There is no easy way out of trauma. I was speaking with one of my clients this week on her narrative, the story she created as part of her traumatic miasm encapsulating
her very existence. I use the word created because she has very little memory of her past and when partial visions flash before her eyes, she creates a narrative to continue to serve an identity that may or may not have been an actuality. She’s not the only one to do this. We all do. We use stories, our version of those stories that happen in our lives, to foster an identity of safety, belonging, nourishment, and life purpose. When I work with multiple family members, I will hear different versions of the same story, as the storyteller forms attachments to those raw pieces of wounding left behind, searching for understanding, binding to people, things, thoughts and emotions that perpetuate some level of survival. Whether that survival is physical, emotional, mental or spiritual doesn’t really matter. How we frame that narrative in our psyches does. The sheer awareness that our identities can be obliterated at any moment we face darkness tends to ignite a terror, a loss of any semblance of self that roots us within and to each other. So we create narrative upon narrative to bind us as deeply into the earth and high into the heavens.
Eventually, we unwind slowly as most narratives begin to change or fade as individual identity becomes less important. There is a connection that happens, a greater connection that allows the trauma to settle into a grace that heals you. Your identity becomes part of the whole, and the trauma has a purpose you hadn’t recognized before. Not just for you, but for the world. The need to worship the trauma and place it as victor on an altar no longer holds interest. The need for the story to make you feel real and authentic in this life is no longer needed.
I love our stories. I love listening to each and every one of them. I respect trauma.
I also love when we become free of those memories and allow them to serve a greater good by igniting forgiveness throughout all of mankind.