Let trauma be the teacher, rather than an enemy.

An injury is something to be healed, not confronted and attacked.

I had to be hospitalized recently because I couldn’t deal with trauma treatment. I was trying so hard to let go, let go, let go… and I kept the attachment to the anger of those men who harmed me. I couldn’t let go of the injury because it hurts.

It’s difficult enough for others to not understand what it is like, we explain but it’s like a wall is between us.

My psychiatrist after the hospitalization explained something that shed a lightbulb brilliant light on my issue: Anxiety moves like something elastic… It moves from “Oh, I’m a little anxious about this job offer” to “I’m completely manic and I need a hospital”. And sometimes we break into tears and nobody really gets why, we get emotional, talking loudly, and those who don’t understand the types of trauma reactions, don’t really know how to deal.

So… I’m treating my trauma like my teacher. My body has been telling me: you’re trying too hard, let time do its thing. And I need rest, a lot of rest. I just entered a Master’s program, I’m taking a UN program for Human Rights,
I won a course on Cultural Management, and I’m also finishing other things from last year, plus learning how to teach yoga, record meditations, and create my online business… I’m not going to break but from studying alone I have about 14 open tabs on my browser… Anyway, if work helps!

So if work helps me not to think about trauma all day long, about conflicts all day long, about what happened in my life all day long… I’m glad I have 14 tabs open, plus a Tara Brach one talking about Gratitude today.

What am I grateful for?

I’m grateful for all these opportunities, I felt so stuck two years ago professionally, and now I don’t. Life molds and changes.

Families are tough things, I’ve decided to really step a bit away from this. A lot of people just tell me “leave” “go away”, but it’s not that simple for me at this particular moment — a more divergent type of healing and a different type of separation. I said a long time ago that I don’t want to be “like them” and I only realized what that meant when I saw that I do not *feel* like part of my family, I felt like a stranger who said, “oh hey, I belong here maybe…oops, maybe not!”. I miss my grandmas and I miss talking to them about this, about the hurt and the pain of feeling this belonging.

But I belong to the Earth more, the birds, the rivers, the oceans, the barefooting along the grass.

Anxiety affects 284 million people in the world. Depression affects 264 million people. Little statistics are known to mankind. More people are affected without even realizing it.

Anxiety makes you seem and feel insane with stress. Depression makes you drive yourself into a very deep well of unwellness, and getting out of bed most days is a victory.

Children need to learn emotional training before reaching adolescence. Children can be the driving force for a better tomorrow

Emotional Intelligence can and will make us better people. Because understanding trauma as a teacher, we learn all this below.

I was not a big advocate of self-help, but it did save my life. Self-help books, the good ones, really did help me get out of major depression into a bit depressed, but functional enough to have 14 tabs open and doing them.

“A wounded psyche” is not really a reality — we have an innate need for good and care and affection. When it’s missing, we feel disconnected. So building bridges towards others is important.

“I’m on my way to something else” is a very vivid sentiment inside of a lot of us, of most of us, or all of us reading this. By treating trauma like a teacher, we are helped to move forward into this “something else” we want to go.

“Let me, love.” Love is a need, just love. It’s a need a lot of us give up on because it seems so difficult to get from others. We barely get compassion from a lot of people.

Being an adult is hard enough, with childhood trauma difficulty raises the difficulty by 50%, but I think we do a good job at faking we understand adulthood.

Trauma as a teacher helps guide us into a trauma-free life, injuries heal if we don’t perpetuate the hurt.