Trauma — It Doesn’t Have To Hurt Forever
Trauma can have a lasting impact, but it is possible to change these echoes by reframing the experience.
Introducing Reframing
What is reframing? One technique to change is to imagine that you are watching the event happen, and then you imagine you are watching it from a distance — like you are in a movie theater and it’s on the screen. In your imagination, change the movie from full sound, full color, to a black-and-white movie, with the sound much quieter. Imagine it as a completely silent black-and-white movie.
The adjusting of what happened, in your imagination (and in your perception), to a distance, and changing your view of it from full sound/full color to at a distance, quiet, black-and-white movie, can give you the perspective of the event in the past, and with less direct impact on the present.
This can be a big emotional relief.
Rewrite Your Experience
That works well for some traumatic experiences, and I do find it useful. But I’m not much of a visual thinker, and I frequently use a different tactic. Instead of visually reframing the experience, I change the story — literally re-writing the experience.
“I was raped as a child” goes from a very painful and confusing story to “the experience gave me strength that has served me well with being an advocate for my own children.”
Why bother, it’s not what I call fun?
I would never wish trauma on anyone, and it does happen. Since it does, I look to make it more useful and less traumatic for myself.
It is well known that people who experience trauma are more likely to perpetrate trauma. The bully at school who is bullied at home, the child abuser who was abused as a child. I don’t want to continue the cycle of violence, and changing my story and reframing what happened helps me break the cycle.
I think of this as a way to not “pay it forward”. It can be painful to look back on trauma, and it’s worth doing, for me, if it lessens both my pain, and my likelihood of inflicting pain. I’m clear that I would not inflict that particular trauma. I also know that I distance myself, I get wrapped up in my own pain, so I don’t see or hear those I am with now clearly. Not being seen and heard for who you are is it’s own pain, and one I am working toward inflicting less.
-Michelle Love
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