How to Heal Yourself from Depression When No One Else Can by Amy B. Scher

Author:Amy B. Scher [B. Scher, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683646211
Publisher: Sounds True

How Trauma Happens

Because of how much our modern lifestyles require of us (and how we require so much of ourselves), our system often can’t distinguish between stress from an actual threat and stress from past unresolved emotional experiences. It just detects “stress” and reacts accordingly. Trauma happens when we go through certain experiences in our lives and are not able to process and let go of them. Trauma can be linked to “big” events as well as to events that seem meaningless or “small”—yet still had a negative impact on you. The common denominator in trauma is that you have not processed and let go of your emotions surrounding the event. I call these events unprocessed experiences. These are snapshots of time, or memories, such as “when Dad died” or “that time Mom forgot me at school.” Experiences are essentially memories that get stored in the body as feelings, “movies,” or images. I see trauma as the emotional energy from any experience that is unresolved within yourself—in other words, unfinished with your mind, body, or spirit. It’s super important to know that not every seemingly traumatic experience will traumatize you (which we’ll talk more about soon). In fact, here’s the thing: the majority of experiences that I see contribute to depression are experiences that people have not yet addressed or talked about, because they seemed “too small” or “silly” to negatively affect them. While we tend to share big traumas and get help to find peace around them, the smaller or unimportant things get neglected and stuck in our bodies, affecting our entire lives. In fact, experiences that seem more “minor” in the big picture of life—from witnessing a fight between your parents to being teased in kindergarten—can actually be more traumatizing than the biggies because of our dismissal of them. In addition, trauma often occurs not because of the gravity of the situation or event itself, but because it happens at an age or time when we don’t possess the mental and emotional capacity, or have appropriate skills, to deal with it.

It’s essential to understand that everyone has trauma in their body—and quite possibly, a lot of it. Just like having lots of emotions, it’s actually quite normal. Not all “negative” events create trauma, because as you know, each person responds to experiences differently. And not all trauma is going to cause depression. There’s no need to judge or berate yourself for what you’ve been holding on to. The whole point of this work is to let go—not create more trauma by beating yourself up.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about why it’s so important to not just try to “forget the past.” You might already have some ideas of what parts of your past you need to deal with just from going through those general parameters of trauma. We’re going to be talking about trauma in more detail soon. For now, keep a running list of ideas or events from your past as you think of them; later in the chapter I’ll help you work with them.

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