Trauma can be a tough topic to approach, but it’s one we must face when it comes to learning how to truly tap into the power of manifestation. If no matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to break past patterns and create the change in your life that you desire, oftentimes there is trauma affecting manifestations.
Sudden, unexpected, horrific or repeated types of negative incidents in life can all lead to the development of trauma.
Many people think of trauma as something that causes immediate changes in a person’s level of comfort, ability to feel safe, and constant feelings of fear or anxiety in specific situations or locations.
All of these can be true, but trauma and its effects are not all that easy to pinpoint. For some people, the effects of trauma may not occur for weeks after the event, and they may build gradually over time if the trauma is the chronic type of repeated stress such as living in a chaotic or unsafe environment or dealing with bullying or abuse.
Besides the obvious reactions to fear, stress and atypical negative events in life, it is also essential to be aware of three other lesser-known symptoms of trauma.
Love addiction is not a psychological diagnosis, but that does not mean people cannot become addicted to being in a relationship. Most people know at least one person that is constantly getting into the same bad relationships with the same abusive, narcissistic, or otherwise emotionally unavailable type of partner.
Why some people develop love addiction can be tied to their early relationships in life. This includes their relationship with their primary caregivers in early childhood. For most children, this is a mother or father, but it can be any member of the family or any caregiver that assumes the role of the caregiver for the child.
Signs of Love Addiction
There are some patterns that are more likely to be present in adults with love addiction. These include:
When people experience traumatic events in their lives, it often leaves them suffering from lingering effects. The collapse of a condominium in Surfside, Fla., the isolation and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the countless personal traumas people experience every day can leave long-lasting emotional wounds.
When traumatic experiences happen, it can be hard for us to move on. If we don’t properly process the emotions that come with trauma, it can feel like we’re reliving those feelings every day. This can prevent us from feeling happiness, developing deep relationships, and trusting others.
We believe that everything has an energetic vibration, from our physical bodies to our emotions. When emotions and experiences aren’t processed properly, their energies can become stuck in the body forming Trapped Emotions. These energetic imbalances may cause physical discomfort, emotional distress, and relationship problems that can block us from living life to the fullest.
Energy healing techniques, creative expression, mindfulness, self-care, and time can all help people heal from traumatic experiences. Here are some methods for coping with and working through unresolved emotions.
I just returned home from leading a healing retreat in Sedona, Arizona. While I was traveling, baby quail hatched just outside my home. During my unpacking, I observed the parent quail teaching each fluffy little bird about the world. I wondered if the lessons are focused only on survival. My thoughts expanded. How often do we humans practice sharing only survival tips, because of past ancestral experiences?
Generational trauma can happen when a traumatic event of our ancestors affects the following generations. A great example would be looking at The Great Depression. Many of the survivors of this very challenging time frame, raised their children with thoughts of lack and scarcity. The Great Depression was a collective experience that was felt by many generations.
Trauma is the emotional wound that certain experiences can leave behind. As many of you know the effects of trauma can linger for years after the initial experience that caused it has been over.
It leaves behind Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, along with the tendency to project the pain of the experience on to our current situations. It essentially keeps us stuck in our past in a way that is negative and unproductive.
It thwarts our personal growth and can come in the way of the healthiness in our relationships. This includes both personal or business relationships.
It creates addiction and insurmountable substance abuse. The lives that trauma has claimed are countless.
There are different levels of trauma. Some of it is so violent and devastating that there’s really no human way possible to avoid accumulating it. i.e. creating it and storing it in your body on an emotional level. It is my experience that these traumas are able to be healed. It can take years of cellular, energetic clearing, depending on the person.
Most of us have at one time or another been ‘triggered.’ A trigger is an event, situation or interaction with a person or group of people that activates the fight, flight or freeze stress response. A trigger is usually related to a past event, interaction or situation that was very painful or traumatic
One of the eventual results of practicing Inner Bonding is that, over time, we develop a strong loving adult self – capable of being aware of when we are triggered, rather than acting unconsciously in response to a trigger. Our consciousness of when we are triggered gives us the choice to act in rather than act out.
