Monday, 21 April 2026 · Two Years On · reconstructed from entries dated 11 and 15 August 2024
When Rest Still Does Not Feel Safe
Two Years On, reconstructed from entries dated 11 and 15 August 2024
This post brings together entries originally written on Sunday 11 August 2024 and Thursday 15 August 2024.
It has been rewritten and reshaped for NAAVoices as part of moving my older writing onto this platform. Some lines remain close to the language of those days because the immediacy matters. Others are written with the clarity that only distance gives.
Together, they tell the fuller truth of what those days did to me, and what I understand now about trauma, re-traumatisation, and the damage caused when systems become part of the harm.
On Privacy, and Not Being Fragile
I never hid what happened.
What I chose not to do was tell everyone.
For the most part, I kept what I was living through private. That decision was deliberate. It was not shame. It was not denial. It was not fear of judgement.
It was autonomy.
I told only a very small number of people at work. People I trusted deeply. People who were close enough to know something was wrong, even if they did not know everything.
Even they only knew enough.
I imagine more than half of my colleagues still do not know what I have lived through. That has always been intentional. I kept my professional life and my private life as separate as I could, not because I was hiding, but because I needed some balance. Some safety. Some part of me that was not completely swallowed by trauma.
Privacy is not secrecy.
It is not concealment.
And it is not shameful.
Sometimes that boundary exists because I do not want pity. Sometimes it exists because I cannot bear the well-meaning but exhausting question, “Are you okay?”
I know people ask it kindly. I know it usually comes from care. But when you are holding yourself together with everything you have, even being asked to assess your own pain can feel like one demand too many.
I was not fragile.
I was functioning.
I was working, parenting, showing up, answering messages, doing what needed to be done. I was also living with something complex, ongoing and largely invisible.
PTSD did not make me weak. If anything, it revealed a level of resilience I did not know I had. It also gave me a depth of understanding that no theory, no training and no professional language alone could ever fully give.
Some things are learned academically.
Some things are learned by surviving them.
Injury, Not Weakness
Looking back now, I can see something much more clearly than I could at the time.
What happened to my mental health was not random. It was not an overreaction. It was not weakness. It was not some hidden flaw in me suddenly surfacing.
It was injury.
And it was cumulative.
Domestic abuse caused the first damage. Police failures deepened it. Re-traumatisation compounded it. Family court prolonged it.
Every incident added something. Every delay took something. Every forced retelling left another mark.
I understand now why so many victims, and so many women in particular, end up being judged for their mental health, when what people are often seeing is the consequence of what was done to them.
The panic.
The sleeplessness.
The fear.
The emotional shutdown.
The hypervigilance.
The tears.
The inability to settle.
The inability to rest.
These things do not appear out of nowhere.
They are the visible aftermath of prolonged harm.
What broke in me was not caused by one email, one conversation or one bad week.
But there were two days in August 2024 that made the damage impossible to ignore.
When the System Becomes the Trigger
The relationship ended.
The harm did not.
It simply changed shape.
It moved through police contact. Through delay. Through safeguarding failures. Through being forced to explain the same things to new people over and over again. Through emails and updates that reopened what should never have still been live.
Sometimes the abuse ends in one form and continues in another.
Sometimes the system becomes part of the trauma too.
That was what I was only just beginning to understand in August 2024.
People often ask whether PTSD or C-PTSD means you cannot cope with stress. The truth is more complicated than that.
Many people with trauma cope incredibly well under pressure. We plan ahead. We stay alert. We anticipate problems. We become responsible to a fault. We keep going because there is no other option.
The problem is not always the crisis itself.
The problem is what happens afterwards.
PTSD is not simply about stress. It is about a nervous system that no longer recognises safety properly. Even when the original danger is no longer physically present, the body does not always believe it.
If something echoes the original trauma closely enough, a person, a place, an email, a conversation, a building, a system, the body reacts as though the danger is happening again.
That is why triggers are so often misunderstood.
They are not always dramatic. They are not always like the flashbacks people imagine from films. Often they are quieter. Stranger. More physical. More cognitive. More exhausting.
