Trauma can be emotional, too
Everyone has experienced trauma in their lives. The word trauma usually invokes images of disastrous auto accidents, physical injury, and other life threatening experiences. Dr. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery wrote, “Traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence or death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe. The common denominator of trauma is a feeling of intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and a threat to annihilation.” Another definition of Trauma is an event or experience that causes threats to our emotional well-being.
Don Miguel Ruiz uses the following analogy in his book, The Mastery of Love. Imagine that you lived in a world where everyone had a skin condition wherein wounds covered their entire bodies. The wounds were extremely painful. But because everyone had them, the world considered this to be a normal condition. The medical books touted this skin disease as normal. Babies would be born into the world without the skin condition, but by the time they were three or four, the wounds began to appear. By the time they became teenagers, they were covered with wounds. Everyone accepted this as normal.
The wounds were extremely painful if touched. The people would go to great lengths to protect their wounds. If somebody accidentally touched another person's wound, emotions of anger mingled with pain immediately would arise and the person may react by immediately touching the other person's wound or running away.
Yet, these people in this other world had a problem. They longed for companionship and close relationships. They would enter into friendships, romantic relationships, and create families to meet their needs. The problem was that because everyone had this skin condition, it was extremely difficult to get close to the other person, because each time, wounds would be touched and the pain would be significant. And so, even in relationships, these people would find ways to protect their wounds. Some would build walls, some would run and hide, some would inflict pain by touching other people's wounds so that nobody could get close enough to touch their own wounds.
This analogy is powerful because it describes how we live. Although we don't have a physical skin condition, each one of us has emotional wounds. Some wounds are small; some wounds are large and infected. As in the analogy, these wounds began to be created beginning at a young age and grew larger with every wounding experience. Each emotional trauma creating feelings of victimization, helplessness, terror, or loss of control.
As in the analogy, we find ways to protect ourselves. Some of us will build emotional walls to keep people out, some of us will pretend that we are fine - but deep inside fear that someone will find out that we are not, some of us will find various addictive ways to cloak the pain. The methods for dealing with the wounds are as numerous as there are people on the planet.
Even so, we as humans have intense feelings of wanting to belong, to be accepted, and to be loved. We create relationships with others and connect in meaningful ways. Yet, even during these times of connection, we end up touching each other's wounds. Sometimes intentionally, but mostly unintentionally, we say or do things that touch another's wound.
These wounds and our efforts to build barriers of protection affect our marriages, our work relationships, our friendships, and our family relationships. When bad things happen to us now, these situations send daggers into our already infected wounds. It can be devastatingly painful and cause a range of powerful emotions that lead us to behave in ways we otherwise would not.
There is hope. Just as our bodies have the powerful capacity to heal from physical injury, so do our hearts have the ability to heal from the emotional wounds. It is possible to free ourselves from the walls and bonds that have weighed us down. It is possible to place balm on the wounds and heal from them completely.
The process is not unlike the way a surgeon cleans out an infected wound. The surgeon must go into the wound, clean out the infection, even administering antibiotic medication if necessary, and then carefully bandaging the wound - changing the bandages regularly, until the wound has been healed completely. Healing our emotional wounds requires a willingness to explore what is in the wound, taking a look at what triggers may touch the wound, and beginning the process of washing the wound out and carefully bandaging it up until that wound is healed and no longer causes pain.
There are a variety of ways to start the process. An individual can work on their own, with another person or a group of people, or even seek professional assistance. The person can begin to write in a journal about their experiences, read books that help provide insight, or talk with a trusted individual about the emotional wounds and explore what could be done to help those wounds heal. A reminder though, healing does not occur overnight. It takes time and patience and most importantly love. There have been many who have achieved this healing. It is possible.
Troy L. Love, LCSW is an adjunct professor at Arizona Western College and the president of Courageous Journeys Counseling and Consulting Services. He can be reached at 287-3621 or by e-mail at troy.love@azwestern.edu.
