Pain Was All That I Was
By Charles Marroni, PCC, CTSS
ICF-Accredited Trauma-Informed Coach | Certified Trauma Support Specialist | Certified Nervous System Regulation Practitioner, Institute of Applied Somatics | Wounded Warriors COPE Phase II | Trauma Certificate, Wilfrid Laurier University
What I Felt
Trauma was a constant throughout my teenage years and well into my early thirties. For a long time, I believed my pain and hurt would be lifelong. Because up until around age 32, it had been.
I spent years in therapy, attended multiple rehab programs, and tried various treatments. Yet, I was still hopeless, exhausted, and ready to give up. Everything was hard. Depression and anxiety ruled my life. I longed for love and security, craving freedom yet chained to the nightmares of my past.
Things that happened to me haunted me through the night, robbing me of sleep and peace. The days were filled with guilt, shame, and self-loathing. We’ve all heard it: “hurt people hurt people.” I was living that truth from both sides.
Love. The thing I couldn’t find for myself. I tried giving it to others and often received it in return. It wasn’t possible for me to have it safely. I gambled with love, collected it, hoarded it, gave it away, stole it, cherished it, and discarded it all at once. How could anyone love me when I hated myself so deeply? My self-worth and self-esteem were virtually non-existent.
Despite years of therapy and a diagnosis of CPTSD, depression, anxiety disorder, addiction, and TBI, no one had explained what trauma truly was. I understood that trauma meant things had happened to me, but I didn’t know why those events continued to affect my life. I was told there was no cure, that PTSD was something I’d have to live with. Yes, I was met with empathy, but not much hope.
What I Actually Was
My childhood wasn’t a horror show. I had love, good parents, family members who genuinely cared. But there were a lot of events. Heavy ones. More than a young person should have to carry. And when that much pain accumulates that early, it stops feeling like something that happened to you. It becomes you.
People saw my depth and authenticity, but what they really saw was pain. Sometimes, pain was all that I was. Pain was my identity.
Black slime. Venom. Eroded, worn, reduced to almost nothing after years of living in survival mode.
The Conditions That Made Change Possible
In my mid-30s, I met someone who genuinely accepted me for who I was and where I was in life, which was quite unwell at that time. She didn't want to change me. I felt accepted. I was enough. And for the first time in my life, I felt safe. Truly, deeply safe.
That safety allowed me to become comfortable simply being. Existing. Taking up space without shame or guilt. I want to be honest about something because I think it matters. She created the conditions for change, but she did not create the change itself. It’s no surprise that she is now my wife.
I Had to Want It
Looking back, I was naturally defiant. After being told for so long that there was no way forward, even though that belief had been my reality for a long time and I was genuinely stuck there, something in me wanted to prove them wrong.
If one doctor said there was no way, I found another option: another treatment, another therapy, another medication, another wellness practitioner. I kept navigating through the system, around the system, despite it. My defiance, I now understand, was resilience in disguise.
Surprisingly, my healing journey happened, to some degree, out of spite. Not even aimed at those who caused the hurt. Just a raw, stubborn refusal to accept that this was all there was for me. Beating the system. Whatever the system is.
At some point, I grew tired of my own excuses. I say that with compassion because some excuses were genuine, and some weren’t even mine. They were handed to me by professionals who wanted to help, but handed me a cage instead of an open door.
I reached the point where the past was no longer a good enough reason to stay the same. I was ready to move forward. I had to learn something I hadn’t been taught: how to have compassion for myself when I didn’t make changes perfectly, while also learning to respect myself enough to follow through on what I said I would work on.
That combination of self-compassion and accountability was something entirely new for me.
A NLP coach was the first person to ask me what I wanted for myself, rather than focusing on how I felt about my past. Coaching created a space where I began to believe that change was possible. I saw options I hadn’t seen before, and that meant I had choices. Yes, I got to choose. For someone who had spent decades feeling like life was just happening to me, the power of choice is truly a gift.
Learning About Trauma Is Part of Healing Trauma
Hope and coaching took me to places where I could sort out and discover who I truly was and who I wanted to become. I wanted to learn, to understand, and eventually, to help others find what I had found.
That learning journey was a pivotal step toward PTG, post-traumatic growth. Learning about trauma was part of healing from it. Understanding what trauma was, how it manifested in my body and brain, understanding my nervous system and how to manage it, finding community, and having deep conversations with others who had walked through the same fire and were motivated to change. That was the rocket launch into my current life.
The Disbelief, the Expansion, the Becoming
What I didn’t expect was the disbelief. During my first year of real change, I held onto two emotions at once. One was grief, mourning all the years I had spent feeling that way. The other was a constant, quiet fear that this change was only temporary, that I shouldn’t get used to it. That it might just disappear.
Something else happened that I didn’t see coming. My emotions started to expand.
For much of my life, I experienced only a limited set of feelings, mainly anger, numbness, and frustration. Those were the emotions I understood. But as time went on, I started to notice new emotions emerging. I felt sadness that was separate from numbness, rage unlike the constant anger I’d known. Over time, I also discovered disappointment, humility, hope, relief, contentment, excitement, and even happiness. In the background of it all was grief. I realized grief isn’t something you finish. It’s an ongoing process with changing seasons. Within it are all human emotions, sadness, anger, joy, hope, sometimes overlapping. Instead of trying to fix it, I learned to move with it.
I’ve also discovered something that influences all of my work with clients: many people believe that if something has been a certain way for years, it must take just as long to change. My experience has shown me that transformation can sometimes occur in a single day. A meaningful conversation. A genuine sense of safety. One new insight that shifts everything.
That is what this journey can look like. I’ve lived it. I’ve watched clients live it: childhood trauma survivors, veterans who came home but couldn’t find themselves outside of service, couples where unresolved trauma had quietly taken everything they’d built together. The path looks different for each person.
If Any of This Resonates
I’m not here to tell you what your experience has been; only you know that. If any part of this journey resonates with you, I’d love to connect. I work with people worldwide, online, one-on-one, who are ready to transition from simply surviving to achieving personal growth.
Your complexity, every conflicting feeling, every version of yourself you’ve been, is valid. Change is possible even after a lifetime of pain.
The good news is we don’t need to go through all the hard pain to get to a new you. Imagine who you want to be, the version you’ve been dreaming of. That can be our starting point.
Charles Marroni, PCC, CTSS, is a trauma-informed coach specializing in identity restoration for childhood trauma survivors, veterans, and couples. He holds certifications in trauma support, nervous system regulation, and somatic practice, and serves as a Wounded Warriors COPE Phase II Coach. He works with clients globally through online coaching.
