Hi, my name is Jess and I am the founder of The Synergy Project and here is my story. Why I felt the need to create this space, not just for myself but for anybody that can relate.

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Content warning: childhood abuse, sexual abuse, addiction, psychosis, family violence, child protection involvement, suicide references. This is long, raw, and unresolved in places, because that’s how life is.

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My Childhood:
 

I guess you could say my story started when I was born into a dysfunctional family system. Like many others. It was typical of the times, lots of alcohol use, verbal and sexual abuse, put downs and you were usually ignored unless you were in trouble. I also had three brothers that were treated very different from me, they seemed to be allowed to just exist, no need to be something for validation, their existence seemed to be enough to be accepted. I on the other hand as a girl, had to prove my worth.

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I survived my childhood mostly by keeping my head in, being seen and not heard and spending most of my time alone. There was solace there. I was lucky enough to live in the bush and developed a love for nature, it seemed to cradle me. When my parents threw debauched drunken parties, I would sneak out of the house and lay on the road and look up at the stars and spend hours during the day amongst the trees or in the river. I believe that to this day has helped me survive and stay connected to something I was yet to understand.

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Because it was a typical family where I grew up, the damage mostly went unnoticed by almost everyone around me. I thought this is it, this is my life. Yet, there was still a little voice that would say to me, this is not normal, your parents are in the wrong and there is nothing wrong with you. But day after day I was told I was wrong, not enough and a lazy good for nothing. Unbeknownst to me I was being trained to be a “good little girl”, do as I’m told and taught that boy’s matter more and men have power over me.

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Due to not getting any positive feedback at home I flourished at school (blessing in disguise) and I would get good grades, do work above my year level and told I was smart. This was the only place where I felt like I mattered. I remember my grade six teacher met my dad and didn’t understand, but after that he took me under his wing and seemed to look after me. I guess he knew something was not okay at home.

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Finding an Escape:

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Everything changed when I got to high school, the teachers were not so attentive and mirrored much of what I was getting at home. It didn’t take me long to disengage and after a fateful encounter with an older student to be introduced to going out the back of the school to smoke cigarettes. That soon turned into drinking at parties on the weekend, experimenting with drugs and sex and my whole system responding with a resounding YES! I found something that would numb out all the pain I had experienced and on top of that was a whole lot of fun.

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I was 14 when I was first introduced to heroin, just as my parents had finally divorced. I thought weed was good, this was fantastic! It gave me a lovely womb like feeling where I could just drift and not think about anything. As Pink Floyd would put it, I was comfortably numb and not knowing at the time self-medicating my pain. Left school at 15 and I finally didn’t give a shit, my mum tired to get me help but I would say I am happy taking heroin and I might in fact take it for the rest of my life. This period of my life lasted up until I was 19, after 4 overdoses, nearly ending up in jail and finally waking up to the fact that the people around me were not my friends. Again, that little voice would whisper to me that I need to get out, until one day it became a scream. After lots of relapses, I was mostly clean from heroin but continued to smoke weed like there was no tomorrow.

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Motherhood and Breakdown:

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Another fateful encounter with an old school friend where I was invited to a party. The people there weren’t down with heroin and actually hated it. Since I was getting clean, I thought that it was a good idea to go. Here I met a man who would change my life. We partied with speed, weed and alcohol until the point where speed became my new addiction. It wasn’t long before I was hooked not only on speed but on a man that psychologically, emotionally and sexually abused me (along with his friends).

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At the time I didn’t even recognise the abuse as it mirrored the pattern that I was given as a child. I felt it was absolutely normal to feel that way in relationships but again that little voice kept telling me to leave. I fell pregnant before I acted on it. My pregnancy was a blessing, I got off the drugs except weed and was in a bliss bubble with all the feel-good hormones and somehow convinced myself that I could change this man. At 20 my daughter was born.

