FROM MY LIFE | PROMPT RESPONSE
Acknowledging Traumas Can Set You Free
One of the April prompts on Know Thyself Heal Thyself — Write about the core memories that built you — came at exactly the right moment.
In the past weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about my life… about things that’d happened.
Traumatic things.
I’ve never been taught to deal with bad things in life. To face them. Whenever something upsetting happened, no matter how trivial or traumatic, I just carried on. I didn’t give it any more attention than some tears, a deep sigh, and then it was on to the next thing.
I never came in touch with my feelings, but pushed them away, righted my shoulders and went on living.
I know now this is no way to deal with trauma.
In fact, I never called those terrible things ‘trauma’ to begin with. It’s only in the past eighteen months that I admitted to myself that I have suffered several traumas in my life.
I believe that had I dealt with the first of those — being abandoned¹ by my first love while pregnant with our child — many other traumatic things wouldn’t have happened.
