How Trauma is Impacting your Daily Life

Hello friends, welcome to this episode of the Mama Hood After Trauma Podcast. Many of us do not know this but today, I am excited to have a conversation about something that I believe is incredibly important with regard to sharpening your awareness. We are going to talk about How your trauma is currently showing up in your life even if it's been years since it happened.

It is indeed destructive, not to realize the depth of ruin, our trauma, if not get over with, could cause to our very own lives.

Let's break it down just a little bit.

When you were in your traumatic experience, which varies in several ways. Your trauma could be living in an abusive home environment, being bullied at school constantly or a prolonged event in which there's no real break from where it started to where it stopped, and it's just little events over a prolonged period of time.

When you're living in a situation like that, your body learns that it needs to stay on edge, because, at any given moment, you don't know if someone's going to explode in a fit of rage, you don't know what's coming down the pipe and because your body’s main objective is survival, it stays on alert. This is what is known as your stress response.

It is designed for short periods of time, like a bear, chasing you down a path, that kind of short experience. However, It is not meant for a prolonged experience and if you are in a prolonged experience your stress response can get stuck in that one position and that is incredibly hard on your body.

Your body is doing everything that it can to survive, which can oftentimes mean that other functions within your body don't run at their optimal level, or they don't run at all. That is where You start to develop digestive discomforts, hormonal imbalances, and all of that type of stuff, living in the physical side of trauma.

If your trauma happened 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago, and you are dealing with health issues now, It can very well be connected, especially if you have not healed the trauma that you experienced. On the other side of that, your trauma could be showing up in mental or emotional distress, anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues.

Your body wants to survive, that's what it wants. Living in a high, constant-stress situation puts your body on alert. It also changes, like, if your trauma happened from the ages of 0 to 7 years old, and it affected those peak developmental years, it also affected your brain and how your brain functions.

So there's that side of it as well. Your trauma affects every part of who you are as an individual. Now, we can go into another conversation on another day about how your trauma affects your parenting, because bet your bottom dollar it does, but becoming aware of how your trauma is affecting you both physically, mentally, emotionally, all of the ways is huge and increases your awareness. It might have only been one situation that lasted 30 minutes, by that 30 minutes, it has affected the rest of your life. Let me be clear, the trauma is not the event. The trauma is what you made the event mean to you.

To give you an example, my trauma was not that my parents didn't raise me. That's not my trauma, my trauma was because my parents chose not to raise me and chose to give me to other family members to be raised. I made that mean that I was unlovable, my bot, my brain, something inside of me made that mean that I was unlovable.

And that was the trauma, because if I am lovable, why am I here? Am I here to just be somebody's punching bag? No, but that is how that works. So take some time and do an assessment, Just ask yourself, How is my physical health? How is my emotional health? Do I struggle with anxiety and depression? You could probably answer that on the fly. Do I have digestive issues? Do my digestive issues get worse or better given a certain situation? Or, here's a question for you to ask yourself, do I seek out stressful situations in my life? Do I create stressful situations in my life because I grew up in stressful situations and that's normal? I need that stressful situation to thrive, to feel like everything is as it should be.

We need to understand that trauma could have a profound impact on our lives, but we could work towards healing and minimize the impact.

So, we’ve come to the end of our conversation for today. I hope that you found it helpful and that you got some light bulb moments out of it? If you have any questions, my DMs, and my emails, are always open. You can find me on Instagram at emily.cleghorn.coach or you can go to my website, home.mendedmommalife.com to find more information about how to get in contact with me.