How Overcoming Past Trauma Can Help You Achieve Future Dreams Trauma. For most people, this is a very uncomfortable word. Even if you're not consciously thinking of a traumatic experience from your past, remnants of it may come out in other ways throughout your daily life. This can be in the form of negative thoughts, emotional outbursts, and nightmares. If you've experienced trauma that you have not dealt with or healed from, it may be interfering with your ability to achieve your goals. You're not alone. Millions of people have been through traumatic experiences. Those experiences don't define who you are as a person, but, the way you think about them, heal from them, and grow from them certainly does. Although it may be difficult to face, overcoming past trauma can be the final key you need to …show more content…
Ask yourself this: “What could I stop doing, do less of, more of, continue doing, and start doing to achieve my goals?” Oftentimes, trauma survivors find themselves stuck in a loop of repeated trauma. In other words, a person who survived an abusive childhood may bounce from abusive relationship to abusive relationship. Think about your past experiences and identify any patterns you might see. Once you do this, you'll more easily identify what you can stop or start doing to avoid those familiar pitfalls in the future. Who Inspires Me the Most (And What Can You Learn From Them?) Now, think about someone who inspires you. For example, someone like life coach Tony Robbins. What is it about them that you admire? What do they do to overcome life's difficulties? Watch their videos or read their books and see how they figured things out. Remember, they were once in a similar situation to the one you're in right now, and they not only overcame the obstacle, they thrived beyond it and turned their suffering into
The “Trauma” is a. It doesn't eke itself out over time. It doesn’t split itself manageably into bite-sized chunks and distribute it equally throughout your life. Trauma is all or nothing. A tsunami wave of destruction. A tornado of unimaginable awfulness that whooshes into your life - just for one key moment - and wreaks such havoc that, in just an instant, your whole world will never be the same again”(Holly Bourne, The Manifesto on How to be Interesting).
All people handle their own tragedies differently and need a different level of support while experiencing their difficulties. While some are able to persevere and accomplish amazing feats of recovery after their struggles, some people are not so lucky and choose to suffer.
Everyone has difficult obstacles in their lives. I have had a few myself and they each have changed me for the better. My most profound experience was being repeatedly molested as a child. I wasn't aware of exactly what was happening to me. I didn't know being touched was wrong. I just knew how disgusting it made me feel, but I didn't tell anyone at the time. I shared this publicly as an adult to help other parents realize that children need to be protected. It was a long journey to reach to the point where I could speak about my experiences with anyone. These experiences from my childhood affected me deeply; however, I have overcome them, learned from them and I have contributed at a higher level because of them.
Memories of a traumatic experience can cause a range of different negative mental health issues. After someone has been through a traumatic experience, the memories attached to the event are not like any other normal memory. Hayasaki describes this when she says, “the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated.” She explains that the reason traumatic memories hold such powerful reactions is that because, during the time of the events in the memory, there were strong emotions connections to the moment while it was being experienced. The feelings left from the memories that have strong emotions behind them can cause severe mental issues. Those emotions from the memories can hold fears that can affect almost every aspect of the person 's life, causing them not to be able to jump back into their daily life routine. PTSD is the biggest mental problem that comes from those types of memories. Lehrer helps proves this by saying, “PTSD memories remain horribly intense, bleeding into the present and ruining the future.” This shows that the unpleasant emotions that a traumatic memory holds can lead to health problems in the future, such as anxiety, addiction, and, of course, PTSD. Unfortunately, that 's not the worst part; there is not yet a way to cure these memories.
“Trauma is used when describing emotionally painful and distressing experiences or situations that can overwhelm a person’s ability to cope” (John A. Rich, Theodore Corbin, & Sandra Bloom, 2008). Trauma could include deaths, violence, verbal and nonverbal words and actions, discrimination, racism etc. Trauma could result in serious long-term effects on a person’s health, mental stability, and physical body. Judith Herman, from Trauma and Recovery, said “Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life” (John A. Rich, Theodore Corbin, & Sandra Bloom, 2008). Trauma does not involve the same experiences for everyone; each individual is unique in that they, and only they, can decide what is traumatic for them.
PTSD is a debilitating mental illness that occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic, dangerous, frightening, or a possibly life-threating occurrence. “It is an anxiety disorder that can interfere with your relationships, your work, and your social life.” (Muscari, pp. 3-7) Trauma affects everyone in different ways. Everyone feels wide ranges of emotions after going through or witnessing a traumatic event, fear, sadness and depression, it can cause changes in your everyday life as in your sleep and eating patterns. Some people experience reoccurring thoughts and nightmares about the event.
