Why Trauma Keeps Us Stuck

Good Morning Everyone! I want to start out by saying that I love all of you and appreciate the gift you give my life. It is the people we have community with who deeply enrich our lives ✨ It’s also Monday, and Mondays are great for fresh starts! A chance to start anew and have hope for a future filled with love, happiness, growth, and peace. I will be talking about Trauma today, so it’s a bit of a serious topic, but necessary for us in our quest to understand, empathize and communicate lovingly with each other.

I want to start by saying that we, as humans, want to live with purpose and meaning. We try to find meaning in everything we do, we ask questions and are born with an inquisitive curiosity, creativity and imagination. Imagination is critical to the quality of our lives. It fires our creative mind, allowing us to hope for the future, while relieving boredom, alleviating pain, enhancing our pleasure and enriching our most intimate relationships.

When a traumatic event happens, it disrupts our creative mind and causes us to live in our primitive mind, which is focused on survival. During trauma, our mind defaults into flight, fight or freeze. We are looking for an escape route, so we can retreat to safety. But there are two different ways we experience trauma: We either successfully run from it and make it to safety, or we cannot escape, as is the case with victims of rape, war, or a car accident, just to name a few. In these instances, we cannot escape right away, so after the event has passed, our mind continues to tell our body that we are in that place, and that we are not safe. In this instance, people of trauma often replay the event like a loop in their heads. They are compulsively pulled back into the past, which interrupts their ability to live in the present or dream of the future. Trauma serves as an enemy and best friend, as the person allows it to control their thoughts and define their present and future self.

Loss of Imagination and Creativity 🦋

Many traumatized people cannot, or find it difficult, to bridge the gap between their traumatic experience and their current everyday lives. They lose the mental flexibility that allows for new experiences, imagination and the capacity to let their minds play. Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain also becomes their sole source of meaning. They feel fully alive only when revisiting their traumatic past. People with trauma are prone to angry outbursts, substance abuse, or craving solitude. They desperately try to quiet the noise or fight it. People with trauma also tend to relive the past by keeping themselves trapped in a trauma loop. We see this a lot with people who tend to date the same jerk repeatedly, stay with an abused partner, or when someone is abused as a child, and then goes on to abuse others. They become used to dysfunction and seek what is familiar.

How can we heal from trauma ❤️‍🩹

It’s often recommended to talk about what happened during the traumatic event, to relive the experience in a place that is safe and where the outcome can be different. We can do this by talking to a close friend we trust or going to therapy and speaking with a stranger, someone who will simply hear us, is free from judgement, and will not try to fix anything.

Group therapy is also important in the healing process because it allows us to speak with those who have gone through the same thing, those who share in our experience and understand what we are going through. After trauma, the world becomes divided between those who know and those who don’t. People who have not shared the traumatic experience can’t be trusted, because they can’t understand it.

Talk therapy, however, isn’t always enough. A traumatic experience not only takes place in the mind but in the body as well, as it is constantly in that high stress flight/fight response, or paralyzing fear. For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed, that it is safe, and that it’s ok to live in the present.

We come across people every day who are living in this inner world of trauma. We cannot always see or know what that person is going through. Knowing this, it is important to approach everyone with kindness, empathy and an openness to understand where they are coming from. Sometimes this is easier said than done, because everyone experiences trauma differently, and we act in ways that are not always coming from a good place. As humans we make mistakes; we don’t always act with good intentions and we say things that hurt others, but it is important to let go of pride and have a forgiving heart. That being said, it is also important to know when you need to step away from people who hurt you and disrupt your peace. We can let people go while also letting go of the anger that’s in our heart. It is important to protect our peace while we heal.

I will continue covering trauma in my blog in the coming weeks, because there’s just so much to say about it! This first blog has barely scratched the surface. Thanks for reading! See you all next week ❤️