Trauma and Forgiveness

I am writing this as someone who has come through trauma. Childhood trauma. Trauma in my adult life. More than one. I am not going to lay out what happened. If something in a one-to-one appointment connects with something I have lived, I can share it then, quietly — if what I learned from it would be of any use to you. What I can say here is that these traumas span many kinds of experience. They had a significant impact on my childhood, my adolescence, and how my view of myself developed.

To me, trauma is unresolved emotion relating to an incident in our past. It is something that, emotionally, we were unable for whatever reason to process at the time it happened, and it then lingers in our consciousness. Over time it morphs and changes us as a person. Sometimes that process starts quite subtly.

Just to be clear, from my point of view — and I think this is the general consensus around trauma — what one person finds traumatic is not the same as another. Somebody could have lived in a war zone and not have residual trauma from that. How they would not, I do not know, but they may not. Another person could have what other people perceive as something that is not as bad as that, and be traumatised by it. Trauma itself is not about the incident itself. It is about our unresolved and unprocessed emotions relating to a specific incident that has impacted us somewhere in the past.

In my early twenties I became committed to acknowledging and releasing my childhood traumas. More were accumulated later, and they were added to the to-do list as my life went on.

On that journey I have explored many psychological theories and concepts of trauma and recovery: transactional analysis^{1 (note 1)}, Jungian theory, person-centred counselling, CBT, and later in my life, spirituality.

Whether or not you yourself are spiritual, I can say that allowing spirituality into my life gave me access to shortcuts in healing that I wish I had found earlier. That is because spirituality focuses on our consciousness, our soul and spirit. Would I have benefited as greatly from going into spirituality without first understanding those other psychological theories? No, and I also believe that feeling complete would not have been possible for me personally without that spiritual part of the journey.

I want to acknowledge the impact of authors such as Eckhart Tolle^{2 (note 2)}, Alan Watts^{3 (note 3)}, Ram Dass^{4 (note 4)}, Michael Singer^{5 (note 5)} and Richard Bach^{6 (note 6)}. Another author who influenced me early on was Nietzsche^{7 (note 7)}. I found his theories fascinating, and they helped me explore and release feelings of guilt and shame, along with the shadow work of Carl Jung^{8 (note 8)}.

Within the last two years I also began to delve deeply into chakra healing. I did this as a way of cross-checking my own healing journey. The chakra system can carry core wounds which affect our ability to come into self-acceptance and peace within ourselves, to release those wounds, and to be truly open-hearted. It also shows what the healed form of those places can look like, which is the part I was checking myself against.

The chakra system: wounds and the healed form

This is a map some people use to notice where old pain still sits, and what it can look like when that place has been tended. It is not a medical diagnosis. It is a spiritual framework I have used to cross-check my own healing — not only the wound, but the healed version of me as well.

1. Crown — Connection

   Wound. I am cut off. I am alone.

   Healed. I am connected. I am not alone.

   Disconnection from meaning, spirit, and belonging in the universe — and the return of that belonging.

2. Third eye — Inner knowing

   Wound. I cannot trust myself. I cannot see clearly.

   Healed. I can trust myself. I can see clearly.

   Self-doubt and confusion — and the return of inner knowing.

3. Throat — Voice

   Wound. My voice does not matter. I am not allowed to speak.

   Healed. My voice matters. I am allowed to speak.

   Silenced truth, fear of expression — and the return of a voice that can be used.

4. Heart — Love

   Wound. I am unlovable. It is not safe to open.

   Healed. I am lovable. It is safe to open.

   Grief, rejection, a closed heart — and the return of being able to give and receive love.

5. Solar plexus — Power

   Wound. I am not good enough. I have no power.

   Healed. I am enough. I have my own power.

   Shame, worthlessness, loss of will — and the return of a will you can stand in.

6. Sacral — Feeling

   Wound. I am ashamed. I do not deserve pleasure or feeling.

   Healed. I am allowed to feel. I deserve pleasure and feeling.

   Guilt, emotional numbness, creative block — and the return of feeling, creating, and pleasure without shame.

7. Root — Safety

   Wound. I am not safe. I do not belong.

   Healed. I am safe. I belong.

   Fear, scarcity, abandonment, survival — and the return of a right to be here.

This post is about forgiveness — and about what trauma does to the space between you and the people who care about you.

