We all experience trauma during our lives and it is important that we don’t compare our trauma with someone else’s experience.
It is not a competition.
Anything that causes you fear, pain, discomfort, a sense of loss, feeling unsupported, powerless or humiliated can trigger a traumatic event. Sometimes we can work through it and move on.
However, as children, if our childhood trauma is not acknowledged by adults who care for us and we are not given the correct counselling, we bury it deep within us.
We may have been neglected or exposed to violence or sexual abuse and it becomes our normal. Or, as with the baby boomer generation and before, emotions and mental conditions were not regarded as important.
There is no point in blaming our caregivers.
We can't change the past but we can learn from it and change how we deal with our remaining years.
Often it takes another traumatic event, to awaken the deeply hidden emotions within us. The pain of the 2nd event takes on gigantic proportions and our response to this event is magnified way beyond what it should be.
For me, menopause in my mid forties was the trigger which led to me having a complete breakdown. I walked away from my 25 year marriage and my young adult sons, and went backpacking around Europe at the age of 47 to try and make sense of who I was.
This was the start of my journey of self discovery which continues 2 decades later.
I realised that I had lived a life of fear and developed survival skills to get me through my adult life but I did not know why. I controlled the people around me because I was unable to trust anyone.
Whenever anyone asked me something about my childhood, my stock answer, regardless of the event, was that "it" happened when I was 8.
It was only once I was on my journey of self-discovery about 10 years ago, I remembered I had witnessed a traumatic sexual assault that had taken place when I was 8 years old. I know that I was 8 because just a few weeks later, we moved to the other side of town and I started the last term of Grade 3 (Standard 1).
This event was never mentioned by my parents or my older siblings.
All I remember was a terrible fear. My emotional development stopped that evening. I became fearful, always ready to run. I had no skills to deal with conflict.
As a teenager, I was sexually abused. In order to escape I would take different routes home from school, hide up trees and jump over walls or sit on the pavement until my mother returned home. Many hours were wasted staring out of the windows watching and waiting for my abuser to arrive.
Now living in a Senior Citizens home, I realise that many of my fellow residents have endured tremendous trauma.
I am not a Counsellor or Psychologist or Psychiatrist but being diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 51 and embarking on an intensive ADHD Coaching programme and training as an ADHD Coach has helped me to heal my emotional self.
ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) is highly heritable (4 out of 5 children) with ADHD have at least one ADHD parent.
ADHD family life is often chaotic, with violence, addiction and money problems leading to major problems if untreated.