How my trauma-taming journey began

I really didn’t know I had experienced trauma. I thought trauma was a word reserved for major accidents where someone was maimed for life, it only happened when there was physical abuse or that it was exclusive to war veterans - that is, until I realized I myself had been fighting a war my entire life.

It had been a silent war and it was unnamed, unidentified and consistently flying under the radar as the stealth enemy-fighter it was, destroying every ounce of my self-confidence, my ability to connect to and follow my intuition and distinguish that voice from the sound of fear, my desire to even get out of bed in the morning or focus on a task that was meaningful to me for any length of time. It even made me feel insecure about going to the store or taking a shower, which is something I dreaded just about every day.

This unnamed enemy was essentially self-sabotage disguised as self-safety. It took years for me to put this together. I just thought something was wrong with me and I wasn’t like everyone else who had no problems making their dreams come true and creating the lives they wanted. There was this nagging malaise that made me believe I would always be behind in the race of life or, worse, not even in the race. Left out. Alone. Abandoned to fight this unnamed enemy for the rest of my life.

If this sounds like you, let me reassure you, there is hope and I don’t mean that as a faint possibility for only a select few. It is real and it’s for anyone who dares to face their trauma and unearth the hope that lives within. Oh yeah, it’s there; but, it feels long gone or like it was never there if you’ve had repeated relationship trauma over time, maybe your whole life, like what I experienced without even seeing it for what it was. It wasn’t until 2014 when my life-coaching instructor used the word trauma to describe what most of us and our clients had survived. The word resonated throughout my being like a tuning fork reverberating the truth. Trauma! Yes, that’s what it was! Again and again and again, like water torture that was subtly and seemingly harmlessly dissolving my very soul drip by drip.

This was my aha moment. This was my introduction to what had been my seemingly normal life thus far. But, what to do about it? Well, that wouldn’t come for another 7 years. Yes, that would make it 2021. And, through more trauma, more awakenings, more heart-wrenching betrayal and nerve-twisting torment, I finally came through that trauma tunnel to discover myself. All of me. The sad, scared, abandoned, lonely, horrified, helpless and seemingly hopeless parts of me - all right there in their rawness and puniness trying to fight this giant enemy that at least now had a name - trauma.

And, the sad thing was, this trauma was caused by the very people who said they loved me. Some of them tried and intermittently did love me to the extent they could but they also emotionally and at times physically abandoned and verbally leveled me to what felt like a nub. Others intentionally hurt me, reveling in the pleasure from causing my pain. It took years for me to “clean house,” with some of my frenemies self-eliminating and others I had to start distancing myself from for my own protection and healing.

As it turned out, this thing I thought was self-sabotage had been taught and in order for me to learn how to self-protect, distance from the perpetrators would be required. Easy? Of course not, maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done! But, still necessary.

Since then, I have dedicated myself to understanding trauma and how to recover from it. As an award-winning newspaper journalist whose mouth waters at the thought of uncovering the truth (not the self-serving narrative a lot of so-called journalists pass off as the truth, but the actual truth as in what really happened, the facts, the literal occurrences), I set out on a quest to discover the truth about trauma. In addition to a master’s degree in health education, a certificate in life coaching and pursuing a doctorate degree in traumatology and counseling, I study trauma regularly through the lens of neuroscience as if my life depends on it because it does and so does yours.

Once we understand why we do what we do, it gives us the knowledge of how to address it. Tools become available to us that help us to name the enemy and then tame it. Trauma ceases to lead our lives. It takes its rightful seat at the table of our lives but it isn’t the table itself. It’s there as our teacher and maybe we can teach it a few things, too - that it doesn’t have the final say in our lives, that we appreciate it being there to show us a truth but it doesn’t have to sound a five-alarm fire over taking normal risks in life (going to the store, making a phone call, leaving the house, decluttering, showing up for an event, taking a simple shower, etc.) and then remain silent when we are in the presence of a real predator cleverly disguised as the love of our life, a friend or family member who “has our back” only to stab us in it, the best boss ever, or an overly friendly colleague hiding a self-serving agenda.

Is it time to have a dialogue with trauma that resurrects the truth - reality as we know it, not the gaslit-version many of us have been fed? It’s from this place of honest reflection, we can live cohesively and harmoniously with our teacher, trauma, who is still alive in our bodies but whose aim is not to hurt us but to keep us from experiencing it again. By learning trauma-taming tools, we will teach trauma how to actually keep us safe and from this space, the real work of creating the life we want can begin.

So, if any of this sounds like you, and you’re interested in taming your trauma for the rest of your life, I’d love to walk alongside you in starting that journey until you feel confident “you got this” without that sounding triggering or patronizing but simply true - creating your new reality where you show up for you in such a way, trauma will know its place at your table without dominating your life again.