Podcast: #15 – Trauma is not just a distressing event

Podcast: #15 – Trauma is not just a distressing event

Conversations with Carolyn Spring
Conversations with Carolyn Spring
Podcast: #15 – Trauma is not just a distressing event
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In this episode

Trauma isn’t something we’re supposed to get over easily. It’s supposed to impact us. It’s supposed to change us. That’s part of why it’s so hard to shift. The problem isn’t with us. In this podcast, I talk about the impacts of trauma and how it isn’t something that we can get over easily.

Transcript: ‘Trauma is not just a distressing event’

My job – what I spend my time doing – is writing and speaking and training on trauma and trauma recovery. That’s a problem when I’m buying car insurance, because there’s never a good fit on the dropdown list of occupations. But it’s also a problem because it’s often a conversation-stopper when I introduce myself to anyone. If I just say to people, ‘Oh, I help people to recover from trauma’ then very often people think I’m a therapist, and that’s the kind of stigma that everyone could do without (only joking!) But I also don’t like saying it because I feel like it sets up what I feel is a disingenuous, dishonest kind of ‘them and me’ thing. You know – I’m okay, I’m fine, I’m sorted, but I help those people over there to recover – you know, those people who aren’t sorted and who aren’t like you and me.

And that of course isn’t the case at all. I am a survivor of chronic and complex trauma. I work with trauma because I’ve been impacted by trauma. I’ve walked and am still walking a path of recovery from trauma. My aim is simply to shine a light on my footsteps, on where I’ve been – and point out some of the bogs I’ve fallen into, some of the missteps I’ve taken, so that other people can avoid them. And also the shortcuts I’ve found that helped me on my way – some quicker and safer routes up the mountain. I want to set up some ropes and bridges to make it easier for others. But I’m doing this as one mountaineer to another, not as someone who’s written a textbook on mountains but has never climbed one.

I think when it comes to the trauma world, one of the most damaging things can be a sense of ‘them and us’. We were traumatised very often in a power dynamic – powerful people (‘them’) rendering ‘us’ powerless. Power dynamics really don’t help us to recover from power dynamics. They hold us in that sense of hierarchy, and superiority versus inferiority, and shame and the sense that we’re not good enough and we’re too damaged and we don’t fit in.

And I really struggle with the whole concept of ‘experts’ who are in some way superior to everyone else. Working with trauma does involve a lot of knowledge and expertise (the more the better), but I think even more important than that, more fundamental, is compassion and humanity and hope; it’s being an absolutely, fundamentally safe pair of hands with bags of integrity; and it’s an unwavering belief in the worthiness and dignity of every human being. What qualification is there, how do you become an expert in that? In helping people heal from the trauma inflicted by human beings behaving inhumanly, our humanity is all-important. Our ability to sit unflinchingly with someone in their distress and treat them with dignity and respect is far more important, to me, than the ability to write an essay on it.

And I have no interest in pretending to anyone that I’m just one of the sorted people over here helping the unsorted people over there – that’s not how I view the world, it’s not how I view people, and it’s not a paradigm I’m at all comfortable with. Everyone is unsorted. Everyone is climbing a mountain. Everyone is falling in bogs. They’re just different mountains, different parts of the mountain, and deeper or gunkier or more lethal bogs.

Therefore whenever I talk about what I do, I always try to throw in the qualifier that I do what I do because of what I’ve experienced – that I am a trauma survivor too. And obviously, in every conversation I have in life, I can’t give a run-down, an explanation, of what I mean by that. I can’t explain what trauma, when, how it affected me, where I’m at in terms of dealing with it. So I just have to put this big, vague word ‘trauma’ out there and hope (usually against all hope) that I’m more or less on the same page as the person I’m speaking to. But actually, of course, a lot of the time, I realise that no, we’re not on the same page – we’re not even in the same chapter. Whether we’re in the same book is even sometimes up for debate.

For example, I was once trying to explain to an older gentleman what I do. I said that my work involves writing and training to help people recover from trauma. I expected him to change the subject, but instead he seemed unexpectedly and unreasonably interested and even delighted in what I’d just said. He broke into this huge smile, his face went all soft and wrinkly with excitement, and he said, ‘Oh really? That’s wonderful! That’s what my niece does!’ So then it was my turn to smile broadly, and all the possibilities ran through my head about what exactly his niece did – was she a writer, was she a therapist, was she a psychiatrist, was she the CEO of a charity working in domestic violence? Did I, perhaps, even know her? So I said, ‘Oh, really? What does she do exactly?’

