Shortly after my parent's death in 2016 & 2017 I decided I heavily disliked the word “trauma”. Personally, I felt like I had no place using it. I'm a thirty-five-year-old who lost her parents (& a dear best friend in between, but that's a story for another post), & that’s how life went. So I shoved it down like any perfectly detached human would.
I discounted the fact that I’d watched them slowly, yet quickly, slip between my fingers, having a few months of pain & suffering each before they were ushered off into another dimension. I felt impervious to deep pain. I felt like I had truly accepted this fate & came out unscathed. Silly girl.
“After countless generations of built up plaque, inadvertently passing down our pain from parent to child until we just couldn't bare it anymore, we've reached a breaking point.”
I went to therapy (for a hot minute) & the word trauma came up; I felt undeserving. I thought to myself, if it were a parent who lost a child, that’s trauma. I'm not permitted to experience trauma, they're parents, that's just how life works. At the time I didn't have many friends who had lost a parent, let alone two, so I really didn't have many people I felt comfortable opening up to. The alcohol consumption & sailing adventures helped me forget what I’d gone through, but the pain nestled in there somewhere, undisclosed.
Since taking some deep dives into the subject over the years it's had me curious to why this word is in our daily life now like no other time in history...then it dawned on me. For one, we've opened up the allowance for feelings. In previous generations people grieved & experienced pain of course, mainly behind closed doors & then it was time to buck up & move on. (it's also not healthy to get stuck, but again, another post for another time).
Now we're making connections between the generations & behavioural patterns & the emotional distress we've collected. Trauma is like plaque, if you don't scrape it off, it builds up.
After countless generations of built up plaque, inadvertently passing down our pain from parent to child until we just couldn't bear it anymore, we've reached a breaking point. It is a perfect storm of built-up trauma, the time to feel it & the means to share it with social media & the internet. Oddly enough, this is a very good thing. This means the path to being unstuck is just around the corner.
Unfortunately, many people now feel their pain, but don't know how to do anything about it. This is where the strength comes in; to witness your pain, then to understand it, to forgive it & heal it. We're human, we're here to feel & we're here to connect. It's time to get over the stigmas, get over our distaste for the word & learn your patterns & triggers, so you can move past them & live a more authentic & damn happier life. Over & out.