What does repeated trauma do to our emotions and why can a troubled childhood last a lifetime if not healed? Because experienced, generated emotions are alive! Throughout my entire life, I have not understood emotions, as they have always been a mystery to me. They were like another frontier deep within the subconscious mind that I was not smart enough to understand. If you were to take a needle and poke it into your finger, it would hurt, but it would not be memorable, no big thing. But you still FEEL that hurt in the moment. Well, imagine that being a sledgehammer smashing your hand, how would that FEEL? You would never forget it, especially if it were done to you! My God, the sheer terror of it all! When you think about it in the future, you would cringe as if the experience were ALIVE just waiting to be relived. On a deep gut level, you would no longer trust the person who hit you. There would be hypervigilance to his or her presence. Are others like him or her? Would an infant or a child intuitively FEAR this person? Imagine no ability to get away from the feared threat.
What would you have to do to survive while trapped in that environment?
How do you explain the existence of living itself? A weird question, but it seems to me our emotions ARE the living fiber of our being as living creatures. Emotions have a life of their own. I think of emotions as similar to magic, as I do the miracle of living energy and life itself. So, the question becomes how do you heal the magic? The living, pulsing, powerful emotions hide, obscured in the deep recesses of our soul. How do you confront them and calm their discomfort and intensity? How and why do they retain the unresolved impact that in so many ways controls our lives now and years, perhaps many decades, after they were unleashed? Our emotions are living, pulsing energy.
You cannot think your way out of internalized trauma when you must do battle with the lurking army of living emotions trapped in your being
Your emotions do not say anything innately bad about you, but they do speak and tell a story of what happened to you. I have tended to think something was weird about me because I have these problems, yet I have come to see that it is not me. That is what happened to me! Emotional trauma recovery requires going into the living feelings and doing battle against the now-stored unconscious demon. See the feelings, accept that they are a part of you from your past, and let them come out so that you actually FEEL them. That is so easy to say, but not so easy to do. Working to go through the pain is a far better choice in life than living a numbed out, chronic substance-abusing, distracting, blurred-out existence; isolating, dissociating, raging at others, pretending an identity (a false self), being hypervigilant, voicing condemnation of others under our breath in a struggle to pull up our drooping low self-esteem, HIDING. Hiding not only from others but from ourselves most profoundly. If no bells are heard at all in your mind, in your being, after reading what I am saying, clearly then something is wrong (or you are one of the lucky ones that escaped childhood without too much emotional baggage).
“Who are you, mommy, daddy?” What if your child was precocious enough to ask such a question of us? How would you authentically answer that question? I don’t know. That has been my life’s answer, I do not know. We must learn to let go. Let go of the struggle, let go of the façade (false self), just let it go. Come out into the light of day. Buried deep a lovable child is waiting and wanting to come out and play, to be welcomed onto the team of humanity. Remember as a child asking someone… “Can you play?” Well, can you, anymore?
We must be honest. Life hurts, and, in the beginning, whatever happened to you, it was not your fault, which should be a mantra! So, if you can relate to any of this from what you’ve heard or what is to come in this paper, don’t you think you owe it to yourself and at least try to become aware? This requires admitting you suffer and perhaps seeking professional help – a spiritual guide, if you will, and I don’t mean spiritual in the sense of a religion. Help to awaken and, yes, to become aware of who you really are, and the now proverbial, what is wrong with me. It is not easy, and it takes time, yet it is worth the struggle.
What do you think the experience of someone exchanging places with you for a moment would be like? What would you feel, do you think, if you were to climb into the suit of someone else? What would they feel if they were to try on the spiritual suit of being you? What are you feeling? What would they come away knowing about you, perhaps that you hide from the world? I think the average person, were they to step into the suit of me and be me for a moment, to experience what it feels like to be me, I think they would openly have an involuntary gasp of discomfort, like a jolt of… ouch! A discomfort experiencing the DYSREGULATED state of emotions that preside within me, consuming far too many of my present moments. That long freight train of life’s experiences, pulsing within me in a state of emotional traumas that rule the day, and well beyond my present-day ability to control. I am working to learn to, one by one, disconnect those rail cars from my life that are pulsing, unconscious to me, with experiences of terror, bullying, abuse from caretakers, sexual abuse, assault, gaslighting, and more.
