There’s all sorts of trauma in the world. There is a lot of literature written towards traumatic reaction obtained through a single event. It is different from complex trauma that extends for years and where there is little chance of escape. Early trauma hardwires our nervous systems for stress. Trauma accumulates. When our foundations are wrought with unprocessed injustice and feelings, this makes it more difficult to deal with injustices later. When our foundations are wrought with unprocessed trauma and feelings, this makes it more difficult to deal with everything that happens to confront us. It is when we have been able to process this trauma and injustice that great things are in sight.
The link at which
the following information was posted was deleted. Just for people to know, I
got these symptoms and definition from the web. Though it was years ago, I got
the information from the web. The information is as good and valid now as it
was years ago.
“Complex PTSD is the
result of prolonged, repeated trauma - usually in childhood such as growing up
in an abusive family, as opposed to trauma that occurs from an event. Those who
experience an event, like a combat vet who deploys long after their personality
has fully formed, remember what they were like before the trauma and wish they
could be that person again. With complex trauma the personality is (usually)
formed in trauma and they’ve never known anything different.”
- Emotional Regulation. May include
persistent sadness, suicidal thoughts, explosive anger, or inhibited
anger.
- Consciousness. Includes forgetting
traumatic events, reliving traumatic events, or having episodes in which
one feels detached from one's mental processes or body (dissociation).
- Self-Perception. May include
helplessness, shame, guilt, stigma, and a sense of being completely
different from other human beings.
- Distorted Perceptions of the
Perpetrator. Examples include attributing total power to the
perpetrator, becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the
perpetrator, or preoccupied with revenge.
- Relations with Others. Examples
include isolation, distrust, or a repeated search for a rescuer.
- One's System of Meanings. May
include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair.
This is in addition
to common PTSD symptoms. This is the end of my use of information from the web.
There is a reason I
keep talking about the developmental periods of children. There is a reason
this is so important. Who is judging between traumas? Between sufferings? Just
a pondering. As a comparison. Someone in a car accident who gets pretty banged
up but who has had a childhood of love and peace. They’re able to navigate
safely through the world, their own emotions and thoughts and fresh traumas
(though they may be large) are reasonably well processed and filed away in the mind.
And another who experienced hell growing up, raped daily and beaten, never
having developed that base of grounding in life.
Think of a soul as a cup or a well. Imagine you have this
well. Now, that well, in the beginning is filled to the brim with very clear
and clean water. But, as time passes, things happen to that well. People drink
from it, things happen around it and things drop into it. As time passes, the
water that was at first so clean, so clear becomes muddied and dirty. Now, what
happens when you try to push that mud to the bottom to allot for clean water to
rise to the surface? Remaining, you still have muddy water because the mud has
only been pushed to the bottom of the well. It’s like having oil on the surface
of a well and trying to push the oil to the bottom. No matter what you do, the
oil will rise again to the top. In a similar way, the human heart is so
precious, so fragile. Sometimes falling into sin is not a consciously willful
choice that is thought over in a logical manner, but rather the re-emergence of
the defense mechanisms we have used in childhood just to survive. “Then the
Lord said to him, ‘Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and
dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did
not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But now as for what is
inside you – be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you”
(Luke 11:39). The human heart, everything about our bodies has an innate sense
of remembering in the ways that serve it best, the trauma and pain as well as
the love and joy that we have experienced. Because just like when we are cut,
blood follows, emotions are natural responses to being hurt inwardly. Do not be
ashamed of your feelings. Do not be ashamed to cry and to comfort each other
when it is warranted. It is so important to express righteous anger in healthy
ways so that your cup does not overflow. We need to learn to love ourselves.
For in the expression of love for ourselves, we are able to understand the
concept of unconditional love and thereby offer our love where it deserves to
be. In feeling love for who we are as individuals, we are able to love God and
to love others. There is a reason for everything we do.
Have you ever had the experience as a child, when you get
hurt emotionally; someone insults you or betrays you, feeling that all you need
to do is to cry, to release the hurt? And when you do, when you’re offered the
chance to, everything seemed to return to normal and you could be happy again.
