People everywhere face traumatic events that shape us in ways we never imagined. We each struggle with life and how to go forward. How to move on. Well meaning individuals will try to encourage you when your going through a trauma with platitudes, or positive thinking.

How often do you hear someone say things like ” you will get over it” or “you are strong,you will survive this too” or even worse to me is “God never gives you more than you can bear”?

This can often leave someone feeling as if their emotions surrounding a situation are invalid. It takes away the power of healing the trauma by feeling the emotions you feel. Each emotion is important. How we learn to cope with our trauma changes who we are meant to be as a whole person. It’s hard to sit with big emotions, be vulnerable and open.

Childhood trauma’s are something that shapes us in ways that we often don’t see until well after the fact.

For me personally I am learning how my childhood trauma’s caused me to shut down, retreat from those I loved when I felt they didn’t want me. I closed my heart and pulled away physically as well. But I am also a nurturer by nature and so I would do other things thinking that it would relay my message of love and convince them how deeply I loved them. Caring for them, cooking for them, doing things to make their lives easier. I often ignored my own pain or didn’t recognize my own hurts. I didn’t realize how my limiting beliefs were playing such a huge role in my life, or even that I had so many limiting beliefs.

When we ignore our pain thinking we have gotten over it or moved on we have not really healed, but we have mastered coping skills. Until those coping skills don’t work anymore. One day you discover how broken you feel.

Something we don’t fully understand is that all trauma changes our brain, not just our psychology but also our physiological brain and how we process even normal events in our lives. Childhood trauma causes cortisol to be released into the brain, this response causes the brain development to be delayed. When trauma happens as a child we don’t know how to heal the past hurts, or the beliefs we form from those responses. It is through our current life experience that we can come to understand that our past has effected us. A trauma response is often a shutting down in varios ways and it’s normal. We may never be the people we once were again but that doesn’t mean we can’t grow and learn from it.

That’s the good news!

We can grow from our traumatic events and reshape our lives. Acknowledge that your response to the trauma was normal. It’s trauma. Even years later it’s normal! You can go back and revisit trauma and heal it now. Or you can stay stuck in repeating patterns that have destroyed your life. The choice is yours.

If you are ready to step into healing and move past trauma responses let me know. I am happy to meet you where you are on this journey and offer my services to coach you.