Sometimes, Trauma…

In a session this week, I had a strong thought. It was something to challenge the “bump in the night” feeling being discussed. It was that heart-bump feeling that it will all go wrong, as it did before, and we will have to go through our “dark night” again.

Even when facing this devastation – bringing familiar powerlessness and back in old fears – there can potentially be a new space for us to hold confidence.

Through the process of therapy, it is inevitable that you now have more skills than you had in your original traumas for coping with what comes. You are not the same person that you were. You have been in the dark before and have come into the sunlight again, better at regulation and emotional management.

We are not who we used to be!

I find it helpful to remember the brain has a natural bias towards pessimism and catastrophe. It doesn’t care so much about your happiness: the priority is survival. Fear is part of the attempt to get you to avoid something it views as a threat.

It can be easy to get overwhelmed with the anxiety of what will come to pass and assume it will bring the same devastation as last time. I don’t believe in this inevitability.

As a child with a high fever, I once hallucinated in terror in the middle of the night, watching the red lights of my clock radio float about before me and the curtains wiggle. I knew that something dark and terrifying was on the bunk bed below me. I could barely breathe, so paralysed I was by fear. How could I call for help without causing the monster to devour me? Finally plucking courage, I tapped repeatedly on the metal bed until my sister came into the room. “Hannah, please stop that noise! What are you doing?” I immediately asked “What is in the bed underneath? What is waiting there to get me?!” My sister made a bemused expression and presented me with the teddy bear she herself had tucked into the bunk below to look after me, specifically because I was poorly. In my delirium, I wasn’t capable of seeing anything positive – my fear made the monster that was immobilising me – a monster that was never going to be there.

Perhaps now, as an adult, growing beyond, through and because of your traumas, perhaps it is possible to recognise you have new powers internally in the responses you can have to darkness. You can challenge the thought that sees the monsters and your own inevitable devastation. That darkness of the past authored all the power and strength you have now – resources not available before and you have new skills to cope that just weren’t possible now. How you respond now will not therefore be how you responded before: perhaps you will find there is no monster, but a teddy bear to give you comfort instead.