Can I still be ME now given what’s happened in my life?
When we have experiences and trauma in life that remain unresolved it can significantly and negatively affect our sense of self – who we know ourselves to be. As a result, we can experience a range of symptoms including self-loathing, self-sabotage, negative self-talk, negative/limiting beliefs about ourselves, lack of confidence, lack of direction, anxiety, depression and much more.
How does an experience or trauma in life remain unresolved I hear you ask?
You see, when we have an experience or a trauma in life and we don’t understand why it happened or what happened, it becomes unresolved. We might not understand our role in the experience or how we responded. We become confused about who we are now. For example, if I have a my-fault car accident, does that now mean that I am a bad driver? Should I have been paying more attention? I always thought I was a good driver. I don’t understand. This is of course a very general example, however the same applies to all experiences in your life.
It is our self-beliefs that are challenged in a scenario like this which causes us to question who we are and importantly who we are NOW given what has happened.
The younger we are when we have an experience or trauma that we don’t understand, the harder it is to answer the question: can I still be ME given what has happened? If we answer with a “no” or an “I don’t know”, we now have to find a way to continue to live our lives with this question looming over us. We have to be more careful of living now just in case we were the problem, the reason, for the experience/trauma. Cue our survival system – fight and flight kicks in so we can focus on being safe.
Why safe? If we don’t know who we are, we don’t know how to respond – to anything. We stop trusting ourselves to respond appropriately in any given situation i.e., we lose our self-trust. This realisation makes the world unsafe for us because what if it happens again AND it’s my fault?
This is all about perception (I am responsible for the problem) and possibility (what if it happens again), not reality (I had an experience) and probability (it’s less likely to happen again because I learned from it).
The longer the event goes unresolved, the more we remain in a sustained or prolonged fight and flight response. The changes this can create in us can be profound. We are not designed to remain in a survival/defence response for years and subsequently we start to develop symptoms – in our physical state, our emotional and mental wellbeing, and crucially our ability, capacity and trust to put ourselves into the world with confidence.
Does any of the above sound like you?
Are you struggling with negative self-talk or a lack of confidence? Maybe you feel like you're constantly Self-sabotaging?
The only way to solve this is to RESOLVE your understanding of the experience so you can go from surviving to thriving.
If this blog has resonated and made sense for you or you feel you'd like to work on RESOLVING any unresolved experiences or trauma in your life. Click the link below to book in for a session or alternatively feel free to contact Aaron to ask any questions or discuss further.
Original Content sourced from Resolve Beyond Neurology and written by Carolyn Farnan
Blog post edited and designed by Aaron Farrell
Comments