Almost Everyone has Trauma…And it’s okay to admit that
What is Trauma?
For years of my life I believed that I did not have any trauma. After all, I had never been to war, wasn’t abused at home, and didn’t have to worry about any addictions. Trauma was reserved for those with obvious issues that I didn’t identify with and share. And to even claim I had Trauma was nothing more than a “first-world problem” and the wild whinings of a privileged person living in the luxury and comfort of the Western World.
If I didn’t have any trauma, then any pitfalls in my behaviors therefore had to be a part of my core personality.
Yet, I am grateful to say, none of my beliefs about Trauma were true.
According to the brilliant physician and psychiatric specialist, Dr. Gabor Mate, “Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you.”
Wth this lens, Trauma is more than an external experience, it is the ways that your brain chemistry and structure change in response to an external experience.
And for everyone it’s different.
That’s why you can have siblings grow up in the same household with wildly different personalities and coping mechanisms. The way that each person deals with a traumatizing environment is solely dependent on them and now their brain decides to process the event(s) they experienced.
Trauma is most easily identified in your reactivity and triggers
Is there a person who you see (or think you see) out of the corner of your eye and you immediately feel defensive or on guard?
Is there a habit you have that you know is self-destructive but you just can’t seem to break?
Are you overly indulgent in or overly avoidant of difficult emotions?
All of these are clear signs that you have unresolved Trauma in your nervous system.
In today’s blog, I want to take a moment to break down these distinctions, and help you build a better understanding of the role that trauma plays in your life.
Two Types of Trauma
Trauma can be brokwn down into two categories:
Big-T Trauma and little-t trauma. By taking a moment to understand the distinctions, you can then build a better understanding of how you might be living with trauma in the body.
Big-T Trauma
Big-T Trauma occurs in the nervous system when major things happen to vulnerable people that should not have happened. This can range anywhere from Emotional, Physical, or Sexual abuse, all the wya to general dysfunction in the Houeshold.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Credit: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
A large number of people are fortunate enough to have not experienced clear indicators of physical, emotional or sexual abuse, and therefore often don’t identify themselves as someone living with Trauma.
While this may true to some degree, it would be a disservice to yourself to belief you are the exception to what is quickly being recognized as a general rule and norm.
In fact, according to the National Council for Wellbeing, about 70% of adults in the U.S. alone have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives. That is 223.4 million people!
If you are considering whether or not you have Trauma, I highly recommend taking advantage of this powerful tool:
The A.C.E. (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study is an incredibly powerful tool to see if you have had traumatizing experiences from childhood that you may have normalized and still carry with you today.
Beyond this though, there is another, sometimes more insidious form of Trauma that is prevalent in - I would argue - an even greater number of beings, and that is little-t trauma.
The A.C.E. (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study is an incredibly powerful tool to see if you have had traumatizing experiences from childhood that you may have normalized, that you actually carry with you todya.
Little-t trauma
Little-t trauma are those less memorable and far more prevalent experiences, that can often compound into Complex-PTSD or CPTSD.
In my work with clients globally, I liken little-t trauma to those crucial moments you have in your life that tell you to “shy away” from your authenticity and exuberance.
You can easily see where little-t trauma lives in your life when you ask yourself how daring and courageous you are able to be in certain situations:
Trying on an outfit you’ve always wanted to wear but it shows more skin than you’re used to
Trying out a hobby or passion you’ve always told yourself you wanted to try
Going into a new environment and making new friends
Heavily masking yourself to conform to a group you are in
Immediately suppressing any emotions for being “too much”
Becoming overwhelmed or uncomfortable around affirmations
Becoming reactive when someone is upset near you
People pleasing
Martyrdom
These are just a few examples, and there are certainly man more but it all comes down to this: Are you generally responsive, or reactive. Do you feel like you have the full agency to be totally, radically, and unapologetically authentic?
If you value Attachment over Authenticity to the extent that you are constantly sacrificing your wellbeing for the sake of others or perceived safety, it’s likely you experienced little-t Trauma. These behavioral patterns are formed when, as a child, you were prevented from being Authentic.
Little-t Trauma is what occurs when those responsible for your upbringing are emotionally unintelligent.
When they say things like:
“stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
“if you keep being upset mom and dad will fight.”
“You think you’ve got it hard? You don’t know what hard is.”
“Stop laughing in this house”
The constant and repetitive devaluing of your emotional experience, results in you learning at a nervous system level to heavily suppress and repress your authentic experience.
You then become an adult who filters every experience through a lens of conformity and masking to maintain and protect yourself.
Thus, you become an adult who doesn’t know what they want, or - if you do know what you want - you have no idea how to pursue it.
Thus this becomes normal, the habits you develop as a child to survive that environment, then becomes personality, and those personality traits - depending on how destructive - then become mental illnesses.
Here is an edgy truth my love, until you learn how to rewire your brain and heal the trauma by shifting beyond the intellectualization of your experience and into the embodiment of wellness you will not be able step out of perpetual reactivity.
A Practice to Implement TODAY
Trauma can be incredibly normalized in your nervous system, to the point that you may not even be aware of how reactive you are.
In fact, when you spend the entirety of your life in reactivity, it can be difficult to discern between healthy choices and uhealthy ones.
With that in mind, a powerful practice you can begin implementing today is familiarizing yourself with contentment.
While Trauma can unsettle you and keep you in a state of hypervigilance, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn for extended periods of time there are still moments of levity and rest in the chaos.
Try engaging with this practice for an hour this week and see how it works for you! From there see if you can start engaging with it once a week, then twice, then three times, and so on until you are doing so daily.
NORMALIZING CONTENTMENT
Pick an activity that you love doing that is incredibly soothing for you.
The activity can’t be something that you do as a coping mechanism (so if you wind down after a stressful day with binge watching Netflix pick something else)
When engaging with this activity, take a moment to ground in the five senses
What do you see?
What do you hear?
What do you smell?
What do you taste?
How do you feel? (This is most important!)
Drop deeply into the feeling of contentment. Move beyond the intellectual and see if you can assign textures to the experience!
i.e. My chest feels expansive, my forehead is tingling, my body feels warm, etc.
Journal about this experience
Try engaging with this practice for an hour this week and see how it works for you! From there see if you can start engaging with it once a week, then twice, then three times, and so on until you are doing so daily.
IN CONCLUSION
In this week’s blog we covered:
Trauma, and how it manifests
The two types of Trauma
Big-T Trauma
Little-t trauma
A practice to take home with you
Try engaging with this practice for an hour this week and see how it works for you! From there see if you can start engaging with it once a week, then twice, then three times, and so on until you are doing so daily
If this blog served you please shoot me an email and let me know! Or take a screencap and tag me @JemarcAxinto on Instagram!
Also, if you are available on March 16th, 2024. I am hosting a Donate what you can Master Class called: Become Your Own Safe Space!
Everyone who gets a ticket will gain access to the playback video until March 24th!