And do you know what he said? He said, ‘She works in insurance and she does all the claims and things when people have had car accidents. She’s very good at it.’ So I was like, ‘Oh great, yes, very, very valuable work. How long has she been doing that for?’ Of course what I wanted to say was, ‘You what? What are you talking about? That’s not what I do AT ALL! That’s not what I mean by trauma!’ (Although of course car crashes can involve trauma.) But it’s certainly not what I mean by what I do to help survivors! So I just let it slide and let him effuse with evident pride about his super-clever niece who’d had two promotions in the space of a year … and I didn’t ever explain to him more about what I do or why I do it.

So when I talk about ‘trauma’, I’m aware that it’s not always what other people in society mean by ‘trauma’. Part of the problem is that if I try to delineate it – if I talk about what happened to me both in childhood and adulthood, what I’m meaning by ‘trauma’ – then invariably the other person becomes quite quickly and quite deeply uncomfortable. It would be a serious case, I imagine, in their mind, of TMI – too much information. And I’d feel, as I have done on many occasions in the past, that I’m ‘going on’ about it, and that by doing so I’m demonstrating that I’m not over it.

And this, apparently, is the holy grail of acceptance in society. We can be tolerated as having experienced trauma, as long as we’ve got over it. As long as we’ve put it behind us. As long as we’ve moved on. As long as we’re not stuck in the past. It’s like the very first mention of trauma seems to trigger in people the need to know that we’re over it. I’ve lost count of the number of times that people have followed up my brief explanation that I’m a survivor of trauma, with some kind of question along the lines of basically asking, ‘But you’re not bothered by it any more, are you? You’re over it, right?

And I used to very dutifully try to concur, and agree that yes, although I used to be very messed up by it, I’ve had lots of therapy now (a bit embarrassing, really, just how much …) and I’ve been able to resolve it and no, nothing of trauma affects me any more. You are safe with me. I don’t even own an axe. Because that’s how it makes you feel – that people are assessing you to see how dangerous you are. Or at the very least, making sure that you’re not going to dump your problems on them and expect them to fix them. Which of course is ironic, because the vast majority of us don’t want to talk about what happened to us. And certainly not with someone who doesn’t ‘get it’.

A couple of years ago I was dating a guy for a little while – and that would make a podcast series in itself!! Things were going quite well (not least because he had a very big tractor) … and I thought, for some reason, that I ought to ‘fess up’ before things went any deeper. Now even the language of that, the way I’m framing it, shows how much we often think of trauma as a dirty little secret – not that something bad happened to us, but that by it having happened, it has made us bad, and we need to beg forgiveness. So we met for lunch one day, in a lovely Scottish pine-clad, tiny, little cafe-cum-restaurant where literally the only soft drink available on the menu was Irn-Bru. And once he’d eaten – obviously I waited until after he’d eaten! – I broached the subject. I said I wanted to just fill him in a little bit on some of my history, because it was important, I thought, for him to know.

But really, the way I was handling it, the way I was setting it all up, it was like I was about to admit to a string of armed robberies or that I’m Boris Johnson’s lovechild. It was coming from a place of apology and embarrassment and shame. Anyway, I gave him the sparsest of headlines, just the top level stuff, and to be fair he was pretty good. He listened very attentively and didn’t run away (I had made sure he’d paid the bill first, just in case he did). And then very graciously and very magnanimously at the end, when I’d finished, he said, ‘Look, that’s fine. I don’t mind that that stuff’s happened to you’ (very forgiving of him!) – ‘as long as’ (here’s the crunch!) – ‘as long as you’re over it. It’s not going to affect you going forwards … is it?’

There were many moments when a little red flag was waved for me over that relationship – many little red flags that in the end led to its rather rapid demise – and that was certainly one of the biggest. It made me realise that whenever we talk about trauma, the big preoccupation that so many people have is, ‘Are you over it?’ I think actually what they’re saying is, ‘Are you over it – so that it doesn’t bother me? So that I don’t have to deal with it?’

That’s problematic at many levels, but I think it’s based on a misunderstanding about what trauma fundamentally is. Because what if the very nature of trauma is that it’s something that is actually very difficult to ‘get over’? What if the very nature of trauma is such that neurobiologically we’re not supposed to just ‘get over it’, at least not quickly?

