One of the common beliefs in traumatised people or those whose past experiences were too overwhelmed for them is that the experiences belong to the past and they are able to get away from them. There are many researches that show when we deny the overwhelmed experiences mentally, our body still shows all the overwhelmed symptoms. Trauma lives in our body and when we have that experience, especially childhood trauma, we learned to find a way to numb ourselves and dissociate; drinking, substance abuse, working out, medication and watching television are some of strategies used to get away from ourselves. When we split from ourselves, we feel empty, unsafe and lonely. We are not only separate from ourselves, we separate from the world and the joy.
Trauma recovery is important because trauma impacts many areas of our life such as relationship with loved ones, our children and our family.
We must connect with our body and our original pain. It is not easy, nor a fast cure, but worth it because we deserve to be happy, we deserve to have sense of self. Remember that all trauma symptoms are not part of us and not part of our identity so we are not supposed to blame or judge ourselves but we cannot keep it as an excuse and live with it, because it is going to mess up our life and the life of our loved ones.
I would like to mention that the most of us with trauma experience visit counsellor and want to work on our symptoms such as stress, anger and low self-esteem rather than working on trauma itself. The problem with that is the traumatised client usually go back to counselling with new problems when they don’t have tools to manage their trauma itself.
Contact me if you want me to guide you around this topic.