Pain and struggles are an inevitable part of life. Every one of us has experienced some sort of trauma.
Trauma is something that affects your present. The way you think and act, the way you perceive things. It’s all somehow correlated to that traumatic event.
And it sucks! Because here you are helplessly trapped and tied to your past!
No one deserves it, no one deserves to go through such horrible pain in life. But as I said, it’s something inevitable. And that’s the way of life.
It could be losing someone you love, being abused and assaulted, getting fired/ divorced the list goes on. Traumatic events are very impacting and life-changing.
No one can compare an individual’s trauma to someone else’s. Because no one, other than the person themselves, actually knows how much pain they had to go through to recover from it.
According to research, almost 75% of individuals have experienced something traumatic in life.
Let’s change the perspective:
Trauma takes a toll on our mental health. Trauma can bring mental issues like PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), anxiety, depression etc, depending on the severity of the event.
Despite all this, most trauma survivors have noted their lives changed for the better due to these events. It gives a deeper sense of our lives and makes us more emotionally intelligent.
Trauma can be a powerful force to bring positive change.
Two psychologists at the University of North Carolina, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun during the 1980s, interviewed about 600 trauma survivors.
And even though some changes in their lives were negative. More than half of the survivors admitted that they have greater inner strength and were re-vamping their lives to meet their goals.
Their past pains and struggles polished them to deal with life more strongly and optimistically. They developed a deeper sense of appreciation towards life and have turned more compassionate and considerate.
Dealing with Trauma
Trauma can be really hard to deal with, it’s a constant battle with oneself.
These events can play in your head over and over again. Making you relive those moments. And if you’re like me, anxiety and panic attacks occur often. It can make life hard to live with.
Every individual has different triggers. And trauma is something that can stick with you for years. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed, or you’re hopeless.
You can grow and move on with life.
You can make certain changes, in your habits and your mindset. That can bring more meaning to your life despite your trauma.
Acceptance
I feel the biggest impact you can make towards yourself to grow from your pain is by ACCEPTANCE. You have to ACCEPT what you went through, the pain you went through and acknowledging how far you have come.
One can’t change the past, but you can definitely change your present by accepting your past and overcoming your pain. It’s important to realize You are not your trauma, you are capable of so much more.
Don’t let your trauma define who you are or stop you from reaching higher platforms in life.
It’s not your fault
A lot of us who have survived trauma question “What did I do to deserve this?”, “I didn’t deserve this!!” , “Why me?”
No, it’s not your fault, you weren’t in control, You didn’t deserve it! In fact, no one deserves to go through something so horrible.
But it happened, you have to make peace with it, as bitter as it sounds.
Questioning it over and over will make your life miserable.
I had a really bad habit of blaming my past for the way I was, or getting into this ‘self-pity spiral’ where I would curse my past and wish I didn’t have to go through all that pain.
My mom bluntly told me to stop playing the victim card and stop moping about something that can’t be changed and I was speechless because what she said was true.
Sometimes sadness and misery are comforting.
But it leads you nowhere. Complaining won’t solve the problem. If you want to see a change in your life, you have to do something about it.
What you went through was out of your control but what you do right now is in your hands.
Talk it out
Keeping your pain and trauma buried in will get suffocating in the future. Talk about it to someone you trust. A friend or a therapist.
I know it’s hard to open up about your trauma, you can always write it down in a journal and express yourself. My therapist gave me this exercise to write a letter, expressing my traumatic events. Because I had so much to say.
And I know reliving those moments by writing them down can be really painful, but you won’t grow if you don’t go through pain.
And that’s why I feel that trauma really makes us such strong individuals. We have gone through so much that even if a mighty calamity occurs, our brains have already prepared themselves to fight it.
If you have gone through something really painful, I just want to remind you of how strong you are! It’s damn hard to make peace with what happened. But it’s all a part of our growth process. And you’ve come so far, I’m proud of you.