They can look like no sleep. Racing thoughts. Compulsive planning. Dread. Emotional numbness. Mistrust. Hyper-alertness. Feeling unable to settle even when you are physically still.
That was what it looked like for me.
And one of my strongest triggers had become police contact.
Not because every officer was the same.
Not because every conversation was harmful.
But because police contact had come to represent something much bigger than individual people. It had come to represent failed protection, unanswered disclosures, safeguarding failures, lost time, repeated harm and the unbearable knowledge that I had asked for help and had not been protected when it mattered most.
Sunday 11 August 2024, 02:39
The Night I Broke
The first entry was written in the early hours of Sunday 11 August 2024, at 02:39.
It began in the bluntest possible way.
That was the day I broke.
Even now, I think that was accurate.
What broke me was not simply the email itself. It was what it reopened.
That night, a police email tipped everything sideways. On paper, it was an update. In reality, it dragged me straight back into months of unresolved trauma.
I had been absorbing it for months. I had been taking it. I had been keeping it contained.
Since January, I had held off taking the handling of the case outside official channels. I had kept hoping my voice would be heard within the system. I had kept hoping justice would come the way it should have.
I kept wanting to believe it was one officer. One failure. One catastrophic lapse.
Not something wider.
Not something more systemic.
Not something that would keep reaching into my life month after month.
The new officer who emailed me was kind. That matters. She had not caused the life I had endured over those previous months. She was not the one who failed to act when it mattered.
What I could not bear was this: she was updating me with information I had already received months earlier from a different set of officers.
In an instant, I was back in December.
That was the point at which I broke, and others recognised I needed help before it escalated.
Not because one email caused everything.
Because it landed on top of months of unresolved harm, delay, repetition and re-traumatisation.
By then, it had been nine months since I disclosed.
Nine months.
Long enough for a life to fracture. Long enough for trauma to settle in the body. Long enough for people around you to start assuming things must surely be improving, when the reality is that process is still dragging you backwards.
It should have been dealt with much earlier.
I should have been in recovery by then.
I should have been able to begin counselling. I should have been able to work properly with support services and start processing what had happened to me.
Instead, there was more pressure. More delay. More repetition.
More harm, dressed up as procedure.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I lost the one person in the system who had made me feel that the abuse I had survived actually mattered.
That loss is difficult to explain if you have not lived through something similar. Sometimes, when trust in a system is almost gone, one safe professional becomes an anchor.
Not because they fix it.
Not because they save you.
But because they make the reality of what happened feel seen.
Losing that kind of anchor, when everything else is already unstable, can feel devastating.
The Email to BBC Watchdog
That night, I was sick of being re-traumatised.
Sick of the updates. Sick of being dragged back. Sick of weighing, every single time, what it would cost other people if I stopped keeping all of it quiet.
Sick of silence starting to feel less like dignity and more like containment.
That was the night I emailed BBC Watchdog and Panorama.
I did not want to be the person sending that email.
I had spent months trying to protect my privacy, my profession, my colleagues and the quieter corners of my life. I had not wanted to make everything public. I had not wanted to become another woman shouting because the proper channels had failed her.
But there comes a point when silence stops functioning as a boundary and becomes another room the harm is happening inside.
That was the night I reached that point.
Forty-Eight Hours Awake
By then, I had been awake for 48 hours.
I remained awake throughout the entire night.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with trauma-triggered sleeplessness, and it is difficult to explain to someone who has not felt it.
It is not ordinary tiredness. It is not just feeling drained after a bad night.
It is deeper than that.
Stranger than that.
Your body is present but not fully yours. Your skin can feel too tight or too distant. Your thoughts slow down and race at the same time. Everything feels heavy and unreal all at once.
Small decisions become enormous. Replying to a message can feel impossible. Deciding what to eat can feel absurdly hard. Time goes strange. Your emotions feel both raw and numbed out.
And still, life keeps going.
Children still need feeding. The dog still needs walking. The washing still needs hanging out. Messages still arrive. Appointments still happen.
The world keeps asking ordinary things of a body that has not rested in days.
Sunday 11 August 2024, 22:32
What the Body Was Doing
The second entry was written later the same day, on Sunday 11 August at 22:32.
