Damn Delicious: Vanishing Trauma Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’m knee deep in the therapeutic process these days. Every Friday, I Facetime with a wonderful therapist who is helping me retrace the script of my life. We’ve been doing visualization exercises where I travel back in time to revisit certain formative experiences. From there, we start to unwind the thread of my subconscious beliefs to identify where certain patterns took root in my life story. I get it if that sounds a bit mumbo jumbo to you, honestly. If I didn’t see it working in my own life, I might roll my eyes a little at it.

Today, we stumbled upon one of the deepest traumatic experiences in my childhood. It involves a former step-dad beating my mom while I was six years old. I was listening alone in the back bedroom of our house terrified out of my mind. I don’t want to get into anything more specific than that, but I will tell you that I relived that moment again as a 34-year-old woman this afternoon and it felt just as real to me today as it did three decades ago.

My therapist helped me reprogram the trauma today by asking me to visualize going into the situation as an adult. I went back and I held my own childhood hand and I asked that little girl if she wanted to leave the situation. When she told me she wanted out, I marched her down the hallway and out of the house. I took her to the safest place I know in this world and I comforted her and I told her that she was safe now and she didn’t have to live in fear anymore. I told her she was brave and I told her what happened to her wasn’t right and that I was there for her and I was going to protect her from experiencing that pain again in her life. I hugged her and when I did so, I kid you not, I felt the back of my neck tingle as she was absorbed in the cocoon of my love.

Talk about intense, right? When I opened my eyes, I felt a little shocked to see myself Facetiming with my therapist. It was like I was transported into an entirely different situation.

After our session ended, I walked around in a bit of a daze for the rest of the afternoon. I took a nap, I reorganized my kitchen/quarantine office and I watched some tv. In the evening, I pulled out some butter and some eggs to do a little therapeutic baking, too. I decided to make Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies from My Cooking and Baking Dream List. My current step-dad always makes the ‘Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies’ recipe that’s under the lid of the Quaker Oats quick oats. It’s his signature and it never fails.

As I baked, I listened to Travis Tritt on Spotify. He reminds me of growing up in Arizona. I mixed and measured, thinking about my current stepdad who is so gentle and sweet and who makes my mom happy. I bopped around my kitchen and I just felt a lightness inside. It felt like a weight that has resided in my sternum for so long I didn’t even realize it was there anymore has dissolved. I thought about my current life, the peace I am creating, the path I have blazed. I have made so many mistakes, even repeating the trauma of my childhood by marrying a man who also beat me and made me feel so unsafe and so afraid for my own life.

But my story doesn’t end at my mistakes. I didn’t accept the inevitability that I would replay the trauma of my childhood. I clawed my way out of that life and I rebuilt a new one, brick by brick. I live in a peaceful home now, where I listen to country music and I make cookies and I bravely go to therapy to ask myself the tough questions about my current relationship and the fear I have around marriage. I commit to moving forward always, stubbornly holding onto my belief that I can live a full, happy life with fulfilling relationships and a deep and abiding joy.

I’m still very much on that journey, but days like today give me hope that I’m getting close because I revisited the most painful experience of my life and transmuted it into something beautiful. I released a pain I’ve been carrying around for years, the weight of it just vanishing before my eyes.

Forever more, these are going to be called Vanishing Trauma Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies in my mind. They’ll remind me of this major milestone, where I took my pain and alchemized it into something delicious. I realized tonight as I was baking that I already kept the promise I made today to my six-year-old self. I already did take that little girl out of that painful experience and I rebuilt her world into something safe and secure and beautiful.

Oh, and I’m just getting started. I’m pretty sure she and I are going to make this life even better, cookies and all.

Vanishing Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (1 stick) plus 6 tablespoons softened butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup chocolate chips
• 3 cups quick oats

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream together butter and sugars.
3. Add eggs and vanilla. Mix well.
4. Mix flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a separate bowl until they’re all combined.
5. Add flour mixture to butter mixture and mix until all the flour is integrated.
6. Stir in oatmeal and chocolate chips.
7. Drop onto a cookie sheet and bake for about eight minutes, until the edges are brown. Let cool for a minute on the pan and then cool completely on a wire rack.
8. Enjoy a still-warm cookie and give your inner child a big, huge hug. 🙂