I see trauma as the adaptations that our body and brain make in an attempt to stay alive in a dangerous world. And that’s why it’s difficult to ‘get over’ it. Because when we’re faced with life-threat, if our body and brain didn’t take it seriously then we wouldn’t survive very long. If they didn’t pull out all the stops to try to keep us safe, warning us with triggers and flashbacks, making us play it safe and small, getting us hypervigilant for danger, forcing us to assume the worst, getting us to jump to conclusions, making us wary of other people – if we didn’t do all these things, all of which are the symptoms of trauma, then our brains and bodies wouldn’t be doing a very good job of adapting to danger in order to survive it. In evolutionary terms, it’s the ability to adapt that promotes survival. Darwin said that it’s not the strongest that survives, but the one who is most able to adapt and adjust to a changing environment.

After trauma, we adapt to danger, and our bodies and brains need to make a big deal out of it. If they just whispered to us, ‘Hey, you might want to watch out for that sabre-toothed tiger’ but didn’t insist on it – if they just left it up to us to be able to chooseto ignore the warning – then undoubtedly we would be eaten by said sabre-toothed tiger.

So trauma isn’t something we’re supposed to get over easily. It’s supposed to impact us. It’s supposed to change us. That’s part of why it’s so hard to shift. The problem isn’t with us.

And that insight made me really realise why it is that when I talk about trauma, it’s not often what society in general thinks of as trauma. My contention is that society thinks of trauma in terms of distressing, upsetting events – sometimes deeply distressing events – but that basically trauma equals a big, bad scary event that for some reason (either a character defect or a chemical imbalance in our brain) we haven’t been able to deal with. The bigger, the badder, the scarier it is, the more ‘traumatic’ we say the event was.

And that’s why it can be hard to grasp that our symptoms – what we often just bracket as ‘mental illness’ – are based in trauma. Because society has this scale of big, bad scary things that it counts as trauma, and if your experience isn’t on the list, you assume it’s not trauma. Basically it doesn’t count unless it’s things like terrorist attacks and war zones and violent rapes by strangers and kidnappings and car crashes involving blood and severed limbs. Only they really count as trauma, in the popular view of trauma.

And that sits comfortably with most people – such events are super big and bad and scary and that’s what trauma is. Or that’s at least what ‘allowable’ trauma is. We’ll understand when you can’t ‘get over’ things like that, at least for the first 6 months. But anything else – really you ought to be putting it behind you and moving on pronto. So we think of trauma as a hugely shocking, scary, emotional event. We think it’s all about how we felt about it. And we all know that ‘big boys don’t cry’ … so if you’re upset by something and you’re not getting over it, you’re evidently either weak or mentally ill. Needless to say, that’s a harsh way of viewing people. But it’s also fundamentally misguided.

Or there’s the other end of the spectrum, where we use the word ‘trauma’ to refer to anything that’s even mildly distressing. Leeds United were thrashed 5-1 by Manchester United on the opening day of the season (I know because, to my great joy, I was there!) and that was ‘traumatic’ for the Leeds fans to watch. I’ll grant you that some of them were upset (I know, because I was there), but they definitely were not traumatised. Being upset does not equal trauma.

Neither was I traumatised when I was about 20 and I was on coach going from London to Oxford and a car pulling a caravan just ahead of us on the motorway lost control. It snaked and wobbled for a few excruciatingly slow seconds over the carriageway and then hit another car in the outside lane. That car then jackknifed at seventy miles an hour across the road in front of us, swerved off at right angles and then literally flew up into the air and over the side of an embankment, like something out of Starsky and Hutch. We in the coach narrowly avoided it and pulled immediately onto the hard shoulder. Three of us – me, the bus driver and an off-duty doctor – got out, ran down the bank, and started to recover an elderly man and woman from some very mangled wreckage. I was distressed by that, I was upset by it – it was shocking, it was unexpected, it was horrible to see – but I wasn’t traumatised by it. (Partly, actually, because I was mobilised and able to act – I wasn’t powerless – but that’s for later.) I was upset, but not traumatised. Two different things.

So in popular parlance when we use the word ‘trauma’ we can end up meaning ‘anything that is upsetting’. And we cut people some slack for continuing to be ‘upset’ by it if it’s been a super-heavy-duty event. But fundamentally we view trauma therefore as an emotional thing. And that’s why we expect people to get over it – because sooner or later we all have to learn to deal with our emotions, don’t we? Whatever we’re upset by in life, sooner or later we have to calm down and move on – don’t we? So why not trauma? Don’t the same rules apply?

I would argue that no, with trauma, the same rules don’t apply. Trauma is a qualitatively different kind of experience to a distressing event.

