Stepping Stones of Trauma
Are you grateful for your trauma?
Growth only comes from struggle. Every time you talk about being the way you are because of your trauma, you’re reinforcing the walls of the prison of your mind. After any traumatic event comes one of two choices, growth or protection. Love or fear. You’re inevitably going to keep evolving, growing, in some direction, and it’s up to you which direction that is.
First off, your experiences need to be validated, most importantly validated by you and it can be extremely helpful to move through trauma with a safe third party like a therapist, counselor, or trusted friend. When we crave endless external validation for our traumas, that’s another trauma response that can inhibit validating ourselves as we are reliant on an unstable source of validation. Your experience being invalidated can be a traumatic event in itself. In the end, it matters more that you’ve validated your experience than someone else. What matters is that you know at your core, it wasn’t your fault, and your experience was legitimate. Don’t solely depend on others to validate your trauma. You come first. Sink into those feelings of the past and remind yourself of the present moment, breathe deep and tell yourself that you are safe. See yourself leaving the past where it is, and realize where it isn’t, which is the present moment.
You can view your traumas as this thing that’s created an energetic disability in your persona that needs to be constantly coddled, or can choose to frame them as a massive hurdle that you were thrown over, and got an experience you would have never had on your own, saw a vantage point flying over that hurdle you would have never seen without that event… and now it’s the beginning of your superpower. Now you’ve got an experience.
Next it’s time to flex those muscles of observation and gain some insight. Look deeper. Look below the surface. What are the underlying factors for why this happened?
Now look at all the insight you’ve accumulated, and choose how you want this to play out by choosing what you want to see, what you want to focus on. There are all sorts of truths, what makes all the difference is which truth you choose to fight for.
And finally it’s enough thinking, start doing. You don’t need to mull your shit over and over. Let shit it go, and then actually LET the shit be gone. We can overthink our traumas for the rest of our lives and we will only suffer more. Ya gotta let that pile of shit turn into compost and let some beauty grow from it. Now you have the experience to help, teach, and inspire others going through similar things. There’s something we can be grateful for, and the people you psych up will be grateful, all this gratitude, hope, and growth coming from… your trauma!
That traumatic thing that happened to you is over. Don’t let it affect your present moment. The present moment is all you’ll ever have. You are only free from your trauma when you make the effort to stop letting yourself slow you down.
