The Voice Of Trauma | The Wisdom Podcast | S3 E33

In this episode The WISDOM podcast we look to the importance of giving trauma a voice; of acknowledging the hurt that has been caused to you by another and to give a compassionate and honourable voice to help others heal what trauma you have caused.

“When you acknowledge your mistakes ~ particularly mistakes in which you have caused harm to another whether intentionally or unintentionally, you hold the power to help heal the relationship and the experience of another.

Please join me!

Transcript

In this episode,

We look to the importance of giving trauma a voice,

Of acknowledging the hurt that has been caused to you by another,

And to give a compassionate and honorable voice to help others heal what trauma you have caused.

When you acknowledge your mistakes,

Particularly mistakes in which you have caused harm to another,

Whether intentionally or unintentionally,

You hold the power to help heal the relationship and the experience of another.

You also free yourself from the hurt that you have caused,

And you create the opportunity for transformation to no longer cause suffering through your words and actions.

You can always learn from the way in which you treat others and in the ways in which you lose yourself in moments of unkindness and the absence of love.

Trauma is defined as a hurt and a wound,

Whether emotional,

Physical,

Or psychological.

The way out of trauma is through active healing and the choice to no longer live as a victim.

You can also experience what is called a spiritual crisis.

This may be born out of a traumatic event that often gives rise to a better life if you continue to live awake and a life of meaning and purpose.

If you are purposefully vengeful and hurtful,

The trauma you experience is overbearing darkness.

This is in a lack of joy and an overarching state of sadness,

Angst,

Foreboding,

In which your mood and self-expression are overcast with the negative and harmful words that you think and ruminate upon,

And of how you treat others.

Trauma doesn't end with your experience.

Trauma continues to exist when you attempt to ignore the inner work that inspires and uplifts the outer reality of your physical world.

If you refuse to acknowledge how you have hurt or harmed another,

Whether in words,

The actions of dishonesty or contempt,

Or as you fail to do what you could have done and perhaps can still do,

That is,

To be kind,

To hold forgiveness,

To acknowledge that your suffering is not just your own.

Trauma is the way in which you become impacted by your experience as you continue to suffer.

When you cast light apart from darkness,

When darkness is released as thought form,

You can begin to release what trauma was here.

I observe the stories and the deliberate thinking that clients hold of their life experiences.

Consider if you've done this before.

You retell the story of something that happened in your life,

And in doing so,

You relive that experience with almost the same intensity.

It's the recounting of a traumatic experience that recreates the same or similar emotions.

Each time you think of or speak about the event that was of pure pain and suffering of any form,

Your body reacts as if you are re-experiencing the trauma,

Because you are.

Even though it is now the story of the event,

A retelling rather than a present moment experience.

When we experience trauma,

The brain shuts down all non-essential systems and activates the sympathetic nervous system and the mammalian brain.

To help us survive the trauma,

The brain releases stress hormones and activates the fight,

Flight,

And freeze response.

The amygdala is literally named for its form,

An almond-shaped structure located in the medial temporal lobe and part of the limbic system,

The part of the brain that helps us process emotions.

The amygdala also helps regulate how we respond to fear and creates emotional memories.

Traumatic stress overactivates the amygdala.

When this happens,

Our fear responses become more intense.

This means that memories of traumatic events can become nightmares and flashbacks.

This can also mean that emotion-driven thoughts become so intrusive that they can prevent us from sleeping.

An overactive amygdala can mean our brain can have difficulty realizing the difference between a previous threat and a threat in the present.

This means that when you are reminded of a trauma event or experience,

The amygdala responds in the exact same way as it would if you were experiencing the trauma for the first time.

Trauma causes the amygdala function of the brain to go on overdrive.

This causes you to be on high alert all the time and can cause you to feel like you are constantly on edge.

The results of an overactive amygdala can look different for each of us,

But untreated traumatic stress almost always causes us to exhibit more fear of other stresses.

Think of the amygdala as the smoke detector in your brain that activates an internal alarm if there is danger.

Unresolved trauma increases the risk of misinterpreting whether a present situation is dangerous or safe,

Thereby creating a faulty alarm system.

People who have experienced trauma often are triggered to react as if they are in danger in situations that are not actually threatening.

If you've experienced this,

You know what it feels like to react almost uncontrollably as you are expecting a threat or misinterpreting a situation as a threat.

