The “Tells” of Complex Trauma and Chaos (as published in The Friday Edition of HeartBalm Healing at https://heartbalm.substack.com)
At some point in your healing journey, you will come to face to face with the parts and pieces of who you are or think yourself to be. Complex trauma waits on no one and just carries on as the dysfunctional chaos creator that reigns over your life. This chaos is a tell, however. It is the way toward what is in pain. It is your internalized world answering – and pointing to where it hurts.
Much of what is arising is ready for healing – is ready to be seen – has risen into consciousness from the subconscious. There may be much in the subconscious that is still submerged, hidden, and not able to come to the surface. Fear and self-preservation are the gatekeepers between our subconscious and conscious worlds. As you heal and fears slowly subside or the need for vigilance and safety begins to dissolve then more will be revealed.
Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.
_French Proverb
If this sounds daunting and overwhelming – it is. Complex trauma is a difficult cross to bear but sometimes, it is necessary to jump into your ocean of chaos and complexity. You must accept your own dysfunctional and elite ways of surviving and acting out your life. For it is acting. It is a complex narrative of characters and triggers and pieced-together storylines that play out before us and within us. Those with CPTSD know all too well that we can leave the house in the morning feeling fine until an unknown quantity enters the scene and our world is turned upside down. Taken from the present and deftly spun into a past story with tentacles reaching into all areas of our being – we are triggered. Hijacked and confused our old safeguards, dog-eared stories, long-held reactions and ways of surviving a similar situation from our past is now our life script again.
We are led out of time and space – and out of body and mind. A zombie in the place of who we thought we were this morning as we left the house. Life feels veiled, fuzzy, spinning out of control and we are left to try and act normal. We reach into our inner depths beyond ourselves and for any energy and strength left, and the mental acuity to try and see through our zombie bodysuit and carry on, work, survive and do the things we think normal people do.
There is a price for this superhuman ability to continue, and exist when we are using every ounce of human strength, energy, and focus to simply carry on. Our traumatized body and mind are also in the game – utilizing every resource we have to assess the threat, ready the body for fight or flight, defend against it, and survive what has arisen.
This cycle of life for the traumatized soul is like being in a boxing match every week of your life. There is the match and then there is the healing from the beating. Then before you are fully healed you are thrown back into the ring again. Resources are slim and so trying to defend with frayed gloves, a half-broken mouth guard, and an inner critic acting as coach asleep or cursing you from the corner is the best you can do. At some point you realize doing your best is barely surviving and all you want is to thrive. This is another tell – this asking and opening for a sense of long-term relief and deep full breaths, a feeling of expanding more fully into your body and being, feeling clear-eyed and alive, and living the life that you know is waiting on you.
The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.
_Peter A Levine, “In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness”
That is why at certain points of your life and journey it is necessary to begin to fully embrace all that is happening and all that you are. It is in the conscious act of stopping to stand and see yourself with compassion and with the little curiosity that you have left and look again with unveiled eyes. To view the play that continues to be acted out day in and day out that shows you the ceaseless futility of trying to keep digging into resources that have long since been depleted to face another day – another trigger, and another surprise takeover. In some ways, it is the last place we want to look. To turn and face ourselves seems like another let-down, another insurmountable attempt to find peace and some sense of routine and stability for this is where it all originates. We look outside ourselves for all the answers, for the magic pill, the best therapist, and the golden ticket that will make it all better. We use our stories of pain and hurt to bind us in our zombied life and cement us in a habitual way of being so we can try and find some rest and normalcy in all of it because changing anything now would be like climbing Mount Everest. We reason that it was brought on by someone in our external sphere so why do we have to clean up the mess – why is it up to us to fix what others broke?
But I say to you now – it is you that is hurting
– you that is facing the foes that come into your life,
and fighting the boxing match each week.
Fair or Not it is up to you.
Fair or Not it is your life to manage,
your feelings to make peace with,
your life to love,
and your being to begin to love back to life.