When we act out in response to a trigger, we do what we naturally do when the stress response is activated: we get angry, blaming, agitated, impatient, annoyed or irritated, or we shut down, withdraw, numb out, go away or disassociate. These are the natural actions of the wounded self during a threat to survival.
I write one page at a time, with only one to five words per line. The structure can look like poetry but has more to do with the physical limitations of a handwritten page and my desire to emphasize multiple meanings. My Page poems are a combination of sketch pad and journal.
The history and method of my writing process can be found in my article How I Wrote Three Thousand Pages Without Trying
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"The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply." Kahlil Gibran
I like to limit my writings to one page with one idea, but my favorite achievement is to distill short meaningful sayings. I have selected a few quotes from my 2014 volumes for you to savor here. Try having three or four breaths between reading each quote to contemplate and expand the meaning to yourself.
How do you generally react when another is being unloving? How do you wish you could respond?
“When Eddie blames me, I react so fast, before I have a chance to get my loving adult onboard. I’m explaining and defending before I can even take a breath,” Lori told me in one of our sessions. I knew exactly what she was talking about, as I had struggled with this same challenge for years.
Most of us learned early in our lives to react to any kind of rejection – blame, anger, withdrawal, judgment, criticism, or being ignored – with some form of reactive behavior. I had learned as a child and adolescent to react to any form of rejection by explaining, defending, crying, blaming back, getting angry, complaining or giving myself up. Even today, if I’m overly tired, I might go right back to these protective, controlling behaviors.
“Your core wounding is separation from self-love, which results in deep feelings of unworthiness. The healing of that wounding is a journey back to your Essential Self..“
The details are inconsequential. in fact, you may not even remember what happened. What is important is that there was some pivotal juncture in your formative years when you first realized that your Essential Self did not fit into the conditioning of the world into which you were born. It was a moment of emotional torment and upheaval, imprinted on your being like a vibrational energetic tattoo. You were not safe.
Simultaneously with that event, a deep sense of unworthiness entered your vibrational sphere and became cemented in place by shame and guilt.
This was the week when it really dawned on me that life is never going back to “normal.” Well, at least it won’t be the normal we knew just a few short weeks ago.
It wasn’t any one thing that made me come to this realization. Let’s just say there were enough different things this week that brought me to this place. The rise of infections. The doomsday predictions that the worst is yet to come. The pictures of makeshift hospitals and funeral homes. The new recommendations to wear face masks if you go out of your house. The rise of domestic abuse cases. And the startling number of 10 million new unemployment claims!
In the last few weeks alone, 10 million people in the U.S. have filed for unemployment benefits. Ten million individuals. Ten million of our neighbors, our friends, our fellow families. It seemed like almost every conversation I had this week involved heartache and loss. The loss of a job, the loss of a business, the loss of a dream, the loss of a friend. And in my own family, the loss of a child and grandchild.
Little experiences are often overlooked. It surprises me how tiny observations can have profound meaning.
It was Wednesday morning, I pulled into a preschool parking lot to perform a children’s concert.
While unloading my car, a mom arrived with a young boy probably three years old. He had a super ball that bounced out of his hand and into the road. The mom grabbed his arm to keep him from running into the busy street.
I did not expect to hear him make the same exact sound my sisters made when they learned my dad died. It was an unmistakable death wail, spontaneous and deep from one’s soul.
What I call “Super ball moments” are brief experiences of trauma. What we associate about the trauma is more dangerous than the pain itself. There can be lifelong consequences when we decide to connect beliefs of what the situation means to our identity.
There are countless reactions that could come from this super ball experience.
Take a deep breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Just breathe. Those three phrases are ones we’ve all heard before throughout our lives, and with good reason. Breathing is not just the way take in oxygen to keep living, it is also one of the most powerful tools we have for dealing with negative energy. However, there’s a big difference between the negative energy we experience throughout our day and deep-seated emotional or psychological trauma.
