are safe enough to feel the truth.
This is something trauma specialists talk about a lot:
the collapse before the breakthrough.
When we’ve spent our entire lives in survival mode — especially as Adult Children of Narcissists — the body becomes the historian.
It remembers everything we pushed down to function.
And sometimes, when the last piece of the puzzle falls into place…
…it breaks us open.
Why This Happens (Trauma-Informed Insight)
What happened that morning wasn’t weakness.
It was physiology.
1. Your body knew the truth before you did.
For weeks, my mind had been processing betrayal, identity, and loss.
But my body had been storing 49 years of emotional strain.
When my daughter left
and my son was gone
and the house was empty
and nothing was left to hold onto…
…the survival mode finally dropped.
2. Collapse is a parasympathetic rebound.
After prolonged stress, the nervous system crashes into a state of shutdown to protect you.
It’s not giving up.
It’s recalibrating.
3. This is what it looks like when the trauma bond breaks.
Walking away from a narcissistic parent is not a clean decision.
It’s a death — of a fantasy, of a role, of a lifelong coping pattern.
The collapse isn’t a failure.
It’s a release.
4. Your body needed to empty out before you could leave.
If I hadn’t broken down, I might not have been able to break free.
What I Didn’t Know That Morning
I didn’t know that only weeks later, I’d rescue my son from that very same toxic environment, when my mother’s wrath turned on him.
I didn’t know August 29th would become Judgment Day — the day we left Missouri for good, and No Contact became permanent.
I didn’t know that the collapse was the turning point, not the end.
I didn’t know that letting everything fall apart was how I’d finally be able to stand up, walk out, and choose myself for the first time in my life.
The Rise After the Fall
Eventually, the sobbing slowed.
The shaking eased.
My breathing came back.
And something else returned too — quiet resolve.
I stood up.
I wiped my face.
I grabbed my keys.
And I walked out of that basement a different person than I walked in.
Not stronger.
Not healed.
But awake.
Sometimes the basement fall is what frees you from the house altogether.
For Other Survivors
If you’ve had a moment like this — on a bathroom floor, in your car, in your closet, in your childhood bedroom — you’re not broken.
You’re breaking out.
The collapse is not the end of the story.
It’s the door.
Your nervous system isn’t betraying you.
It’s guiding you toward freedom.
And someday, you’ll look back on the moment you fell apart and realize:
That was the day you finally began to rise.