Hidden traumas (unknown to, unaware of by most of us) … living still, buried deep out of even the normal place we hide our feelings. Traumas that are so painful to endure, there is a place in our brains where nature puts these living, pulsing memories away from our easy access to retrieve. A special place for things we do not want to see, no, we cannot handle seeing, at least at the time and age they occurred, but they live, and they hurt us. They hurt us at their origination, and they hurt us perpetually as our train moves along in life. They live, they pulse, and they hide oh so deeply. Our traumas were so painful that the envisioned, pictured recall of the felt experience is lost in a dissociative state of amnesia about the event. Dissociative amnesia is a tool of nature to protect us from things in the moment that are too terrifying, and too traumatic for us to endure, at the time, and in those traumatizing moments. Thank you, nature, for that. But what about now, perhaps many decades later? That repressed trauma/experience LIVES in us, unresolved and activating our present-day emotions around its powerful influence. It is the cry of neurosis, phobias, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and more, a reliving of our past emotions generated from the terrorizing events, in our present moment, over and over and over again. We so often can’t remember the events, (perhaps some can), that sparked these terrible inner wounds, but we have the emotion-filled flashbacks that are unexplained bouts of psychic terror that seem to have no place or meaning in the present. What is this, out of the blue, psychic terror that comes over me? Living life with a vague, barely noticed, and perpetual state of impending doom.
Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.
** Copyright notice. All of my writings are copyrighted and registered with the Library of Congress.
- My name is Jesse Donahue. In 2015, at the age of 58, I took up writing, and since then I’ve written two novels, poems, and essays about my journey struggling with CPTSD. The essays, 70+, were an adjunct to journaling in therapy to amplify my learning and self-understanding.
My writings, which include therapy notes, poems, novels, and essays, are all a part of my ongoing personal therapy. Many of my essays are in a stream-of-consciousness style, unleashing, sharing, and delving into energies that continuously process in my subconscious. My writings, initially, geared for me and my therapist’s eyes only, began with my exposing my thoughts, fears, and feelings (or the lack of) onto paper… a journal of therapy notes. Then, with fear overcome and via a personal decision of choice, I shared them here with the readers. My essays, most all, originate from my weekly therapy notes. My intent and desire is to encourage readers to recognize traits in themselves and find a therapist if they are willing and able to do so. If you are in therapy, ask your therapist to read them and discuss what pertains to you. For some, it can be a long and difficult process over extensive periods to awaken to the unconscious issues that have us acting out in life. Our behavior can seem like dancing to a buried, invisible energy that we are not able to directly see or confront. It is my sincere hope that my insights will assist the reader in the process toward reaching a deeper self-understanding. Bringing the unconscious out into the light of self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance fosters self-love and the process of change.
My published writings with the CPTSD foundation: The Hidden Bugaboo (*recommended). The Beganning. Twelve Days Without Coffee. Learned Helplessness. Cast Out of Eden by Toxic Shame. The Crumbs and The Banquet. What an Outside Appearance may Not Show. Obedience to the Light – Bombs or Love. Stepping Into the Shoes of Who You Are. Personal Honor, Integrity, Dignity, Honesty. Inspirational Tugging – Teachers. Codependency – Overriding the Monster of Self Hate. Surfing the Light Through the Darkness. We are but Storytellers. A Writer’s Brain – The Gift. The Highway of Worries. The Emptiness of Yesterday. The Man Who Lives Under the Bridge. Living in the Dis-World. SPECTRUM.
