Trauma

Trauma permanently changes us. This is the big, scary truth about trauma: there is no such thing as “getting over it”. The five stages of grief model marks universal stages in learning to accept loss, but the reality is in fact much bigger: a major life disruption leaves a new normal in its wake. There is no “back to the old me”. You’re different now. Full stop. This is not a wholly negative thing. Healing from trauma can also mean finding new strength and joy. The goal of healing is not a papering-over of changes in an effort to preserve or present things as normal. It is to acknowledge and wear your new life, warts, wisdom and all- with courage.

See, here is what people with trauma need to hear more often; Life is hard. Sometimes you will feel like giving up: on people and on yourself. You have good days and bad days but more bad than good or so it seems.
Everyday you question yourself; “what is this all for? Am I making the right choices?” or “am I supposed to be here…now?” You have more questions than answers and sometimes you don’t even know how to answer them. Life is hard, but you have to keep going. You have to rise above the waters of your soul, and bloom, no matter how hot the fire is. No matter how many arrows life throws at your back, you are a warrior. You are a soldier filled with both pain and love. And life, well, life is just another beast you were meant to tame and there is no one better for that job. Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with an emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centres. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen inside the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going long after the sound has been turned off. If you overload an electrical system with too much energy and too much stimulation, the circuit breaker activates and shuts everything down.

The human nervous system is also an electrical system, made up of wires, atoms and electrons. When it is overloaded with too much stimulation and too much danger, as in trauma, it too shuts down to just basics. People explain it as feeling numb, in shock or dead inside. The fuel turns off. Intellectually, you lose 50-90 percent of brain capacity, which is why you should never make a decision when you’re in the “trauma zone”. Emotionally you don’t feel anything.

Spiritually you’re disconnected, you have a spiritual crisis or it doesn’t mean anything to you at all. Physically all your systems shut down and you run on basics. What is so intriguing is that physical symptoms that were previously prominent often disappear during this time. Then, when you drop back into yourself, all the physicalities may return. This is because physicality requires physical awareness. A common misconception surrounding trauma and trauma related disorders is that finding someone to blame will make you feel better. This could not be further from the truth. The knowledge of who is responsible for the caused trauma is not important, and in many situations will only cause more pain. But, my question to all of you is, Why do we find it so easy to blame ourselves? It may be partly a conflict between an empathetic nature and assigning blame. Blaming others goes against the grain. Our consciences have us take responsibility for our behaviour when things are going wrong. Some of us were raised to take too much responsibility in our families, which just makes it natural to do so. People blame themselves for everything for the purpose of beginning to grasp some form of understanding as to why they went through what they did. Alas, understanding is not everything.