Greeson et al. point out that many children in foster care “have histories of recurrent interpersonal trauma perpetuated by caregivers early in life (2010).” They identify this as complex trauma. This may include physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect or domestic violence. This study included 2,251 foster children who were referred for treatment. Of those youth 70.4% reported two or more of the forms of complex trauma abuse, and 11.7% reported all five types. Every child in custody has experienced some form of trauma. At the very least they have been through the traumatic experience of being uprooted from the home they know and placed somewhere new, with people they don’t know. Even if they are being taken from a terrible, abusive environment, that is still their family and they are being torn away. The authors point out that children in custody do not receive the most exhaustive mental health screenings possible, so instead we end up treating the most visible symptoms instead of screening trauma exposure and trauma-related symptoms. Time and resources are inevitably spent treating problems that are actually symptoms secondary to trauma experiences and PTSD.
The weight of constantly listening to difficult, harrowing, and upsetting events in other people’s lives can have negative impacts on therapists, especially for those who are inadequately trained or who have poor coping mechanisms. While most therapists deal with this strain, it is particularly true of those who work consistently work with patients who have experienced trauma. Trauma refers to an individual's exposure to actual or threatened harm, fear of death or injury, or witnessing violence. Common forms of trauma seen in therapy environments are rape, abuse, victims of crimes, accidents, and disasters. Trauma work requires specialized training and support in order to be effective for the clients and to help to deal with, minimize, and
With my past social work experience I understand that trauma can affect many people in different ways. Traumatic life experiences can vary with everyone and their way of coping and reacting. I worked a children services for about two years. I have been able to witness the effects of trauma on a lot of the children I worked with. For example, I had to remove 5 children from their mother. Their mother was using meth at the time leaving the oldest child, who was thirteen years old, taking care of the youngest. The mother was in an abusive relationship with their father. The father was very emotionally abusing by threatening the kids and mother. Removing the children from their mother was a traumatic life experience.
A very interesting case is that of P.K. Philips. She had been diagnosed with PTSD because of the many traumatic events that flooded his life, including; a childhood filled with physical, mental, and sexual abuse, as well as an attack at knifepoint that left her thinking she would die. His mentality changed and she felt safe no where in this world. She was also plagued with terrible nightmares and her rejection for any outside help only delayed her healing. Fear soon engulfed her, “By age 17, I'd suffered my first panic attack. Soon I became unable to leave my apartment for weeks at a time, ending my modeling career abruptly. This just became a way of life.” It was only after she knew she had PTSD, did she take medications that helped her regain her life and now, she had rebuilt her career as an artist and can finally enjoy her life.
The individual’s mind has various methods of protecting the self by identifying a scenario and applying certain defense mechanisms. This part of the mind is called the psyche, which acts as the brain’s defense mechanism when one deals with trauma or sadness. Most often, people do not even realize they are being protected by the psyche, because its job is to make one become unaware of their potential intense feelings. This feeling of unawareness is called dissociation, which Martha Stout refers to in her essay, “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday.” Dissociation isolates memories so that one can function properly without letting their emotions take over. Stout explains that trauma
In our trauma class, we've been discussing how traumatic experiences can impact people long after they're over, and even affect their families for generations (generational trauma). Reading City of Thieves by David Benioff really opened my eyes to how this works, especially among Jewish communities like the one Lev comes from. Lev is a Jewish teenager who experiences incredibly scary and stressful situations during the siege of Leningrad in World War II. Along with Kolya, he is sent on a dangerous mission to find eggs during a time when people around them are dying from starvation and cold. This kind of intense pressure and life-threatening danger is exactly the kind of experience that can lead to long-lasting trauma.
While many individuals struggle to let go of their past experiences, many are still troubled and continue to strive to overcome their fear and
Something that I have learned after overcoming this battle is that life is very unpredictable and it is up to the individual to rise above and choose the right path. This excerpt from the poem “Recovery” by Maya Angelou has given me encouragement and inspiration to move on with my life and become the best person that I can be: “A last love, proper in conclusion, should snip the wings forbidding further flight. But I now reft of that confusion, am lifted up and speeding towards the light.” I live by these words everyday because they motivate me to succeed and overcome the impossible.
Trauma is a psychological reaction to sudden traumatic events and overwhelming issues from outside. Additionally, the exposure to activities that are outside the human’s normal experiences. Traumatic events become external and incorporate into the mind (Bloom, 1999, p. 2). Traumatization happens when the internal and external forces do not appropriately cope with the external threat. Furthermore, trauma causes problems because the client’s mind and body react in a different way and their response to social groups. The symptoms of trauma relate to irritability, intrusive thoughts, panic and anxiety, dissociation and trance-like states, and self-injurious behaviors (Bloom, 1999, p. 2). Childhood trauma happens when they live in fear for the lives of someone they love (Bloom, 1999, p. 2). Judith Herman’s trauma theory states that the idea of repressed memories relates to unconscious behavior. These repressed behaviors include those inhibited behaviors relate to memories of childhood abuse. From McNally’s point of view memories of trauma cannot be repressed especially those that are more violent (Suleiman, 2008, p. 279). In addition, one of the theories used to dealing with trauma includes the coping theory. With situations, people tend to use problem-solving and emotion-focused coping. Emotion-focused coping happens when people are dealing with stressors. When the stressors become more