Trauma, trans/nb, and recovery

[Trinity]

Most of us have "trauma".  Not to be confused with Drama.  Though trauma can cause drama.

And then being trans/nb, there are traumas that have been caused directly because of that.

And then there are also traumas that are outside of that.

Childhood traumas can be the worst.  Adult ones, in my case, are not as bad.  Repeating ones, where wounds are reopened by repeated blows, are devastating.  Those for me are the hardest ones.

I try to reduce traumas that are caused by repeated blows.  I do this by establishing boundaries, what I will watch, what I will not watch, what I will talk about, what I will not discuss.

Self defence then becomes the first step.

Recognizing that I may not have been the cause of the childhood trauma is another.   And if I did, then forgiving myself, because I didn't really know better.

But in my late teens and early 20's, my way of dealing with trauma was extreme.  Turning off the feelings.  Sex and drugs and booze, in life threatening amounts.

Later, once sober, I had to feel the feelings and go through them, go through the whole process of anger denial fear negotiating and acceptance, a greif process.

But it goes way deeper than that.  Forgiving myself for not defending myself, not defending what I call sh'e, or really they, was so important to finding some peace and freedom.

And again, I did not know how to defend h'er.  I did learn, but I did it wrong, I tried to bury h'er, kill h'er, tried to man up, and the result is in the now.  I can be quite fierce to be honest. 

But that fierceness was not directed to protecting h'er, it was to something else, hiding her or more, going after the ones that caused harm.

Now, it is more protective, and it includes others that need to be protected as well.  And it especially is directed at the thought processes and doctrines that caused the deepest wounds, the Matrix and the agents of the Matrix, who can be deadly and don't even know they are, they are blind.

They cannot see with the heart.

Seeing with the heart, is everything.

So, for me, how do I recover from trauma?

Well, just said it, and live in the now, and help others.

Where is recovery, for you?  And are you afraid to feel and then heal?  Is that even a necessary process, to go through the feelings to the other side, if we had shut them down?

[nyx]

I find it often hard to define which events in my life are or are not sources of trauma. Maybe because I never experienced the 'big ones'... It is more like that: the story of my life is full of bad things that are individually too small to do a great amount of harm, but together, they are so many that it might explain my low self-esteem and my depression, my anxiety, etc. It just happens that when I start thinking about some events of my past, it induces strong negative emotions in a way that makes it sometimes unbearable.
If I were to make a list of those events, this post would get way too long. I think I need therapy to sort this out because I realize it is these 'mini-traumas' that make me lose track again and again. I spend days crying, having massive physical pain from my hardened muscles, sometimes panic attacks etc, and it makes my everyday life quite hard to manage.
I think for recovery, I first need to accept these things as facts. Most of the time, I'm in denial because I think there is no trauma and no reason for me to be upset. Like with wounds, you first have to understand that the pain comes from the wound and then treat the wound so it can heal.

[Ativan Prescribed]

If you are seeing a therapist, it makes total sense to make a list in order of what you think of as the little things, if its a negative, it isn't just some little thing if it impacts you.
I have had some very wild experiences and mostly because I have little fear of most things, so stuff like massive injury is a list in itself, near death experience, death around me in some situations, like violent deaths.
But I deal with those because I have to deal with them, if I let them go I know its going to come back and bite me in the ass.
This makes it easier for a lot of the little things to be seen as just that, little things and in the past where it isn't a real factor, while I think of them as learning experience mostly, I still fall into those times of rumination about them.
That is the killer with past experiences, if we can't logically move past them and emotionally move past them, we end up ruminating in that endless cycle that just forces reliving it over and over.
But I also am a fierce fighter when it comes to most things, and thats a result of bad experiences that were trauma and I beat them to death emotionally and spiritually, and of course logic, they are experiences that deal with traumatic experience but don't hold trama over me any longer.
I mentally treat them as my enemy and kill them off with whatever it takes, I see it in my minds eye and kill it, I beat the shit out of it, I take no prisoners, I rule my self in the past, the past doesn't rule me, the past doesn't define me, my ability to define my past defines me.
What we generally see of ourselves in the past is our frame of reference for that moment in time, if it was a bad experience and traumatic of one sort or another, we tend to use that same reference that we were in at the time, take yourself out of it and see it for what it was, it is usually someone else's fault or doing, it was something that was not preventable because of this or that, but rarely do we see it as our fault if all the aspects of that moment are seen from all angles, looking back we tend to see the world revolve around us, when it is really that we just happened to be there in that moment.
Your actions at the time can range from doing something that causes you to be sucked into whatever it was or its someone else placing you there, you have to see it from all perspectives to know what the real truth of the moment was, and then flip it off and tell yourself you are not the problem, the moment was the problem.
Have you ever told someone about that shitty thing you did to them way back when and they look at you with a blank stare because they don't remember it like that if at all? Its you dragging the guilt around for years that is the damage, not that moment, give yourself a break and realize that its all just moments in time and that you can't hold the problems you were thrown into as being your fault, its everyone in that moment, not just you, everyone there is just as much a part of it all,.. and in the end, does it effect everyone else as well? Stop beating on yourself, you did the best you could with what you had at the time, it isn't like you had intentions and thats the thing, even intentional, you have to ask yourself what led up to that, all the evils in the world are seldom one person fault, its everyone who even just stopped and stared, they could have said something.
Look at traumatic events as you were there and you had your part in it, but that doesn't mean you have to feel guilty over it, stop looking at things as this negative event and look instead at the learning experience it was.
Dare to fight back against what you perceive as being slighted in the past, is that slight what led your life to this point or your reaction to it, you have to be able to just tell yourself fuck it and time to move on for most everything from those moments that make up the past you don't live in anymore.
I like this bit of advice someone gave to someone else years ago when asked why things don't seem to bother them like they would most people.
In view of my impending death, I don't have time for crappy thoughts.
The point is that you should be thinking and doing about your future and leave the past in the past, what little of it that has an actual effect on your future is very very little, unless you let it rule your future going forward, don't let the past be an anchor that keeps you from being excellent.