Trauma is complicated. It is delicate. It is personal. It is intimate. It is intense. Trauma is stored in your body, unbeknownst to you, and is activated by triggers from a variety of stimuli. This is natural. It is our survival instinct kicking in. It also activates our nervous system & makes many trauma survivors be forced to learn a new survival mode | perpetual fear + activated everything because necessity of safety is primal.

Fight, flight or freeze which is part of our automatic response in fear becomes activated when danger is sensed and safety is threatened. This is a healthy, innate response to keep us safe, but the body stores this baseline of fear in our body and learns to recognize any stimuli associated with the events that are traumatic & made us unsafe. This disregulation of the nervous system keeps trauma survivors stuck & blocked and creates physical manifestations of emotional pain.

Your body is constantly learning what your mind is subconsciously communicating & vice versa. Listen to what your body tells you. Follow your gut.

I am the throes of processing complex trauma. This sudden, devastating truth of the trauma that forever changed the trajectory of my life and robbed me of my youth, the words are still nearly impossible to utter. Today, to another trauma survivor, in the beautiful, peaceful land of northern Minnesota, is the first time in my life I said the true words of my hardest memory aloud. To another trauma survivor. We are everywhere, but seem to feel safer staying in the shadows.

I am actively working through understanding the memories I stored away 2 decades ago. The pain. The feelings. The changed trajectory of a life. That story will come when I am ready. In the meantime, I am trying to process, educate | understand | accept | embrace how every experience that profoundly impacts us, even subconsciously or to the ego state, has an everlasting negative hold on the mind, body+ spirit.

Sitting in really, really devastating feelings is not easy. It is necessary though; to heal. To live, fully. To live, authentically in your own story.

I am not able to fully name the most complicated trauma that happened to me at 15, but I am inching my way closer to the next step of healing, i.e., personal empowerment / liberation. It has truly been such a process I am still stumbling over the right words & feelings for a blurred memory that has come to light after 2 decades. My life-altering shift in losing motherhood to gray market fertility medications and subsequent IVF litigation unrepressed my most buried, darkest moment. The process of reliving, in the most minute detail, the hardest stretches of my life for people who would read over my 141 pages and not care, broke me. It activated me. I became triggered. I worked through it, but have become triggered again.

These days I am leaning into uncovering some of my harder, more buried truths that have come back to the surface. I have always run from trying to understand, but now in the right moments, it is a puzzle I a piecing together, slowly, of a life-altering memory that was so deeply repressed, even EMDR at rehab in the desert did not uncover it.

Progress over perfection.

Slow and steady.

These are my two go to life mottos that I share with many of the people I chat with as a Crisis Counselor Volunteer with the Crisis Text Line as part of #988.

I live by these mottos, and to always find the silver lining, even in the most dire of circumstances. There always is a silver lining.

Some of the rawest conversations I have had these last months has been with people in crisis. Real crisis or just the pain that we all feel, but some days it starts to become too much for them. The bravery of reach out for support. Of acknowledging when you need help. Of leaning into the growth we can all do, always, daily, moment by moment, to better understand ourselves, and as a ripple effect; those around us.

Pain is real. It reminds us that we are alive when we burn our fingers by touching too hot a log on a fire and feeling pain, or by stubbing our toe. Pain after heartbreak is real. Pain from losing a loved one is real. Any pain you feel is real.

My heart has been heavy & broken a lot in my near 37 years, but these last few have done a roller-coaster of emotions. Setting the firmest of boundaries, losing people I never thought I would lose, being judged and stigmatized time and time and time again for my life circumstances, not choices.

The truth is I have retreated because the reality of today weighs heavy on me. I am an empath. A virgo. I feel deeply. Strongly. Intensely. I believe right is right and wrong is wrong and I truly believed in humanity. And the world today is just breaking my heart; so I am processing things slowly and more intensely these days while I voyage West for a wellness retreat on a Christmas tree farm in Oregon.

Stay tuned on my adventure & journey of trauma recovery + healing ✨.