Essence of trauma work

 When we talk about trauma, it is necessary to first ask ourselves what is trauma? This question is easiest answered with examples from real life. The best way I have to share is with my own healing journey. For the longest time, I looked at the word “Trauma” as just something people use when it comes to physical harm. My idea was, "If something does not work the way it should on a physical level, it is then called trauma.” Everything else seemed to be up to ironing out of mistakes with logic. 

 Still, there was something crucial missing, I could not make myself to be the person society wanted me to be. Not good enough, not smart enough, not productive enough, not strong enough. All in all, endless corridors of disappointment and dead ends that shaped my youth and the person I perceived myself to be.

 At one point, I met someone who brought the concept of “Trauma” into my life again. It took me an immensely long time to fully understand what I was being taught over and over again. I found when something sounds logical it is actually not enough to fully take it in and start to live according to that new truth, we actually need a positive experience with that before we take it fully in and see it as part of our new reality. So now, the word “Trauma” had been explained to me in a new way. Essentially, it is not just like a broken leg, trauma has a nature of a different kind. Something much more subtle but powerful, the way we feel is deeply connected to our past experiences. Trauma shapes how we experience our emotions, make decisions, and express our free will, how we love our most beloved ones and love ourselves. The nature of how we even perceive emotions or have access to them depends on this subconscious reaction that happens underneath where the trauma lives. 

 Even after learning all these things about trauma, it took me a while to apply it into my life. If a trigger came up I ran away from it as hard as I could. I focused on something else, tried to think positive, hide my head underneath the sand, disassociated from the feelings and acted as if it was not happening. I tried to make it a logical process so hard but I had failed to be the man I wanted to be in my life. I was ready to give up, I really did give up. Just at that moment of letting go a perfect storm followed. The person who had guided me to understand the deeper meaning of the word “Trauma” encouraged me to face these feelings head on without escaping them. This time I did not find a way to run away from what I felt, instead I met it head on. I asked from these feelings: What is it that I feel? Why is this fear there? How can I save this part of me that feels this way? I gave this set of feeling a imaginary body and it took on a personality and story, it started to speak to me. This process made it possible for me to also give the child version within me what it needed to make it feel safe again, to make it feel connected with the surrounding world and people in it.

 The first time I went through that process it felt to me absolutely unnatural. I didn't even recognize the feeling itself, I had no vocabulary to connect feeling with how they are expressed in words. Is it anger? Is this feeling something else? I had never taken time to reflect these signs. It was an absolute mess to unpack. I thought I was going to die if I met the seemingly endless intensity in myself, but instead the calmness followed. Once I met the needs my internal part had been expressing to me my whole life but I hadn't been there to listen I was able to solidify something new within me. 

 I decided to become a caretaker of my own feelings. Doing this reshaped the person I perceived myself to be, I started to change for the better. Repeating this act of meeting my inner conflict head on every day for years, I unraveled the gifts left for me by many previous generations of my family and the society I lived in. Now after years of trauma work I would like to share with you what has changed for me and what is the reward of that change.

 It came out that healing means a complete change of situation.  A change on a physical level, mental level and emotional level. In order to make this change last we need to give up something to gain something else instead. On a physical level it can be a partner who gaslights us or on a emotional level it can be giving up on logic or state of mind that wants to preserve itself. This change however is easier said than done.

 Our emotions are guiding us to act in different ways. Which in turn over the years starts to express itself as thought patterns that support what we feel. This in turn leads us back to making decisions based on our trauma reaction. Our emotions shape the personality we have and how we express that in practice. If we know that emotional reactions are shaped by traumas then we can start to see how changing the way our emotional body reacts to different situations in our life can change fundamentally who we are.

  This is exactly what I did, I started to unravel and change autonomous reactions my emotional body held on to in different situations. That in turn allowed me to start to make different decisions. I did not run into conflict with myself, I did what I wanted to do because it brought me closer to expressing my free will. My decisions started to come from a place of curiosity, interest in life and wanting to fulfill my needs. These decisions came from a different place in me. I did it because I wanted to, not because I would be consumed by fear if I did not do what felt safe to me. I had imagined my emotional body to feel safe in situations that before felt to me like all consuming and inescapable intensity in its many forms. I was finally feeling free of what I had sacrificed and shaped it into a new me, a person who can now feel differently therefore thinks differently and in turn also makes different choices.

 Trauma is something that shapes our reality all around. We see in every decision, in food we eat, in a morning routine, the way we sleep, the way we walk and talk. In order to heal from trauma we need to face something unimaginable. The 'death' of who we are. This is something be aware of before we dig deeply into trauma work, we must ask ourselves: Am I ready to let go of who I am? I'm not speaking only about personality, I'm talking about everything in its entirety until only memory remains of the person that was once there. This is where many people get stuck when they start their healing journey, they want the change without the change. Or they want the luxury of choosing to replace certain parts of their life and leave the rest as it is. This “Ego” will hold on to old patterns with kicking and screaming until it is sacrificed to become new. It's an internal war that is expressed in the job someone holds onto. A company they keep. It's the thought patterns that keep thinking the same old ways that hold us back in healing. All of this most likely needs to change in order to become this new expression of self. This is the price we need to pay to become free of automatic reactions that our trauma body expresses through our emotions. In essence, this is what trauma work is and what one needs to go through to change life and its expressions. To heal from trauma.

Ott Rõngas
06.03.2024