You will also react immediately to the real threats that you experience because you and your brain are primed for this.

When you give your traumatic experience a voice,

It means that you do more than retell the story or ruminate on the anxiety and fear from a victim's standpoint.

If you are ready to release the trauma,

To transcend it,

It first needs the expression of your honesty and truth.

I'll begin first discussing trauma that you have caused another.

You can know if you have caused someone to be deeply hurt,

To feel emotional and or physical pain and suffering.

You just need to consider how your words and actions impacted another and,

Of course,

To ask them.

Ask another to share their experience of a situation in which you were unkind and in which you demonstrated words and emotions in a way that you are less than proud of.

In your self-directed honesty,

You will know if you need to check in with someone,

To do your best to write a situation with an apology,

With kindness,

With assurance that you are owning your misguided words and actions to never repeat this.

It is only when you acknowledge and internalize your actions that you will see the trauma that you have caused.

Trauma is not something that occurs frequently.

Yet,

If your behavior is yelling in anger,

Belittling someone,

Or any form of physical aggression or violence,

These moments,

However brief,

Can cause so much damage.

If another person has experienced an emotional,

Psychological,

Or physical hurt or wound because of your words or actions,

Recognize your part in contributing to their suffering.

You are,

In part,

Responsible for their trauma.

We cannot truly know the extent to which we have caused harm or a detrimental impact to another.

Research in the area of memory distortion and mental imagery suggests that people tend to remember more trauma than they experienced.

This is a phenomenon referred to as memory amplification.

Trauma memories are experienced and stored in the brain related to the particular moment in time that was lived.

In other words,

Your state of mind,

Your experiences lived up to the moment of a traumatic event,

Even your mood state,

All impact how you perceive a situation and the degree to which you are sensitized or desensitized to what you are experiencing and how this experience is impacting you.

What we know and understand about trauma is that it is debilitating,

In large part because you continue to relive the traumatic experience without having the tools to heal.

Stating the original event is what causes you to continue to suffer in the present moment.

To give trauma a voice is to acknowledge where you are in relation to your experience.

Whether the trauma was 15 years or 3 months earlier,

It is still not of the present.

This imprint can only cause you harm if you consciously or subconsciously continue to dwell on replaying the trauma of what is the past and cannot be changed.

To give a traumatic situation a voice is to acknowledge what wrongdoing you are responsible for.

For example,

If you lose control of your emotions and react with anger,

And this anger escalates further in your conflict into rage,

And as you direct your rage at another,

Is it enough to say,

I'm sorry?

I'm sorry is a start.

It is in the remorse and empathy you feel together with compassion for the suffering of another that you were responsible for that you must give voice to.

Your voice is the acknowledgement of sorrow and the admittance of wrongdoing.

This and any other steps that you can take to help another become the tools of healing for you both.

Trauma for any past situation is the trauma that you need to give voice to,

To say,

This happened and then I did this to heal from what happened.

This is how you live empowered to continue your journey of truth seeking and your delivery into who and what you live now.

What you want is the acknowledgement of your life today as sacred and important in the present moment and what your life is still becoming.

Trauma can occur in a single experience for a moment or several moments and then the body,

Mind and soul seek the balance of serenity.

Liveness for the experience,

For the unkind and wrongful behavior that caused you or another harm or suffering spoken quietly,

Written or spoken aloud and with the desire for healing through feeling your remorse,

Your compassion and your suffering is how you heal trauma.

Of what you caused another and also what you have lived with yourself.

Now to speak of trauma that you have carried as your experience.

There is another form of giving voice to trauma.

We are talking about the trauma that you experienced from a situation or another whether directly or indirectly and to which you continue to experience until you reclaim your voice of this experience.

This is a voice that holds you responsible for whether or not you take a victimhood stance.

It is the voice of your heart and your soul.

It is a voice of your inner wisdom.

It begins with an inner dwelling voice not of your mind.

It is of your soul to awaken your senses to the experience.

You do have the free will choice to decide the outcome of what you will perceive and call a trauma.

And if something has been traumatic for you,

You can and must decide how you will best heal so that the trauma does not continue to impact the rest of your life's experiences.

This is something that you must give your voice to.

You must also believe in the power of free will to decide and to use all of the force of your heart and mind to back your decision.

You no longer need to be a victim of what happened to you.

We can ask for grand experiences and the teachers and life lessons that will best support our growth and learning.

We cannot always decide how these lessons and teachings will play out in our reality.

