How does it look like when you relive your trauma? part 1
What you might experience and feel.
This post, like any other on my profile, is based on my own personal and private experiences. The below examples are how my body reacts and my emotions.
For the audio version, click here.
So, how does it look like when you relive your trauma? Especially that you’re not aware that anything traumatic happened to you early in your life. You don’t realise there is a pattern, but feel that certain situations and people keep coming back into your life, in different form. You might think, “Why is this keep happening to me? Why do I keep meeting this kind of people? People I can’t trust or people that disappoint me? Why all the good men/women are taken?”
Your body tells you about it:
you might feel you want to run away,
if your legs had a free will, they’d start running, taking you with them as far as possible from the situation,
your legs and arms feel itchy and tingling,
the area of your belly might feel constricted,
you might feel pain in your belly area, be bloated or have loose stools,
your whole body might feel contracted, bent forward, as if it was trying to make a little ball of you,
the area of your heart might feel squeezy, like a short but piercing pain,
you might feel suffocating, as if your lungs were constricted and couldn’t open up,
you talk fast, a lot, with a speed of the light, with high-pitched tone, people have difficulties following what you’re saying.
Your emotions tell you about it:
you might feel panic, you spin yourself up higher and higher in all those emotions and sensations,
you feel powerless and helpless,
you feel frustration and anger,
you wonder, “Why is this happening to me?”, “What have I done to deserve this?”
you just want it to stop, you want this person or the situation to stop, “Can’t they see what they’re doing to me?” you might ask yourself,
Most of the time it’s a person that is involved:
Thinking about adult children of borderline parents, emotionally unavailable, unstable or immature and narcissistic parents, then it’s definitely a human being that is involved. It’s another person’s behaviour, what they say, how they say it, what they do.
Talking to them, trying to fix the conflict or distressful situation, telling them how you feel doesn’t help. Internet tells you how to solve conflicts: sit down, talk to them, tell them how you feel, what they/the situation is doing to you… But with this kind of people, it doesn’t work. You can sit down and talk and 5 min later they’re back to square one.
you feel helpless, powerless, caged, like in jail,
you keep repeating the situation in your head, the conversation, who did what and what was said,
you feel emotional pain,
You try to do something about it, the whole internet tells you that, “Everything depends on you”, but does it, really? Everything?
If you’re looking for a job, does this depend on you, who they choose? If you’re looking for an accommodation, does it really depends on you that the prices are high and your salary cannot pay for a place of your own? If you could decide the prices of the accommodation, it would be probably much cheaper. So there are things outside your control.
So external factors, they don't depend on you, but they do affect your emotional state at this very moment, right? You can’t control the external factors, and you realise that, so you try to control something else, and that something else might be a subscription for something. Once, when I was relieving my trauma, I couldn't control anything around me. So I tried to cancel my subscription for the gym because that was the only thing that I could control. So, I was thinking of cancelling it. I decided to cancel it. But…, two weeks later, I would realise that I need it for my rehabilitation. So another indication is:
irrational decision-making in the heat of the moment,
trying to control the situation and the outside factors, others behaviours,
you stop doing the things you like because you have no energy to do it.
You spend so much time rethinking the whole situation, feeling different emotions, your body constricting, causing you tension here and there. You simply have no energy to do things you like. You don't go to the gym, you don't go for a walk. You don't go meeting your friends. You might eat more, whether it's fast food or sweets or whatever. You might drink more. You might get stuck on Internet or you watch lots of movies, TV series, because it cuts you off from the current situation you're in. Because you have no energy for anything else, and it allows your brain to distract for a moment.
You may not even notice your body anymore that there is tension in your neck.
You keep talking about your situation to your friends.
You talk and talk, and they listen, and at some point they don't want to talk about it anymore. It's because they don't have the capacity to talk about it again and again and again. They don't have the capacity to listen anymore. They give you advice, and they make your case a personal mission. That’s why they burn out. They try to solve your problem. But you just want to say things out loud, because otherwise you feel like you're gonna explode. There is so much energy that has built up inside of you because of that situation. There's so much frustration, panic, anger, disappointment, you name it. And it all wants out.
You don't want to hear what you're supposed to do. You just want them to listen, to hug you, to say they love you, that they are there for you, that they care about you, that everything will be fine, and that if you need any help, you just say it. This is all you want. Just for them to be. You don't expect anything else.
And since your friends can’t listen to it anymore, you pour yourself out to your colleagues at work, random person you meet… Just so you can let all those feelings and sensations out of you.
“You can't stop”
I mean, you feel you can’t change the situation you’re in. There might be a reason for this, you may not have a job, there may be nowhere to move out, that you can afford. Maybe the house is both of yours and why should you move out and leave the whole house to the other person. Might be because of the kids, right? There might be lots of reasons that your friends don't even know about, they don't even think about, they say “just leave it” and you cannot “just” leave it. It’s too complicated to leave it. But very often it feels like there’s this invisible power that just keeps you with them… As if you were tied to them with some kind of magic, invisible rope…
At some point you just feel isolated, lonely with no one to talk to. You suppress this entire emotion and energy in you, even lower in your stomach, because you cannot just talk about it. People just don't have the capacity or energy to listen to it anymore.
If you had, let's call it a normal person, in front of you, who actually wants to solve the conflict, you'd argue, then you would talk, then you would solve the conflict, and then the person, and you would respect each other, adjust the behaviour, so that everybody's happy. But when you talk about people like borderline or, emotionally immature people, it doesn't matter how many times you sit down and talk, because 5 minutes later they're back to square one. So you know that there is no point of sitting and talking. You’ve done that, you’ve tried that and now you feel powerless… They’re back to pushing your boundaries. And setting boundaries is not easy, if not impossible, for you. And you just have all these feelings rumbling around in you.
When you argue, you allow the energy to go out and leave your body. Then you talk, and then you solve the conflict. But when you have tried that with that parent, partner or colleague from work, you know it just doesn't work. There are people who actually are like a wall: anything you say bumps off them like a tennis ball from a wall, you know that talking with them doesn't help. So all this stays in your body somewhere, and it's rolling there, and it's trying to find a way out.
So, in short:
You have body sensations that are unpleasant.
You might feel that your arms and legs have some kind of sensation and if they could, they would just run away with you.
Weird sensations in your belly,
There might be some negative sensations around your heart and lungs.
You use a fast and high-pitched tone when you talk.
You feel powerless, helpless, frustrated.
You might think, “What have I done to deserve this? Why is this happening to me?” You just want to talk, and you feel like caged.
And the worst case scenario? Your body gives in, and you’re diagnosed with depression.
There’s coming part two, I just need to polish it (🇵🇱🤣). This post was originally much longer, but it was a bitch to read that long post and make a podcast of it.
I hope that helps. I hope you liked it.
Have a nice day.
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