This series is made after undergoing cPTSD therapy for childhood trauma. On this road, I had to face emotions locked up so many years ago. In order to help myself, I created these 4 characters: Shame, Sadness, Anger and Fear. The work is all self-portraits, and all the outfits are made by me. Long hours of knitting and embroidering allowed me the space needed to sit with my past to stop carrying it into the future.

"cPTSD can develop when trauma is prolonged, repeated, or difficult to escape, such as ongoing abuse, neglect, or living for a long time in fear.PTSD is an often better known condition where a traumatic experience returns through flashbacks, nightmares, avoidance, anxiety, or feeling constantly on guard.cPTSD can overlap with PTSD, but it does not always look the same: for example, a person may have emotional flashbacks—sudden waves of fear, shame, or helplessness—rather than clear visual memories of a specific event.It often affects a person more broadly: their ability to regulate emotions, their sense of self-worth, and their relationships with others.Someone with cPTSD may struggle with persistent shame, feeling damaged or unsafe, or finding it hard to trust people, because the trauma shaped not only what they remember, but also how they see themselves and connect with the world."

When speaking of sadness, I would say it was the most diligent emotion for me - it was coming almost every day at the same time, just as I was getting tired. And at that time, I liked to pick up my knitting. Knitting a long dress like that took weeks. As for the top part, I used the same pattern I used for the image with Daniela and a similar embroidery technique. Still, I went a bit away from classic shapes and created a tree along my body. I used acrylic paint for the mask, and a piece of fabric for a scarf (this one I would change if I were to start over, because it had a habit of flying away in the middle of performing). I also have to note that, for me personally, this sadness wasn't like a nice sadness of having something valuable and losing it - it was indeed longing for what I didn't get to have.

Some statistics.

Approximately 12.5% to 14% of children in the U.S. will experience a confirmed case of abuse or neglect by the age of 18.
https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/.../national.../
Where I think the public opinion is furthest from reality is that only 15% percent of abuse (primary) is done by people outside the family, only 3% by unknown or missing perpetrator ("stranger danger"), and mothers participate in 2/3 of abuse cases.
https://outofthefog.website/abuse-statistics
Average durations vary by the type of abuse:
Sexual Abuse: Lasts for an average of 7.5 years.
Physical Abuse: Lasts for an average of 8.3 to 9.5 years.
Emotional Abuse: Lasts for an average of 9.2 to 9.9 years.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5346510/

Prior to the therapy, I would tell you I had the best, most ecological relationship with anger.
Very early in life, I understood that a person who can anger you is a person who owns you. They can drive you to a complete breakdown, or make you do things you will regret and then hold them against you every time you don't obey.
So I learned to never ever show anger, and instead I metabolized it into this steel stubbornness that moved me through life - from escaping my situation in my youth, to doing whatever I set my mind to without compromises. There were two catches, though:
1. Having such "will of steel" made me completely forget how to listen to my body or have any understanding of my limits - which is a theme for another time.
2. And not showing anger with time started to mean I don't verbalize my boundaries. Meaning I still do exactly what I want, and if someone crosses the boundaries that I never mention, I walk away. Which, you know, made it hard to build relationships.
But overall, anger was my friend and my fuel until, in therapy, I recognized its other byproduct. That's for the next week.

As I explained before, when in therapy, it was as if I were entering the situation of my childhood with the eyes of an adult. And that's when another type of anger appeared - one when you see someone small and helpless being under duress.
When you are in this anger, there is a feeling like you are right in it, and you can and should be angry forever, as you are protecting something precious. Yet, after some time, one needs to find a way to forgive. Not in a way of letting your tormentor back into your life or allowing them to corrode your boundaries, but finding the way to leave the past in the past.
Otherwise, you will keep tripping over the same situations, getting emotional flashbacks where you regress back to the age of your trauma, feeling like the ultimate victim, always justified in any reaction, not seeing how your current actions affect people who have nothing to do with your flashbacks.
Until ultimately you will become a monument to your pain, a person with no other purpose in life except endless reenacting of what happened.
Right now, I see the childhood trauma as something like a virus. An affected person who can't objectively see their situation lives with severe emotional pain, trying to suppress it or distract from it. The act of hurting another person provides short-term relief and a subsequent strong craving.
This another person is often a person's child because 1) the child can't retaliate or leave, 2) the child is easy to gaslight, 3) the child is often a trigger in themselves. And so we come to an endless cycle of intergenerational trauma, which sometimes subsides due to personal growth and healing, and sometimes comes right back due to new external trauma like wars, epidemics, repressions, etc.
Seeing things in this way allowed me to find meaning in healing, and not in being a monument.

When it came to this 4th part of the project - the emotion of Fear - it was honestly the biggest mess for me. I made four different costumes, and nothing looked right. One of them was so bad I didn't even retouch it. I think, in part, it's because I rarely feel fear per se.
If with anger, I learned not to show it on the outside, with fear it seems the more chaotic and dangerous the situation is, the calmer I become. The price for it, though, is constant anxiety in small things, from the classic "did I turn off the burner", to being hyperaware of every little abnormality in all cars' trajectories on the highway, to the exhausting constant reading of the people in the room to see if someone didn't like what I said (or did they simply think of something else). This makes it very hard to ever relax.
Sometimes, some of the "fears du jour" start to develop an OCD component. Then I need to patiently remove them through corrective experience, but I know the new ones will appear in their place soon enough. Sometimes I feel as though those OCD things are like pressure valves for my anxiety, and the thing itself won't stop whatever I try to do.

I finish this series with a bit of a weird feeling as I don't have any real conclusion.
By publishing the series and interacting with the cPTSD community, I understood how much I underestimated the part of healing that came before therapy - from being able to leave as early as I did, having safe, amazing people in my life even before that, being functional in my job.
The thing is, though, my life was highly imbalanced because I had to run from my suppressed pain all the time. So it was endless work, with pockets of fun, but without the ability to ever stop and catch my breath. And no matter how much I loved living in my head, in my photoshoots, with time I started to see the serious limitations of that.
Do I feel normal now after the therapy? Absolutely not. I probably feel much less normal than before I looked at my inner landscape. But I think normality wasn't the point either. The point was: to create long-term and seriously, to make next steps in my marriage, to stop wasting all my energy on outrunning the feeling of impending doom, I needed to stop running and face whatever was chasing me all these years. It was hard. I honestly don't know if I would recommend it. But it was right for me. And now that I survived it, I look at life with all that it entails, and finally I am calm.