7 Questions to Ask Yourself to Kick Start your Healing Journey
Today, I am excited to have a conversation about something that I believe is incredibly important concerning sharpening your awareness. Today what we're going to talk about is how your trauma is currently showing up in your life, even if it is years since your trauma happened.
So let's break it down—a little bit.
When you were in your traumatic experience, maybe, your trauma was living in an abusive home environment or being bullied at school constantly, or, maybe it was a prolonged event and there's no real break in where it started or where it stopped and it's just little events over a prolonged period– 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. So, your body, because its main objective is survival, stays on alert.
This is what is known as your stress response and it's designed for short periods– like a bear is chasing you down a path. It is not meant for a prolonged experience, and, if you are in a prolonged experience, your stress response can be affected. Stuck in the on position is incredibly hard on your body.
Of course, your body is doing everything that it can to survive, which can often mean that other functions within your body don't run to 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.
That's the physical side of trauma.
So if your trauma happened 10, 15, 20, or 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, and other mental health issues.
Your body wants to survive. That's what it wants. It wants to survive.
Living in a high, constant-stress situation puts your body on alert. It can also change how your body functions, for example, if your trauma happened from the ages of zero to seven years old, it can affect those peak developmental years, namely your brain and how your brain functions.
So there's that side of it as well.
So, 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 increasing your awareness of how this thing– it might have only been one situation that lasted 30 minutes but that, 30 minutes, has affected the rest of your life.
Let me be clear, let me make it obvious — The trauma is not the event, the trauma is what you made the event mean about you.
To give you an example, my trauma is not that my parents didn't raise me. That's not my trauma. My trauma is that 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. Something inside of me made that mean that I was unlovable and that is the trauma. Because if I am unlovable, Why am I here? Am I here to just be somebody's punching bag? No, but, that is how that works.
Take some time and do an assessment. Ask yourself–
1) How is my physical health?
2) How is my emotional health?
3) Do I struggle with anxiety and depression? You could probably answer that on the fly.
4) Do I have digestive issues?
5) Do my digestive issues get worse or better given a certain situation?
6) Do I seek out stressful situations in my life?
7) Do I create stressful situations because I grew up in stressful situations and that's my normal? Do I need that stressful situation to thrive, to feel like everything is as it should be?
I hope that you found it helpful. I hope that you got a light bulb moment out of it. If you have any questions, my DMs and my email are always open. You can find me on Instagram @emily.cleghorn.coach or you can go to my website, home.mendedmommalife.ca to find more information about how to get in contact with me.