As we get older, we can allow these hurts to get stuck as they accumulate. We
need to release the pain and shame. And we need to replace this pain with the
love that is found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We need to do that to make
the transformation.
When we are traumatized, our ability to think clearly is
sometimes hindered, often skewed. When there’s so much going on in our minds
and bodies to keep our emotions and thoughts, anger and shame suppressed, there
is little faculty left available for the façade that everything is alright. One
of the manifestations of my own personal trauma is that of toxic shame. If
you’re not familiar with the concept, essentially it is the feeling that ‘I, as
a person and life force, am worthless, damaged and devalued because of things
that happened to me’. This sort of reaction is often harbored in childhood
because the child has either no thought faculties to process the emotions and
horror of what it is experiencing, or because it has no other choice. When an
adult hurts a child, it cannot process that the people caring for it (to a
child, all adults are in a position of power) and upon which its life depends,
are evil, because to do so, the whole world must be evil. A child is selfish,
naturally and innately. When something bad happens to it, it believes that it
caused it.
CPTSD is akin to a developmental
disability. I do not understand social cues and etiquettes. I feel as though
people are giving too much attention to who people have become and are not
paying enough attention to who people have the capacity to be.
There is a concept that our
identities, our core selves can be wounded deeply, by trauma or shame in early
childhood. Those wounds can continue to have an influence on the direction of
our lives, in our actions, beliefs, words, everything that we do and think.
Trauma accumulates and shame and other negative feelings accumulate. Without
healing these, replacing those voids with truth, our lives can be led by past
hurts.
There are always reasons for how
people are acting, however neurotic and strange they may seem. We shouldn’t
mistreat people. How do you define mistreating people though? Naturally, we
would assume that someone who is aggressive and who picks a fight with someone
as mistreating them. Someone who threatens or puts down verbally another would
be considered mistreatment. Would you define someone who walks down the street
talking to themselves as mistreating others? Maybe they are having the worst
day imaginable. Maybe they are even emotionally imbalanced. Maybe they do not
love themselves. After all, we must love ourselves in order to be able to
adhere to the Golden Rule of Loving God, Loving others as ourselves. A while
ago, I walked really slowly next to an older woman with a walker, who was
crossing the street slowly. I did it because I wanted to make sure that she got
across the street safely. She started yelling a couple of times. The fact is
that we do not know people's intentions. What we interpret as hostile could be
nothing more than somebody swatting a fly away from their head.
Maybe this is just my thought.
Just because someone acts contrary to what they say does not defeat the meaning
of their message. To me, the value of truth is worth a lot more. Its value is
in the inherent message and is not dependent upon the purveyors of its message.
Truth makes everything clear. The reason I agree with you is because people’s
perceptions are shaped about what people are saying through how they act. What
I am saying here, in this post and in this response is that God sees the heart
of people. “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John
7:24). We all should strive to live our truths. We all do so and are learning to
do so, through scars, and sometimes even open wounds, at our own pace. We
should stop once in a while, have a look back and see how far we have come. And
take a look at the good things we have done.
When we view people through a
lens, we strip them of a humanity. No one is defined by happenstance things
they have said or done. We must learn to separate our emotions from judgement.
Our identities are so much more valuable than we believe. Just like who we are
is more than what our exterior beings express of the reactions and our
attitudes. The spirit and the body complement one another greatly. What we do
in our spiritual lives will highly influence our physical beings. Contrarily,
what we do, more so, what happens to us in our physical bodies will affect our
spiritual lives. How essential it is, with this in mind, of the treatment of
those developing with true love.
Why doesn’t the Spirit heal cancer? An amputated limb? The Spirit does
not always heal but gives us the grace to endure. There is a need for
compassion. The inside of a person's cup can be influenced by many factors. Abuse in childhood contaminates a child's cup. Did they have a choice in this?
The test of holiness is not how we
interact with the world. We are all sinners. The test of holiness is entirely
the grace of God. Let love and humility and kindness and God’s grace not be
contests. But yes, certainly, let holiness be a contest! We need this.
Who you are is not what you do.
People have free will but not everything is beneficial to them. Wisdom is made
right by all her friends 
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