That matters, because it shows how quickly the raw breaking point became a question about trauma, triggers and what all of this was actually doing to me.
By that point, the question was no longer only, why has this happened?
It had become, what is this doing to me?
The answer was in my body.
That week looked like this:
Sunday night: no sleep.
Monday night: asleep around 3am.
Tuesday night: slept.
Wednesday night: asleep around 1am.
Thursday night: an email from a former investigating officer, no sleep.
Friday: crisis calls with Victim Support, CMHT and the British Legion.
Friday night: asleep around 4am, awake by 8am.
Saturday night: another email from the new investigating officer, no sleep.
Three full nights without sleep in seven days.
Not because I could not cope with ordinary life. Not because I was weak. Not because I was falling apart for no reason.
Because my nervous system did not perceive safety.
That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Stress was not the real issue.
Safety was.
The Splinter
There was another thought going round and round in my head during that time.
My ex was placed on bail within two months, once the case reached someone who treated it seriously.
Two months.
That fact sat in me like a splinter.
Because if that level of action was possible within two months once it reached the right hands, it is impossible not to ask why it was not possible earlier.
Why not in January?
Why not sooner?
Why only after more damage had already been done?
At the time, I was carrying concerns I could not yet prove. I want to be careful about that, because hindsight and evidence are not the same thing as fear in the middle of trauma.
I also want to be honest.
I was not the only person asking those questions.
My IDVA raised separate concerns from her own professional position. It was not just me lying awake imagining things. There were reasons those questions existed.
That matters, because survivors are so often encouraged not to trust their own reading of patterns.
We are encouraged to minimise. To self-correct. To avoid sounding difficult. To avoid sounding paranoid. To wait quietly until the pattern becomes undeniable.
Often, the person living inside the pattern sees it first.
Professionals who listen carefully may see it second.
Institutions, if they see it at all, often see it last.
“Every Avenue Possible”
I was told that the investigation into the abuse of my children had “followed every avenue possible.”
That phrase has stayed with me.
Because what it meant in practice did not match what it sounded like.
DC Rhian Davies, the children’s investigating officer from PVP, spoke to my children. My ex was spoken to.
No one else who had been in our home was approached.
No witnesses.
No friends.
No one who had seen.
No one who had heard.
No one who could have spoken to what life was actually like.
That is not what “every avenue” sounds like to me.
By the time I fully understood how limited that investigation had been, I had run out of fight. Trauma does not just wound. It depletes.
There comes a point where even pushing back against obvious failures requires energy you no longer have.
What made it worse was the familiar feeling that I was facing all of it alone again.
Thursday 15 August 2024
The Day Someone Finally Acted
The third entry was written on Thursday 15 August at 16:02, after the first urgent contact with mental health services had happened.
That was the point where the experience stopped being only about collapse and started becoming about recognition.
The day after that sleepless night, I spoke to Jackie in Professional Standards and to a woman from the Royal British Legion who had been supporting me and my children.
That second conversation mattered.
She could hear the level of distress I was in. She did not minimise it. She did not leave me to explain it over and over. She did not ask me to make my pain tidier before acting.
She heard it.
And she acted.
She contacted CMHT directly on my behalf.
That intervention changed everything. It also exposed one of the hardest truths in all of this.
It took my service history, my link to the forces, for someone to step in with the urgency the situation had needed for a long time.
That is not easy to admit, because gratitude sits alongside discomfort there.
I am deeply grateful to her. I will always be grateful that she heard what others had not heard and acted when I no longer had the strength to keep turning my distress into words people might take seriously.
But gratitude does not erase the inequity.
Support came when the right person made the right call.
Need alone should have been enough.
First Mental Health Contact in 34 Years
Within a few weeks, I had been seen by CMHT.
That marked the first contact with any mental health service in 34 years of my life.
That fact matters more than I can easily explain.
I had never previously needed psychiatric care. I had never needed crisis intervention. I had never needed long-term mental health support.
I had worked, parented, carried responsibility, managed pressure and kept going without any of it.
So when I reached CMHT, it was not evidence of some long-standing inability to cope.