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After my daughter came, the abuse got worse. I had clearly inconvenience him by having her, even though I gave him an out. Here I was with a new born, young and alone with a man who intended to harm me and my child. To cope with the situation, I joined back in with doing drugs but this time it was meth. The cracks in my mind began to show. I started to lose touch with reality and I become paranoid thinking everyone was out to get me. At one point accusing my brother for placing a tracker in my toothbrush and accusing my mum of sleeping with my partner. That’s when my mum intervened and called CATT on me.

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They started asking me questions about the TV talking to me and that’s when I heard the little voice again. Don’t tell them anything. I knew that I was confused about my reality at the time (a lot of it from psychological abuse) and experiencing some kind of psychosis but I also knew if they knew how crazy I’d sound, they’d lock me up. I still remember the doctors I spoke to seemed detached and clinical and I didn’t trust them. They kept talking to me about medication and I wanted to talk about what I had gone through in my childhood and my partner. At one point looking at each other with a grin and saying borderline. I’m thinking what the fuck is borderline but nobody explained anything. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to let them into my internal world.

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After this incident I moved back in with my mum for the sake of my child. I would sit night after night drinking coffee in the dark ruminating on all that had happened to me. I began to realise the patterning and why I fell into a psychosis, it was a mirror of my childhood experiences and it had somehow gotten mixed up with what I was experiencing with my partner. I remember feeling so alone and left trying to figure it out on my own. My mum just wanted me to get on with it, whatever that meant, but I felt broken. I knew I couldn’t stay in that state as I was responsible for another human being but at the time didn’t find any relief.

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My ex-partner was still around at that point and giving me drugs for child support. I would sit waiting all day for him to call, not because of the drugs but because I was so attached to him that I couldn’t let him go. This went on for 2yrs where I was so obsessed with him that I would allow him to continue to treat me with disrespect. It wasn’t until one day after my daughter coming back from a weekend with him that I realised that I needed to end it, but my daughter would never be the same again. I didn’t see him for another 7 years.

 

Some Hope:

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In that time, another fateful encounter but instead of a person it was a book. Carl Jung, Undiscovered Self. As I read it, something in me was like woah what is this, but at the same time sounded familiar like it was something I had forgotten. It was then I found my new addiction. Books. I read philosophy, psychology, sociology and anything I could get my hands on to explain my life, the world and why I was the way I was. This is why my early schooling was such a blessing, I found my medicine, knowledge. I was starting to put the pieces of the puzzle back together one book at a time.

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By the time my daughter was 3 I gave up the weed and decided to go back to study to become an addiction counsellor. I had a thirst for more knowledge and also to help others that may also be experiencing what I had gone through. Even though I had on the surface seemingly got my shit together and the people around me where pleased with me. I had this underlying crushing depression and thoughts of suicide. I just keep searching and hoping I would find the answers, somewhere.

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Every time I would seek help, the doctors would try to give me anti-depressants, I would try to explain that my depression is situational and they would look at me blankly and write me a script. That little voice told me not to take them. This was also the same time my daughter was displaying very worrying behaviours that stemmed from trauma, not only hers but mine as an unhealed mother. Nobody seemed to care what was behind mine or my daughters dis-ease. We got shuffled from service to service with no hope of relief.

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With all that in the background I continued my studies and went into the addiction recovery field, thinking if I could just keep going that I would eventually feel better. I managed to keep up the facade for almost 6 years smiling on the outside and quietly dying on the inside. I did learn a lot in that time, I learnt more about addiction, mental health and what drives it. It was getting clearer that people were treating the symptoms but ignoring the cause. Something I would come back to later.

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Another Breakdown:

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It was 7 years later and my ex-partner decided to take me to court to gain access to our daughter. I was on the verge of “making it”. I was drug free, mostly stable, had a steady job, keeping a roof over our head and I was also studying my Bachelors of social work. This is where it all fell apart. During the court process it seemed the family court was more concerned with if I was a good mother than taking into account her father was absent for 5 years, abusive to both of us and still taking drugs.

