Buried Trauma

Life Changing

Sarah Fairbairns spent much of her life feeling she was a bit different. Growing up in the 1960's and 70's she had the reputation of a wild child. On a student exchange in the United States she got to dance on stage with the caste of the famous counter-culture musical Hair. In her early 20s she travelled to India with her boyfriend in search of hippy culture, tuning out, dropping out, taking drugs and becoming what was known at the time as a 'freak', a group at the extreme end of the hippy spectrum. And yet all the while she faced bouts of sadness and depression and a confusion as to why that should be. It lead eventually to an attempted suicide and psychiatric treatment. Things improved and stabilised. She married, had children and came to terms with her life, while never really feeling settled. She even trained and qualified as a Psychotherapist. And yet it was only towards the end of her training that she started to connect an event from her childhood with the unsettled life she'd lead and the fragility she felt. That trauma had happened when, at the age of eleven, she had been diagnosed with lateral idiopathic adolescent scoliosis, resulting in curvature of the spine. The result was a period in an orthopaedic hospital away from her family with dramatic surgery on her back and incarceration in a restrictive plaster caste. That long, isolated hospital stay and the process she went through to stabilise her spine was ultimately deemed a success, but the girl that emerged from hospital was more than just a medical success story. In her 70s, and with the threat of further surgery on her back, Sarah began to recognise that a failure to deal with the trauma of that childhood hospitalisation had been a key factor in her state of mind and behaviour throughout her life. She wrote in to Life Changing and told Dr Sian Williams about her slow recognition of her buried and Life Changing childhood trauma, and why confronting and understanding it had provided belated but extraordinary relief.

Producer: Tom Alban