Trauma isn't just what happens to you - it's what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you

Blog by Nina Madden - Trauma isn't just what happened to you. 

Trauma isn't just what happened to you. It is what happened inside of you as a result of the thing that happened to you.

It doesn't always look like flashbacks or nightmares. 

But sometimes it runs like an undercurrent throughout our lives...

A sense that no matter what our achievements are - we're going to be found out to not be up to scratch...

No matter how much effort we put into our looks, someone else is always skinnier, more beautiful, more desirable...

Never being able to really put the finger on what is wrong with us, but feeling it nonetheless. We just can't say exactly what it is.

Most of the time “T” goes incognito – never identified as such.

You don’t identify. You had a happy childhood, your parents tried their best, you have “forgiven”. Okay they were not perfect but  

..you can’t shake that feeling, perhaps an emptiness, or that something not right with you. No matter how many accolades, successful, how many adoring friends

It doesn't look like a trauma, the original events long forgotten, but the feeling still remains.

Never good enough, successful enough, achieved enough. Someone is always better, more successful, skinnier, cooler.

We build careers, successful companies, higher positions, busy lives, to compensate for that niggling feeling.

And that’s okay surely? That’s life. It’s to be enjoyed, lived, maximised.

Sometimes it is obvious,

but you’ve forgiven those who hurt you, you rationalise, even minimise, - tapping into psycho-spiritual narratives of sending love, sending compassion – feeling a pressure to forgive (so that you can finally become a good person) but then the mother or partner looks at you in a certain way, or blunders in a way, and you feel the rage rise up. The husband or wife makes a comment and you feel the heat rising.  

You can understand it, talk about it, but knowing everything about it hasn't helped you heal.

The slightest touch It still hurts.

This is because trauma isn’t what happened.

It’s the imprint of what happened. The imprint on your identity. On how you feel about yourself, about who you are, your self-concept.

It’s the mark on who we believe ourselves to be.

Sometimes if feels like shame.

Shame when we receive a critical email, shame when we get rejected, shame when we say something and then wonder if what we said was stupid.

And if shame is too hard a feeling to feel, we cover it with anger.

Sometimes it feels like we’re going to die. Or left abandoned – and then die.

It's not rational, it's not cognitive.

it doesn't discriminate between rich or poor.

Taking therapy doesn't touch the sides. CBT creates more internal conflict.

It's hidden pain - that never went away

Like an open wound – the slightest touch is unbearable, the small comment, the snide remark and the match is lit. Your anger flares up, or your shame hits you like a punch in the stomach. 

This isn’t because you’re broken, or because you’re bad. This doesn’t mean you’re scarred. It means it still hurts.

What we call irrational behaviours, flying off the handle, getting tearful, or even just a constant churning of anxiety or irritation, a desire to flee, to fight, or to turn yourself into a pretzel to please (fawning) are all signs of hidden pain.

When I found a compassionate space between EMDR and IFS, in combination with my favourite Rumi poem the Guesthouse I knew I had found a space to truly heal these kinds of wounds at their very core.

I think probably this is a good place to disclose that I also wet through two years of EMDR therapy myself and tapped into healing childhood wounds I believed I would carry with me to the grave. 

After all the coaching and NLP I had done (starting back in 2007) I had built a fun, meaningful and fulfilling life.

But it had not got into warming the rock of pain that lived in my heart from those years.

I learn from those two years of EMDR that through compassionate guidance to the very core of the issue we have the capacity to heal any past.

Does it help if I share that in therapy my therapist asked me “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

At that moment I made a choice. To stay silent, or to go there. The only way out is through. 

But with trauma, words cannot capture the horror of your experience. Putting it into words can feel like a betrayal of the true significance. 

So I spoke in broken sentences, fragmented words, pain I had held inside me and not shared with a soul for 40+ years.

And I watched the dot on the screen, and I knew the only way out was through.

Today that memory and those memories are part of my story. I can talk about it - if I choose to and only whom I choose to - without collapsing. I can find the words. I know I was not at fault, not guilty, not bad. Those things happened to me, not because of me. 

And that death is part of life.

That is how I know that no matter what happened to you, or by whom, we can heal the wound from the inside out.

Healing Happens in the Meeting With Self 

Healing happens in the compassionate meeting and witnessing of the self in those moments. And when someone holds you there long enough to see, long enough for the mud to clear, the darkness of the dark night to give way to dawn you can begin to see it for what it truly is.

Objectively, real. From a slight distance. But with compassion and love. 

You discover yourself exactly as you are, as you were.

You see the truth. You were never bad, never broken.

It sounds so simple but is so ground breaking. 

You knew it, but never felt it. 

The truth.

You were just a kid.

Like any other kid, doing their best, just trying to get by.

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Technical Note: EMDR uses bilateral stimulation with therapeutic protocols to heal the issues at the imprint level, beneath conscious cognition,. The result is integrating the healing with the conscious mind to create a new powerful understanding of yourself and your story and your place in the world.

Note - the quote that trauma isn't what happens to you it's what happens inside of you was popularised by Gabor M but well written about in the major trauma literature.

Note– before becoming a coach and EMDR therapist Nina Madden wrote her MA dissertation on language, poetry and trauma.