Though we would like to think of ourselves as resilient and even immune to the painful things that happen in our life, the reality is that the things that happen in our life, have a very real effect on us. And when they go unresolved, they will manifest emotionally, mentally and physically.
When a painful, unwanted thing happens to us, it can easily become a trauma. A simple definition of trauma is distress without resolve. What should stick out to you about this definition of trauma is that this could mean anything from an infant being weaned to an embarrassing event to chronic experiences where you end up feeling like your worth to others is only about the quality of your performance all the way to a veteran watching comrades being blown up by landmines at war to complex sex abuse and trafficking. Trauma is something that happens in all demographics, across all societal classes, to people of any age, race, class, religion or sex. There are so many types of traumas that a person can experience.
Everyone has trauma. Everyone has experienced distress in their lifetime that is unresolved. Everyone has made adaptations to their personality as a result of experiencing trauma. And everyone’s current, adult life was influenced by the traumas they experienced in childhood. And it is in fact these events that lie at the root of the vast majority of the problems we face and things we struggle with in our adult lives. As the field of psychology evolves, professionals will start to recognize more and more that the vast majority of behaviors that have been grouped and labeled as mental illnesses are in fact adaptations to distressing experiences. And more and more, doctors will start to recognize that trauma is what lies at the root of the vast majority of physical illness.
When we don’t find a way to actually resolve a trauma we experience, we become stuck in many ways at that moment of trauma. Simultaneously, the trauma becomes stuck in us. And we find ways to adapt to it. We develop coping mechanisms. These coping mechanisms allow us to survive distressing circumstances in our lives so we can keep on living despite the stress. They benefit us in some way when they are invented. But over time, we can see that the very coping mechanisms that benefitted us, are in fact the very thing that is hurting us and the people around us. These adaptations may serve us in some ways, but tend to doom us in other ways, especially in the long run.
Trauma changes the course of our lives. When a trauma happens, we make the painful thing that we have experienced mean something. And that in turn alters the way we think, the choices we make and the things we do. Trauma changes the way we think. Trauma changes the way we feel. Trauma changes the way our physical body operates. The symptoms of trauma can manifest as anything from changes in a person’s personality to dysfunctional behavioral patterns in relationships to coping mechanisms to negative self-talk to flashbacks to nightmares to insomnia to addictions to anxiety or depression, to unrelenting thoughts about a specific past event or series of events. To the difficulty regulating anger. To a general feeling of emotional numbness. To a physical disease or illness. To low self-esteem to self-harm to chronic pain to mental illness to simply a lingering feeling of a generally unsatisfying or painful life and so much more.
It is important to understand that the body is being informed all day, every day by the thoughts you are thinking and the way you are feeling. The physical body is not like a separate machine. Most people who are struggling with a physical ailment of course have no idea that there are mental and emotional roots to every physical ailment. And this is one reason why a person can put so much effort into remedies and improvements that are solely focused on the body at a physical level and end up seeing such poor results. Because of this, trauma will manifest as physical ailments. This is so much the case that one could correlate specific physical ailments to specific traumas.
So that you can understand how trauma manifests emotionally, mentally and physically, I’m going to give you an example. Irene was brought to the United States by her parents from Eastern Europe. They were refugees. Though Irene never experienced war directly, she was caused great distress by the feeling of constant threat. Her parents always seemed in crisis. And she felt responsible to behave in a way that put no pressure on them at all. There was no predictability relative to where they would be staying or what they would be eating or when they would see loved ones again. All of that was in someone else’s hands. Rather than being about an isolated incident, Irene’s trauma was about the dynamics of how her life was day to day growing up. As a child, she usually felt too on edge to play. She did not feel secure or joyful. She felt guilty for having any pleasure when her parents were not experiencing pleasure at all. She needed to feel comforted. But could not actively pursue the need. Because that would be to ask something from her parents, who were too stressed out as it was.
On a mental and emotional level, this trauma caused Irene to believe that the world is an inherently unsafe place and that everyone is too maxed out to help anyone else. And that pleasure is something she could not have. That life is not about pleasure. To cope with this, she suppressed, denied and disowned the aspect of herself that is lighthearted and child-like and playful and joyful. Rather, she identified with a part of herself that is serious, practical, perfectionistic and that is a workaholic. She works herself into the ground and does not prioritize joy at all. Doing this, actually makes her feel safer because it makes her feel on top of and in control of the very sad reality of her life, rather than at the mercy of it.
Whenever she experiences a situation that is pleasurable in her life, she feels guilty. Because of her often serious, cold and hard way of being, people feel tense around Irene and are typically not drawn to her. So, she experiences a severe lack of connection and affection. She carries herself with so much constriction in her tissues, that her body posture is out of alignment. Her shoulders are hunched. Her chest is concave. And she is constantly experiencing back pain. And this complete denial of pleasure has negatively informed her body to the degree that she has developed type one diabetes. Her diabetes has served to only make the original issue that caused it, worse. Because now, her condition makes pleasure even more impossible. She can’t enjoy food at all. Food or the lack thereof is a constant source of anxiety for her.
You might be thinking to yourself that Irene’s situation seems extreme, after all, most people were not refugees as children. But trauma does not need to look like what we would traditionally call trauma, to be trauma. Even experiences that you or other people might consider small or normal, can be traumas that have a massive impact on your mind, emotions and body. And don’t forget, Irene doesn’t understand that she experienced trauma. Because what she experienced is so much better than what anyone else in her family experienced. And her parents love to tell her that because they brought her to America, she avoided all the bad things that could have happened. She has so much opportunity and convenience and food and water and shelter and she is safe, unlike everyone who they left behind.
Most people have not put two and two together yet regarding what they are experiencing on a mental, emotional and physical level and the trauma they have experienced. They don’t yet see the flow chart from the trauma to the effect that trauma had on them mentally, emotionally and physically. There are a great many reasons for this all the way from memory suppression to normalization to minimization to adopting other people’s way of seeing our experiences. To it being too scary to admit to trauma because of the consequences we think we will experience if we do. To traumas being hard to see because they are about what didn’t happen, rather than about what did happen. To simply not committing any time or focus to thinking about it.
It is critical that as a society, we start to connect the dots and wake up to the fact that unresolved trauma manifests mentally, emotionally and physically. As well as wake up to the fact that trauma lies at the root of the mental, emotional and physical ailments that we are experiencing in our lives. There are so many modalities that exist to heal traumas. I, myself have created one. It is called the Completion Process. If you are interested in learning how to do this process, you have three options. You can go through the e-course that I created, in which I explain the full picture of trauma on a much deeper level and walk you step by step through how to heal trauma. You can pick up a copy of my book that is quite literally titled: The Completion Process. Or, you can go to www.completionprocess.com and select a practitioner to walk you through the process. The Completion Process is the process that I, myself used to overcome the kind of damage that most experts believed had no cure.
When we resolve distress, rather than cope with it, we are able to weave the negative experience into the fabric of who we are in a way that it benefits us. We are no longer plagued by painful negative emotion about it. We are able to live in the present moment, without feeling like we keep getting dragged back to the painful memory of an experience Essentially, what happened in the past no longer controls the way you feel or behave in the present. You are no longer a deterministic byproduct of it. By being aware of the picture of cause and effect, as it plays out in your own life, you can consciously heal what needs to be healed, and by doing so, experience a different fate.