It was evidence of sustained trauma.
It was evidence of cumulative harm.
Even getting to that appointment was difficult.
I had to walk past the police building connected to so much of the harm just to reach the service meant to help me. Once I was near it, memories came back in waves. Sitting in the car with distressed children, waiting. Holding everything together while the person responsible seemed able to move through systems with ease.
By the time I was in the waiting room, I struggled to articulate how I felt.
That is one of the cruellest parts of finally getting support after a long period of survival. People imagine that when help appears, words become easy.
They do not.
Years of emotional suppression do not dissolve just because a room is safe enough for them.
The practitioner was visibly shocked by the scale of the police failures.
That was validating.
It was also painful.
Because it reinforced what I had already begun to understand.
I was not recovering from something that had ended.
I was still living it.
Not Depression
I was very clear throughout that appointment.
I was not clinically depressed.
I was experiencing low mood when triggered, yes. Exhaustion. Fear. Emotional shutdown. Hypervigilance. Panic. Sleep deprivation. The strange deadness that follows prolonged alertness.
That is not the same as depression.
I knew that if the wrong label was attached to what I was living through, the real issue risked being missed all over again.
Context mattered.
This was not a long-standing mental health problem appearing out of nowhere. This was a nervous system responding exactly as expected to unresolved threat.
That is part of what so many victims are up against.
Once you become visibly unwell after prolonged harm, the focus can shift from what happened to you to how you are presenting now.
The system starts responding to the symptoms and forgetting the cause.
You become anxious. Too emotional. Not coping. Difficult.
And the original injury drifts into the background.
That is not understanding.
That is misreading harm.
I was not seeking a label.
I was seeking stabilisation while external threats were still active.
Why EMDR Had to Wait
We discussed trauma-focused therapies, including EMDR.
I was explicitly told that EMDR could not begin while the police investigation remained ongoing. That was clinically appropriate.
People sometimes interpret pauses in trauma therapy as avoidance. But trauma processing cannot be done properly while the body still believes the danger is live.
It requires at least some baseline sense of safety.
If investigations are ongoing, if legal processes remain unresolved, if emails and updates keep reopening the wound, that safety does not really exist.
Processing trauma while still inside the conditions that keep recreating it can destabilise rather than help.
That is not avoidance.
That is correct timing.
Immediate Regulation
The focus had to be on immediate regulation instead.
Medication was discussed not as a long-term answer, but as temporary stabilising support for acute symptoms such as insomnia and heightened arousal.
Prolonged sleep deprivation is not just unpleasant. It is risky. After enough nights without sleep, emotional regulation drops, cognitive function suffers, and physical resilience starts to fray.
In that context, support is not about dependency.
It is about harm reduction.
It is about getting someone through a period their body should never have been pushed into in the first place.
We also spoke about grounding techniques, including EFT.
Afterwards, I realised I had been instinctively tapping my collarbone during acute stress long before I knew it had a name.
That recognition stayed with me.
There was something strangely moving about realising my body had been trying, quietly, to regulate itself even when I felt furthest from myself.
EFT is not a cure. It is not enough on its own. But sometimes the smallest acts of regulation matter, because they remind you your body has not completely abandoned you, even when everything else feels unsafe.
Moral Injury
There was another dimension to all of this that I could not fully name at the time, but which makes complete sense to me now.
Moral injury.
The damage was not rooted only in the abuse itself. It was also rooted in the repeated institutional failures that followed. Failures that sat in direct conflict with the professional, ethical and safeguarding standards I work within every day in my own role.
When systems tasked with protection become sources of harm, the injury is not only personal.
It becomes institutional.
Something deeper gets damaged. Not just trust in people, but trust in what the system is supposed to mean.
That is part of why police contact became so triggering. It was not only about the original abuse. It was also about the collision between what should have happened and what did happen.
It was about knowing, professionally and morally, that this should not have unfolded the way it did.
That kind of rupture leaves its own wound.
Why Survivors Get Judged for Their Mental Health
Looking back now, I can see why so many victims end up being judged for their mental health.
Not because they are inherently unwell.
Not because they are weak.
