Understanding Your Trauma

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – sounds so distant when you read it like this, doesn’t it? Like some clinical thing that other people experience?

If you were to ask me about PTSD before my loss, I would have naively told you it’s something soldiers bring home from war. People who have witnessed or lived through horrific events we can’t even imagine. 

Little did I know that it’s not only war that can wipe away life as you know it… stealing you from yourself in a single moment.

We all experience trauma, and it leaves its marks in ways big and small. But we’re not used to talking about it. We’re not educated on what traumatic responses look like in “normal people,” so we start to believe that our aches and pains, our failing memory, or other ailments are just “things that happen” as we age.

Trauma affects us all in ways we can’t always see or name.

And until we start doing the work to better understand its impact collectively, it will continue to steal so many from themselves, their lives, their work, and their relationships.

Trauma and PTSD can be healed, though it can take time and painstaking patience. But not if we don’t understand it. Not if we’re not able to name it in our day-to-day and all the microscopic ways it’s influencing our life, decisions, relationships, and results.

Do your healing and growth work.
Ask questions when something doesn’t feel right.
Don’t settle for the status quo around things that don’t feel good.
Get help and support from someone who understands trauma.

We all have it, and we all need to begin the work to heal it.