Now generally, in society, as I say we’re quite understanding if someone’s experienced a big traumatic event and they’re really distressed by it in its immediate aftermath. We get that. You can’t get over big things immediately. Of course you’re going to be upset. Just been in a car crash on the M40? Take the afternoon off. But we do expect people to get over even big things eventually. A great saying that mostly we all believe is that time heals, so we adjust our equation to say that we need a little time to get over a little trauma, and a bigger amount of time to get over bigger trauma. It’s a causal, linear relationship that we should be able to plot on a graph, right? Because time heals.

But here’s the thing with trauma: trauma messes with time in multiple ways, and time doesn’t heal trauma. Time heals distressing events (or if I want to get super-technical, time in REM sleep heals distressing events), but time doesn’t heal trauma. Therefore you can be as impacted by it 5 hours later as you are 50 years later. Time on its own makes very little difference.

And anyway trauma isn’t fundamentally about being upset by something. It may involve upset, even deep distress and intense emotion, but that’s not what marks something out as traumatic or not. Trauma isn’t just a very distressing event. It’s qualitatively different, not just quantitatively different. Trauma involves life-threatening powerlessness and leads to a fundamental change in our neurobiology. There’s an actual shift that goes on in our brain and our body – such a significant shift that it is literally visible in some cases on brain scans. It is, in that sense, a physical wounding right there in our brain whether we want it to or not, whether we’re aware of it or not. And just like we can’t control getting hungry when we haven’t eaten, or getting hot when we’ve exercised, so we can’t directly control the changes that trauma effects in our body and brain. You can no more simply flick a switch to ‘get over trauma’ than you can flick a switch to stop your hair growing. It’s a natural, instinctive, unconscious phenomenon. We are literally powerless to control the impact on of us true trauma.

So trauma isn’t just a big, bad, scary event that distresses us and which we haven’t yet gotten over. Trauma literally – the origin of the word is even that it’s a wound. If someone has shot you and a bullet has entered your arm, you can think about it however you like, you can reframe it, you can say ‘This is no big deal’ or ‘It’s in the past’, but the reality remains that there’s a bullet in your arm. And it’s like that with trauma. How we think about trauma – in the first instance – doesn’t change how it impacts us.

Now that doesn’t mean to say that how we think about trauma in the long-run doesn’t impact how we recover from it, because it does. But we have to get things in the right order. Trauma recovery is as much about sequencing as anything else – it’s about approaching things in the right order. And in the first instance, recovery from trauma involves recognising exactly how powerless we are to not be impacted by it and how that impact is profound and primitive. And actually that that impact is for our survival, for our benefit rather than simply to mess up our lives and turn us crazy. The symptoms of trauma make perfect sense once we understand that our brain and body are adapting to try to stay alive. The symptoms of trauma are not the brain and body gone wrong – we’re not either weak, cowardly, lazy or mentally ill. The symptoms of trauma are an attempt to survive and then predict and avoid further life threat.

You know, it’s hard enough as survivors that we’ve had to experience trauma. It’s totally unacceptable that we then receive such little support for having done so, and that we get blamed and shamed for not having recovered. Experiencing trauma is by its very nature a lonely, intensely isolating experience. That’s then exacerbated when society at large fundamentally misunderstands what trauma is, and so puts pressure on us to just ‘move on’ and ‘put it behind us’.

I believe that we need to develop a much greater respect for trauma. I think in our modern, 21st century arrogance, we reckon that we’re thinking machines first and bodies second: that we have bodies really just so that we can get around and go where we want to in order for our brains to have a good time. But one of my big passions is understanding the evolution of homo sapiensand how as a species – actually the only remaining members of the genus homo – we have evolved as hominins over the last two million years with big bodies and relatively tiny brains. The cognitive revolution, the sudden expansion of our ability to think with our front brains, only kicked in around 70,000 years ago which is the smallest sliver of time in evolutionary terms. So we have evolved largely with our back brains and bodies in charge, and it’s been over those millions of years that we have learned and evolved to survive life threat.

Trauma isn’t a 21st century phenomenon. Trauma – or rather the way we handle trauma – is in our genes. We need to have a lot more respect for the fact that there’s an evolutionary, a developmental sequence, that we need to follow if we’re going to recover from trauma, and that that doesn’t start with our front brains. We can’t think our way out of trauma. We can’t just get over it and put it behind us by making some cognitive choices and developing some new cognitive frames. They are important facets to trauma recovery – as is talking about what happened, which is super important – but only if we do it in the right sequence, in the right order. Body first, emotions second, thinking third.