Not because they are unstable in any simple sense.
Because abuse causes damage, and systems often respond badly to the damage they helped deepen.
In my case, domestic abuse caused the initial injury. Police failures compounded it. Re-traumatisation intensified it. Family court prolonged it.
Once that damage became visible, there was a terrible risk that I became the problem in the eyes of others.
My exhaustion could be scrutinised. My distress could be noted. My anxiety documented. My sleep loss pathologised. My attempts to explain treated as too much.
Instead of asking, “What has happened to her?” the world starts asking, “What is wrong with her?”
That is the cruelty of it.
So when I look back on those days now, I do not see weakness.
I see injury.
I see the predictable outcome of cumulative trauma with nowhere safe to settle.
It was not an inability to cope with everyday stress. It was not a long-standing mental health condition waiting to surface. It was not resistance to treatment. It was not depression wearing the wrong name.
It was a body that had been asked to survive too much for too long.
What broke in me was not resilience.
It was the illusion that I could keep carrying all of it and remain untouched by it.
When Will Rest Feel Safe Again?
In the end, the question underneath all of it was not, can I cope?
I had coped.
For months. For years, in many ways.
Through abuse. Through police failures. Through fear. Through family court. Through parenting. Through work. Through sleeplessness. Through repeated retellings. Through silence.
The real question was simpler, and sadder.
When will rest feel safe again?
That is what trauma takes in the end.
Not always your ability to function. Not always your ability to survive. Often what it steals first and longest is your ability to feel safe enough to truly rest.
Recovery from PTSD does not happen through therapy alone.
It requires safety.
It requires accountability.
It requires the harm to stop being recreated by the very systems that should have reduced it.
Until that happens, many survivors remain suspended between endurance and exhaustion.
Not because they cannot cope.
Because rest still does not feel safe.
A Note From This Week, Two Years On
I want to add something here that was not part of the original entries, because the gap between then and now is part of what this piece is trying to hold.
This week, I have been in contact again with the woman from the Royal British Legion who supported me during the period described above. She is the person who heard what others had not heard, and who made the call that led to my first CMHT appointment.
Speaking to her again brought the memories back in the way that voices sometimes do.
Voices carry time.
A sentence from someone who was present at the worst of it can reopen the room you were in when you last heard them speak.
The timing was not accidental either.
Last week marked the anniversary of my first ABE interview, the point at which a profound mental decline began. Yesterday was two years since the second.
I am not ready to write about the second one yet.
I do not think I have to be ready to mark every date that has caused profound harm. I remember them all. But the timing has to be set by my ability to go back there, relive it and, hopefully, like every other passing date I write about, close the door on it.
What I noticed, though, is how differently I moved through it this time.
A friend sent me a message last week that put into words what I had not managed to say myself:
“This year you are coping better than last year. Last year you just went quiet. This year, you are aware. Can name it. Articulate it. That’s a massive step up.”
I sat with that message for a long time, because she was right.
Last year, I went quiet.
This year, I can name it.
That, in one sentence, is what recovery from this kind of injury can look like.
It is not the absence of pain. It is not dates passing unnoticed. It is not triggers losing their grip completely.
It is the return of language.
The return of awareness.
The capacity to recognise what is happening while it is happening, rather than only afterwards, once the silence has already swallowed the weeks you lost.
I thought about those dates again today. I acknowledged them. I let them be what they were.
And I kept moving.
That is not the same as being healed. I know that.
Healing from something that is still, in places, ongoing is not a straight line. It is more like learning to carry the same weight with a different grip.
But it is a step up.
And for anyone reading this who has been where I was in August 2024, silent, sleepless, carrying something nobody around you has the full picture of, please know this:
The silence is not the end of the story.
The naming will come.
The articulation will come.
The capacity to recognise a date, feel it land, and still know who you are on the other side of it will come.
It does not arrive on a schedule.
It does not announce itself.
One day, you simply notice that you can name what is happening to you.
And sometimes, the person beside you, the one who has been watching more carefully than you realised, will notice first.
Accountability & Experience: My West Mercia Police Story
My Lived Experience: A Personal Journey Through Trauma and Recovery
