Disclaimer (pause to read):
The Trauma Healing Paradox
For the sake of this conversation,
let's define trauma
as a deeply distressing or even disturbing experience.
But it's not just the big stuff,
stuff like experiencing a natural disaster,
or a war, or being abused...
It's also stuff like
being weaned from the breast
before we're ready to participate in that decision,
or,
being the only one in our family
that was super responsible
and feeling like we were carrying the entire weight of our family system,
or,
growing up so poor
we couldn't really get what it is that we truly desired.
Trauma is also that stuff we normalize.
For so many of us,
the trauma that we experience
it goes unresolved.
And as a result,
it just keeps on repeating over and over again.
Our trauma must be something
that we focus on healing in our lifetime.
In fact a big part of personal growth and expansion
is healing from the trauma
that every person experiences in their lifetime.
To heal, is to experience something
different and antidotal,
usually the opposite.
For example:
If somebody has a deep trauma around loneliness,
to heal might be something like
to find consistent reliable connection.
And if a person has experienced the trauma
of feeling completely powerless,
to heal, might be something like
finding personal empowerment in some way.
To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled:
What is Healing?
But for today's conversation,
it's important to know that even though it's awesome,
a really good thing,
to simplify complex concepts,
to simplify also can lead to the shadow of oversimplification.
and rigid thinking, in fact.
And this is especially the case when it comes to trauma and healing.
Because trauma is an unwanted experience,
it's really tempting to make trauma itself wrong and bad.
and it's also tempting
to make anything that's causally related
or that is a byproduct of trauma,
bad and wrong.
This includes adaptations we may have made
as a result of that trauma.
But, by doing this
we limit ourselves
in terms of the way that we think about healing from trauma.
We also miss a powerful truth about life itself.
Something that people are very slow to accept,
is that trauma doesn't only play a role
in the problems, in the weaknesses,
in the dysfunctionality and disadvantages of people,
it also plays a role
in their strengths and their advantages
and in their solutions.
What trauma does,
is it causes polarization within people.
This means trauma is often at the root of people's failures.
But it's also often at the root of people's successes.
To explain this,
I'm gonna give you a couple of examples.
Jane had a mother who was very young.
In fact, she was only 15 when she had Jane.
Jane's mother was lacking support in a very real way.
When jane was young
because of the very real needs her mother had
and her lack of awareness of the implications of doing so,
her mother flipped their roles
so that jane was taking care of her every whim.
In order to avoid consequences,
jane had to make her entire life about supporting her mother.
From being her mother's shoulder to cry on,
to rubbing her back (which was always sore),
to working with her mother at her house cleaning job
even as a small child,
to giving her birthday money to her mother for bills, etc...
Jane was literally custom trained
to perfectly support another person's success
regardless of whether she wanted this or not.
This trauma led to Jane having a codependent relational style,
not really knowing who she was or what she wanted,
being soft-spoken and disempowered.
However, it also led to an incredible capacity
to perceive the needs of others,
a perfectly honed skill set regarding assisting others,
the ability to emotionally regulate anyone,
the capacity to dedicate herself to another person
and to work towards success together,
and the rare personality trait of taking the back seat
and letting someone else shine
rather than vying for attention.
Brett grew up in a wealthy household,
his parents, especially his father,
cared mostly about one thing and that's public perception.
They put a ton of pressure on Brett from a very young age to be excellent
so that his family could use him as a kind of trophy.
Brett learned that the only way
he could get any approval from his family
and the only way to avoid being ostracized like his sister was
was to step into that family pressure
and to dedicate himself to being excellent.
He chose golf as his venue for excellence.
This trauma caused Brett to feel like
he had to justify his value and worth
in his family and earn love.
It caused him to have a core self-concept of shame.
It caused him to obsessively perfect his golf game
to the degree that he would stay on a course for hours
sobbing from rotator cuff pain
until he got the stroke exactly how he wanted it.
However, this trauma also led
to an incredible level of discipline,
a superhuman capacity to focus,
an achievement-oriented personality,
the achievement of greatness,
incredible financial success
and a professional golf career that most people could only dream of.
It's tempting when your view is limited
regarding trauma and healing,
to jump to the conclusion
that you know exactly what is in the best interests of Jane
and also Brett,
when it comes to healing
from the pain that they experienced in their childhood.
For example, looking at the scenario with Jane
you're probably thinking "oh my gosh,
Jane needs to be way more selfish.
She needs to make herself about herself.
What she needs to do
is to go out there and focus on her own personal endeavors
and put herself in the limelight for a change
and to stop worrying about other people.
It's an easy conclusion to come to.
But this is only one potential healing option.
It may or may not actually be the best healing option for Jane.
For Brett, you're probably jumping into the conclusion
that he needs to find someone who really loves him for him,
whatever that means,
and that he needs to quit golf
or anything else he may be doing to earn approval.
Approval needs to be something he gets
even when he's lounging on the couch.
He needs the pressure to perform taken off of him
and he needs to learn how to be gentle with himself and have fun.
But this is just one potential healing option for Brett.
It may or may not be the one that's actually in alignment for him.
What if I told you
that trauma plays a role in your destiny?
What if i told you that trauma
perfectly custom molds you
for that destiny
which is your pre-birth intention for you in this lifetime?
Can you consider
that it's not only those good things
that you wanted to experience, but also the trauma
that you wanted to experience
that would mold your intention for this life
or line up with it?
That's why you chose those specific people
at that specific time
in that specific place.
When we make trauma wrong
and anything that is causally related to trauma wrong,
we miss the fact
that if there was absolutely no problems with significance
in anyone's childhood,
and there was no experiences of poor reflection,
there would be no actors in Hollywood.
