Mapping My Trauma for Someone Who Actually Gives AF

This week’s share is raw, unfiltered, and written straight from the messy middle of healing. If you’ve ever tried to build something healthy after surviving something toxic… if you’ve ever flinched at kindness, or had to teach someone how not to trip over your triggers… this one’s for you.

I'm learning that real love—healthy love—asks us to draw maps we were never taught to read. Here's what mine looks like lately.

Creating a Healthy Relationship After Being in a Toxic One

Where do I even start?

I’ve thought about writing this down so many times. To me, it feels like drawing a map of each other’s trauma. That’s what I told my friend Laylani about a year ago. Every weird little trigger, every miscommunication, every misunderstanding that turns into an argument—or just a frustrating clash of our neurodivergence—it’s like they’re sign posts on a highway. The better you get at pointing them out, the less likely you are to totally crash into the past.

Imagine: you veer too far to the right and hit the zipper strip. It jolts you awake, and now you're in a bad mood. That’s what it feels like. In the map I’ve been drawing for my partner over the last three years of dating, I never realized how many caution signals there really were.

I’ve been in several pretty bad car accidents throughout my life—one at eight years old, where we spun out after someone T-boned my mom’s Corolla trying to run a light, and another at fifteen, my best friend overcorrected on the highway and her Ranger rolled over multiple times, finally coming to a stop on the drivers side of the vehicle. Both of these were terrifying, but I was always the passenger.

Until, one morning on the way to drop my kids off in 2018, I was in a serious at-fault accident. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but it was a big, expensive mistake that I still carry regret over. I’m realizing now how much I need to let that go—I don’t want to carry it anymore.

Aside from not being a great passenger because of the PTSD I’ve developed from those accidents, I also carry the warning signs of another kind of trauma—emotional trauma caused by the hands (and words) of many of the different men in my life. Women too, but in romantic relationships, a male partner tends to mirror the dynamics I grew up with: my dad, my brother, my grandfathers. One of my grandpas lived next door to me until he died when I was ten. The other was a steady presence in my life until he passed when I was 35.

It’s funny how much my current partner reminds me of different bits and pieces of all those men I knew before I knew him. But they say we choose our partners because something about them feels familiar. They repeat patterns we've already known.

And that brings us back to the roadmap.

I think that’s why we end up on the same paths as others—because trauma imprints our directions. Creating a healthy relationship after a toxic one feels like carefully drawing a roadmap of your trauma for the other person, while they’re drawing theirs. You compare notes. You trip over manholes that didn’t have covers. You stumble over mounds of dirt that weren’t marked with cones. Maybe you even drive your car off a fucking overpass.

There will be collateral damage. Because I am no cartographer. I don’t know how to draw a perfect map. I’m learning. I’m growing. I’m in therapy—both with my partner and on my own. I’m doing all kinds of healing work so I can get better at making this map—not just for him, but for me.

So when I trip and fall over someone else’s roadblock, I can remember that it’s probably some past version of me who just skinned her knee and needed someone to notice.

Now I have a place to write that down.

I have a person to record it with. Someone who cares, who actually wants to know when he’s accidentally hurt me.

And it feels foreign and unfamiliar. Maybe I’m just learning how to write road signs in a different language.

Emotionally healthy is my second language.
Petty and passive-aggressive? That’s my first.

So yeah, sometimes I slap him with a metaphorical street sign. I say something that cuts him deep without meaning to. And then we both realize—hey, maybe we should mark this spot. Maybe we should come back later and smooth it over. Because if we’re drawing a map from our own hearts to someone else’s,
we deserve to write things down.

We deserve someone who doesn’t want to trip over our feelings or our past. And we deserve to pick up a megaphone and say, “Hey, this part here—this is dangerous. I need you to slow down. I need you to hear me.”

You deserve to speak up and tell the truth.

“Hey, I know you didn’t mean it, but those words you used? That’s the same shit my mom used to say to me.”
Or: “Please don’t tell me to calm down. That phrase? It wrecks me. It feels like driving into a brick wall.”

I’m not sure if any of this even makes sense to whoever is reading it. I just know that learning to draw this map—my life, my path, my heart’s route to others—has been so fucking hard.

It’s felt like eating celery during a root canal. Like breaking old bones again. Like ripping open wounds I thought had healed.

But sometimes that’s what healing requires, right?
If a bone breaks and never gets set properly, it might need to be re-broken to heal the right way.

And that takes tools. It takes focus. It takes support. And healing.

But oh my goddess, does it feel better afterward.

Sometimes grief shows up in that relief—because now you realize just how bad you felt before. And you grieve for the version of yourself who didn’t even know what “better” could feel like.

You grieve the you who was a slave to survival mode. To outdated belief systems.

And even though it hurts, I see the benefit in all of this healing work.
I see the beauty in crafting this roadmap between my heart and the people I love—my partner, my children, my friends, my family (both biological and chosen), and all the beautiful souls I haven’t even met yet.

But I think the most important map I’m drawing—the one I care about the most—is the one that leads me back to myself.

Back to my essence.
Back to my heart.
Back to the reason I’m here on this planet.

Sure, the detours that let us connect with other people are meaningful. But the real work? That’s internal.

Because the one heart I know I can always count on, until the day I die, is my own.
Right here.
Beating in my chest.

I can love me more than anyone else ever could.
And I can trust that all the pathways I’ve walked—every connection, every heartbreak, every healing—are inside me. I can access that loving forgiveness any time I need it.

And I can teach others how to do the same.

Someday, I hope to expand more on this idea of hearts and roadmaps.

But for now, this is my messy middle.
This is my not-so-curated creation. And it counts as this week’s newsletter.

Til next time: Love you, mean it,

—Mindy