Updated: 2 days ago
A small glimpse into what happened when buried adverse experiences from early life surfaced in adulthood, and what I know now.
Some experiences do not disappear because they have been survived. They can sit hidden for years, outside conscious thought and ordinary life, until something shifts and they begin to rise.
This is a small account of how difficult it was to understand what was happening, and how much difference the right support eventually made. It is also about the long process of rebuilding a life, and the perspective that can come from having moved through services, recovery and back towards community, purpose and participation.
Before
In 2012, I had been working at a college in Edinburgh during a period when the colleges were merging and redundancies were expected. I had enjoyed my time in Edinburgh, had been involved in a lot of different projects, and because I already had a deferred place at university, it seemed like a reasonable moment to move on and take it up.
That summer I did a little casual volunteer work in the south of France before university began. While I was in France, a friend spoke to me on the phone and commented that I seemed unusually hyperactive, more intense and over the top than normal, and although he was concerned, nothing particularly serious happened and I carried on with my plans.
I moved into the halls of residence and began trying to orientate myself to a new place, new people and a different kind of life.
At first, what I noticed was difficult to describe. I felt overwhelmed and sometimes strangely detached from myself, almost as though I was outside my own body, while at the same time trying to find my way around the campus and settle into university life.
The interruption
It became increasingly obvious that something was wrong.
My behaviour became more erratic, I began seeing a GP, a friend travelled up to help me and took me to hospital, and at different points I was seen by crisis services. Eventually I had to leave university.
Until then, I had been following a fairly recognisable path through sport, education and work, and although my life before that had certainly not been straightforward, I had reached a point where I was doing well and had plans for where I thought I was going. That path was interrupted very quickly.
What I did not understand at the time was that experiences which had happened much earlier in my life, and which I had largely carried without fully processing, were beginning to make themselves felt in ways that I could neither recognise nor explain.
An explanation
After referrals to mental health services and appointments with consultants, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2013 and prescribed lithium.
I found the diagnosis difficult to receive because it had never occurred to me that I had a serious lifelong psychiatric illness, and suddenly I was trying to understand myself through an explanation that felt both unfamiliar and frightening.
For a long time, that diagnosis shaped the way I understood what was happening to me.
I became wary of my own emotions and energy, and experiences that might previously have been understood simply as excitement, distress, overwhelm or exhaustion could begin to feel like signs that something much more serious was happening.
This is not something I write about in order to blame individual professionals, because people were responding to what they could see at the time and working within the understanding available to them, but the explanation I was given did not ultimately account for what happened next.
Between 2013 and 2017, I muddled through as best I could. I was living with the understanding that I had bipolar disorder, taking strong medication, and moving between being unwell with symptoms and in and out of work while trying my best to keep some kind of ordinary life going.
In 2017, I began working long term with a private therapist, and that marked the beginning of a very different phase.
Opening the door
After the end of a relationship, I went to see a private therapist in Devon because I felt intensely overloaded and wanted help with what I kept describing simply as stress on the brain.
I was not looking for a major explanation of my life and I certainly did not arrive expecting to revisit my childhood or earlier experiences. I wanted someone to help me reduce the pressure I could feel building in my head and body.
What began as a few sessions developed into a long-term therapeutic relationship. Over the years, she worked with me through periods of considerable distress as experiences, memories and patterns that had shaped much of my adult life gradually came into view. The work was not simply about understanding the past; it was also about recognising how those experiences had continued to live in my body, relationships and responses to the world, and learning how to respond to them differently myself.
During those first few sessions, however, ordinary questions began to open things up.
Where had I grown up? What had happened at different points in my life?
Once those questions began, experiences I had kept separate from my everyday understanding of myself started to surface, and what followed was not a single revelation but a long process over time, in which one layer of distress would become visible, gradually settle, and then be followed by another.
At times this was extremely difficult to live through, particularly because my housing and wider circumstances were not always secure, but over time I began to recognise that there was a pattern to what was happening rather than simply a series of disconnected symptoms.
As one set of symptoms was understood and worked through, another could appear, sometimes looking completely different from what had come before. What had initially seemed like an inexplicable deterioration began to feel more like a process of old experiences becoming available to consciousness in stages.
When the body did not feel safe
Later, while living in North Ayrshire, I was supported for more than a year by an occupational therapist within an NHS mental health team who had a strong understanding of trauma.
That period was one of the most difficult of my life, although from the outside there was no obvious external danger around me.
Nothing was happening in the house itself, but internally my body was responding as though I was profoundly unsafe. That distinction became important to me.
