Have you thought about how your life, right now, may be being infiltrated by traumatizing events? Believe me, when we are "in it" so to speak, it can be extremely difficult to recognize the impact primary and secondary trauma has in our own everyday life. I know I have personally experienced this myself in recent weeks, and I have been a practicing LLP psychologist for 20 years! So...even when we are highly self-aware, we can overlook the obvious in this regard. Today's post is about taking a long-enough look at your own current circumstances to see if your life is traumatizing now---and what can be done to successfully move past it without getting stuck...
Here's an example: everyone comes from somewhere. In fact, you may still live in the same city/township/rural area that you were raised in. Or, you may have moved once or twice within your same metropolitan area. Perhaps you moved several times across one or more states. For others still, transatlantic moves may have been a part of your personal history. Whatever the case, the whole experience of "moving" and changing residences can range from "not at all traumatic" to "severely traumatic" depending on the circumstance(s) that led to it/them. I can recall one young man who became very angry and embittered towards his parents after he realized that "moving six times" during his formative years had deeply traumatized him across several areas of functioning. "I was always having to say goodbye to friends....I would get comfortable in my new house and school and then suddenly we had to pack up and leave again...My parents didn't at all consider us kids and what we needed, it was all about his job.." etc. etc. By the time this young man got married, he was barely speaking to either of his parents. It wasn't until the birth of he and his wife's first child that he managed to re-think his attitudes towards his father's former career, now that his father was retired. "Even though I hated moving and was repeatedly traumatized by the process, I better understand now that my parents didn't have much choice given what my father did for his living." "When I finally went to therapy, it was my therapist who reminded me that carrying all that bitterness around inside me was continuing to traumatize me until I was able to move past my past." No doubt.
I am reminded next of an old former colleague of mine who met her first husband in high school. He had a tumultuous family life, something he and his girlfriend avoided talking about when they began dating during their sophomore year. By the time he died from a heart attack on a local golf course, he had blown through two more marriages and had several children by several different women, not all of whom he married. My former colleague never remarried, and decided to remain living in the house she was raised in. She is now 72 years old. All of this man's children, including their daughter, are grown with their own families. The last time we spoke and I asked her what was new, her answer was not unexpected, "Same sh**, different day." Past trauma(s) have a way of keeping us stuck in our fear and worry...especially when our lives keep us feeling "stuck" in the present as well. Change may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's an important-enough ingredient when we need to un-stick ourselves from that which still plagues us.
For people who work with trauma by choice, such as Emergency medical professionals, Medical Examiners, Morticians, Firefighters, Mental Health Clinicians, Social Services Providers, etc....we all face some form or another of trauma every time we go into work on any given day or evening. We never know what will traumatize us as a result of our involvement with any given patient or family system. I know of several individuals who ended up quitting their jobs within the health and human services professions because they just couldn't consistently manage their own response(s) to the past or present-day traumas of their patients/clients anymore.
I have watched people live...and die...not having reprocessed their past pain from traumatic life events. That's a sad reality that we rarely talk about. Even at the deathbeds of some of my former clients, I have heard things like "I can never be forgiven for..." or "Nobody has ever loved me anyway because.." It's just so beyond sad how easy it is to make ourselves feel worse than we already do!
To turn ourselves around, we have to be open to deep-diving into our perception of ourselves and identify what we are believing that works completely against our status as a child of God, created for a purpose, and acceptable to be here. That isn't an easy job when we have convinced ourselves that we are lower than dirt because of all the traumatic events we have experienced going back perhaps to our own infancy. Yet no matter what we went through that we don't even consciously recall, it sure isn't going to help us to keep traumatizing ourselves, in our present lives, because of what we did or didn't do in the past.
A licensed and qualified therapist can help you move from being stuck in your past trauma and present pain by helping you to reprocess it and move past it. It is possible. As a result, we learn how to slow ourselves down and prevent ourselves from falling into the same holes of shame, self-condemnation, guilt, and anger repeatedly.
It's time to move past your past and stop the pattern of continuing to traumatize yourself now...and in the new year of 2024 ahead. You can do it. I know you can.
Until next post...