According to PTSD United, 70% of adults in the US have experienced some sort of traumatic event in their lives. Trauma is often thought of as physical or sexual abuse, death of a loved one, being the victom of a crime or some other such tragic occurance. But trauma comes in all shapes and sizes. Emotional trauma is experienced by every human.
Emotional trauma can occur when you had an embarrassing event happen in childhood, it could happen from being rejected by someone, or ridiculed or shamed. There is a broad spectrum and everyone deals with trauma differently. What is damaging to one person may not be for another. Therefore it is important not to make judgements or assumptions about what is or isn’t “traumatic.”
Much of what we carry originates from our childhood and the sensitivities and logic of a child is much more vulnerable to shame, guilt and fear than adults. So some of the trauma that gets buried in the early years can be surprisingly simple and even seem rather benign to adult logic.
The main problem in society today is that we are all carrying around unresolved trauma because we have not been taught to identify it or fully understand it, let alone heal it. Instead we have learned to integrate it into who we are. We develop hardened personalities and the people we grow into is a result of all of our accumulated trauma from this lifetime and others.
TRAUMA IS STUCK ENERGY
Emotional trauma accumulates in your energetic field and causes disturbances in your life. These disturbances can manifest as physical pain, limiting beliefs, attracting the same undesirable experiences over-and-over, repeated unhealthy patterns and addiction.
Modern culture and Western medicine has us seeking to treat the symptoms of trauma instead of going at the root of the symptoms and actually healing the trauma. The list of undesirable symptoms above are all your body’s way of telling you there is an energetic imbalance that needs to be addressed. Rather than numbing the symptoms, we need to honor them and look inward for clues as to what the root of the trauma may be.
This process will allow psychological flexibility and can act as a catalyst for expansion and a greater capacity for love. It is actually a useful tool for spiritual growth. That’s not to say that trauma is a good thing, but rather, trauma can be used for good.
IT’S TIME TO CHANGE HOW WE DEAL WITH TRAUMA
Our current societal norms have taught us to “suck it up” or “tough it out” when we are faced with trauma. Crying and the showing of emotions has been labeled as a sign of weakness. When entering the workplace we are told to check our personal lives at the door when we enter and put on a happy face.
This has created an environment of people turning away from the wounded parts of themselves. When we turn away from our woundedness, we are denying our feelings (our truth). On a subconscious emotional level, this is experienced as rejection, shame, or self hatred, which furthers the damage of the trauma. In this way, our societal norms are actually causing more harm and keeping us stuck in a perpetual state of traumatic response. This is why addiction, anxiety and depression has reached epidemic levels.
We need to identify and address buried trauma on all levels and begin to acknowledge it, accept it and feel it.
The negative energy associated with unresolved trauma that gets lodged in the energetic field got stuck in the first place because the emotion was not allowed to flow. So in order to get it unstuck, we need to safely reevaluate it and allow it to flow. That is where the saying “feel it to heal it” comes from. The other important part is being able to actually name the feeling.
Because humanity has been denying our feelings for centuries, our DNA has become encoded with the tendency to reject and accumulate negative energy associated with trauma. As such, many people don’t even know what it is they are feeling. So the act of naming their feelings can be quite challenging.
However, once we name the feeling it can activate the stuck energy and trigger a sensation in the body. We then can allow the sensation or emotion to express which will restore the flow of energy and remove the negative energy and allow us to move past the trauma.
An important thing to note is that the longer the energy has been stuck, the more it amasses and therefore the MORE it will need to be purged (or expressed). It may take several sessions of trauma work to completely remove large blockages.
THE REALITY OF RESISTANCE
This all sounds very straight forward and simplified when I spell it out via written words. But when you actually sit down to do this spiritual work of uncovering and healing trauma, your ego and even the body will oftentimes resist. It goes against the nature of everything we have learned since birth.
The ego likes things predictable, even if the result is suffering. The ego fears the unknown more than staying in a state of traumatic response or suffering, because it knows how to deal with the current status quo and it will not give up control easily.
We must be gentle with ourselves, like we would be with a scared and wounded 5-year-old child. We must think of our egos as the scared and wounded child. Assure it that we are safe to express, we are safe from harm and everything is going to be okay.
Once we have named our unresolved emotional trauma and allowed it to express, then the really amazing spiritual growth work begins.
PUSHING PAST LIMITING BELIEFS
I mentioned limiting beliefs before as a symptom of trauma or a “disturbance” in life. Our personalities, actions, preferences and habits are all formed based on our beliefs. And what most of us don’t realize until we start doing the deeper work of uncovering trauma, is that many beliefs cause limitations and dictate our lives. The limiting beliefs are often born out of trauma, either yours or that of your ancestors.
For instance, I’ll use an example from my own life of a rather benign limiting belief that I picked up in childhood as a result of emotional trauma. When I was 7 years old, I forgot to do my homework and I went to a very strict catholic school. The teacher announced publicly as the class was handing in their homework, that because I did not hand in mine, I would be punished with detention.
Nobody got detention in second grade. I was the only one and I was mortified and I buried the emotion surrounding that experience. This led me to create the belief that homework equals no fun and homework equals punishment. Consequently, I developed a habit of avoiding homework and an addiction to procrastination that I’ve carried throughout my life until I uncovered it as being a limiting belief.
As an entrepreneur, much of what I do can be classified as “homework” and this limiting belief that homework equals punishment began to manifest in my business. I started to experience a lot of resistance and I knew I had a limiting belief that was standing in the way.
So trauma healing is a multi-step process, but once you really start moving old stagnant energy out and and start reprogramming your old outdated limiting beliefs that were tied to the trauma, your vibration really increases. You start to experience alignment, synchronicity and flow. And the places that used to hold low frequency stuck energy get filled up with more light.
You begin to pull in more of your higher self⏤more of your divine light. That elevates your intuition, your capacity for love and activates your true authentic nature and divine gifts. In that way, the greater the traumatic wound you carry, the greater capacity for love you will have and the greater your potential for integrating Divine light is. But of course, you must heal your trauma in order to fully activate your Divine potential.
If you are ready to uncover and heal your buried trauma in a safe and supported way Mija’s Intuitive Counseling can help.
About the Author: My name is Eran Afner, I’m a Spiritual Copywriter and Coach. I help spiritual entrepreneurs, lightworkers and other conscious professionals grow their businesses and broaden global impact through writing heart-centered content that engages people at a soul level. Mija and I met in 2020 when I helped her with her website rebrand and relaunch. It was a rather serendipitous connection as I have been doing very deep spiritual work, healing unresolved trauma and integrating my shadow for quite some time. This happens to be one of Mija’s stronger areas of focus and she is now mentoring me in my spiritual growth and shadow work. As I continue to help her with her marketing content. A divine partnership indeed, Mija and I serve each other as we both walk The Way of our Truth to fulfill our Higher Purpose. Learn more about me at: AfnerWords.com.