Trauma can occur from any number of things that we experience throughout our lives. According to teachtrauma.com, the most common types of trauma are the following:
There are some basic symptoms of trauma that you may be able to notice. People who have experienced trauma may appear shaken or disoriented, and may not respond to conversation in a normal way. They may also appear withdrawn or not fully present in the moment, even when speaking.
Sometimes you’re the windshield;
sometimes you’re the bug….
Sometimes you’re the Louisville slugger;
sometimes you’re the ball.”
—Mary Chapin Carpenter
Life has a way of smacking us down, hard, sometimes repeatedly, when we least expect it. Things can be going along smoothly, and then out of the blue: wham! You are knocked off your feet by a sudden turn of events or twist of fate. It can be a minor passing upset or a major trauma. Life doesn’t tell you ahead of time what’s coming up around the next corner. Each day can be really wonder-full or really challenging. This is how I would describe my life over the past year.
Many people find it hard to move on when they lose a spouse or a partner. While some feel guilty, others think they’re cheating on the person who has passed. And then there are others who say they don’t deserve to be happy and choose to go through the rest of their life alone.
Those on the Other-Side don’t want us to linger in pain or be alone. They know that as humans, we need to touch and to be touched, to hold and be held, and above all that, we’re meant to love and to be loved. There’s never any judgment from them when it comes to affairs of the heart. When you feel you cannot get out of bed because of your sadness, it is them who gently push you forward.
To cope with the loss of your life partner, here’s the best advice I can give you: Your loved ones wouldn’t want you to suffer alone, so I recommend that you talk to someone about your feelings, be it a close friend or a professional therapist. It doesn’t help if you shut yourself off from those who were part of your life when you were a couple.
What do you do when the bottom falls out?
The Practice:
Take heart.
Why?
It takes heart to live in even ordinary times.
By “taking heart,” I mean several related things:
When you take heart, you’re more able to deal with challenges like aging, illness, trauma, or conflicts with others. You’re also more able to take advantage of opportunities with confidence and grit.
Additionally, it takes heart to live in, live with, and live beyond times that are really hard. Your personal hard time might be bad news about your health, the death of a parent, or betrayal by others. Or it could be related to changes in your country and world, and your concerns about their effects on others and yourself; I’ve written about the importance of finding and facing facts at the level of society (feel free to skip it if you don’t want my take on politics).
There are so many examples of honorable people facing great difficulty with dignity, principle, and courage. They did it. We can, too.
Happy almost-Thanksgiving! If you are like me, I'm sure that you cannot believe the holidays are already upon us. What happened to Fall? Although the song says "Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays," despite what we see in Hallmark Channel's Five Night Thanksgiving Movie Event, the fact is that most of us experience a sense of dread as we envision our upcoming holiday gatherings. Feelings of resistance, anxiety, and resignation start to bubble up as we anticipate the drama and dis-ease that will undoubtedly accompany the candied yams and pumpkin pie. As we contemplate the upcoming holiday, our minds naturally drift back to Thanksgivings past and we automatically become stressed out thinking about our family dynamic and the scenarios that consistently cause trauma and trepidation before we get to and/or around the Thanksgiving table. Any hope of warm and fuzzy feelings turn cold and cautious as we contemplate situations like:
The other day, I was sitting at lunch with my kids as they started to discuss the Texas shooting and started to wonder why the news had moved on from this story so quickly.
My son said, “Wow, that Texas story was wild. Why aren’t more people talking about that? Isn’t it weird that it just came and went?”
I thought about that. Stories used to stop us all cold in our tracks. Now, they just seem to come and go. Moments that used to bring a collective sense of grief—a collective sense of oneness—now seem to come and go without landing.
Hurricanes like Irma, Maria, and Harvey embody this extreme aspect of Shiva. Monumental raging winds and rising water completely obliterate the old, often leaving thousands homeless and grieving the deaths of friends and family. In the aftermath, something new is eventually created, but loss of home and loss of life are not easily assimilated or accepted. Those affected may experience emotional trauma as well as financial burdens. These human crises break our hearts. How do we face life at times like these?
