On the nature of healing from trauma, Carl Jung once said, ...no matter how much parents or grandparents have sinned against the child, the man who is really an adult will accept these sins as his own condition, which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question, he will look into his own heart.
In my own life, I've seen a lot of trauma. My childhood was terrible. I had an abusive power-lifter bodybuilder father who was prone to great violence. My mother, brother, and I were often on the other end of that violence. I've got scars on my face that remind me of my childhood. Things only seemed to get worse for a number of years. In my early teens, I was a victim of a hate crime that nearly killed me, and I lost family to tragic circumstances. The first 20 years of my life seemed to be filled with trauma, near-death experiences, and broken hearts.
But long after I survived all of these things, it was the trauma that finally caught up with me and nearly took my life like some bear that had been quietly hunting me all these years. It works quietly that way. It eats away at our center and slowly robs us of so much. We tend to grow a little crooked in our ability to love ourselves, to love others, or to allow others to love us. It's a quiet distortion that settles over us and our lives, a hum we got so used to hearing we often forget it's there.
I say all of this as a bridge to sharing how I healed from trauma.
In the end, for me, healing from trauma wasn't a storybook scenario we've all read about or seen play out on the big screen. It wasn't a scene from Goodwill Hunting where I cried on my therapist's shoulder as he helped me finally face what I couldn't stomach to see or how he taught me to stop blaming myself.
Not at all. For me, it was something much closer to Jung's sentiments.
In other words, while it's not my fault, it is my responsibility to make sense of it all. I asked myself what it means to who I am today, both good and bad. And not to use my past traumas as some pass to do bad things, to not take care of myself, or even truly try to heal myself. It didn't absolve me of my responsibility to heal. In other words, I couldn't simply blame the past for how I am today. I saw too much of that in my friends and in the people around me. I dabbled in that oasis for a summer myself. It's a trap.
Jung also said, "I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to be."
That was my mentality as well, eventually. Granted, I needed something to help open my eyes.
So often, we get stuck in our trauma because we cannot move on without getting what we feel is owed to us. We want the person who hurt us to come back and beg for our forgiveness, to repent their ways, to cry and have immense guilt for their wrongdoings. We want our damn apology! Sometimes, we may even want revenge. We may want more than an apology. We may want their blood.
But the painful truth of the matter is that they usually never apologize. We never get the grandstand display of them breaking down and begging for our forgiveness. No. Usually, the monsters creep back into the darkness and eventually disappear. The truth is, they don't apologize, and they don't follow us. We just can't let go, so we carry them with us.
We walk down the road of our lives, dragging the trauma behind us and yet feeling as though the trauma had been pursuing us. As if the trauma was following us. It only seems that way because we haven't learned what was meant for us to learn. And that is my bigger point in this discussion, that there is something to be learned, to be taken, to be understood.
The misconception many of us hold is that by letting go of the trauma and by taking responsibility for ourselves, we are somehow pretending it never happened or that it was somehow our fault. But acceptance and surrender don't mean giving up. Just as working on ourselves and turning inward to face ourselves isn't the same as disconnecting or running away.
We look back on our trauma, and we are filled with the deception of "should," as in, "I should have known better!" Or "That should never have happened!" And we get trapped in this dualistic perception of the world being fair and unfair. It's enough to buckle us and make us afraid and depressed. It's enough to make us disconnect and shut down. And life flies by us as we are stuck in our mud. This hurts us even more.
The thing that freed me from the shackles of my trauma was rediscovering my true nature, that I wasn't this pitiful and damaged little ego. No. I was something more special, more free. You and I are made of stars. That's the reality. Through the process of rediscovering myself and making healthier life choices, such as learning to confide in love and let go of fear, a truly interesting thing happened.
I looked back one day, and the chains were gone. Through my work on acceptance, forgiveness, and self-growth, the trauma had fallen off, just as it should. It happened in a gradual process as I slowly but deeply realized everything that had happened to me was okay. It wasn't my fault. The universe wasn't out to get me. It was as it was supposed to be. There was nothing to fight, face, challenge, or flee from. It's okay to let it go now.
This entire ride has its own intelligence, and things are unfolding. Not as we believe it should unfold but as it will.
When I look back on every terrible thing that happened to me, I can sincerely say it impacted my life somehow for the better. Or, at the very least, it shaped me into who I am today. Again, if you're blaming the past with anger, you will likely not appreciate who you are today. You may see yourself as some damaged monster, like Frankstein's monster, pieced together with pieces that don't belong.
A forest burns to the ground, but a new, healthier forest rises from the ashes, teaming with even more life.
The healthier mind accepts the world AS IT IS, not as it feels it should be. That's a piece of humble pie we must learn to swallow.
In Eastern religion, tragedy is seen as a kind of opening by which something beautiful can be birthed simultaneously. There's an opportunity. The idea is this... what if it's all playing out just as it should? And what if the thing we need most is to wake up and reclaim our place in the dance?
The bigger picture, my friends... it's all about the bigger picture. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and thereafter, it gets much easier just to let go of whatever damaged you. In time, your body will follow your heart and mind. It's not the cinematic experience of overcoming trauma that I found, but I think it's far more poetic.
I reiterate. Find yourself, free yourself, and the bear will have become something else.
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