Life Interrupted
You know that feeling when you find your stride and then out of nowhere something knocks you right off your feet, like a guttural punch? We’ve all experienced it at one time or another. Trauma is a lot like that, it recalibrates something internally. There are lots of different kinds of traumatic experiences with specific nuances and each point of impact deserves special attention. I think it’s vital to define what I mean by this term so that it’s not just a broad brush stroke, but rather a de-stigmatized way of understanding challenging experiences. I think of trauma as something external that intersects with your internal world and it’s impact dysregulates you to the point of highjacking the nervous system’s natural pattern of operations. We are naturally built for resiliency and have survival strategies for overcoming life’s obstacles, but sometimes there are circumstances that create damages that need specialized treatment and attunement in order to recalibrate.
Some examples of trauma could be, but aren’t limited to: natural disasters, car accidents, emotional or physical abuses, bankruptcy, terminal illness, disability, pregnancy loss, sexual violation… the list is innumerable but you get the picture. It’s different from a difficult day, because the impact has larger ramifications on daily life rhythms. It forces a person to rethink their entire orientation to the world, and it threatens a person’s sense of safety and wellbeing almost inducing a crisis of identity. How do you move forward when your entire world has been flipped upside down? I believe it is possible, however your experience navigating through will have different obstacles because of what you have endured. It is naive to think that healing is a return to things as they were in their pre-existing condition before the trauma ever occurred; rather it is a reclamation of sorts or a repurposing towards rediscovery. What I mean by this is that healing is a tenacious journey towards reconnecting with your true essence and voice, by holding onto your core identity and moving towards a restoration beyond the harm done.
My therapist once told me that, “If you don’t let the past shape you, it will define you.” These words have been with me at different instances as a reminder to reorient and adapt to lessons learned even in the midst heartache. After someone has experienced trauma it disrupts and interrupts ones momentum and their endurance gets stalled. One of the things I find so vital in these isolating and deep felt moments of experienced grief is the supportive insight of a loving perspective that sees beyond the wreckage. Our eyesight is skewed when we are in a traumatized state of shock, it is almost impossible to recover in complete isolation. All you can see when you have endured a mass disruption is the devastation itself, it’s difficult to see beyond it when you’re in it. Sometimes all you need is for someone to throw you a lifeline to draw you to shore. I’ve found that when I’m trying to make sense of circumstances that brought significant disruption, it helps to have someone put language to your experience and empathetically feel it with you. When you’re receiving support there needs to be an active acknowledgement without minimization. Being honest with what you’ve experienced takes risk and to feel it deeply asks even more of you. It’s not enough to merely stop there though, so often people get stuck in their trauma narratives and never move beyond ground zero towards a new reality. That’s where I believe it is vital to regain a capacity towards dreaming anew, it’s one of the greatest resiliency strategies when moving beyond something devastating. Growing an imagination for goodness requires that you allow other’s resiliency stories to inspire you towards healing. Living an embodied life invites you to own your story in a more real and integrated way that is regenerative, this is the beginning of reclamation.