In my recent posts, I've used the word 'trauma' many times, but what is trauma?
Trauma is not just the memory of a terrible event, although it can intertwined in many ways.
Trauma is an internally, unreconciled event from the past
that haven't been adequately processed.
If these events are left neglected (suppressed) they have the ability to cast a very long shadow over the rest of your life - in a hundred different ways that you're entirely unaware of.
An example of an unreconciled, traumatic, event.
Imagine that you're asleep one night, and you hear a car alarm going off, shortly followed a few seconds later by a massive explosion.
You venture out to see your neighborhood in ruins, and
observe that members of your family have been killed.
While we are devastated at events, we're also under pressure to continue on with our lives and unable to give yourself time to mourn what has just happened.
You move on from that dreadful experience too quickly, without any real, emotional, assimilation.
The unattended memory of that night, that bloodshed, chaos, and loss is still there however and it doesn't just 'disappear'.
Instead, it's driven down into the subconscious, where the pain of the events are not as intense, so raw.
That internal space of some unreconciled event, is what trauma is.
Unless it's dealt with, the years and decades that follow will be - unconsciously - influenced by it.
It will come pouring out through an intense emotional response to something.
For example (using the scenario above), we hear a car alarm
going off, and suddenly suffer an extreme panic attack.
We suffer the panic attack for reasons that we can't really understand.
Subconsciously, we're thrown back into that original place of panic from years, or decades, ago.
Psychologists have learned that trauma's can as easily be acquired.....It doesn't have to be some massive explosion and dead bodies everywhere, to create a trauma.
Non extreme trauma events.
Imagine a five year old child, one who makes an error in a math exam.
They take the news home with them, to tell their parents.
When they get home, they find that their parents have been drinking, and are in the middle of some big argument, throwing and smashing things around.
From the perspective of a five-year-old child, it feels like the the end of the world.
because the the young developing brain has not yet develped enough to separate events from themselves, there's no way for them to make sense of the moment - beyond taking responsibility for it.
As a result of this they may feel like a terrible person, terrified that if they make an error (like in the math exam), it might unleash violent explosions in others (the parents, arguing and throwing things).
As an adult, every time there's a risk that they might make an error over something, there also comes a terror that someone, somehow, will get furious - and maybe even violent.
All because that memory - and experience - hasn't been fully dealt with ,internally.
The solutions....
...You have to try to get a better sense of the specific incidents in the past.
The ones that 'trigger' you today, in some way.
Is it trauma?
How do we differentiate between what is a 'trauma', rather than another stimulus? (i.e a real and justified fear).
By applying rationality.
Observing the intensity of feelings that emerge in conditions when there is no objective rationale for that intensity of emotion.
Example:
The five year old that we've just talked about, is now an adult...
They working in an office...and a colleague, who's kind, points out an accounting error that they've made on some paperwork - and a stark terror fills them, then they get angry and shout back hysterically....
That is unreconciled trauma .
That is not the appropriate response to a kind colleague pointing who's merely pointing out an error.
That is an unprocessed incident from the past, casting it's long and debilitating shadow into 'the now'.
Exorcising the demon....
Because the memory of the original incident is still alive within us , and at the same time, with our conscious minds trying it's best to avoid the incident, we have to neutralize it.
How?
By using tools that we now do have. Ones that we didn't have , as a child...
Rational examination.
Rational examination of traumatic past events , can allow us to finally feel comfortable about examining the said events.
Rational examination will allow us to be able to see the traumatizing moment for what it was.
Rational examination will not trigger the emotional panic, and the illogical conclusion, that it was 'all our fault'. The five year old child can be - as an adult - now reconciled within us.
Rational examination will mean liberating ourselves from a prison that we've constructed for ourselves.
One that we never even knew existed!.
Once we truly know that our math error at school was not the cause of parents fighting and throwing things, we can move on...
We can truly grow up.
By properly gripping the original event in the claws of our rational adult mind - and by stripping away the evil that we imagined - the trauma can simply fade away....(OVER TIME).
The trauma will have been healed.
You'll then have escaped your own mental prison, and you'll have repatriated a part of yourself - with the rest of you...!