That means,
there's really none of that good quality entertainment,
there's also none of those movies
that change the way that all of society thinks.
Without the trauma of injustice and middle child syndrome
and the guilt and separation
of having more resources and opportunities
than most other people that looked like him,
while at the same time not being allowed to play and connect
with kids that didn't look like him,
there is no Martin Luther King Jr.
Without your trauma
you would be a very very different person.
Yeah, potentially, in some ways to the positive,
but also in some ways to the negative.
Now, I don't want you to listen to this
and to jump to this conclusion
that what I'm saying is
"we should just never try to prevent people from experiencing trauma,
because trauma leads to such good things".
That's not this conversation.
And you obviously know where I stand on that subject,
otherwise I wouldn't waste my time doing all these videos for you, would I?
Yeah!
That's not the point of this conversation.
All I want is to ask you
can you see the danger of jumping to the conclusion
that if what drives a person to want to act
is all this trauma around significance,
and if acting causes a person
to slip in and out of different identities,
to heal, they must stop acting?
That may be the right decision for one actor
and the totally wrong decision for another actor
even though they have the same trauma
or similar trauma.
Do you see the danger of jumping to the conclusion
that if the trauma of feeling invisible
and being excluded and being separated
and feeling guilty,
is a big part of what fueled Martin Luther King
to step into the public eye
and create the movement that ultimately led to his death,
that it somehow diminishes
the rightness or inalignment-ness of his career?
The most important thing you can do about your trauma
is to become aware of it.
You need to recognize your trauma
and recognize what it caused within you.
You could consider this recognizing the ABC
of the trauma dynamic in your life.
By the way,
part of the awareness that's inherent in this process
is seeing both what is detrimental and what was beneficial
about those experiences.
It didn't just take away from you, it also added.
From there, you want to think about
what is the different healing experience?
What could the antidote be for me specifically?
This awareness includes consideration
of the beneficial and detrimental consequences
of each option you might choose as a healing step,
and from that place of awareness,
the most empowering thing you can do
regarding your trauma,
is to make a conscious decision with your own free will
about what you will ultimately choose to do with it.
Knowing that the right answer for you
may be to experience or be the logical opposite.
Or,
it may be to consciously choose to align with
and own something your trauma created in you,
rather than to be in a pattern of determinism
relative to that thing.
What might be healing for you
is to choose to consciously embrace
something that your trauma created in you.
And, what's healing about it
is that you have changed the pattern itself
by consciously deciding to accept it,
to embrace it and to own it.
Talk about an exercise in empowerment and free will.
also doing so in a conscious way.
Is what changes this detrimental pattern into a beneficial one.
That means the way that this thing
that was caused in you as a result of trauma
expresses to the world,
will be a beneficial one
not only to you, but those around you
instead of a detrimental one.
However, what's interesting about this that I have noticed
is that to the outside and to the untrained eye
what this looks like is that a person
is consciously aligning with their trauma.
For example:
Jane, in our previous example
did decide that she needed to put some serious time and effort
into finding herself.
So, for a time, she decided she did need to experience the opposite
by focusing on what her actual core truth was.
But guess what she found out?
The realization she had
was that she really loved
to dedicate her life to the success of another person.
That the feeling of putting her energy toward them
and the result being
that they then achieved tangible results,
made her feel like she could impact the world.
And that she really hated the pressure
of being the center of attention.
As a result, the healing choice for her
really came as a result of embracing the fact
that her mother custom molded her
for her destiny of being a personal assistant to a political figure
and that by making the conscious choice
to dedicate her life to another person's success
healed the pattern of feeling forced
to dedicate her life to another person (her mother) without her free will.
It was also more healing and more in alignment
with her life purpose and also personal truth,
than going for the limelight herself,
and living an independent life
and chasing personal success would have been.
And in an interesting twist of fate,
she realized that her mother
literally made it
so when it came to being a personal assistant,
she was unbeatable.
Brett decided that to heal
was to do all kinds of work on his relationship patterns
so he stopped lining up with women
who put all this pressure on him to succeed,
because really, they were just interested in him being their trophy.
That being said,
after choosing a rather passive wife
that really loved play and leisure time with him
and who didn't push him to succeed in any particular way
and that being this opposite experience that was healing,
on the other hand,
Brett decided that the most healing thing he could do
was to own his achievement drive
and embrace his extreme discipline
and welcome the pressure intentionally.
He made the decision to keep going for greatness
regarding his golf career,
and as a result of making that conscious choice
he experienced the entire game of golf in a better way.
Also, he realized that as a result of his trauma
and what it turned him into,
he had the edge on the competition
because he loved watching all the other players crack
when he didn't.
I'm going to spell out a truth for you
that I don't want you to forget.
Trauma can seriously prevent what you really want.
But also seemingly paradoxically,
especially regarding your destiny,
it can seriously custom forge you for what you really want.
It can bend you for failure,
and it can bend you for success.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Your trauma absolutely took from you,
but at the same time
it absolutely gave to you.
And seeing reality is to see both aspects of this full picture.
The moral of the story here
is that when it comes to healing trauma,
conscious choice is what really matters.
The conscious choice to scrap
what isn't leading you to what you want,
scrap what doesn't work.
At the same time,
powerfully own,
powerfully step into
what does work
and those aspects that were given to you by your trauma
that line you up with what you want.
Have a good week.
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I wannna thank you personally
for the bravery that you have to step into awareness.
I'll see you in the next video.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte Join the volunteer subtitle group on Facebook ASK TEAL TRADUCTION/TRANSLATION