It's OK to be agressive in healing trauma. | CPTSD Coach
It’s ok to be aggressive healing childhood trauma.
There is a vast difference between being hard on yourself and pushing yourself into growth. To be brutally honest, as I always am, I think that we need to have a reclamation on this idea that just because we are trauma survivors that we can’t push ourselves into something. I will forever be the first to say that gentleness and patience are the keys to healing, but I find it incredibly discouraging that people consider pushing yourself through something hard and uncomfortable and being relentless in your will to heal as a trauma response. I can’t help but ask myself, what am I willing to do to have the life that I want? What am I willing to do to heal trauma, to heal my body, and to heal the world? That answer is whatever it takes with swiftness, accountability, and an unrelenting drive.
Why is it that we view pushing ourselves to learn and grow as a bad thing? Of course, we have to factor in the isms of this process and how often it’s easy to turn healing into just another thing that we do. But there has to be a conversation about pushing through on the hard and uncomfortable days. There has to be a willingness to get up and do it again even when it sucks and even when all you want to do is stay in bed and eat chocolate cake. Trust me; I have been there. It’s easier to fall back into old patterns, habits, and routines than to pick yourself up and do it anyway. The building blocks of healing are about rebuilding trust and sovereignty within yourself. And how do we do that? We have to reclaim what is ours. We have to prove to ourselves that we can do hard things. We have to force ourselves into the life that we want to have. There is something to be said about momentum and centrifugal force.
It’s ok to rest when healing trauma.
If you need to rest, then rest. I will never argue that. I have days that I disappear into the ether of nothingness because I need it to recharge. As an introvert, I love my alone time. I love doing nothing. But more than nothing, I love the feeling of being in control of my life. I see the difference that pushing ourselves through hard things makes in our lives. When I think about the people who have done anything extraordinary with their time here on Earth, I see the mountain they had to climb and their willingness to climb that mountain until their fingers bleed and the Sun and wind scorned their faces. The difference between success and failure is doing it again and again. Too many people quit because they aren’t willing to do the hard work for a long time. The difference between success and failure is effort and commitment, and an agreement with yourself that you have to keep going.
Yes, I know someone reading this right now vehemently disagrees, and that’s ok. I am not writing this to convince you of anything. I am just acknowledging that all too often, we fail ourselves by leveraging the excuses in our lives as a scapegoat not to show up when we know we can. We leverage the word can’t, we blame our trauma for our behavior, and we allow our pasts to dictate our future. I have been there. I have felt the depths of what the human spirit can endure and allow. And to be honest, that works until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t work any longer, and that trauma response instead becomes the baseline for how we exist in the world, we have to acknowledge that the only way we get out is by stepping through it.
I hope that we can come to this place as a community of people healing trauma and accept that we have to be aggressive, not in a violent way, but in a way that catapults us into the life we want to have. I often come back to this notion: Though trauma may be our foundation, it is not our future. I have said that for years and under that statement is truth, and that truth is that if you want to rebuild a foundation, you need to do some hard shit over and over again to strengthen, fortify, and reinforce your pride, self-love, sovereignty, and power. Being a dick to yourself and proving that you can be the hero in your own story is not the same thing.
Be gentle yet aggressive. Be firm and light. Be what you know you can. Do the work.
Until next time my friend…
Be Unbroken,
-Michael
P.S. You can take my brand new 1-hour course: The Key to Healing for FREE. Click Here:www.linktr.ee/michaelunbroken
Michael@ThinkUnbroken.com