We’ll never be ‘over it’

Deep things happen to us in life, deep losses, deep sadness thing that mark our souls forever and hopefully over time deepen us leading us to places that we often walk through deeply alone at the most difficult times.  I don’t feel we ever really ‘get over’ them, we learn to live with the experience but it forever changes or transforms us.  I had a conversation yesterday with someone about trauma and she said this ‘trauma changes your pace entirely’.   Trauma affects our neurochemistry and biochemistry and its a kind of heat, fire and inflammation, at least the multiple body traumas I have been subject to of which there have been at least 20 felt like both fire and storm.   One I barely lived through.

I am burning and burning at the moment as in Australia we have had a flu virus which has killed 121 people and I caught it last week.   I wont go into all the symptoms, didn’t know how I would stay in my body to be honest the pain was so intense, I was struggling to breathe and that takes me right back to those other times of earlier trauma.  Finding place of peace and calm was impossible for two of the five days on the others I had windows and patches, a quiet sunny afternoon watching the movie Creation on the traumatic life of Charles Darwin with Jasper stretched out beside me.   Afternoon rests which let me just sink down deep inside to the calm of sleep.  What I learned though was how much I struggle and resist and even panic when I get sick or even rest.  I am not even aware I am sick at first just know my energy is ‘off’, its probably due to the fact of the intense body trauma pain I have had because it all just comes flooding back.

What I also did in a moment of panic was call this old body therapist who I had visited with while back and in the midst of being sick as a dog she was so pushy I had to get over there the next day for an appointment before it all settled on my lungs and I was in real trouble.  Well I did all of that and then came home yesterday and was exhausted I could barely contain all the sensations in my body and I could not eat, my nose was bleeding and would not stop, huge clots of blood.  It was so horrendous I didn’t get to sleep until 2 am.   Then woke drenched in sweat, the fever must have broken.   I was given all these remedies that I just found had a terrible reaction and inside I was angry angry angry (but not consciously so – all at myself) why had I let her push me over a boundary?  I had woken yesterday feeling relatively okay and it was such an effort and long drive to get there.  But today I realised this is what happens to me due to my trauma and childhood emotional neglect.  I panic, feel unsafe inside and then run to someone and they grasp the nettle and then its all on when really I needed just to sit with myself and try and manage the symptoms but in trauma that is so hard to do.  Just so hard.  Its a subtle form of self abandonment.

That said the body part was wonderful, it involved gentle supported holding with my body and a lot of grief came out, but I was also talking, talking, talking realising I was running everywhere with all the old traumas and I don’t feel that was necessary,  it took so much out of me yesterday.  Today I cannot take the remedies as I don’t trust how my body would react and my pure gut feeling is that I don’t need to be fed yet more substances but that what trauma really needs is quiet loving presence, gentleness and being with us in love.   When I am fully received and just able to sit body side to side with a loving presence then my nervous system calms down.  That happened in the session and it was good.  I just hate the fucking remedies.

Anyway what I started out trying to write here was how we never ‘get over’ trauma.  I do think for some traumas a time comes when we integrate the full effect.  This may take years and its agony work over both burning hot coals and icy stones to get there, a deep dark wilderness journey that can not fully be expressed in words.  If we have to ‘put our trauma behind us’? what does that mean?  That is now long gone and no longer part of us?  Sorry I just don’t get it.  Trauma changes us, in fact I think the most genuine soulful beautiful people I have met are those who have gone to that hellish place and returned but then wear the coat of the scar clan with pride but not ego.  Even writing the word pride sits a little uncomfortably with me but the point is that I don’t feel we should ever be told or feel that we need ‘to get over’ trauma.   Its effects are long lived, we can only hope that they do not mark forever negatively the rest of our days.

If people genuinely feel they want to help trauma survivors, please, please, please.  Just be with them, shut your mouth and listen, don’t put your 20 cents worth in.   Truth is if you haven’t lived it you will never fully comprehend but the sensitive and empathic among you will at least be able to be with it in love and in doing so be of service to someone in distress who needs so sorely not your platitudes but calm, loving, unconditional presence.