You do have a say,

A voice to choose peace,

To choose kindness over pain and sorrow,

To choose forgiveness of another's actions of wrongdoing when you cannot yet forgive the person.

Trauma is not meant to destroy us.

Traumatic situations are meant to be healed of the experience itself and much more that lives beyond that moment.

When you embrace the healing of a particular situation,

You open yourself to gain clarity and the wisdom of what is already the path into all love and the nature of the divine.

There is a prayer and mantra that you may wish to use as what grace and dignity you will choose to hold for the life that you will continue in because we all desire healing and wholeness to what we once were or something better.

This experience of healing is to remind you that awareness of the goodness of life begins with a desire for contemplation and the abundance of love witnessed as compassion,

Goodness,

Courage,

Will,

Promise and the light of your soul which is here and in your perfect wonder of its grace.

This prayer is for the delivery of certain experiences to the light,

All experiences of ease to be what you live and the faithful inclusion of your heart as the mystery of light,

As the release of all forms of pain into the enigma of what lives beneath and what awakens you to what is already desired healing,

Relief,

Self-love and the love of all beings.

What awakens you to live of your light?

Find this for yourself.

The trauma you once experienced is but one event in time and space that has a propensity to set you on a different course,

To rule with conviction what you already seek and to release the physical,

Emotional and psychological pain and wounds into the space and time of now for what now is healing and wholeness.

Life begins anew in the instant that you choose so.

Life is a succession of perfect moments,

All in support of the divinity of what you are and your ever courageous movement,

Inspired by the pure bliss of now.

Life is the warming grace of the divine,

Masterfully upholding you.

You must choose to soar,

You must decide it.

The actions of your heart will always support this.

I choose freedom,

Freedom from my words and actions and the hurt and harm that I have caused another.

Freedom from my suffering and for the suffering of others.

All thoughts and actions now healed,

For the other person and for myself.

Let yourself sit in the words of this mantra and prayer for a time.

Notice what impressions and feelings rise up,

Forever healed between you both.

You hold the ability to release the damage of what you have caused and of what has been done to you.

You have the dignity here in your heart.

You open to its power,

Its comfort,

Its release of all pain and sorrow and you arrive in the conscious surrender of now,

Holding bright the path,

The courage,

Your willingness to surrender the suffering and to give rise to the light that is what you are.

For whatever has happened,

Release the experience attached to the emotion,

To the pain,

To suffering.

Release the attachments you hold to the situation and or the event and to any victimhood stance that you have lived.

Instead,

Let the light of your inner wisdom reveal the path that leads you from here into the greatness of what you become,

Of what manifesting you inspire to and of what healing serves your metamorphosis into divine spiritual love.

Meditate and pray on this.

What is your path into your greatness and of your light?

What is the highest ideal of this moment and of all of eternity?

Here is another prayer and mantra that will help you with your healing and wholeness.

You may wish to repeat it together with me.

I release all of my suffering into the light.

I hold light that fills my being.

My conscious thought energy is of what I choose next,

Of my heart open and full.

For the abundance in my life,

For the release of all sadness and pain,

Anger and fear.

I am reborn in this moment.

My light is the perfect wonder of happiness lived here and now.

I share this with you because we are all responsible for causing another to feel trauma if we are unkind or deliberately hurtful.

This is the path to healing from this,

Whether you have caused another to suffer or you are suffering.

The experience of healing is replete with what you have desired.

It is entirely possible and instantaneous once you decide that you are no longer willing to perceive a situation as traumatic and that you are ready to release it into the light.

I know that there are going to be some traumatic events that are far more difficult to heal from.

I want you to know that these are still possible to release and heal.

If you would like my help with this,

Please reach out to me.

I will guide you through this.

Healing often occurs in layers all toward the greater whole.

Thank you so much for listening.

This is Dorothy,

Sending you great healing love.

Namaste.

Thank you so much for joining me in this episode of the Wisdom Podcast.

To hear more,

Please check out the other episodes here,

As well as my guided meditations,

Including my Signature Pros meditations and I Am mantras,

And as well the meditations to guide you into a deep and restorative sleep.

Please also visit me on social media and say hello.

And a special thank you to Insight Timer for this beautiful space to share all of my love.

Allow yourself to go within,

To access your inner wisdom,

And to live this.

Awaken your authentic power,

Live your truth,

And be love.

Namaste.