My first interaction with trauma happened on the battlefield. Seeing someone lose their life as you watch is something that not very many people deal with in a positive way. And when you have a connection to that person, it is even harder to understand.
While you are deployed, you don’t really process any of the horrible things that happen. First, you don’t have time to, and second, no one is going to listen. When everyone is in hell, not too many people care if you're burning.
But when I got home, it was evident that I was a different person. Certain things seemed a little harder to deal with, and I would find any way possible to get those thoughts out of my head. That leads me to the first thing you have to do to work through your trauma and find a better life on the other side. You have to acknowledge what happened. You have to acknowledge that what happened changed you, and you have to want to feel better.
Trauma is a process. You work through the mud and the muck, and sometimes while you are processing it, you can’t seem to get clean. Everything reminds you of the things that happened, and all you want to do is think about something else, but you can’t. What most people do is fight against it and attempt to make the memories disappear. This is often the exact opposite of what you want to do. I like to think of trauma as a bully that thinks it owns your mind. The only way to get a bully to stop is to face them, and that is what you have to do with trauma. You have to face it and remind yourself that your mind is your own. That you have the power over where you are and where you want to be. That is the second part of working through trauma: you face it.
And the final part of the process is knowing that bad days will happen, but they won’t last. There will be times that it is more difficult to get out of bed, and there will be times when you hop right up, prepared for the day. If you treat each day the same and realize that it’s only 24 hours until something changes, then something will always change.
I believe that everyone has had trauma in their lives. There are the obvious occasions, but there are also the not-so-obvious occasions as well. We think about the warrior going to battle, the police officer seeing people on their worst day, or the mother losing a child, but we don’t think about all the other trauma that happens to people and how they, too, may be having a hard time dealing with it. Trauma is a deeply distressing experience or multiple experiences. If you think about it, that describes some people’s everyday lives.
So if we all slow down and acknowledge that trauma has happened, face the trauma and take a look at how we can change our situation, and realize that there will be bad days. Maybe we could move through some of the shit we face and not track it all over the world every step we take.
Very insightful thoughts on facing trauma. Good work.