My past few days have been filled with the same conversations many people are having.  It doesn’t matter if you live in the United States.  You were probably watching what was happening in America.  Our elections have an impact on the world, and I’ll be honest, this one might have been the most significant so far (at least since I was born).  I consider myself to be quite connected to my emotions, but I’m still working through my response to this.  One thing is clear to me: almost everyone is having a trauma response right now.  This is happening for two reasons.  This current experience feels traumatic, and this is highly likely to bring up past experiences which were also traumatic.

That’s a big problem for us.  When we respond to current events with the flashback emotions of past traumatic events, we can end up repeating patterns.  As you know, these are not patterns we want to repeat.  When we take actions fueled by flashback emotions, we are rarely able to make a change to the way we are interacting with the world.  This is not what we want.  When we address the flashback emotions and learn more about the memories driving them, we can take new actions and make the changes necessary to end the patterns.  First, we must see them for what they are.  We must recognize them as trauma responses.  To help in that process, I developed a short list of responses which might be attributable to trauma.

If you are telling yourself this will have no impact on your life, it’s a trauma response.  As children, we learned how to pretend things were okay when they weren’t.  The controller developed very impressive skills at convincing self that things were fine in situations where it was not.  We stopped seeing things clearly because we could no longer see the truth without falling into despair.  This is a necessary childhood trauma response when we are trapped in trauma.  We must lie to ourselves to survive.  Without healing in adulthood, we will keep doing this, but it is no longer helpful.  We need to start being honest about what impacts we might experience.

If you are telling yourself this is the end of all life (or yours), this is a trauma response.  On the opposite side of our trauma responses is the intense and paralyzing fear that developed in our traumatic childhoods.  Our fear kept us hypervigilant by always assuming the worst.  This is also a controller pattern.  We can exhibit both these responses at different times from the same controller.  In certain circumstances, we will tend toward one response over the other.  This is a very personal preference based on our traumatic experiences.  Both extremes are trauma responses.  The reality is in the balance between them which comes with healing.

If you believe a man is going to save you from some evil he says exists, this is a trauma response.  People who say they will protect others are often looking to control others.  The self-proclaimed savior is never going to save anyone.  In order for someone to claim they can save us, they have to make sure we feel enough fear to crave saving.  In childhood, this is how they get us to remain faithful to abusers.  We start to see all relationships rife with unhealthy power dynamics as an opportunity to be saved.  Unfortunately, this brings about more abuse.  As adults, we need to stop believing the fear tactics so we can feel grounded enough to lead our own lives in authentic directions.  We don’t need anyone to save us any longer.  That’s a flashback.

If you can only see a person as entirely good despite evidence to the contrary, this is a trauma response.  As children, we had to fool ourselves about people in addition to circumstances.  While we knew our abusers were not safe, we also knew we had no choice.  We refused to look at the bad.  We would accentuate the positive in our abusers.  We would rewrite the story and never EVER open our minds to anything that would challenge the story we told.  Our love seeker learned to make them look like the most amazing person even when they clearly weren’t.  This was necessary in childhood but is disastrous in adulthood.  If you are putting anyone on a pedestal, you are susceptible to abusive practices, including cult-like experiences.  Nobody is all good.  It is critical to open our minds to the good and bad associated with others.  Take them off the pedestal.

To break out of these patterns, we need to start with what we can control: expressing our emotions.  Our intense emotions are mostly flashbacks and they need to be heard.  As we listen to ourselves, we can release some of these flashback emotions.  It will help us find a new inner balance and we will start connecting with new options we couldn’t see before.  Try out some of these writing prompts if you are struggling with big emotions right now.

• Ungrounded anger will keep us from making strategic decisions and playing the long game.  If you are angry, write from the rage which is naturally coming to the surface.  Writing it in a letter to a particular person is a great approach when learning to rage write.
• Ungrounded futility will keep us paralyzed.  If you are futile or feeling hopeless, write from the feeling that abusers always win.  Like other emotions, futility can feel like it is entirely about now but keep looking for how it is about the past too.
• Ungrounded fear will keep us from setting our boundaries and protecting ourselves in healthy ways.  If you are scared, write from the fears of what is to come.  If it feels exaggerated to your adult brain or bordering on paranoia, still give it the space to express.
• Unprocessed shame will fuel the futility that paralyzes us and exacerbate our need for perfection.  If you are feeling shame, write from any feeling of not being good enough to change your life or this world.  It isn’t easy to hear from the shame, but it helps change our patterns.
• Unfelt grief will stop change from happening.  It can also make us sick.  If you are feeling sad, let the grief come.  Let the feeling of what “could have been” express itself.  Give yourself time to acknowledge the losses you feel.

Through emotional expression, we can find a way to bring balance to our inner world during this challenging and triggering time.  We can find the next best step forward so we can change our patterns no matter what others are choosing.  It can be difficult to live in a world which doesn’t support our own inner growth, but if we keep bringing it back to our inner conversation, we can find moments of peace when it feels impossible.