It’s not until you endure something that a human being was never meant to endure that you sustain a hit to the body, mind and soul that’s commonly called trauma. It can happen for many reasons, it can happen innocently, or it can be a build up over the years.
It can happen through a grief that leaves you backwashed in such shock you reel for months, and sometimes it takes years to recover—and indeed some don’t. Or it’s abuse from so early on, a life can seem to have never had a chance. Talk with enough homeless people and there are plenty of stories like this.
It’s like the mother I saw at a train station today chastising her three-year-old violently for behaving like all three-year-olds do. Talk about a child raising a child, but dig deeply enough, there’s trauma in the mother’s story.
There are some things you don’t believe until they happen to you.
Post-traumatic stress. I knew about PTSD before I suffered my own post-traumatic stress, but never do you figure upon the gravity and breadth of post-traumatic stress until you’re called to bear the ignominy of it.
Post-traumatic stress took me to a place where my mind ceased to function, and it lingers even today in those moments where there is no answer; seconds of momentary overwhelm where I simply say to myself, “Hang in there, buddy; this too shall pass.”
To feel out of control is to know trauma, and yet there’s nothing to be ashamed about in suffering it.
I’m so glad God’s equipped me with personal experiences of trauma, because it’s honestly the best way to be trauma-informed. You quickly realise there are limits and you begin to accept the limits of others. Gentler on yourself is gentler on others. Compassion for yourself is compassion for others.
When it’s a trauma response, it’s fight or flight or freeze or fawn—and when you look at it, so many of our responses come straight out of that place, for rare is it that we don’t bear some trauma.
I know all too well all the trauma responses and even a blend of them as responses seem to compete with one another in a disorganised way of coping. This is defined as triggering, and the grand challenge is to experience the triggers (without them tearing you or others apart) enough to learn about them; how can I learn what prompts them, how to prepare, how to stay safe, how to modulate the response in a better, safer way of coping.
Healing is the ‘beyond’ of trauma.
In discussing grief, how many people have been affected by it? Everyone. Some respond to its truth because it overpowers their sensibility, and they capitulate. Others seem unfazed but watch how it leaks out in some other way.
At every level trauma is the outworking of so much of life that overwhelmed us.
Depression and anxiety we face because we’re overwhelmed by emotions that sweep us away—just like trauma. The panic attack, just the same. The shattering of confidence in the attack of dread.
So much of our mental illness is enfolded in trauma or manifested so much like trauma the concepts are inseparable.
When we understand the concepts of trauma in the everyday life, we become instantly compassionate, knowing that harms done causes or creates harm, and what stands before each of us is the quest to learn; how to wrestle, when not to sweat the small stuff, nurturing gratitude, safe vulnerability, apology and redemption, gentleness toward self and others.
If this has triggered anything for you, I pray you go gently on yourself, understanding you’re not alone, that there’s hope, and that vision of peace you have is possible.
Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash
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