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I was put through a gruelling ordeal where I had to prove I was a good enough mother, do random urine tests and parenting courses, while the father went to rehab for two days. It seemed I was jumping through all the hoops whilst he had none but still, they would give him access. The judge at one point saying he might be a deadbeat but as a father he has rights. I was like wtf! I had done everything in my power to protect my daughter by getting her away from her father and his drug fueled life style, getting off drugs myself and trying to be a better person. None of that seemed to matter.

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Meanwhile, my daughter was spiralling out of control and at one point showing psychosomatic symptoms, not walking for 2 weeks without any apparent cause and even shaving her head with a razor blade. I saw my daughter being retraumatised by an abusive man and a system that was broken. Eventually, as I could have predicted her father stopped turning up for access visits and set off again into oblivion leaving me and my daughter retraumatised and left me picking up the pieces.

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This is where I had a relapse back into smoking weed, as a single mother with a trauma past, I just couldn’t take the pressure anymore, I didn’t want to take anti-depressants so I just self-medicated. I ended up quitting my job, leaving Uni and moving back in with my mum. Everything up until now had completely broken me. All I could do was try my best to be a mum. I’d take my daughter to school and come home and collapse, spending days on the couch feeling absolutely defeated by life and then putting my smile back on to pick her up again. After all I had been through and I didn’t think I could get back up and do it over again.

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It seemed life was against me and no matter how hard I tried, I’d get knocked down again and again. So, for years I stopped trying, I’d get up, get my daughter to school, I’d smoked weed, then I’d pick my daughter up again. My depression became a cocoon, I was alone and like my childhood it felt like solace in a world that didn’t seem to care. I also went through a stage where I had lots of promiscuous and often dangerous sexual experiences with strangers. It was a strange feeling where I felt dead inside but somehow the sex was healing me and my attachment issues. I eventually stood up and said no more to the men.

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Therapy:

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Since I left my ex-partner, I had been in therapy, most of it ineffective, but it gave me a place to be validated for my experiences. Eventually, when my daughter was 15, she was diagnosed with BPD. Due to her behaviour, it became harder to know what to do. This is when I sought out a psychologist that specialised in BPD to better understand how to support her.

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I thought I was going to therapy for my daughter but it turned out she was exactly what I needed. She helped me to understand my daughter by helping me to understand myself. She was the first safe space I had ever experienced and I could allow all my trauma out, discovered my own maladaptive behaviours and the patterning from childhood. I still remember a pivotal moment when I walked into her office and instead of intellectualising my trauma and being understanding that hurt people hurt people, I came in full of anger. She said that’s it, that’s what I was waiting for. For you to get angry because what you have experienced is not okay and you need to feel it. Here I began my healing journey of feeling all the feels that I didn’t have the space nor the capacity to feel up until now. I wasn’t officially diagnosed with BPD and most of the traits weren’t as present but it gave me an insight on how I was shaped and how then it was now affecting my daughter.  

 

All I could do as a mother was work on myself, so for the next few years I continued my personal seeking. Looking back being grateful that I was literate due to my early school years and I had the curiosity to keep asking questions about life. I ended up doing a transpersonal counselling course because at the time the mainstream services were missing a big part of what makes us human. I thought that it might be the answer but just showed how in more spiritual circles there was a lot of bypassing of the human messiness. However, I was introduced to expressive dance and through this have not only reignited my love for dance (it was shut down as a kid), but found more medicine and agency by being able to finally feel safe and expressive in my body. This is also where I discovered all about how trauma effects our nervous system which seemed to be the missing piece of my healing journey. 

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Losing my Daughter:

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A long story short, I ended up losing my daughter to the system at 16 due to her constantly running away from home. On her 18th Birthday DHS dropped her off at a doctor that would, without any investigation into her trauma past, give her hormones to transition into a boy. She became a he. This is still difficult for me as I can see the many layers of why she would make this decision and it wasn’t because she was legitimately feeling like she was in the wrong body. I saw it as a mental health issue whilst the world was celebrating “him”.

