Tragedy strikes a life for whom was written heroism, and heroism it was until trauma dug deep, the triggering started, and lamentable behaviour ensued, which then elicited that shame cycle, which further intensified the grief of trauma.
Trauma is one of the greatest undiagnosed maladies common within the sets of abuse and addiction today, and the saddest thing, trauma walked into a hero’s life unannounced, and it can threaten to stay indefinitely.
If a person is stuck in the cycle of addiction, truth is trauma probably started it.
There is so much shame attached to all these themes, and the saddest thing is shame only reinforces the vicious cycle. If only you can get past the shame, recovery then is a distinct probability.
Abuse doesn’t always occur because a person intends to abuse. They may hate themselves for abusing. They may not feel entitled to abuse people at all. They may despise the fact that they cannot help abusing substances or engage in practices that are an abuse. So many people come to the end of their tether because they cannot get free of the bondage they’re stuck in.
Think of the nurses, the paramedics, the police, the firefighters, the veterinary surgeons and nurses, the doctors who have succumbed to work-related trauma—especially the health and other frontline workers throughout the pandemic—and, if you get close enough, you can see the social destruction trauma causes.
For getting in harm’s way for the cause of service to society.
How many upstanding citizens succumb to addictions to flee the fright of trauma as it fights to freeze the person?
How many of the people who are not affected by trauma would be if they were subjected to the same stimuli as those who have trauma?
How many of those who go on to abuse not only substances, but people go on to do so because they have unhealed trauma they couldn’t deal with?
If anything could be a legitimate scapegoat, it ought to be trauma, for it’s such an unforgiving nemesis as to stick to the walls of our bodies so we cannot escape it.
Normalising trauma is understanding how normal shame is—across the board—as the greatest protagonist of cycles of addiction, abuse, and trauma. All these themes inherently feature much shame.
And yet, those we hail as heroes—and always ought to—come unstuck because of exposure to a hazard so immense they cannot rectify it without society’s empathy. Yet, society is fickle—it needs its heroes, but it also cuts down the ‘villain’ with killing ferocity.
Too often the hero and the villain are the same person but for a little luck one way or misfortune the other.
The point is, let’s see the bigger picture. Before we judge a person for glaringly poor behaviour, especially if they lament the fact, we could hold out to the possibility that there’s something that could explain it. Judgement only makes trauma worse. It doesn’t fix it at source.
More and more as trauma becomes increasingly attributable for maladies, we need to be a more compassionate society. We need to be a bigger picture society that endeavours to identify causes and support people rather than not investigate the symptoms more so as to condemn and banish them.
I’m all for keeping people safe, and if trauma makes someone dangerous, then keep the targets of that aggression safe. But it doesn’t mean we cast off the aggressor as the scapegoat banished to the wilderness. Curiosity instead may lead us to ask them if they need help.
Those who take up the offer of help will often be helped. We must ask and be prepared to offer it.
Addressing the problems of trauma is gathering all the symptomatic behaviours in a net, to get interested in them to the extent of doing what can be done to address the causes buried much deeper beneath.
Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash
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