9 Things I Learned as a Trauma Survivor to Help the Next Generation
What if healing was all you needed to do to change the world?
It took a year of my life to be able to say that I had just left an abusive relationship. I used a lot of other words during that year — words like toxic, unhealthy, and incompatible. It took twelve months to articulate that the relationship wasn’t just bad; it was emotionally abusive.
For many people, admitting to past trauma is challenging. We make excuses to explain it away. We’re reluctant to define a portion of our lives in a negative way. We find a narrative we can live with, and we try very hard not to see it any other way.
But trauma leaks through the cracks.
It shows up in our relationships. It pops up when we least expect it. Time truly doesn’t heal all wounds. It just buries them. But our emotions won’t be stopped, and the things we bury slowly rise to the surface.
9 Things I Learned as a Trauma Survivor
Part of the problem is that human beings are apt to compare traumas. We think we don’t have the right to own our trauma or work on our recovery when other people have had it so much worse. What we forget — or never knew in the first place — is that trauma isn’t…