 

When my daughters father came back into the picture when she was 9, is when she suddenly wanted to dress like a boy. I was never against this expression as I knew it was serving a purpose and she would eventually work through it. That day never came. Due to the trauma she endured and mental health issues suddenly at the age of 17 she wanted to be a boy. DHS concluded that her behaviours were because I was not accepting of the fact she was in the wrong body. I begged them to look at the mental health and explore the trauma but instead they, because now they were trained in LGBTQxyz, in their wisdom confirmed her gender and sent her off to change herself forever.

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Picking up the Pieces Again:

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I had to somehow accept what had happened and pick myself up again. I eventually landed in a peer support role where I can use my lived experience to help others. I love what I do, but some days it is hard. I am witnessing first hand how the organisation is slowly turning into a more corporate culture, becoming increasingly more about tick boxes and funding than serving the people. This is where The Synergy Project comes in. After all my studying and seeking, the missing part ended up being the peer work role. It is human, it is raw and I feel it is exactly what the world needs more of. I had been tinkering with the idea of creating something for people for years but nothing quite fit the bill up until now.

 

Through my experiences, I not only learnt about my personal struggles, my patterning laid out in childhood, how it shaped me and my life experiences and how to slowly deprogram myself. But I also saw how there is a system that doesn’t give a damn about us and how it mirrors the dysfunctional family system and re-traumatises us. My experiences also awoken me to the way the world works and being able to see the bigger picture of what was happening within our systems and who really is orchestrating society. I am more convince now that we live in a mental asylum and it is being run by the innates, all you have to do is follow the money.

 

I look back now and can see how far I have come, how much I have grown and moved through but I still have my hard days, days where it is hard to continue on. But then I remember, that little voice is always there, whispering to me in the quiet moments, telling me the truth of who I am and what I should do. It kept me alive. It got me out of life-threatening experiences and told me to not comply to something that I didn’t feel was right. Making space for the quiet moments has become my priority. I still am unlearning patterning and clearing up the space to be more myself, only doing enough in the external world so I can survive and trying to thrive where I can, but it is exhausting when doing it alone.

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The Need for Something Different:

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It’s almost impossible to heal in a toxic environment. We are still within a system that doesn’t allow us to rest, reflect heal or restore and constantly disconnects us from nature, our own nature. From our early childhood experiences, to our education systems, to our legal systems, to our health care systems, to our political and economic system, the whole bloody lot. We are all shaped and suffer from maladaptive behaviours just to survive. We are all told who to be, forced into compliance, taught to be good little girls and boys and twisted up inside by trauma and having to listen to an outside authority about who we are. We were never taught how to listen to our intuition, to use our own agency. It was stripped from us from birth.

 

I believe the system is set up to drown out that little voice, the one that knows that things aren’t right. The one we fight against, when what we are told by outside authority doesn’t seem right but we feel we have no choice but to give in. The very voice that I feel has the cure for our mental dis-ease.

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We need spaces to listen back into ourselves, that’s the medicine. We need spaces to rest, restore and reflect but most importantly connect to our fellow human beings, share our war stories and feel less alone. We take our power back, not by listening to a system or authority that seeks to separate ourselves from ourselves and each other but to strip ourselves back, unlearn all the ways we abandon ourselves and come together in common-unity.

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Afterall we are nature, we are held by nature, we just have had it educated out of us and we forgot. I believe nature and that little voice is who we truly are and holds the key to our salvation. It’s the map that we all innately have. If we can unlearn and strip away everything we are not, drown out the outside noise and tune back inwards and to do it in community, it will turn into a mighty roar!

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If any of this resonates, you’re welcome here.
The circle is already here, it just needs your presence.
Come sit with us at a Synergy Circle when you’re ready.
There is always a chair and space to simply be.

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Reach out anytime: SynergyProject@proton.me