Have you had a traumatic experience in your life? It could be from being attacked by a dog, being hit by a car, being bullied to sexual abuse. If you have you are not alone. About 6 out of 10 people suffer from a severe traumatic experience that have significant impacts on their lives. This includes sleeplessness and nightmares, lack of hunger, social anxiety and generally a feeling of constant fear and lack of self-confidence.
As a counsellor my priority is to help you work through your trauma in a controlled way so that you can get some normalcy back in to your life. I use a variety of techniques and methods to help you with your trauma with the goal of helping you confront and integrate your trauma so that you can regain your power and regain control of your life.
At the heart of my work with clients who have had severe traumatic experiences is to help them actually use the trauma as a strength so that they can learn from their traumas and understand why this experience happened and why it is an opportunity to grow. This is what I’m going to talk about here.
We are not always in conscious control of what happens to us, and by this I mean that you might be having a normal day but all of the sudden you’re hit by a car and paralyzed for example. You had no control over this. In your mind you might constantly be replaying the event, wondering if you should have checked the roads again, or not gone out that day and so on. Basically you create a negative feedback loop in your mind on how things could have been different so you wouldn’t get hit by that car.
First of all these types of negative feedback responses are completely normal and a natural part of the healing process. It is the way our mind and subconscious can process and understand the experience. There are a whole range of emotions that come with this as well including anger, sadness, self-pity and anxiety. Once again, these are all completely normal responses and in fact necessary as part of the acceptance of the situation.
A huge part of how people deal with traumatic experience come down to perception. This person who was hit by the car will eventually come to a cross-roads in their healing process where they can choose to either choose to continue down the path of perceived victimhood which leads to more anxiety, depression and self-pity or choose to perceive the experience as an opportunity to understand their life post-accident and how they can adapt to their new circumstances to regain normalcy in their life. If the person chooses understanding then they are choosing the path of empowerment. This is because they want to once again take control of their life and will use whatever tools they can to do this. For example, if before the accident this person was physically active and played sport but now they are in a wheel chair then they would seek sports suited for their circumstances. A wheelchair based basketball competition for example.
As this person continues to find new ways to integrate the life changes of their traumatic experience they will soon gain normalcy in to their life and in the process realize how powerful they are even if their life situation drastically changes.
Human beings are all different and unique, and not everyone will deal with trauma in the same way. Even so I do believe that EVERYONE has the power to integrate their trauma in a healthy way to regain a normal life, even if this new normal life is different from the old one. While we are not always in control of what happens to us, we are ALWAYS in control with how we choose to respond to what happens to us.
From a metaphysical perspective, tackling trauma from a victim and self-pity mentality will attract more of the same experiences that make you feel low, negative and with lack of energy. Likewise tackling trauma from a place of acceptance and self-empowerment will attract more of the same and open up ways for you to feel energized, balances and fulfilled.
There is so much more to trauma than I can cover in this bite sized blog which is really just a very high level account of trauma.
If you have suffered from a traumatic experience then please get in contact with me.