As a growing child I experienced and felt things, and many times I wished I had names to be able to address whatever emotional feelings I felt at the moment. And like all many people in my generation when we turned to our parents, they either brushed it off or attributed it to superstitious reasons.
As a grown-up woman, I sometimes believe that things would have been different if I knew from the youngest of age that it’s okay to feel what I felt. To have the assurance to let my emotions run their course. As someone who turned to books for answers and when I was old enough to own a phone, LOL. I would download every psychological book I could find in hopes to understand.
I discovered a couple days ago that a close friend of mine suffered from PTSD, she grew up with an alcoholic-abusive father, she always had a problem with any excessive sound, from banging of a door to a scream to a speaker with volume that hits to fifty, such sounds seem to trigger traumatic memories that hadn’t been voiced in years and she would go into hyperventilating state in seconds. I know that many of the reasons why her mental state worsened was that she never knew that such events can mark an individual more than they can believe or are aware of.
The mentality we all grew up with, is that certain feelings are for the privileged. And that is one of things that drives me to advocate for mental health, we all hurt and we all should be given that space to express and heal it. I have been reading a book called “The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Ven der Kolk” and it depicts how the brain expresses trauma and how our emotions and habits keeps the unseen scars, until our identity embraces It as part of its own.
One thing of what the author mentioned that hit me and stayed with me is: “After trauma, the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t.” that simple statement explained my whole life in a single phrase, how I was naturally pushed to people with whom I had the same traumatic experiences or even simply failures.
The cycles that surround our lives unseen and yet they weave events that become our lives, healing isn’t just about forgiving, crying about something or receiving therapy, it’s about forging a new identity, it’s a chance for us to decide who we want to become and have say in it.
Model: @kezafiona
Yeah that's it