Breaking the Cycle of Trauma-Centered Living
Your stored trauma is speaking to you, and it’s not pretty.
It wraps you in a cloak of ‘safety,’ telling you ‘it’s cold out there.’ It’s telling you that life without it is impossible. It enshrines the past in the present and writes your future in stone.
And it’s all a lie.
Life was not meant to revolve around past trauma, but that is precisely what society preaches. The existence of trauma is taken as a given, unalterable and unavoidable. We aren’t offered real solutions to the root problem. We are offered drugs to dull, techniques to cope, and topics to avoid.
If you were stabbed with a knife, you would not tolerate that knife remaining in your body while you arranged your life around living with it. You would insist on having it removed, since healing cannot begin until it is. But for some reason, we all are taught to accept the reality of internalized trauma as inevitable.
When you believe internalized trauma is inevitable, the result is a life crafted around traumas and their triggers. As long as this is going on, you cannot live authentically. You can’t connect deeply inside the vulnerable space of another if you insist on bringing your triggers with you. There comes a day when you have to choose between your trauma and truly living your life.
The trauma-limited version of you can never live your destiny.
In the battle between willpower and trauma, willpower will eventually lose.
Healing from trauma is not learning to live with trauma and cope with triggers. It is taking you back to your original perfection, so you can access, again, who you truly are. It is retaining the lessons and wisdom gained from your past while releasing that which blocks you from fully engaging in your future. It is reuniting with the child within and regaining the joy that child holds.
We get so focused on building a life around our traumas and triggers, that often, when faced with the opportunity of clearing them out, we balk.
And trauma whispers seductively...
“I don’t need healing, I’m perfect as I am.”
“I need to read another book, talk with another therapist, have another medicine journey, get some more Reiki healing, and THEN it will gently drift away.”
“The past is the past, and I just need to let it go.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“This is who I am, and I just have to learn to live with it.”
“I am the creator of my world, and so I must have created the trauma, so in reality, it’s not trauma at all.”
“I don’t have time. Others in my life come first.”
“I don’t deserve my own healing.”
And we find ourselves in a cycle of trauma, repeating endlessly, and locking us away from connection and freedom.
Trigger -> Re-Traumatize -> Reaction/Blame -> Coping/Avoidance -> Back Under ‘Control’
…and the cycle begins anew.
We are not our traumas.
We are not our triggers.
What would life be like, lived without coping mechanisms, without triggers, without trauma? What would life be like, if it wasn’t centered around our traumas?
We ARE perfect, but that doesn’t mean we have access to our perfection, or even know who we are. Healing is taking us back to our original perfection. Taking away that which we are NOT, so we can be who we ARE.
Reconnecting to our divine selves.
