People who suffer from anxiety disorders, depression, low self-esteem, addictions, personality disorders, and other mental health issues do not develop symptoms out of nowhere. What most people do not realise is that unresolved trauma could be causing or perpetuating their problems.
Trauma is often at the root of many problems that affect our wellbeing, but often we don’t recognise it as trauma because it doesn’t fit our conception of what might be traumatic.
What Is Trauma?
When people think of trauma, they often have in mind major events such as physical or sexual abuse; but the more subtle traumas in childhood can cause us just as much pain. Trauma can be caused by teachers undermining us, peers bullying us, parents giving us mixed messages, or being unsupportive or inconsistent in their parenting.
The difficulty people have with identifying their own childhood experiences as traumatic is because they see them from the perspective of an adult, and this can trivialise them.
People may think that their experiences, although painful at the time, could not be the cause of their problems, because they are not in the category of major trauma.
They may dismiss them as small, seemingly insignificant events that they should have been able to “get over”, and may even feel embarrassed that something like that could cause them to feel pain in later life.
Unresolved Trauma
But the truth is, unresolved events do cause pain when you carry the feelings through to adulthood. And when you experienced these traumas, you experienced them with a child’s limited understanding and narrow range of coping skills.
Things that may seem insignificant as an adult take on gigantic proportions as a child. The younger you were when the events happened, the less you were able to process them skilfully, and so part of you gets stuck in the childhood pain, even in adulthood.
Sometimes people don’t even know what has caused their issues, and may need to explore their feelings to find out what is behind them. In my experience, most of what needs to be healed comes from events before the age of six, and later events can reinforce these feelings further.
A therapeutic tool called Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) can help you to uncover and resolve these traumatic events quickly and with less pain than rehashing them in counselling. NLP enables you to actively process the experiences that had previously kept you stuck, and move on with much more strength, resilience, and self-worth than before.
What are you still carrying around that you want to let go of?