I want to be careful with that. People who are very raw with trauma do not need another lecture. I am not being negative about anyone living through it. I have been there. I am talking from the other side of a lot of it, not down to anyone still in it.

One of the reasons I have tried to help people is that I feel a deep level of compassion and empathy for anyone who has been through that journey. For me, it was so arduous and long-winded. It took every resource I possessed within myself, and I had to gather resources from outside myself, to truly understand the complexity of what was happening — and then, after that, to be able to release it.

It can look like selfishness. It isn’t

When you are stuck in survival, it can look, from the outside, like a very selfish mindset. I do not mean people are being selfish on purpose. I do not mean they are choosing it.

When I think back over getting through it, survival is what trauma creates. A survival mindset. Disconnection. Walls around the person. It cuts you off from the world around you so completely that you cannot really engage with it. That is what it did to me.

In the isolation that people experience, they often find it very difficult to feel true contentment or happiness at all. The default setting can be numbness — quite numb — because that is how they manage.

It can also create self-destructive behaviours. You are not only disconnected from people, and from the world around you. You lose self-belief. You lose confidence. You end up with a very negative view of yourself. That is what trauma does. It is a destructive mindset.

It can become physically destructive as well. Alcohol. Drugs. Self-harm. Even more complex and severe mental health difficulties can grow out of that disconnect and isolation.

You are inside the walls it has built. People who love you want to help. They cannot always get through, because they cannot break those walls down for you.

That is a lonely place to be in, for everyone involved.

Staying with family

Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I had gone to stay with family because I was having a difficult time. I was dealing with difficult situations from my childhood. I was disconnected, emotional, depressed, and in a dark pit of despair, with no exit that I could see at that time.

I was looking after my children. I had help from family, and I did that care myself as well. What I was struggling with was feeling disconnected from them, because my emotions were so overwhelming inside myself. I felt I had to keep that from them — hide it from them — because of how it was overwhelming me.

My children’s grandfather — known as Daddy by the family — is a wonderful Christian man. He and his wife supported me then, and they still support me now. I saw them at that time as like the parents I never had.

He was in serious concern for me. I was an emotional wreck at that time. I was really struggling. He had observed that, and noticed how raw I was. During my stay I had a few conversations with them about what I was processing in my mind, what my thoughts were. They were very difficult things to experience.

Then, one day, he took me to one side. He sat beside me. He put his hands on me, and he said:

You have to forgive. The only way to get through this is to forgive.

I said, how can I forgive a person — meaning my stepfather — who has done what he has done?

You don’t forgive for him. You forgive for yourself.

This was one of the most powerful moments of my life, up to that point. I still reflect on it now — how powerfully it impacted me. It was a catalyst for change. Maybe not imminently, because of the emotional state I was in at that time, but it sat with me, and it repeated in my mind, and it was definitely a catalyst for change in self-empowerment. I contemplated this. Initially I was against the idea of forgiveness. I was in that victim mindset, and that is why I was struggling with the concept of forgiveness. I know the term victim mindset could sting for some people. This is my own reflection. I am talking about myself. This is how I reflect on it. At that time I was in that mindset, and I was taking actions that were more self-destructive than nurturing and caring for myself.

In my mind, forgiveness is not about saying the perpetrator has no blame attached to their actions. It is not that. It is: I accept that this thing has happened. I accept how I feel, and I acknowledge how I feel about it. It is okay for me to feel that way. My feelings and emotions, and the impact on me, are valid. I choose to fully accept that, and then transcend it in my mind and in my heart, so that I no longer punish myself for that experience and deprive myself of love because of it — self-love, and love from others.

Saying that clearly, after years of reflection and work on myself, can make it sound easy. It was not easy. The process of doing it was, at times, an agonising, tumultuous journey. It took years.

A trigger, years later

I reached a place where I really felt like all my trauma was processed, released, and gone back to the universe. Then, in the present, this event happened. I had a trauma trigger with somebody very close to me. I did not expect it. It was a unique situation. Something from the past came up, and there it was: the anxiety, the self-doubt, the inner narrative taking over.

The trigger took me from a place where I felt like a fully healed person, to feeling like a vulnerable child who was at risk again. That is how I felt when I was in the situation. It was an awful feeling. It was a huge shock to experience that, after all the work I had done on myself, for a trigger just to come out of the blue and take me down in that way.

