Bex MacArthur

“She Was Numbing a Pain She Didn’t Even Know She Was Feeling.”

There is a specific kind of pain that doesn’t announce itself.

It doesn’t arrive with a name, a diagnosis, or a reason. It simply lives within you — quiet and constant, like broken bones you’ve somehow convinced yourself are not broken. You walk around in that body. You smile in that body. You build a life in that body and call it peace.

That’s what trauma does. It makes prison feel like home.

And when you don’t have the language for what you’re surviving — when wrong diagnoses and missing memories shape your entire reality — you find other ways to cope. Substances. Escapes. Anything to turn down the volume on a pain you cannot even identify yet.

This is my recovery story.

Not the clean, cinematic version.

The real one — made up of a thousand small moments and still unfolding.

When You Don’t Have the Words for What You’re Living

She didn’t have the words.

That’s the thing people don’t talk about enough in conversations about addiction and trauma recovery.

You cannot heal what you cannot name.

She was living with incorrect diagnoses, missing memories, and a version of herself that had been shaped — slowly and deliberately — by people and experiences she could not yet see clearly. She was controlled, groomed, and hurt in ways that do not leave visible marks but hollow you out all the same.

And she didn’t know it because the rose-colored glasses were so thick that what she called home was actually a kind of prison. What she called peace was actually performance.

So she escaped in the only ways she knew how.

A cigarette break here.

A little THC to soften the edges of the day.

Getting high at night so the volume of everything would finally quiet down enough to sleep.

Not because she was reckless.

Not because she didn’t care.

Because she was numbing a pain she didn’t even know she was feeling.

This is what addiction looks like when it is tangled up with lifelong trauma.

It is not always dramatic.

It is often quiet, functional, and invisible — even to yourself.

What I Expected Recovery to Look Like (And Why I Was Wrong)

When healing finally came, it did not arrive the way I expected.

I expected it to look like trying and failing without making real progress. I thought I would spend my life performing okayness instead of actually experiencing it. I believed healing meant mind over matter — pushing emotions down, smiling through the pain, and burying everything deeply enough that it could no longer reach me.

That was the model I had:

Survive by not feeling.

What actually happened was messier, slower, and eventually more real than anything I had been taught to expect.

The world had to crack open first.

Rock bottom came — not as one dramatic cinematic moment, but as a point where I had betrayed myself so completely, my morals, my family, and the core of who I believed I was, that I could no longer keep pretending.

Then came the questions.

Then came the searching.

And slowly, painfully, the answers began to emerge.

The correct diagnosis was an important step.

But the words — the actual language for what I had lived through — arrived slowly over months and years.

In many ways, the words are still finding me.

What Healing From Trauma and Addiction Actually Looks Like

Here is what recovery actually looked like for me — not the highlight reel, but the real version.

It looked like the rose-colored glasses shattering.

Not all at once.

Sometimes the truth arrived like a flood — sudden, overwhelming, and impossible to process all at once.

Other times, it arrived quietly:

That hurt me.

That wasn’t okay.

That wasn’t who I am.

And sometimes I would forget those realizations and have to learn them all over again until they finally stayed.

We began to understand that the harmful things said and done to us were not our identity.

Those experiences shaped us — that much is true, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest — but we still had the power to decide how they would shape us moving forward.

That realization changed everything.

Recovery from substance use looked like this:

We stopped smoking because we were pregnant.

We stayed stopped because our oldest son asked us to.

Every single moment of weakness, we thought about him — and suddenly it stopped feeling like a battle. It simply became a choice we no longer questioned.

The THC and alcohol came next.

Not because of a program or a rule, but because our children mattered more than the escape.

And something else began happening that I never expected:

The safer our environment became, and the safer the people around us became, the less we needed to escape in the first place.

That is the part nobody tells you about healing from addiction and trauma:

Healing compounds.

Every small moment of choosing yourself, every person who treats you like you matter, every boundary you maintain, and every truth you finally name — it all builds on itself.

The need to escape becomes quieter.

You begin living inside your body instead of constantly trying to flee from it.

What I Want You to Know If You’re Still In It

I want to speak directly to the person reading this who is still in it.

Take an honest look at your life.

Not the version you have curated or convinced yourself is acceptable — the real one.

Look at how the people around you treat you.

Pay attention to how it makes you feel.

Understand that good moments do not erase harmful ones.

Substances do not erase them either.

Pain has a way of quietly eating away at who you are and who you were meant to become, even when you cannot yet see it happening.

Sometimes we cannot imagine a way through because we have never been shown what better actually looks like.

That makes change terrifying.

The unknown can feel worse than familiar pain, even when that familiar pain is slowly destroying you.

That is not weakness.

That is what happens when survival has been your only mode for so long that you no longer remember anything else.

But you are worth stepping into the unknown.

Take the steps anyway.

Even when it feels like things are getting worse before they get better, because sometimes they do — and that does not mean you are failing.

Unfamiliar discomfort is not the same as old pain.

It means something is shifting.

Desensitized pain is still pain.

And you deserve to be free.