Trauma is a concept many of us have heard of. It is often vague in our minds, a kind of damage, an injury, something that leaves a wound.
But the trauma we are talking about today is less physical. Its impact on the body, however, can be just as devastating as a mortal wound. In fact, if left unchecked, it can eventually contribute to the mortal body giving out entirely.
Trauma is an event, an experience, or an occurrence that shapes us in a negative way. Sometimes it can even come to define us. That is something we should not allow, but it is much easier said than done.
Trauma often begins in a state of extreme fear, stress, or emotional impact. It shapes the soul and creates a kind of shield within the mind, a mechanism meant to protect us from experiencing that pain again.
A guard is a good thing, but it is not good to let your guard become a prison warden. The very thing that once protected us can eventually prevent us from living.
Identifying trauma, and the toxic marks it leaves upon us, is crucial if we want to end its reign. That requires deep and often uncomfortable introspection. We have to be willing to look at ourselves honestly and ask why we react the way we do, why certain things hurt us so deeply, and where those wounds began.
It is okay to cry. It is okay to be sad. It is okay to be afraid.
I know this because I deal with complex trauma myself. I have yet to overcome much of it , for years, I thought I was overcoming it. Looking back now, I believe I was often simply masking it, hiding it from myself rather than healing it.
What I believed was strength was sometimes trauma. What I believed was obligation was sometimes trauma.
What I believed was simply the way I was could, in many cases, be traced back to wounds I carried from childhood.
I will only lightly touch on some of those things, the experiences that have hampered my life up until this very point, and that will undoubtedly continue to affect me as I work through them.
As a child, I experienced abandonment in many cases. I am the youngest of my siblings, and I often felt detached from the connection they had with one another. They came before me. They shared experiences of childhood that I simply was not there for. I came later, and in many ways, I felt as though I had less of that childhood experience than they did.
I became shy. I kept to myself.
By the time I was there, my mother had turned to alcohol. I have many memories of her disappearing without explanation, leaving me as a little child terrified that something had happened to her, that my mother had died.
I remember the panic and helplessness of not knowing where she was.
I was sexually abused at the age of five. I do not want to delve into that here.
Then there was my father. He was the pillar of our family. He showed me what it meant to love and what it meant to forgive. Those are beautiful things, and I am grateful for the lessons they taught me. But there was another lesson I learned without realizing it.
I did not learn how to set boundaries. My father endured things for our family, sometimes to his own detriment. My mother was unfaithful to him, she drank heavily, she belittled him and berated him. And he chose to withstand it all. He did it for our family. I watched that, and that trait carried over into me. It taught me, in a way, that love meant enduring almost anything.
That forgiveness meant staying, and holding onto someone was more important than protecting yourself from what they were doing to you.
So, when the person I loved began breaking down my soul, I held onto her. I endured, I forgave, and I tried to save what was already destroying me.
Eventually, she broke the covenant of our marriage and left me for another.
I can see now that the way I responded to that pain did not begin with her. It began much earlier.
These experiences leave marks. Sometimes you do not even realize how deep those marks are until something in your adult life touches the same wound.
Beneath all of this, I still have a deep desire to be loved, to be wanted, to be desired, to feel that I matter to somebody. A close friend once summed it up for me in a way that I have never forgotten: I have a craving for validation. When I do not have it, I will do almost anything to keep hold of it when I find it, even to my own detriment.
That realization hurt, but sometimes the truth hurts, because it is the first thing that can actually set us free.
My trauma has definitely affected my ability to trust. It has affected my confidence, my self-love, my relationships, and even my ability to function on certain days.
It has affected far more than I would like to admit, but fighting trauma is like grabbing a bull by the horns.
Before I could fight it, I had to recognize what I was actually fighting. Sun Tzu wrote that you must know your enemy before entering into battle. That principle rings remarkably true here. You cannot fight something that you refuse to see.
You cannot heal a wound that you insist does not exist, and you cannot overcome something if you continue allowing it to define you.
I am still wounded, I am still learning. There are days when I am not strong enough. There are days when the sorrow overwhelms me, when the past feels closer than the present, and when my own mind becomes a battlefield.
But I am on my way to battle this affliction. I have identified it. I can face it, and even when I cannot yet conquer it, but I can refuse to surrender to it.
Perhaps that is where healing begins, not with pretending that we are strong, but with having the courage to admit where we are weak.
Be strong.
Keep courage.
And do not let your guard become your prison.
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