Distressing events don’t involve a fundamental shift in our neurobiology, but true trauma does. Distressing events are like cuts and bruises – painful in the moment, but in a week or two they’ll heal. True trauma mangles us – it changes us, it rearranges things on the inside of us, and we are changed as people because of it.

So that’s what we’ll look at maybe in the next episode. For now, I hope that this episode has helped alleviate a tiny bit of the shame we can feel that we’ve been traumatised and that we’re struggling to get over it. That’s not a fault in our character or our brains. It’s just the way it is for us as homo sapiens.

Speak soon.

16 Comments

  • Joan on 15 September 2021 at 7:14 am

    Thank you so much Caroline, I am seeing a client today who has childhood trauma caused by an alcoholic mother. Having listened to this podcast It is going to be very helpful in explaining the reasons for the trauma and removing some of the shame, giving more acceptance and hope.

  • Linda Taylor on 15 September 2021 at 10:46 am

    Thank you once again for the perfect timing of your generously honest podcast. I have just taken on a client with a very traumatic childhood.
    Your podcast has made me think about valuing the unique effects of each person’s experience and how that experience can become an ongoing, inner, part of who we are in the present, like a long piece of elastic that keeps pulling us back there.
    It’s also made me think about reconnection to the part of the ‘pre trauma self’, in terms of strengthening the ego to help proceed with the journey of making positive change towards, hopefully, moving forward.

    Thank you again

    Linda

    • Sally P on 23 September 2021 at 9:20 am

      Brilliant, Carolyn, as always. So clear, honest and informative. How you put things cuts through jargon, power dynamics and expectations and replaces them with experience, wisdom and reality. Helpful to so many people with so many perspectives. Being able to do that is a talent and a gift….especially around a subject like trauma. Thank you for sharing what you do.

  • Cassy Blyth on 16 September 2021 at 3:38 pm

    Magnificent podcast, I’ve just started listening to your material. Its very refreshingly honest, clear, focused and experiential which is why it resonates so deeply with my own story. A lot of the rhetoric about trauma is very scientific or a bit puffed up and psychoanalytic/ full of archetypes which can feel like a flight from reality. This is very grounding to listen to and reminds me to take my own trauma story back down to earth. Beautiful work.

  • Philippa Stafford on 16 September 2021 at 8:12 pm

    Thank you Carolyn. When I hear you talk about trauma, deep parts of me hear and let in the words . . . .they know the truth you speak . . .. . . and they trust you, because THEY know that YOU know, because they can tell you have been there. Thank you.
    I have had people say to me “Why don’t you just let it go?” These days I say “Show me exactly how and where I am holding it, and I will happily do so”.

    • Loren Keeling on 19 September 2021 at 2:18 pm

      Thank you for this content. I’ve just found your podcast via Twitter.
      I’ve experienced various events throughout my life. I never really thought of trauma in connection to the events until much later in my life when I experienced a full blown emotional psychological breakdown and was hospitalized.

      I recently wrote about my experience for a collaborative book that is being published soon.

      Since writing that chapter, I made a decision to write my first book. The subject of which relates to my current situation and feeling of being stuck in trauma.

      I have also had people tell me I have not moved on. Or I should just move on. This doesn’t help.

      I will tune in to future episodes. Thanks Carolyn.

  • Brie on 16 September 2021 at 8:56 pm

    Carolyn, thank you

    I wish my friends and family would read and internalise those words so instead of (1) projecting onto me, telling me I need to move on now (because that’s how they’ve been told how to handle things e.g. being made redundant), or (2) posting “help help” messages on facebook and then being confused about why I have responded by my blind crisis reaction. But… they haven’t cared to find out anything about trauma or suicide- because they learned all they need (want) to know on TV. And their beliefs work for them.

    And this is the problem isn’t it? That we, who understand what trauma is and how it affects us, have done our homework, and those that haven’t been affected are blissfully ignorant – and don’t really want their bubble bursting – and live in denial.

    The challenge is to educate those that don’t want to know so that society can be an inclusive place for us trauma survivors. One where we are not seen as failures for our differences and needs.

    There have been great strides in tolerance towards non-heterosexuals over the last 30 years.

    How can we really make a difference for inclusivity in this topic? It’s a bit taboo. Everyone knows its there but they squint when they walk past it so they don’t really have to see it.

