Category: Trauma

Spaghetti and Hurt Feelings

I am a pretty clumsy person. Like a keep-an-eye-on-me-around-closed-sliding-glass-doors, probably-should-never-eat-spaghetti-without-a-full-apron-on kind of person. Suffice it to say, my childhood nickname lauded my propensity to accumulate minor bumps and scrapes through incredible feats of un-coordination. I won’t tell you how old I was when I nearly broke my glasses walking into the corner of a doorway instead of through the doorway - although, to be perfectly clear, it was part of the transparent wall of a racquetball court…and that was the problem: it was perfectly clear.

 

Anyway, as my luck would have it, I’m also a pretty relationally-clumsy person. At times I completely miss that I have caused emotional discomfort or harm. I put my foot in my mouth routinely enough that I< ...

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It’s abundantly clear the world does not look or feel the same as it did two years ago. I’ve noticed that people tend to refer to time as “before 2020” and “after 2020”. With my clients, I have referred to the pandemic and quarantine as a global trauma. I don’t know if anyone has coined that term yet, but I have seen some reference to it as a “global mass trauma”. I would describe a global trauma as a catastrophic event that has affected the entire population of the planet in some way, shape or form. It’s something that has transformed life as we once knew it. 

I think it’s fair to say the pandemic in 2020 has done just that. It’s easy to say “well, it’s over. Just let it go”. When the reality is, it’s not over. And the repercussions aren’t over. If we take what we know about trauma and apply it on a global level, what do we know? 

We kn ...

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This one’s for the lonely,

The one’s who seek and find,

Only to be let down,

Time after Time…

 

A friend of mine (let’s call him Brian for the duration of this post) recently shared with me a phenomenon, that he found not only in his personal journey toward self-actualization through his childhood trauma, but specifically in the context of his own therapy. He was actually made aware of this cognitive pattern in which he would consistently caveat his trauma disclosure with a vindication or defense of the perpetrator of his abuse. In his context, this was often his parents, and a stranger who had sexually assaulted him when he was five to six. 

This one’s for the torn down,

The experts at the fall,

Come on friends get up now,

You’re not alone at all

 

For context, Brian’s father was severely abusiv ...

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