Trauma Expands Life’s Possibilities

This may be the very first time that you have heard the word trauma associated with something positive, but here it is: the more emotional trauma you have experienced in your life, the more of life’s possibilities you have access to.

Why is this true?

Because trauma affects the human experience to such a degree and in a way that is so confusing and uncomfortable that it will prompt you to ask different questions in your desire to resolve it. Those questions will never occur to people who have never known that degree of trauma.

What they do instead is simply accept their corrupted experience as “normal” or “who I am” rather than as unacceptable levels of discomfort that may be resolvable. It is only when we dive deeply into the questioning that we discover things about the nature of humanity and the possibility for life that we would never have known existed.

This insight will greatly benefit those who are wondering who might be a resource for whatever other insights help you recover from your own personal trauma from the vast number of people who self-identify as life coaches or self-help experts. At the very outset you can trim that list of potential resources down to only those who have known exceptional trauma themselves. That is a surprisingly small percentage. But, without that background those who will be guiding you will most likely be addressing far different questions than the ones you are asking. Or, won’t do much questioning at all, instead blaming your poor experience of life on “faulty thinking.”

The bottom line of this is that when you seek guidance from someone who has not shared your experiences, whatever relevant guidance you may receive will come buried in and amongst a lot of so-called information that will not serve your specific need to feel better. They may be insights that are genuinely reliable, but they will be the lowest-common-denominator type of insights that are not likely to be the most powerful for you. My own type and degree of trauma is my only qualification for writing this, but it is the only qualification that matters.

Everyone who has ever walked and talked on this earth has experienced trauma to some degree.

In the past we have considered trauma to be a pass/fail issue; in other words, trauma is either something you have or don’t have. Yet, childhood by itself can be accurately described as traumatic, and I assume everyone reading this was a child at one time.

So I invite you now to consider that trauma is universal, distinguished only by degree. Yet, there is no degree of trauma that is “satisfactory” and not worthy of addressing. This is because the abiding effects of trauma always, without fail, degrade the experience of life.

This degradation shows up in the form of inauthenticity. But inauthenticity is a word that is too clinical to be of much value to most of us, so instead let’s call it by its experiential reference: feeling bad about yourself and life. So, your degree of trauma may be different than mine, but the process for restoring our authenticity and feeling better about life are the same. And why wouldn’t someone want that?

Trauma is the result of a (real or perceived) threat to our survival.

What trauma does is to refocus our awareness to ignore the Self in favor of hypervigilance against a hostile world. Simply put, the human design is that you cannot be both authentic and unsafe. If you perceive that you are unsafe, what makes you authentic (individuality and vitality) are sacrificed for the goal of survival, which demands a correct answer, not an authentic one.

When this trauma is chronic or severe, that inauthentic pattern becomes your de facto way of being and, eventually, the only way of interacting with the world that feels “real”. It also, of course, continues to feel bad, and the results you are able to produce in your own life become severely limited. But it persists because of the perceptions of familiarity and safety. The human design dictates that familiarity is preferable — regardless of how it feels or the results it produces — because it equates to safety.

According to the human design, how you were compelled to interact with your environment as a child in order to feel safe becomes your reflexive pattern as an adult. That reflexive pattern becomes more ingrained everyday as it becomes more familiar and practiced throughout adulthood. That is often referred to as our “comfort zone”. Any deviation from that pattern is perceived as dangerous, reckless, unsafe, and irresponsible.

But all of that happens without language, so the way back must also happen without language. It is a matter for personal discovery guided only by the pleasantness of the experience we can create through some combination of conscious thought and courage.

What I’m saying is stop reading this article right now and go about the work of rediscovering who you are in this moment.

This is the reason that we so desperately need to stop dealing with important matters of our internal experience with language. Language always misses the point of life because it’s a logical construct. In essence what I’m saying is stop reading this article right now and go about the work of rediscovering who you are in this moment. But, hopefully, you will do just that when the time is right and I trust that about you.

In the meantime, it’s important to know that what language refers to as “familiar” may in fact be more than just a practiced pattern. It may in fact have more in common with safety than it does familiarity, but we have come to internally label the experience of being unsafe as “familiar” instead. It is far more acceptable in society to act in familiar ways than it is to be unsafe.

So, what is the road back?

Well, it sounds obvious to say that the road back is to rediscover how it feels to be safe. But, while true, those are just words. What we need instead is an act of imagination and creation that causes us to feel good despite its lack of familiarity and sense of “realness.” One of life’s great uses for our capacity for creation is to create a new world for ourselves that is ultimately supportive and safe.

There are no cookie-cutter masterclasses or 5-step programs that teach the art of being you, and recovering from your particular type and degree of trauma. Fortunately, they’re not necessary anyway. All that is necessary is the courage to allow yourself to feel great by whatever means necessary including (what will occur to you as) delusional thinking. All creation is delusional thinking because creation sees something that has never existed before. In that choice you are actually re-introducing yourself to your own authenticity, for which there is no justification necessary.