The Importance of Traumas

 

There are two avenues of approach on how and why traumas that occur in our lives are not only necessary but very important to the outcome of what many seek.  You can accept the spiritual one or the pragmatic one but if you are truly daring, you can accept that both are true because one does not exist alone and needs the other to be complete.  Here let me try to explain.

From the stage of infancy to the age of eleven (11), is the time span where parents have to educate their children, instill proper manners and behaviors, and lay out options for their children in as many situations as they can think of so that if that situation happens, our children will react to it without thinking and avoid that Freeze, flight, or fight mode we enter when faced with something that we have never encountered before.

At the age of twelve (12) to twenty-five (25) is our exploration stage and here we are trying out the skills taught by our parents, combined with those from society, and the examples those most influential in our lives set.  We watched them closely and mimicked their ways early, so now it’s test time to see what really works and what really doesn’t.  This exploration stage will be what we will capture as our beliefs, ideas, and principles.  We will find out what skills taught by those before were right or wrong.

This is where traumas come in and is the best test as whether your existing coping skills are adequate for these times or do your need to find new ones.  Traumas forces us to deal with those things that we may not wish to deal with and often times are not aware of their existence until it happens.   Without options to consider when a trauma happens, we immediately go to the only coping skill we have which is often the freeze, flight, or fight response.  Had we been given options or even created our own, we would have operated exactly in that fashion as if it was so natural.

After the trauma, we then begin to search for the “why” and without prior options or any input from a influential person, we struggle.  Every single person born will suffer trauma, this fact is unavoidable.  So it is strongly suggested that each time your hear about a situation, your ask yourself, what would your do in the same situation and then work out several different ways in your mind.  When your fail to do this your now open yourself up to not control your trauma but allow that trauma to control you.

Traumas offer us all only two options.  Your can allow it to keep your as a victim or your can become a survivor.  A victim is someone who uses the fact that this particular trauma happened to them and curry favor in any way shape or form.  They see the world as owning them for putting them through that trauma and soiling their innocence. A victim will dedicate the remainder of his or her days to this hell we call life, trying to make everyone that they come across pay for this crime against them. A victim will ultimately continue repeating these traumas in one way or another and remain mired in the mud with then, never moving forward. 

A survivor takes the lesson of this trauma, finds ways to prevent a repeat of it and uses every single piece of it to make better choices and the fuel to continue to move forward. A survivor finds what part that they played in the movie, takes full responsibility for the role that they had, holds others accountable for the parts that they played and carries the burden of the choices that they made and the results from them.  A survivor quickly and often shares what they have learned with others who may be about to or are currently going through that same trauma.  A survivor teaches not to convince but to share and can respect another person and respect themselves enough to allow those individuals to choose for themselves.

Traumas are life lessons that are placed upon your when you are ignorant of the pain and suffering of others.  When your refuse to see that a trauma is a blessing to help your become a much better version of ourselves.  Enter the spiritual side.  We were all made in the image of God, God is an angle, and we already have our wings.  We know this because we can walk into any business and find strangers staring at us like they know us, they do.  Our task here in this hell I call life is to demonstrate to God that we can handle the halo that goes with the wings and that we will never allow that halo to make us prideful and think as the other angel did, that he was a better ruler over humanity than God.  Any idea who that other angel was? Here’s a guess he has used the name Lucifer.  Evil is a master of disguises, wears many masks, and hides in the dark but goodness only has one which is the light.  Trauma gives us a choice of either staying in the dark or stepping out into the light.  The choice is ours and ours alone, no one can make it for us, no one can live it for us, and no one can be held accountable for it.