Surely trauma is something that happens to other people.
Like people who’ve experienced severe and frightening events such as sexual abuse, acts of violence, war, natural disasters, or terrorist attacks.
But really trauma is anything that causes a shock to your system.
That means we’ve ALL experienced trauma, including trauma we don’t even remember from childhood.
In just a minute, I’ll share with you how that childhood trauma could still be affecting you, but first…
What is Trauma?
Trauma can be physical, mental/psychological, emotional, and even spiritual.
Examples include:
- Watching your father struggle financially as a child
- Seeing your mother being beaten by your father
- Having your emotions constantly invalidated throughout childhood
- Being verbally abused, including name calling and insulting
- Not being seen or acknowledged, especially by your parents
- Constantly being criticized and put down by parents or authority figures
- Being humiliated by teachers or friends
- Witnessing a loved one suffer through an illness or difficult situation
- Losing a loved one or a pet
Although we’d expect a trauma to be associated with intensely painful feelings, that’s not always the case. Sometimes traumatic events can happen to you, and you feel nothing at all. You’re just numb.
That’s because people often cut off all awareness to the trauma as a self-protection mechanism to avoid feeling the emotional pain and psychological distress.
It helps them survive, as often there is just too much to process and it becomes overwhelming.
However, a trauma that is not processed soon after the event will remain frozen in time and space. The emotional shock and mental programmings that arise will be stored within different parts of the body.
How Trauma Can Continue to Affect You
Even though, today, you may look back on past experiences and see them as insignificant, that’s not how you experienced them as a child.
As a child, you didn’t have access to the kind of inner resources you have today. You were just learning about life, and you weren’t sure how to process the information you were taking in about the world. You couldn’t know, logically and rationally, that you were going to survive and it would all be okay.
So it is not about what you feel or think NOW about those events, but rather about what you felt and made the event mean back then.
How can past trauma still affect you today? You can see the effects in:
- Low self-confidence and self-worth
- Self-sabotaging tendencies and behaviors
- Feeling emotionally sensitive or crying easily
- Aggression and rage, e.g., exploding at the slightest thing
- Lack of social skills or few friends
- Taking everything personally
- Chaotic and abusive relationships
- Lack of energetic or physical boundaries
- Severe anxiety and panic attacks
- Depression and suicidal tendencies
- PTSD and psychological distress
- And more
In my experience, trauma is always the root cause of people’s inability to find love or resolve money issues, health problems, or negative life patterns.
The Importance of Healing from Trauma
Healing cannot be a logical or a thinking process. It must be a feeling process.
A lot of times, I will see the trauma in my client’s energy field, but when I mention it, the client will quickly dismiss it. They tell me they are over it. Because they can’t feel anything towards it now, they believe it is not affecting them.
Our minds naturally want to avoid feeling negative or uncomfortable emotions. An easy to get around these feelings is to rationalize or justify why it shouldn’t affect us or why it couldn’t be the real issue.
From my experience, I believe this is because that capsulated trauma holds memories of feeling unsafe. It holds fears, shame, anguish, and distress. It’s stored with feelings of confusion, betrayal, abandonment, resentment, and regrets. It includes sensations of not being loved, not being accepted, being ignored, and all alone.
No one wants to feel all that, let alone remember it and feel it again. It’s much easier to just block it off.
But there are consequences. If you do not process these traumas, they will continue to affect you. You can feel out of control and unable to get a grip on yourself, your health, or your life.
For many years, I was in complete denial about how my childhood traumas were affecting my life. It was only when I faced these traumas—and I mean truly processed all the emotions from my heart—that I started to change or, should I say, became more myself.
I started to feel more at peace with myself. I became less emotional and less reactive. I felt lighter and more in control of myself and my life. My health issues, one by one, started to resolve themselves. In general, I felt more joy about life.
I have witnessed my clients’ lives transform just by processing their childhood traumas.
So, if you have dismissed some of your emotional wounds and wondered why you are unable to shift some negative life patterns, now you know.
The beginning is always the hardest. But when you get to the other side, you will have wished you started sooner and wondered why you were so scared in the first place.
Emotions are the language of the soul. They are how we understand and process our experiences. It is only by processing our emotions that we can grow and evolve to become who we truly want to be.
I encourage you to do your inner work! Take time to process your emotions from past traumas and emotional wounds.
Be brave, face your stuff, and I promise it will be the best thing you could ever do for yourself.
Let us know what you think!