Unpacking Trauma
Trauma can be one main event or the accumulation of smaller less pronounced events. Examples: car accident, sexual assault, divorce, bullied, neglect, abuse, conflict. People ask me when they should start to unpack their trauma(s)? My response is, when you feel ready, when you feel safe and have a foundation to start the work.
Unpacking trauma is not a linear exercise, it will be one that will cause responses in you, and sometimes it may feel as if you are going backwards in the process versus forward. This has a lot to do with the fact that up until you start to work with a counsellor for instance or another support, you were living in survival mode, and it helped you to get through hard parts of life. Characteristics of survival mode, can be blocking, numbing out, pushing away thoughts, memories or ignoring unhealthy behaviours. Therefore, once you start the unpacking process, feelings, emotions, and behaviours will start to surface. This can be an uncomfortable space to be in, it may cause your mind to wander when working, you may feel disconnected from people, you may have stronger emotional responses such as crying, irritability, sadness, anger. This is all normal and a healthy part of moving through and towards understanding your trauma and starting to heal.
Healing from any event in our life, is not about unpacking the event and than never looking at it again. It’s not about doing the work and that event will never show up again in life. That would be compartmentalizing yourself from the event. The event happened to you, that cannot change. How it continues to impact you, and how it shows up in your life, that is what you get to shape and change. It is about being able to unpack the symptoms from the event, know that they are a part of you and by looking at them, you gain control and power over where what you want to do with them.
Just as you would start to unpack boxes from a move. You look at each item and decide where you want to place it, some you put back in the box, some you put out for everyone to see and others you donate, as they are no longer something you need or want in your life. Unpacking trauma is similar, you decide what is serving you and what needs to be looked at more closely. Not every event has to be unpacked, just the one(s) that keep showing up in dysfunctional or distressing ways, in your life.
