Here is what I know about Trauma……. YOUR trauma is YOUR trauma!! No one gets to tell you what your trauma is or what caused it. It’s important that you identify your trauma. Identifying your trauma is the beginning of the healing process.
What is trauma you ask? Well, that’s for YOU to define. your trauma is your trauma. What is someone’s trauma is someone else’s bump in the road. What I mean, is that what is trauma for you may not be trauma for someone else. Baby boomers are great at telling younger people about how their trauma is not trauma at all. I’ve heard boomers and even gen x’ers say, “let me tell you about some trauma….” Boomers were those kids where spankings were allowed, bulllying was just a thing everyone went through, if you weren’t a winner you were a loser and everyone told you that from your parents to your teachers to your friends. You were never ” allowed to feel” anything. You bucked up and went on! Boomers were those kids that you were lucky if your parent was home when you got home from school and you got your own snack or went hungry. You paid attention in school or you failed, that was life. If you cried going down the hot slide in the summer, or the cut on your forehead from the sled in the winter- you were labeled a baby and it usually stuck. So boomers and gen x’ers feel like they win the trauma gold medal because they lived to tell about it.
But what we or they often forget is that humans, no matter when they grew up, are survivors. Kids today may get participation awards but that doesn’t mean that all children are exempt from the pain of what that means or doesn’t mean. Their trauma is their trauma. I know, I know, we see kids today grow up in their upper middle class homes, with lots of food to eat, someone to help with homework and no bully’s and we think they are fine! What trauma could they possibly have suffered? BUT, who are we to judge someone else’s trauma and that my friends is where we go wrong. It’s when we start thinking someone’s trauma ISN”T trauma.
What I love about the younger generation is that they can identify their trauma, the anxiety it causes and may even reach out for help while the older generation gets older and the suffering begins. They begin to have bad feelings, bad memories, pain that they have carried with them for YEARS!! You can only suppress it for some amount of time, it will come out and it will cause you pain. Avoidance ends up being NO technique at all!!!
So first let’s all realize that a person’s trauma is just that, their trauma! Let’s validate the fact that they can identify it, acknowledge it and then deal with it!!! Let’s also understand that there is probably no person on the planet that doesn’t have some sort of trauma that they are dealing with. Then when you realize ALL of this, it’s time to reach out and ask for help to process and deal and heal the pain from this trauma. Remember, you can do this and you are not alone. All you need is a little courage.
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