When I sit in my ‘man cave’ (our office) I feel like I’m in my safe place and I can close the door and leave the world outside. But that’s not really true, I believe it creeps in under the door and through the cracks. But it’s in my ‘man cave’ that I find refuge, strength and distraction; my greatest source of therapy. For it’s here I can read, write my blogs, paint and just mediate or pray. Oh yah, I forgot, and I become ‘Walter on da line’. All of these various activities have helped so much in helping me escape the darkness or that feeling of knowing that something is just not right. That nagging, gut wrenching feeling of uneasiness. Words really cannot describe how it really feels.
As I sit here in the early hours of the morning, there’s a deafening silence. I’m not comfortable with silence, it scares me, afraid of what thoughts I might hear. So I grab my pencil and start writing, I’ve needed to write but didn’t know what to say or where to start. You would think I have said everything I needed to say by now. But everyday brings new challenges, something new that triggers my brain to want to write about. Mental illness certainly has given me lots to share and the topics are endless.
Today I want to talk about trauma and how it affects your life, how we deal with it and how someone with a mental illness, especially depression and anxiety, can cope with it and survive. Trauma is defined as a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. Over my lifetime I have encountered many traumatizing experiences, all of which triggered my depression and anxiety disorder. So dealing with trauma in your life, while at the same time living with a mental illness, hits you with a double whammy. You are fighting two battles at the same time, which makes it even more distressing.
I’m going to be honest with you, there really aren’t any concrete answers. There’s no one thing that I can say to you that will make the pain go away, except time and that just deadens it for a while. There’s a lot of truth to the phrase, ‘time heals all wounds’. But I always say, ‘they leave such ugly scars’. Especially when it comes to trauma; we have to take just one day at a time and with each day there will come some healing.
I am not a trained professional, nor do I claim to be; but I have lived and survived through many traumatic experiences in my life.
I believe the first step is to talk to someone; whether that being a professional therapist, councillor, trusted friend or partner. Knowing that you are not alone and you have support is certainly your first step on your journey to healing.
We also have to accept that bad things happen to good people. It’s a part of life that we all will have to deal with at some time or another. I compare my life to a boat on the ocean. There are some days when we have a beautiful calm but then there are other days when we are in the midst of the raging seas. But we have to remember, storms don’t last forever; we just need to ride out the storm and eventually (sometimes longer then others) the storm will cease and the calm will come again.
If our trauma was caused by someone else; we have to forgive, we must ‘love your enemy’. Now that doesn’t happen overnight. Ecclesiastes says, ‘there’s a time to love and a time to hate’. Right now we may be at the hating stage, but with time we can learn to love again and let go of the anger. Holding on to anger and hate only hurts ourselves, so there are and were many times when I had to let it go and free myself and learn to forgive.
We also need to recognize our strength. Life may at times knock us down but we have to get up again. I believe experiencing painful events and trauma in our lives makes us more resilient. When we see that we have already survived, we know we can make it through again. We just have to keep getting up, never stay down.
Experiencing trauma in our lives can also give us greater compassion for other trauma survivors. We can relate on a new level because we ‘get it’. And relating to others can further provide a source of strength. It certainly gives us a sense of purpose in life when we know we are helping others and bringing some good into an already hurting world.
So if and when we do experience trauma in our lives, we can work through it and with time, will find healing and the hurt won’t hurt so bad. I hope I have encouraged you today and have given you some food for thought. We are stronger then we think, even in the roughest seas.
