Fear as a Painful Emotion

Last week I suggested that you might focus on an event in your life that you experienced as traumatic and ask yourself if the event has changed you. I suggested that you might look for evidence that you are responding to situations and people in a more distrustful, angrier and aggressive way or have you perhaps become more withdrawn and risk adverse. I said that this week we would look more closely at those behaviours in the context of my comment that, “The trauma you have experienced is not responsible for the negative changes you can identify. What changes us is the painful emotions we have internalised which inhibit our ability to move on and be the person we would like to be.”

First it is important to recognise than many positive changes can occur in our lives following a traumatic event. It is common to hear people say, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” I prefer to say that “what does not kill me can make me wiser and more mature.” Some of us can look back on a past trauma and realise that many of the good and helpful principles that we apply to living now, were born out of that time of challenge. For me personally, I consider that much of the empathy I have for others has its foundation in a childhood trauma, and whilst I am not thankful for the trauma, I am grateful for the empathy. My emotional responses to that trauma were not resolved until I was nearly forty years old. It took me that long to understand that most of the things I struggled with in my teenage years were not a direct result of the event, as I had always thought, but were the consequences of repressing or internalising the intense anger and fear I felt toward the person who had hurt me and the shame I carried myself.

Survivors of all types of abuse have similar emotional responses at differing intensities. Anger, fear, shame and almost always a general sense of disempowerment. Seeing ourselves as victims renders us as unlikely to take responsibility for the repression of these feelings. Instead we blame the perpetrator, or ourselves or the people who should have taken better care of us and continue to allow ourselves and our loved ones to pay the price for our decision not to resolve our pain.

When a counsellor, way back in 1979 asked me what I felt toward the person who had abused me I said it was anger. Then he asked me who paid the price for that anger. The answer was simple but disturbing. It certainly was not the perpetrator. I recognised that the shame I carried was the cost I was paying. And the anger that I projected on family members meant that they were paying a high price as well. His response was to challenge me. Would I be content to remain a shame-ridden victim all my life and ask my loved ones to pay the price for my anger, or would I accept the reality that I was the only one who could disempower the painful emotions that ruled over my life.

It is not usually possible to leap straight from a traumatic experience to complete healing. It is a process, and the length of that process may vary from person to person. But every process must have a starting point and that will be when we decide, for love of ourselves and those close to us start down the pathway to healing. We will start talking about that next week.

God Bless

Graeme.