What I was able to do, first of all, was identify that as a trigger. This is not how I want to experience this situation. This is a trigger from the past, and it is making me feel this way. I had the insight immediately to see what was going on. I also had the willpower not to let it overtake me. I wanted to conquer it. It took a little bit of time to do that, but I did it, and it helped me feel free.

I was able to be open and honest about it with them. It took some time after identifying the trigger before I could do that. What I felt was that, in order to overcome it, I needed to be able to talk about it openly, acknowledge it, and then have a conversation. I was able, over time, to get through it. They were very supportive.

That trigger came from a significant traumatic event in my childhood. It was a big one. The trigger itself was significant and overwhelming. I do not want that to sound as if I got over it quickly. It was difficult. It was making me very anxious.

My spirituality directly impacted my ability to process and transcend that experience, much faster than I would have done in the past. It did not take months. I already had the insight within me, which really helped. I identified it. I knew what it related to. I revisited the incident, the feelings and the emotions. I apportioned the blame and the responsibility onto the person who took the action that created the trigger in the past. Through my spirituality I was able to transcend it much faster than I would ever have done with a trigger before.

It was not one incident. It was a series of incidents over time from my childhood. In the past, something like that would have derailed my life for months, dealing with it. This time I was able to get through it in a couple of weeks. It remained a bit raw, and it probably still will rear its head again. I do not think it is a one-time deal, all done and dusted. I know it is within me now. I still feel it a little bit within me, and there might be scenarios where it comes up again. But I will have had one go round the cycle of it, so I will understand what I need to do, and I can do it even more quickly when it comes around again.

Healing is not pretending nothing ever happened. What it is, is the ability to accept it, acknowledge it, and really transcend it. That is the key. It is about transcendence. Forgiveness is part of being able to transcend the experience, but transcendence is actually what the healing is. Transcending the experience. Not carrying any of the unresolved emotions from the past. Being able to live in a place of peace with the experience that happened. And not to let it compromise our ability to feel deserving of love, or of loving ourselves — or leave us bereft of loving ourselves.

It just goes to show that this is ongoing work. Recovery can be real. A trigger can still arrive. The two can both be true.

A commitment to yourself

The key, for me, is a commitment to yourself. That you value yourself. That you love yourself. That you are worthy of happiness, and of a life. No matter what you go through, it is important never to forget that. To keep trying to reach it.

If you have self-doubt, try to understand why it is there. Process it. Release it. Make yourself more at peace.

That is how you begin to break down the walls. When you empower yourself, you become bigger than the walls around you. Then you start knocking them down. You knock holes in them. Things can reach you. More positive experiences can get in.

Over time, you start to be convinced that the world is not such a bad place. There are good people out there. I can access support. I can rely on help around me if I need it, and it will benefit me. It will help me.

I have to go through a process of inner work. I do not have to do it alone. I can have anchors. I can have positive relationships to help me with that. There are other people who will understand what I feel, and not judge me.

Why am I engaging in that process of inner work? It is for myself. I am doing it for myself. I am not doing it because I am being pressured by people around me. I am doing it because I want to feel valuable. I want to learn to value myself, and I want to feel valuable in terms of the contributions I can make to my own life. I also want to feel resilient in being able to do that. I want to feel that I can depend on myself, and rely on myself, to carry out the goals and aspirations I have in my life. I can reach a place where I am happy and contented, embracing being authentically me.

Not a demand

I am not telling you to forgive anyone. If you are raw, that can feel like another demand, and I will not put that on you.

I am only saying what was said to me then, when I could not see a way through: you do not do it for them. If it comes at all, it is for you.

If you want to talk, rather than read, that is what one-to-one appointments are for.

Notes

These are some of the places where I met these ideas. They are not a reading list I am handing you, and they are not the whole of it. There is so much I have come across over time that I cannot even remember it all.

1. Thomas A. Harris, I’m OK — You’re OK (1967). Transactional analysis. Back to text
2. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (1997) and A New Earth (2005). Back to text
3. Alan Watts, recorded lectures, including talks circulated on YouTube. Back to text
4. Ram Dass, recorded talks, including talks circulated on YouTube. Back to text
5. Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul (2007). Back to text
6. Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970). Back to text
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Back to text
8. C. G. Jung, The Red Book (2009), and recorded talks, including talks circulated on YouTube. Back to text

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