Early this spring, I took my daughter’s bike out of winter storage. She was so excited to be riding again. After school one day as she headed down a steep hill, she got the speed wobbles and fell face first into the payment. I got the call as she was on her way to the hospital. I worked to keep calm as I drove up to the emergency room, and the moment I saw her I wrapped myself around her, held her and kept her as close as possible.
Physically she’s healed, but I knew then that the emotional scars would take time. As we were dealing with the physical healing, I had started to consider what the emotional healing would look like for her.
During a phone conversation with someone close to us who was checking in and wanted to know how she was healing, I said that she was healing remarkably well, but I was now focusing on the emotional trauma. I was met with a response of shock and judgement: “Just leave it alone,” ‘“She will be fine” and finally, “I’m concerned about the damage you will do to her by focusing on the trauma.” This made me realize how far we still need to go as a society to understand trauma and rethink our relationship with the word.
‘Trauma’ is modern world language; although the word isn’t modern, the way we use it in dialogue and the science behind it is relatively new. Trauma is a Greek word for ‘wound’. We can have physical and emotional wounds, and sometimes we deal with both simultaneously.
There are different types of trauma.. There’s ‘big T’ trauma – a traumatic event such as a war or an abusive parent/household etc, and there’s ‘little t’ trauma, such as the end of a relationship, or the death of a pet and much more. If you’ve had a big T event in your life, it can also make little t events feel pretty intense; you may even have a similar response to the smaller trauma as you had to the big t event in your life.
For generations we’ve been taught to hide our emotions, and kids were taught (including myself) to be seen and not heard, not to express themselves, to hold back tears (“Don’t cry, you’ll be fine,”) and pull themselves together without any instruction on how to do so.
In short, we have a large portion of the population that isn’t able to speak about how they feel, understand that feeling is good, or that stuffing down emotions is unhealthy and leads to all kinds of physical and emotional ailments.
We need to give people grace as they navigate this, and we need to give ourselves grace as we ourselves learn how to talk about our pain. If we aren’t able to be with the discomfort of our pain and trauma, we’re certainly unable to with others.
Dr. James Gordon, in his book Transforming Trauma, says there are two dangerous myths about trauma. The first is that many believe trauma only happens to other people, whether it’s those that live in war zones, those that live in desperate poverty, or those with grotesquely abusive homes. The belief is that it doesn’t come to most of us and shouldn’t come to most of us. The second is that if it does come, it’s going to disable us forever and we’re going to need a lifetime of medication and support.
Both these perspectives are dangerous because trauma is a part of human life., If we neglect tending to the parts of ourselves that have been traumatized (either little t or big T) we tend to pass those traumas onto others in our lives or react to the world from the unhealed parts of our trauma.
I feel that’s why, in our world of massive economic, racial and social disparity, we have ‘othered’ people who we perceive have been traumatized. (In a kind of privileged way that white people (including myself in this stereotype) tend to do.) We avoid talking about trauma and view it as something that happens to others and not us. We are fearful of it and we don’t want to be associated with it for worry we may catch it, or it may make us look less capable and likable.
Trauma is complex and not prescriptive; it’s not a one size fits all experience. However, some common symptoms of trauma include anxiety, depression, reactivity, dramatic mood swings, fear of engaging in the world or with others, troubled sleeping, a constant need to please or be perfect, trouble with concentration, worry about the future (more than usual) and agitation. These are just a few examples, but they give you an idea of how it can play out in our daily lives. These responses are natural and normal reactions to something that feels distressful in your body.
It takes time to process and heal, but it doesn’t take forever and it definitely doesn’t have to take a lifetime.
With my daughter, it’s still taking time. We’re slowly processing the accident and finding ways to learn that she can pick herself up when she’s been hurt. But she needs my support, she needs to know I’m there to listen and hear her, and that she has a safe place to come when she’s scared. It takes time, but if I put the effort in with her now, she will become stronger for it. Imagine if we could have that perspective for anyone in our lives that we know is going through a hard time? How would we be different if we knew someone was there for us when we’re feeling broken or scared?
Trauma is a HUGE topic and I can’t even come close to unpacking it in my Mindful Monday, but it’s why I do the work I do and what I’ve been focusing my studies and education on for the last couple of years. There’s some great books out there on the topic, and I highly recommend educating yourself as a way to be more compassionate with yourself and hopefully others.
With love
Noelle