Last Updated on 19 February, 2026 by Cara Sutra
This is the first post in the first series of a new multi-series personal writing space at Cara Sutra. Life Unscripted: Living Out Loud is home to my real life and personal reflections beyond sex tips and sex toy reviews. It’s where I share my raw, honest truths about my lived experiences, touching on trauma, motherhood, ageing, chronic illness, love & relationships, sexuality and identity. The first series in this space is entitled The Survivor’s Journal: Reclaiming Life After Trauma. Today I’m writing about why I’m writing a survivor’s journal, as an introduction to this series.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in survival mode. For me, life has always been about staying alive despite the many horrors, finding a way to cope through the various storms and bracing for the impact of whatever nightmare was coming next. I have carved out many happy times for myself too, but my nervous system was never truly relaxed and at peace. I’ve been coasting on defence mechanisms and hypervigilance and I’m only now, in my mid-40s, coming to realise how deeply living like that has affected me and what the true cost has been.
Why I want to document my trauma recovery
It’s important to me to tell my own story in my own words, rather than continuing to be psychologically affected by other people’s versions of my lived reality. Fighting against past gaslighting which echoes around my psyche is a daily battle. I’m no longer willing to minimise, distract from or ignore my experiences for my own or other people’s comfort. It’s my life, no-one else’s.
In February 2023, I made the impactful decision to go sober. This helped guide my decision to explore a supported journey of healing via one-to-one therapy, beginning in May 2025. The enforced slower pace of life and increased self-reflection which arose from developing M.E. around the same time, in combination with my sobriety and therapy, has led to some truly astounding revelations.
Writing only about sex and orgasms, when there are such monumental realisations and shifts happening within me, feels inauthentic. Integrity and authenticity are core values for me. Therefore I made the decision to share my trauma exploration and self-discovery journey with my readers, both to help me make better sense of it all, and in the hope that doing so could perhaps help and resonate with others.
I’ve also written about how my public identity and private reality finally collided in Beyond the Sex Blogger Label: Revealing the Rest of Me, where I share the full story behind this shift in my writing.
What “healing after trauma” means to me right now
I’m certainly not healed after trauma right now, and I’m working on myself with the support of therapy and my husband without the expectation that I’ll ever be fully healed, whatever that is. My aim is to live life as a “contented mess” rather than “fractured chaos”, which is what life has felt like up to now.
My healing work right now is centred on being kind to myself. Gently parenting myself, giving myself grace and patience, forgiving myself and changing how I speak to myself has been mind-blowing and life changing. Not forgetting this is incredibly difficult, and something I have to work on every day.
All through my life, my inner voice was intensely critical, unforgiving, brutally harsh. That inner voice wasn’t ever my own, I’ve learned. My true self has been hiding abandoned and scared under complex layers of conditioning, trauma, protective anger. Being kind to my ‘Self’ is slowly persuading it to come to the fore and helping to quiet my over-enthusiastic inner critic.
For me, “healed” isn’t a set destination that I’ll reach someday. Becoming healed is an ongoing, active process and journey of self-discovery and acceptance. I’ll always live with the effects of conditioning, my childhood, various traumatic happenings. All I can do is try to understand, live alongside my past, untangling my thoughts, attitudes and reactions to live more at peace with myself. To live is to be a work in progress, constantly learning and accepting and adjusting.
A note about honesty and triggers
I am a trauma survivor, and this series is my journal. As such, my writing will include discussions of triggering subjects and events including childhood neglect and physical abuse, religious conditioning, other forms of psychological and physical abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation and attempts, eating disorders, coercive control, domestic violence, sexual assault and rape.
I’ve spent years minimising, avoiding, or taking the blame for things that happened. For the things other people did to me. This is something I’m no longer willing to do. Writing my truths is part of my newly realised commitment to stop minimising the damaging impact.
My aim is to be unflinchingly honest about these painful aspects of my past, sharing the raw truths about what happened and how these events affected me. Obviously, it will be incredibly difficult to write, and I imagine incredibly difficult to read.
This isn’t an apology; it’s a trigger warning so that you know what to expect. I don’t write for shock value, but to support my healing journey. I write so that anyone out there who has experienced similar knows that they’re not alone. Don’t mistake this for a roadmap; I’m not a psychologist or expert and I’m certainly not writing this from a place of perfect recovery and healing. This is me offering a friendly hand, company in the dark, as we stumble through the rest of our lives trying to feel our way towards peace.
If you’d like to understand the wider life story behind this healing journey, read Beyond the Sex Blogger Label: Revealing the Rest of Me.
