My journey with trauma

About 2 1/2 years ago I read something in Brene Brown’s book, “Rising Strong” that gave me pause: “Living, growing up, working, or worshipping on eggshells creates huge cracks in our sense of safety and self-worth. Over time, it can be experienced as trauma.” (p. 62, emphasis mine). Hmm…could I have experienced trauma?

Well, the answer is yes, yes I have experienced trauma and it has impacted me in far deeper ways than I ever imagined. I’m not going to go into details as to the cause of my trauma but I do want to share my journey in learning about trauma, learning about myself, and learning to process my experience. It has been a long, hard road, and I don’t really see an end in sight at this point. But I have learned A LOT.

The hardest thing, initially, was grasping the idea that 1. trauma is stored in the body (and this has to do with our flight-fight-freeze response) and 2. there is no ‘language’ centre there. The body communicates through a ‘felt sense’, not through the thoughts running through my head. This is a foreign landscape to me. My solution to everything has been to ‘figure it out’, think it through, find the solution. I can’t use those tools here. I have largely ignored what my ‘body’ was telling me for most of my life. So to try to learn to ‘listen’ to my body now has not been easy. It’s not impossible, but it hasn’t been easy.

I haven’t blogged for a long time but I’m getting the sense that now is the time to share my journey. My hope is to share what I’ve learned (and am learning) about trauma, to help bring some understanding in this area, and to encourage others. I’ve updated my blog with the following quote:  “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus. I read this recently and it really resonated with me. I am in a season of “winter”. It is a season of pain and sadness, of discovery and healing. In this hard, hard time I yearn for my “invincible summer”.