I ask you – who could do it better?
Who has a better view,
and a truer sense of who you are,
what you need,
and how to gently love and care for you
– than you?
Beyond the self-sabotage and the self-hatred and the shame is still a space of self-love.
Maybe it is a neglected area where the garden of you is untended, full of weeds and tangles, overgrown to cover things meant to be hidden,
but it is still there – waiting.
Waiting on you.
Like the little child waiting on love,
waiting on a parent to be kinder or gentler,
waiting to be held and comforted,
waiting on understanding,
waiting to be seen and acknowledged,
but now waiting on you.
Will you – can you – turn towards yourself,
and be the one that she has been waiting on her whole life?
To begin turning towards ourselves and accepting how we live our life, how we respond to this or that or them, how we exist and get through our day and our week is part of the reckoning that can lead us back to ourselves and back to wholeness.
If you can see it is as a journey of discovery – the opportunity to begin to unearth all that is within you; all that has become covered over, ignored, allowed to grow and run wild and begin to see how extraordinary you are for all that you must do in the course of a day, a week or an hour – then you can begin to lean into what you need, how you have neglected yourself and how to better respond and love all that you are.
Each time you notice a tell, and face a part of you that has acted out unconsciously in response to a triggered situation and look at it again with eyes of interest, compassion, and self-loving kindness you continue the process of healing, and integration. Over time you may begin to laugh at the folly of how you respond to something because now you see clearly how you have had to function and how the old habits and seasoned characters are still acting out. The heat begins to lessen and the coolness of how you respond to life as it unfolds and shows up is profound. How you begin to see what is happening with new eyes that beam with your nurturing love behind them offers more healing, more clarity, more aliveness, and more transformation.
At the end of the day, this world is your canvas. You give it all the color, contrast, and control that it has over you. If you recoil, get angry, and lash out at the judgment and words another directs towards you remind yourself that this is another tell, and it is up to you to see where within you their words and actions have hit their bullseye. What are you believing in another’s words or judgments about yourself? This is where you begin to uncover, face, and learn what still hurts within you. That is where you begin the conversations about what you are believing and how someone else seeing that is a direct reflection of how you have painted your inner landscape and then believed yourself to be.
This is not easy work. It is grueling and humbling and digs away at the ancient foundations you have built to keep yourself safe, hold you grounded in place when your world has lost all gravity, and support your walk in your fractured and dysfunctional world. But you can find solid ground and walk taller by accepting wholeheartedly who you are right now – with all of its complexities, feelings of brokenness, anxiety, exhaustion, perpetual hope to feel better, days of wellness and feeling whole, and all that breaks us into pieces again, and how we handle these trials.
No matter what you think of yourself – or what your inner critic tells you in harsh tones and judgmental words – you are uniquely you. There is no one that is without problems in this world. No one that does not wish for something better or to be different or feel well. Each of us has a unique way of living and existing in the world and if you can face yourself right now, and accept yourself as the wisened, courageous, vibrant, alive, and breathing soul on her own exquisite journey that looks like no other than you have started.
how you love yourself
is how you teach others
to love you
To read or explore more please reference this publication’s resource list:
- Subscribe to the HeartBalm Channel on YouTube. A growing collection of HeartBalm Meditations with Sunny are available.
- Peter A Levine, “In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness”
- Rupi Kaur, “Milk and Honey”
For other helpful articles, tools, and topics visit the HeartBalm Archives, and for healing-guided meditations please visit the HeartBalm Meditation Toolbox on the home page or go to the HeartBalm Channel on YouTube. To subscribe or to find out more information go to the HeartBalm website.
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Sunny Lynn, OMC is a spiritual counselor, writer, poet, photographer, meditator, and nature lover on a mission of transmuting complex trauma through self-love, healing, and bringing balm to hearts everywhere. She has a blog and podcast – HeartBalm at heartbalm.substack.com that speaks on the topic of self-care and self-love, mindfulness and healing while living with CPTSD.
