[wanchain]

Hi All,

I just thought I would write about my perspective of trauma and healing.

I used to think that a trauma is an extremely shocking event, like someone jumping off the roof and landing right in front of you, totally disassembled like a meat loaf, and then you spend the next few nights getting nightmare out of it. Or being severely beaten up or tortured inhumanely with brute force, resulting in blood and scar all over you, and you are half dead and half alive.

If you accept the above as the definition of a trauma, then I don't have a traumatic experience. Once, a psychologist asked if I had a trauma before. I said no.

In 2017, I discovered that I had both physical trauma and psychological trauma, after receiving Rosen Method therapy. Now, I would define trauma as such:

physical trauma is trapped adrenaline
psychological trauma is trapped emotions

Needlessly to say, my healing process was to release the unprocessed and trapped emotions and adrenaline. Throughout this process, what surprised me was how unaware I was to these things that were held by in the subconscious or unconscious. I spent years acquiring self-awareness, even though what I was really aiming for was physical health. Now I finally understand why I started my health and healing journey with self-awareness, self-discovery, self-empowerment, etc.

It's like our education system. Say you want to be an accountant. You need four years of university. But you don't actually learn about accounting until the second year of university, and even then, not all your courses are about accounting. There are other courses you must take, such as marketing, finance, statistics, mathematics, information management system, etc. So these are the supporting courses designed to augment your accounting knowledge. But before this, you go through the first year doing general science, or general art, which is supposed to raise you to a certain platform to prepare you for your accounting education. But even before your university education, you go through 12 or 13 years of education, which is to raise you to a certain platform such that you can operate in a university environment. In such a way, my healing journey had been a series of preparation, learning about the universe through the spiritual path, only to come to a point where I am able to look inward, to see the cause of my accelerated physical deterioration.

I grew up in an environment where I was not allowed to express myself, and where I was to absorb all the violent emotional expression of others. In that environment, I learned that you had to roar like a thunder if you wish to express anger, frustration, irritation, etc. If your expression is of a lesser emotional intensity, I would not know what it means, and therefore would not know how to interact with you. Social handicap. So for a very long time, I only attract drama queens, or people who are equally handicapped.

My ethnic and cultural background also contributed to my trauma. Our elders demanded respect, even though there was nothing respectable about them. My relatives would tell me to listen to my parents, to submit to my parents. If my parents were angry at me, it's my fault. So I grew up thinking that it's normal for elders to roar at me. That was the level of my awareness about trauma and wellbeing.

It takes a village to raise a child; and it takes a village to destroy a child.

The road to traumatic healing is a journey inward. Your village does not heal you. Only you can heal yourself.

Wanchain