Trauma

We all have some sort of trauma in our lives. There’s just always something. Sometimes it’s ongoing, sometimes it’s something that just hits you in the face from nowhere, and you thought you were over it, but you find out that’s not quite the case.

Today has been traumatic for me to say the least. It’s also been quite good, or at least it’s ended well, but I’ll get to that later. For now let’s talk about trauma.

How do you deal with trauma? That random memory of something your partner/spouse/lover did that one time that hits you in the morning randomly, and you start to think “wow did he take me for eediat?”, or that harsh word they said out of hurt or anger, and you know it was out of a place of pain, but now someone says motherfucker randomly, and they’re not even talking to you, but you get a flashback and it stings all over again.

What about when you’ve gone through public humiliation? Lol that one is the worst. Whether you caused it, or someone else caused it doesn’t matter. Public humiliation trauma is something else really. Especially because just when you’re about to get well, someone else brings it up, or something else like a saved Snapchat text from a year ago that you find when you randomly text an old friend reminds you of that time in your life.

Why does no one talk about the effects of public humiliation? The friends you lose, the shame you feel, the pain? I think people react to public humiliation differently. Some people lock themselves in, and build walls to protect themselves, others go into overcompensating mode, and yet others try to explain to people who ultimately don’t give a fuck. If you know me personally or you’ve been reading my blogs you know which route I took. Honestly if you ask me I think it might’ve been all 3.

I’ll tell you for free though, it’s a process, and I can’t tell you there’s any right way to do it, actually I can, do it with God. I’m not saying that you won’t still make mistakes, or that you won’t still hurt people, because truthfully hurt people hurt other people, but if you do it with God, you’ll turn out better than okay, because He’ll let you know that ultimately everything works for good. The betrayal, the mistakes, the humiliation, the pain, the things you wouldn’t choose, they’re all working in your favour.

I talked through my trauma, I didn’t want to a lot of the time, (although there were times I wanted to) and honestly it saved my life and my mind. There were consequences, and I still have to deal with them sometimes, but the truth is I couldn’t afford therapy, I didn’t know who to trust, and I needed a way to let someone I love know where my head was at, I also needed a way to keep my heart soft, and talking to everyone and yet no one in particular by blogging worked for me.

I wanted to give up a lot of the time, I wanted to not do it a lot of the time, but the truth is I came out of all of that, (everything that happened in 2018/2019) by writing my blog so much better. I came out with my purpose, I came out with love; real love not that fake stuff, I came out with better character, I came out with faith, and honestly I think that at the end of the day it’s the best thing that happened to me.

I can only say that now, because of God’s mercy and grace. While I was going through it, (and even on some days now when I’m dealing with the traumatic experience) it was an excruciatingly painful thing to deal with. I have to constantly and deliberately forgive. Forgive myself and forgive others that hurt me.

Forgiveness is an interesting thing. I think we look at forgiveness from one angle, but it’s really a case by case thing.

The first thing about it is that you don’t do it just once and forget about it, you have to do it every time you get a memory, you have to flush it out so your heart can be pure and free to move forward.

Another thing about forgiveness is that it doesn’t mean you have to reconcile. You can forgive someone and still want them as far away from you as possible. For example I’ve forgiven everyone I need to forgive, but there are so many people I just won’t be friends with again, and it’s nothing personal, it’s just I'm not going to live in dysfunction and call it forgiveness. Sometimes it’s not forgiveness it’s dysfunction, and you have to learn to separate the two. Honestly I’m still learning, and by learning I mean I just depend on The Holy Spirit to tell me when I need to reconcile and when I don’t.

Anyway for anyone that’s been through a traumatic experience, especially public humiliation, i would like to know how you dealt with it, but more importantly I would like to tell you that there’s hope, you can and will get over it, and don’t let anyone shame you for how you choose to get over it, because the truth is no one knows what you really need but God and you, and if they really didn’t like how you were handling it, maybe they should have done something constructive about it.

Love, Yoma.