I began to understand that the intensity of what I was experiencing was not necessarily evidence that something dangerous was happening in the present, but that older experiences and states of fear were being felt very strongly in the present body.
They were the years in which my body and nervous system began responding as though the worst times of my life were happening again.
With support, reading and a great deal of trying to understand what was happening, I slowly developed a different framework for making sense of myself.
The book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker was particularly helpful during that period, because it offered language for experiences that had previously felt confusing and fragmented.
Putting the pieces together
After moving to Somerset, I was referred to another mental health service and began cognitive analytic therapy.
The therapy was initially intended to be relatively short term, but it was extended several times and eventually continued for around a year, followed by a period of group therapy.
One important part of that work involved going through my life chronologically.
Because I had moved so often and lived in so many different places, my therapist and I went through the years very slowly, looking at what had been happening and what I remembered from each period.
I was also writing during this time, and the combination of writing and working through my life year by year allowed some experiences to become visible in a way they had not before.
A great deal had already surfaced during the earlier years of therapy, but this chronological work helped me find what felt like a missing piece.
For a long time my experience had felt like a collection of fragments which I could not quite place beside each other, and gradually those fragments began to form a more coherent picture.
I sometimes think of that process as Tetris.
The pieces had been there for years, but they had not fitted together. Once they did, the pressure began to change.
The final part of the work was about finding my own voice within what had happened, and learning to speak about my life without relying entirely on the explanations other people had given me.
What remained
Recovery allowed me to distinguish more clearly between symptoms that had developed around trauma and characteristics that had been present throughout my life.
I no longer understand myself through the bipolar diagnosis I was given in 2013, and I have not taken psychiatric medication for many years. I was later assessed by a consultant psychiatrist who specialises in the presentation of autism and ADHD in women, and was diagnosed with autism and ADHD.
That understanding has proved much more useful in making sense of longstanding difficulties around sensory overload, social demands, attention, hyperactivity, energy and recovery time. It has also helped me recognise that there are genuine limits I need to work with, rather than fear or misunderstand.
After the most severe trauma-related symptoms had settled, those longstanding characteristics remained. Being able to understand them separately from trauma helped me look back differently at many earlier parts of my life, including experiences in education, work, relationships and sport which had previously been interpreted through other explanations.
The important difference was that I was no longer frightened of every strong feeling, burst of energy or period of overwhelm in the same way.
I had a more coherent account of what had happened to me, and increasingly I had ways of understanding what belonged to my history and what remained part of who I am now.
Turning experience into something useful
Over time, that greater understanding gave me more than an explanation for the past. It gave me a much clearer sense of myself in the present, including what I could manage, what I needed, and what had previously been misunderstood.
I later worked in lived-experience roles within the NHS, where some of the years that had once felt chaotic became part of something useful. That work gave me the opportunity to contribute to conversations about services, recovery, communication and how people are understood, and reinforced for me how much small relational things can matter when somebody is trying to find their way back into ordinary life.
More recently, I have found my way back to sport and study, but also to a wider interest in the conditions that help people reconnect with community life after periods of difficulty. I am interested in participation, belonging, supportive relationships and the things that can make it easier for somebody to step back into the world and remain involved.
The first sign of return
The first sign that something was beginning to shift was very small.
I went into a sports shop intending to buy trainers because I had been thinking about going to the gym, and while I was there I saw a bright green football.
I had not kicked a ball properly for a long time, I was considerably heavier than I had been when I was younger, and there was no particular plan attached to buying it.
Something about seeing it felt good, so I bought it and took it home.
Looking back, that football was one of the first small signs that another part of me was beginning to return, long before I knew where it would lead.
I can look back now and see that the crisis which interrupted my life was the point at which experiences carried for many years began to rise into conscious life, and understanding that and getting the right help took far longer than I could ever have imagined.
Across those twelve years, from 2012 to 2024, I gradually developed a much greater degree of self-understanding, a more coherent sense of my own history, and eventually the confidence to begin moving back towards parts of life I had thought I had lost.
If it had not been for the exceptional care, compassion, skill, persistence and commitment of three therapists who worked with me at different stages of my recovery, alongside the support of family and friends, I do not know where I would be now. Their willingness to stay alongside me through some very difficult years has made an enormous difference to the course of my life.
I write more about what happened next, and my eventual return to sport,
in a creative writing piece Finding a Way Back
Claire Gibb is a writer and third-year Sport Coaching & Development student based in North Ayrshire, interested in place, memory, recovery, participation and the relationships around sport.