Worthy read today that I had to share. Love you Katerina for your heart to share!!
Healing past trauma triggers.
Palms sweating, mind racing, and the room is spinning. "What is happening?" you think to yourself, "How did this happen to me again??"
Heaving and crying, you are inconsolable. Your loved ones are trying to reach you, but you're pulling further and further away... withdrawing into your safe cocoon where no one can hurt you and nothing can touch you.
Your loved one lays his hand on your back and you can barely feel it, you are so numb. All he said was "I think we should talk". He never knew it would've affected you like this.
He tries to reason with you, and you shut down even further. Memories are racing through your mind like lightening bolts. The time when your parents would tell you "we need to talk" and then took you into their room for a belting. The time when your ex muttered the same words and then broke your heart by telling you he was in love with someone else.
You can barely speak. You are lost at sea, far away from reality.
You're in a trauma trigger.
Heaving and crying, you are inconsolable. Your loved ones are trying to reach you, but you're pulling further and further away... withdrawing into your safe cocoon where no one can hurt you and nothing can touch you.
Your loved one lays his hand on your back and you can barely feel it, you are so numb. All he said was "I think we should talk". He never knew it would've affected you like this.
He tries to reason with you, and you shut down even further. Memories are racing through your mind like lightening bolts. The time when your parents would tell you "we need to talk" and then took you into their room for a belting. The time when your ex muttered the same words and then broke your heart by telling you he was in love with someone else.
You can barely speak. You are lost at sea, far away from reality.
You're in a trauma trigger.
Trauma triggers.
I can't think of anything that has more power to imprison and harm your future than unhealed emotional triggers. These pesky buggers have the power to take an apparently good situation and turn it into one of the most vile and painful things you've experienced. A loved ones embrace, their confessions of love, a car that reminds you of your cheating ex, an expression on someone's face that reminds you of your abusive father, anything and everything that you associate with a past trauma has the power to take you back to being immersed in that experience.WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN?
Often times, it is because we are trying to process the hurt and it's implications after the fact, when we are no longer on the moment, but we are experiencing the emotions that we've long since disowned or rejected.
The horrid occurrences can terrorize us in our sleep, our relationships, and our minds. The fear of facing the source of it head on keeps us imprisoned in a fragile cycle of episodes and recoveries, where we may do untold of damage to ourselves and loved ones.
Getting a little more personal:
I have my own story of a painful trauma trigger I used to suffer with that plagued my relationships. You see, my very first boyfriend I had that I was intimate with ended up cheating on me and left me with a trauma trigger that told me that I was worthless and that my relationships would never last. And for 7 years, that's exactly what happened. Each time someone would get too close to my heart, my expectation would be that they were going to hurt me, and it would trigger the fears and panic in me. I would start acting out irrationally and do and say things to sabotage the relationship. And voila! Heartbreak, pain and suffering all over again. These triggers kept me from experiencing true intimacy with people that cared about me, and my paranoia drove them away into the arms of others as well.
This self fulfilling prophecy cycled on and on until I started learning about the mind and how my beliefs actually shape my experiences in life. And that is when I started to thaw. I began to allow myself to feel the heartbreak, the trauma I had tried to push away for nearly a decade. And even more frightening than feeling the pain, I allowed myself to feel the hope and love again. To cherish the concept of true love that I had cast away as rubbish long ago.
AND YOU KNOW WHAT?
I got hurt again, but this time, my relationship with my hurt was different. I didn't let it close me off to the idea of someone really loving me.
AND YOU KNOW WHY?
I had opened my heart to them and it was progress; I was moving in the right direction.
Recovery from trauma triggers isn't an instant fix - it's more like a gradual lessening of the chokehold that the episodes have on you. When you experience and allow the emotions, and correct the associated beliefs, what happens is something beautiful. New awareness is born, and you are able to see the same old situations with new eyes and feel things differently.
Instead of reacting in a robotic autopilot way where you don't feel like you have any control over your upset behaviors, you are able to really feel them and not run away from the deep pain that is causing it. That is true healing... And new insights and neural connections are forged, and eventually the trigger has disapated to a faint blip on the radar. You eventually will have healed the trauma, and welcomed your experience back into the fold.So, in conclusion...
Next time you experience yourself in the painful throughs of a trauma trigger - remember my words and know that there is hope. Trauma happens to the best of us. It doesn't make you weak, unworthy, stupid, or dramatic. You are a beautiful and whole soul that just needs to remember a few things so you can live from that place of unbrokenness again.
Oh, and also love... It doesn't matter how many times you've fallen, only how many you've got up. :)
