“But Christine, was it really trauma?” None of us want to call something trauma that wasn’t trauma. We tend to not want to catastrophize past events or make it worse than it was. So….was it trauma? Does it really need to be dealt with and processed, or am I just fine?
My question to you would be….how does it effect your day to day living now? Do you alter your behavior now and live a less than healthy functional life now based on incidents in the past? Are you hypervigilant? In other words, do you walk on egg shells around certain people, peace-keeping or peace-faking instead of peace-making? There’s a difference you know. Instead of perfect peace between you and another, you find yourself chronically uneasy, even though there might not be ‘fightin’ words’ or physical violence? Do you have habits that you use to cope when you feel stressed, that might not be healthy? Exercise, while healthy in general, maybe an unhealthy amount of exercise you engage in to cope. Or maybe you eat too much or the wrong things to settle the fret. Perhaps it’s drinking alcohol to ‘relax’ because you can’t relax without it…or other things. My default? I cleaned house-compulsively to cope with feelings of ‘not good enough’ when waters were rough on the home front. It had less to do with my marriage and had everything to do with things that happened in the past. But with a stressful speed bump in my marriage-I coped with neurotic cleaning so I could feel ‘good enough’ and ‘worthy of love, and not in the dog-house.’ Patterns that were set in childhood. (ehhh hem-not healthy!) Are there healthy things you would otherwise normally do that you avoid because of a past stressful event? I also found myself being a bit ‘control freak-ish’ at times. Ok, maybe not a ‘bit’ control freak-ish but a lot control freak-ish. Not taking any significant time off work for instance (for years!). Trauma, you see, isn’t necessarily a result of lights and sirens events. Trauma can have many faces. You don’t have to experience cuts, bruises and burns or have to be missing limbs to have experienced life altering, behavior altering events. Words and toxic behaviors like silent treatment can be as destructive and damaging as having received bruises or blisters from the hand of a parent or other care giver or perhaps bullying peers set on having a scapegoat. Words and acts of exclusion or humiliation can be as damaging.
So….what can happen when we don’t process that trauma? Lots, as it turns out. Unprocessed stress can result in:
- Chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety
- Continuing abuse in your family legacy, passing down abusive behavior and dysfunction to the next generation
- Withdrawing from life/relationships
- Chronic disease such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, cancer, coronary artery disease, fibromyalgia, etc…
- Decreased income due to poor job performance, lack of career advancement
The majority of us repeat the patterns that we saw growing up or we swing radically the opposite direction to counterbalance the damage instead of living in balance. We, for the most part are all doing the best we can with the tools in our toolbox. The question is-could we be doing better?
If you are feeling ‘off’-assess what emotion you are feeling. Are you feeling sad, anxious, insecure, mad, scared? What thoughts are you having beneath that emotion? What unhealthy behavior are you engaging in to cope, or what healthy thing are you not doing because of your thoughts around that emotion? Are you shutting down and withdrawing, drinking alcohol, engaging in drug use, eating when you aren’t hungry, not having conversations that you should otherwise have but don’t feel equipped to?
There is help and hope and healthier ways to deal and heal.
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