UnderstandYour Mind & Understand Your Connection To The World

“Our experiences can be memorized in our bodies and continue to be present in how we move, speak, and interact with others. Our past has the ability to influence how we live our lives in the present.”

~Ronnie Sumrall EMDR Therapist (ACSW).

When someone experiences a traumatic experience and attempt to to move away from the experience without a mental health perspective, the mind will inform the body that it hasn’t recovered through 3 forms-dreams, habits, and reactions. When a person’s trauma goes untreated, they may tend to have nightmares or experience difficulty sleeping. Perhaps they may even become avoidant of going to sleep completely for days, even weeks at a time. Eventually, the inability to manage the stress of everything can be represented in many ways.Very often by substance abuse which tends to lead to addiction is a choice that people make in order to separate themselves from the experience. Next to this, we have reactions. The way that untreated trauma can manifest in someone’s habits, is that they may tend to avoid certain people. Perhaps those people may remind them of someone associated with their trauma. A person may chose to avoid certain places that reflect difficult time that they experienced in their life. To take this understanding ever further, an individual may choose to avoid the outside world all together (Isolation). This can be seen represented by a person being avoidant or uncomfortable with leaving their home for extended periods of time. 

What we have just discussed is something called triggers. Becoming aware of the connection between our current habits and a persons traumatic history is the key to understanding how trauma remains present in our lives. If gone untreated for long periods of time, individuals become comfortable with how the impact of trauma influences their lives. What is meant by this, people have come to develop a relationship with their reactions to a trigger rather than dealing processing the direct trauma itself.

What this may look like is a person choosing to be avoidant, isolated, or become comfortable with managing their reactions to a trigger rather than addressing the reason why the trigger is there in the first place. It is almost as if the person has become ruled or governed by their reactions and have chosen to situate their lives surrounding their emotions (triggers) rather than approaching the reason why they are having them. 

What treatment to trauma does is it invites the person to take their power back. They are taking control over the power that their triggers (Trauma Responses) have had over them. When you work with Mental Health Perspective, you are introduced to interventions, approaches, and modalities that have been known to work to treat trauma. With that type of support, you will begin to explore what your would look like by not controlled by your triggers.

When a person is under duress over a long period of time, they tend to learn to make adjustments to house the discomfort that they feel in order for them to simply move through their daily life. . The question that comes to mind is. . . is that living? Is that truly living? Is that living up to your highest potential? Let’s explore this scenario. A person who has become comfortable with designing their lives in a way that they have become comfortable with experiencing untreated triggers related to trauma is most likely approaching their lives externally in the same way. What this may look like is a person may make a  point to not be resistant or reactive, not only to change, but also to people who want to build relationships with them. This could mean relationships with family, friends, or potential romantic partners are in potential danger of being affected by a persons’ untreated trauma responses (triggers).

What I like to do is imagine a house. In this house there are many rooms. In this house, one room might be housed by different memories, thoughts, and feelings-good and bad. For a person who is ruled by their emotions/reactions to a trigger, that room is bigger, larger, and perhaps they have gotten to the point where they have provided furniture and possibly even energy to feed that emotion. Thats how comfortable a person can become with untreated trauma. They may even go so far as to make it as comfortable as they can by pushing people away so that they can suffer without disturbance.