Hey Nevena
Hi.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too.
When I went to see the psychiatrist,
I was so lightly diagnosed
and given the antidepressants immediately,
which is just to num what you feel.
Just continue to suppress and continue burdening it,
and to be fair, it has helped because I was numbed.
The trauma hasn't left you.
It's still in your body trapped.
So when I started medication
and I was diagnosed, I was relieved obviously,
to have my symptoms go away.
But I knew that I needed to do a lot of work on myself and that it's not over.
So that's when I found you, and I Googled
and I breathed and I went into the cold,
and I've been doing that every day, ever since.
I wake up and the first thing I do is I do two or three rounds of breathing
and I go straight into the cold shower
and I find cold anywhere in nature I can.
I go into the ice
and as a woman,
as a traumatized child,
to be able to choose pain,
I'm in control, I'm choosing to feel the pain.
I can be with it, I can sit with it,
I can feel my body again,
and I'm in charge of my body.
No medication can give you that.
And it's free and it's simple and you are alone, you don't need anybody to
guide you, tell you how to do it.
The biggest thing that trauma takes away from you is the ability to feel the the beauty of life.
And you feel threat in everything
And also you learn to disassociate from your body because that's a defense mechanism,
and so what the cold did for me is it made me feel my body again.
And I found the thing that healed me, which was the cold.
Yeah, so no medication,
no therapy did ever offer that.
Wow, that’s great.
It doesn't matter where your trauma comes from,
you are able to get back into control.
I think that what is also a really big issue, is that
if you've been for example, sexually molested as a child
and a child doesn't know what's happening to him/her
and obviously you disassociate, you block it out
and then that kind of memory is stored in your body,
The body remembers, but the brain doesn't,
and then if you come out to a psychiatrist or a psychologist,
and say: ‘’I'm having these issues, I'm overwhelmed with emotions, I have anger issues, I'm self-harming,’’
‘’I don't know what's going on.’’
And then you say, what happened to you as a child, but you can't remember,
and all they say is: ‘’Well, you've got depression and you've got anxiety disorder, and you don't need to remember.’’
‘’That's it, so here's some antidepressants and you can just continue your life.’’
So obviously, if you don't know that there's any other solutions,
this is your life saviour so you hold on to that.
and if a doctor’s told you that, then that must be it.
But then, you suppress the symptoms, you numb the symptoms with the medications.
The cold makes you survive. It makes you to just be there in the moment.
Anything else is shut down.
The cold creates new connections in your brain, new patterns, and I think if you've dealt with the trauma,
you've got such strict patterns of behaviors and ways you look at the things and ways you deal with things,
because that was the way you survived.
But the cold teaches you new connections, new ways to deal with that, new ways to look at the pain, to look at your own suffering.
I don't know, I think I couldn't live now without
those two, so simple.
And you can do it everywhere. Anywhere you go in the world, it's there.
Yes.
What you say is of great importance, because in the end, trauma is trauma.
Whoever is looking at this,
this is a life experience, a real experience.
And I love Nevena for coming forward and talking about it
because there should be no taboo on something that is inside that needs to be released
besides the fact that you experience trauma... You cannot even talk about it!
It's like you did something wrong.
You didn't do anything wrong.
The taboo makes you shut up and not being able to work it out.
Come on, guys, it's over.
It's done, breathe and go into the cold and be your lovable self, become sensitive again
instead of disassociated from your feelings.
Become happy, strong and healthy,
and with a beautiful mind, as you have as you are.
Bye Nevena!
Bye, thank you.