    I welcome links to campaigns in addition to Carolyn’s that are keen to break the taboo, that want to teach the public who feel helpless when confronted by those afflicted by trauma, so they aren’t scared of us anymore, so they aren’t worried they’ll end up carrying some of the load, but they’ll feel safe. It’ll help us feel safer and less alone too. I feel certain the pressure to not suffer adds to the height of the wall I have to scale to reduce my own suffering.

  • Faith on 14 February 2022 at 9:53 pm

    Hello Carolyn,
    Thank you very much for this piece. It was honest and full and really addressed the shame society puts on survivors of trauma to not bother them and move on (don’t they think we want to?). You are right it is isolating and extremely lonely to recover. I myself was in a trauma training program to become a therapist when I was raped. The shock and despair and shame was overwhelming. I have done lots of writing to process along with therapy and now I work as a therapist. But the experience – particularly how others treated me in the aftermath and even now if I choose to share – that has made me look at society as a whole very differently. I am way more cautious who I let into my inner circle now. As you so clearly put it, I have been changed qualitatively. There is no going back. It’s nice to know there’s someone else walking the walk too.

  • Gayle on 18 February 2022 at 4:55 pm

    Iam so exhausted. Thank you.
    The world is against me right now. I needed this xx

  • carmen on 8 May 2022 at 9:23 pm

    Gracias, pude leer en español porque la computadora lo traduce, pero el audio no esta doblado al español . Gracias porque aclara màs lo que es el trauma, ayuda a comprender mejor que solo es difìcil superar todo lo que se ha pasado. Y que no es una simple cuestiòn de emociones que hay que cambiar, sino que es mucho màs que eso. Suelo sentirme prisionera y no sè còmo escapar, supongo que es el trauma que esta ahì, a pesar de que creo haberlo dejado atràs, aunque en lo que he leìdo ahora me doy cuenta que no se queda atràs, aunque uno no lo traiga mentalmente al presente. Gracias

  • michael brady on 23 August 2022 at 3:50 pm

    Thank you, Iv’e just started my third course of therapy followed by nemerous different medications , im feeling a slow progress , sometimes a feel the therapist isn’t the best trained in Trauma by asking me to smell essential oils when i have so much anger and guilt .
    This has been the best reading i have experienced, again thank you for giving me a better understanding

  • Pauline Jacob on 19 April 2023 at 2:28 pm

    This is brilliant. Thank you for explaining the difference between upset and trauma, and why people can’t just “get over” trauma. That nails it and is so helpful.

  • will murphy on 30 April 2023 at 8:58 am

    Thanks for this, I listened to all the podcasts, the evolutionary neurobiology perspective very useful…the symptoms of PTSD, useful, adaptive to human survival, overiding cognitive front brain function.
    As you know the models are not good at expressing what it’s like to live say with developmental attachment trauma, and the ‘effort to just survive the experience’ not only in childhood but adulthood. When I listen to Bessel Van Der kolk, and Peter Levine, even though their work is useful…. their massive overconfidence/egoic claims that PTSD as an illness is now resolved by their processes, my jaw drops in disbelief…..

    Thanks again
    Will

  • Kimberley23 on 11 September 2023 at 11:22 pm

    Carolyn… you ‘hit the nail on the head’ … people who haven’t experienced Trauma, or worked alongside people who have, do think we should ‘move on..’ It’s like most things in life.. how can you possibly begin to have an opinion, unless you’ve come across it yourself, either personally or professionally. It’s always there ‘ on your shoulder’ … I’ve learned to accept that, quicker the second time( I have no memory of the trauma), than the first. I’ve accepted that I carry it around with me.. it’s not ‘heavy’ anymore… it’s a nuisance, yes, and sometimes I get so very tired (insomnia), but most of the time, it’s now ‘weightless’ but still there, I have accepted that it will always be there… it just can’t hurt me the same as that first time.. it’s a less intense feeling.
    To anyone who is still dealing with their trauma(s)….you will eventually reach a place (with experienced & wise advice) where you can live again. Let’s face it, your life is on hold and time is stuck until you reach that place. Eventually though you will get there !

  • Amy G on 15 September 2023 at 1:51 pm

    Thank you Carolyn,
    This is so good! And so true, it takes many many years to recover from trauma, some people don’t recover, and that is so very painful for them(a huge understatement!) all you say about trauma is so true. Thank you for your honesty and your understanding and empathy.

  • Sue Clocherty on 22 December 2023 at 9:01 am

    Thank you. I no longer feel like I have two heads

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