Painful moments strike out of nowhere. I was listening to a podcast with Theo Von interviewing Dr. Gabor Mate, and of the two hours they recorded in conversation, 75% of the discussion focused on unprocessed trauma and its effects on humans. One explanation stuck with me that Dr. Mate gave Theo clarifying the difference between stress and trauma. Without directly quoting him, he described trauma as a wound that stays long after the stress has left. It’s a wound because you continue to feel it and experience it in the present. He went on to quote Peter Levine, a trauma specialist, sharing, “Trauma is tyranny of the past.”

This is by no means a scientific write, and I’ll avoid overusing the word “trauma” because it feels like it has already saturated the market of mental health conversation. 

Triggering moments behave in a specific way. To me, the nature of these “smacks” (meaning “a sudden blow,” not in reference to heroin for the street-smart folks) is in line with a physical smack, I don’t see them coming. I have little to no control over them in the moment, but rather, I experience them. They are always surprising, but they aren’t arbitrary. They have a backstory. A history penned in my brain and body. The sharp, stomach-wrenching sensation feels disorienting. I also tend to comb through these moments and ruminate on the details of the incident. I dive into my mind. I do this to make sense of it all, and I begin to tell myself a story. A story about what kind of person I am for feeling hurt by, what appears to be, a normal encounter. I hear myself say, “Only a sensitive, overly complicated person would feel confused. A baffled idiot who knows nothing. An inadequate human.”

This happened to me recently. Watching my son play on a jumper, the sun shining down and my skin feeling warm, drinking pink lemonade, and taking in the air, I walked under a pergola to join my father relaxing, a loose smile on his warm face. With a playful gesture, dad said something in reference to an earlier conversation we were having. He said, “You have to learn to submit.” Now, it’s common for my dad and I to discuss lessons in the bible, especially when talking about personal problems, which was our earlier conversation. It’s also uncharacteristic of dad to be cruel to anyone, to me, but his phrase of “learning to submit” caused me to emotionally spin out. One sentence brought me back to the history quietly living inside me. One lurking word tucked neatly in a simple phrase. It’s confusing how those words, the ones that look and sound like all the other words, sometimes feel totally different, totally loaded. It reminded me of talking with my parents and being confused when I was a little boy. 

This is a familiar and overwhelming experience – when on the surface, things look like all the other things, but they don’t to me. They feel different. It’s the lyric in the song that makes my eyes fill with water, all the while, music is just music, right? It’s the words someone uses that brings heaviness to my shoulders and stomach, but at face value, the words seem devoid of ill-intent. Those moments are difficult to describe to myself, and yet even more difficult to explain to the person who spoke the hurtful thing. That’s another layer of difficulty with trauma. Unless someone has taken the time to look at their own pain – the hurt they have unknowingly carried for a lifetime, the history inflicted on them some time ago – they won’t be capable of understanding the language of pain. Words often fall short of a feeling, but they curate an environment for feelings to be let free. The environment people require to be made whole, to heal and move on from their past experiences, is an environment desperately needing to be built in the world.

As was wisely said in the podcast episode mentioned above, trauma should not be compared. It comes in all shapes and sizes: unjust death and war, famine, losing a loved-one when they are too young to die, not being seen as a child, not being understood. I would never compare my circumstance to the horrors many have endured, but wounds live in us all, and they carry influence. They shape our understanding and behavior. When we either can’t or won’t look at these hidden influences, our traumas, our inner story plays out, most of the time for worse. The process of undoing negative stories doesn’t take a lifetime, but it does require effort and vulnerability. It’s the only way I’ve learned that I’m not a baffled idiot who knows nothing, that I’m not full of inadequacy. 

As I sat on that porch, hurting from my father’s words, I realized my early experiences that spurred my negative self-beliefs still exist in me, and they come to be made known in my present moment. As uncomfortable and painful as those moments feel, as unfortunate the truth that people I love the most have the greatest ability to cause my hurt to resurface, that is the love I feel is worth fighting for.