How Trauma Shapes Our World: What Happened to You?
We are all shaped by our traumas large and small. In the best selling book “What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing,” its authors Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry offer a subtle but powerful shift of perspective through both heartbreaking and enlightening stories combined with neuroscience as to how our brains form and react to trauma and stress especially in our early childhood. In explaining how our brains work, Dr. Perry states:
“Not only is “What happened to you?” the key question if you want to understand someone, it is the key question if you want to understand the brain. In other words, your personal history — the people and places in your life- influences your brain development. The result is that each of our brains is unique. Our life experiences shape the way key systems in our brain organize and function. So each of us sees and understands the world in a unique way.”
As a result of our traumas, the emotional memories embed within all of us as we carry it with us often to our ignorance. For most of our lives, we don’t look for it or understand it or stow it away with the rest of the compartmental aspects of our selves. Unfortunately, this trauma reveals its ugliness in circumstances that we never envisioned.
Anger.
Violence.
Anxiety.
People Pleasing.
Passivity.
Validating.
Addictions.
All of these behaviors are consistent with the theme of a distorted view of value and self worth. We wear these badges but hidden to mostly all. I am certainly no exception.
Our trauma may have been the loss or abandonment of a parent or loved one. It could have been from the victimhood of violence or abuse. For others it may have been from the mere witnessing of such violence or abuse, without the benefit of a sense of self of what is right and wrong, and the adoption of deeply rooted self blame for such harm. It is a place where the child experiencing the trauma simply has no control. As noted by Dr. Perry, importantly, it didn’t even have to be trauma with a “T” but it could have been small moments where our needs were simply not met.
“For me, understanding trauma has always been linked to studying event-specific changes in the stress-response systems. These events can be major and obvious to all, as in the case of physical abuse by a parent. But I believe trauma can also arise from quieter, less obvious experiences, such as humiliation or shaming or other emotional abuse…”
As I sat with my mother in a skilled nursing facility, her prior self has been stripped away by advanced age and dementia. Her striking black hair is mostly all white but still soft to the touch. Her brow is softened. Her words are slightly mumbled as she speaks. Her body extremely thin and worn, and in some areas bruised and battered from life. Her emotions are now just like her thoughts which are fleeting never residing long enough to anchor themselves to be recalled. The same questions are asked while the same answers are given. It is Groundhog Day shortened to every few minutes.
She is no longer the strong willed, fiercely independent and quick and dangerously tempered woman that raised me. Unlike her turbulent and chaotic past, she is more child like, more gentle, more appreciative of those caring for her. She constantly tells me she loves me and I believe her and respond by telling her that I love her as well. I look into her eyes, ignoring her deteriorating physical form, seeing the spirit within her. I look deep and open myself up to truly see her.
As I look upon her, I can’t help but think “what happened to her?” and her own trauma of losing her father when she was 7 years old and the emotional and practical damage to her family that was left in its wake. To be later disowned by her family and culture when she met and married my father, leaving her home, place of birth and identity for a new land with my oldest brother in tow. To arrive in the United States which wasn’t welcoming to those who looked and sounded different, and the uncertainty of it all while my father was trying to find his own place in life and fighting the currents rising from his own family history. Now place the regular hardships of life on these two young souls (which no one escapes from however small or large) on top of it all. An all too familiar story of struggle.
How did their childhood traumas shape their receipt of love, and the giving of it? How did it create their own worldview? These questions are not an academic exercise for me since their traumas indirectly were passed onto me in my own experiences and trauma as a child, and regrettably, I have passed them to my own children. As they say, the past is never gone in family dynamics, they just pass onto the next generation as part of their legacy. It is a part of us. It is our individual shadows that co-exist with our gifts.
Whatever the different scenes that we played a role in, the plot is similar amongst all of us. We are formed by our traumas and experiences and the residual of such damage never goes away until an intentional path of healing and knowing is pursued and embraced. Intellectual awareness is not enough. Hours or years of therapy is not enough. You must experience your purity, your love, your joy, and your worth unburdened from the layers of armor you have accumulated and worn over the years realizing that they no longer serve you. Stripping yourself of your stories, and remembering who you truly are.
So many lifetimes.
So many lessons.
So many stories to tell with a cliff hanging ending of whether our hero will find himself or herself. To walk through our own personal dark and ominous caves to transform and ascend to the highest versions of ourselves to heal not just ourselves, but those in our lives now and in the past.
Healing is not a linear path but taken in incremental steps formed through experience, connection, love and compassion for those who hurt you, but more importantly, love and compassion for yourself. Cultivate loving yourself with an open heart, and you will naturally love others, since there is no true separation.
Now when I look at my Mom’s gentle eyes, I simply choose to see love reflected back at me serving as a reminder that it is never too late for anyone to take their steps on the Knowing Road.
Thought: What trauma have you experienced and how has it shaped you?
This article is published as part of the Knowing Road, an email newsletter for those interested in improving the most important relationship in their lives — the one with themselves. To learn more and subscribe click here.
