Changing My Name: Redefining the Self After Childhood Abuse, Neglect, and Decades of Complex Post Traumatic Stress.

A step I am taking to redefine myself as I move beyond childhood abuse, emotional and psychological neglect.

Life before ten years old was a fragmented pattern of isolated memories. For decades I did not have coherent timeline from zero to ten.

The timeline of my life was only clear and consecutive after I had been enrolled in private school at eleven years old.

As I transitioned from homeschool and an isolated life to private school, my body-mind dissociated from those years, locking all of the horror into separate rooms. All I recalled were scattered bits and pieces that I thought told the story of my young childhood years.

Decades later, when the space in my life perfectly aligned, five months before my daughter's tenth birthday, the doors to those rooms opened. Everything flooded forward. Slowly the young life I'd endured became clearer.

After the doors opened, I journeyed through six months of tears until her birthday. Not long before the day arrived, the worst of my past flooded forward. I had to face the enormity of pain and brutal trauma I had endured. I had to face that my parents never protected me. Instead their emotional and psychological abuse and neglect forced me into a disorganized attachment, outlining the trajectory of my life.

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My parents are aging. My mother is declining and my father's brain is riddled with Alzheimer's. I no longer have to explain myself to them. I no longer have to defend my choices. The tables have turned as I care for them on the last leg of their lives' journeys.

Now is my time. Now I am safe and free to proclaim the person I was always meant to be. And that is what I am doing.

My new name is Akasha Simone Dionne.

Akasha is derived from the Akashic record, the Divine space that hold the ancient wisdom of all time. Simone represents "the one who listens," as I listen and support my sisters who have endured lives fragmented by abuse. It is also shared by beautiful and powerful women, including Simone Biles, Nina Simone, and Simone de Beauvoir. Dionne is my married name. I share this with the husband I adore, my children, and a family that I call my own in the mountains of Maine.

Now I begin the process of legally changing my name, which I am looking forward to. Of course, there are parts of this process that feel intimidating— asking my friends, family, and colleagues to address me as Simone, how to answer reasonable questions in ways that honor my boundaries, confronting potentially probing questions, and so on.

Yet, I move forward anyway. I will no longer have any threads connecting me to a past or caregivers that threatened my sheer ability to live a fulfilling life. I must heal from the burdens they laid upon my body-mind— I can do that. I will do that.

Not in spite of them. Not with resentment or for retribution.

Simply for liberation, love, and purpose.

Name Redefined— a Poem

Years have passed and forests bloomed,

Freedom rises in skyward roots,

Their wisdom shared what consumed,

My heart in shadows; ghosts imbued,

With grotesque hate and pain as food.

I rise with the forest's glory,

Soring on their livened story,

Redefined by the wind,

Between their branches I begin,

Growth into a women's soul.

Those ghosts defined me only,

During times when I was solely,

Reliant on ties to absence.

Now the ties have been undone,

And I stand a free woman.

Mother, wife, healer, boldly,

Solely,

Me.

Akasha Simone Dionne

Sarah Dionne (Akasha Simone Dionne) is a clinical supervisor, consultant, and trainer. She owns a private practice, Sarah Dionne & Associates, contracting with pre-licensed and LCSW clinicians in Massachusetts.

Simone's work is based in compassion. She is dedicated to her purpose, being a voice for and supporting her sisters, women healing from complex trauma and survivors of sex trafficking.

Find out more about Sarah's work:

CLINICAL SUPERVISION

CONSULTING AND TRAINING