The Other Side of Trauma

by Ron Surgeon

On occasion, we need a kind and wise person to hold our hand as we go prodding in the darkness of our past, seeking to salvage useful materials to take with us into a broad future forged and congruent to our unique design. 

 

Trauma is the Greek word for wound.

It is used today as a response to a deeply distressing physical or emotional event. Trauma is not only a response to what has happened to us. Trauma is also a response to what we wish had happened but didn’t. These are our deflated hopes and expectations. Maybe a childhood was stolen away through neglect or too much responsibility given too early in life. Maybe trauma was experienced through a relationship’s deteriorated trust.

It is this aspect of trauma I would like to focus on. Some people would minimize these things as traumatic because others have gone through worse circumstances. One subtle danger to beware of when discussing trauma is demeaning your experience of pain by comparing it to someone else’s experience, which may appear more severe. Pain is still pain. 

 

Therapists talk about “Big T” trauma and “little t” trauma.

“Big T” traumas are the definable moments in time such as abuse (physical, sexual, or emotional/verbal), tragic accidents, divorce, etc. “Little t” traumas are the patterns of dysfunction in relationships such as inconsistency, abandonment, feeling used, or high conflict environments. 

Consider the person who was rarely celebrated for who they are, but routinely celebrated for what they have accomplished. During their early years, they grew to realize the more they achieved, the more they were acknowledged, resulting in an identity based on performance. Achievement equals love. The more you do, the more you’re worth. The basis of personal value becomes Doing instead of Being which leads to relationships that generally seem to fall short of true intimacy: being known and valued simply because you are

The way we learned to receive love in our youth contributes to the masks we wear in adulthood. Masks are the ways we show up in the world. These are the personas we want others to believe about us though we don’t believe them about ourselves.

Personas are exhausting.

We cope with the exhaustion through various ways; some of which are depression, anxiety, and addictions (work, substances, entertainment, sex, etc). Coping in these ways helps us to avoid reality and disconnect from our capacity to truly feel. Feelings matter. We are primarily feeling creatures, not thinking creatures. We are feeling creatures who think.

The task or calling to which we have been invited is to recover those aspects of our childhood that were neglected either through other’s imposed values on our lives or through our own fears about recovering those deflated hopes. We recover those missing aspects by living them out anew, integrating them, however minutely, in our adult lives.

I call this opportunity “Integrating the Unlived Life,” which is how we come closer to experiencing meaning as a process instead of a destination.

This is how we incrementally and experimentally recover deflated hopes from our past to take with us into a broad future congruent to our unique self-expression. What have you always felt called to, but did not attempt? What have you felt called to, but needed permission?