I hit an iceberg …

Or maybe it hit me

I think that’s it. I was just minding my own business and out of nowhere came this huge iceberg and knocked me down, pulled me under water and … eventually spit me back out all banged up and broken.

You know what I wish I knew earlier?

• Knowing you have trauma and accepting it are not actually helping you heal

• Big T Trauma is not what’s gonna hit you hardest

• Experiences/people that you thought were positive, might just be the most toxic

• Your world is going to be shattered many times over

• Perpetrators are not as big a factor in healing trauma as you might think

Knowing you have trauma and accepting it is not actually helping you heal

You can read all those self-help books and watch all these videos, listen to podcasts and know EVERYTHING there is to know about trauma, but that’s not actual healing work. I used to think this was enough. I understood my triggers, my reactions and why I was having mental health struggles.

That’s all well and good. I thought I knew but turns out I didn’t know anything about healing.

I had to work through those difficult emotions that were left unprocessed. Those emotions that were very much stuck in my body and needed to be (re)processed and released. I was not ready for that.

Big T Trauma is not what’s gonna hit you hardest

When I sat in a Psychology 101 seminar at university, and they were listing traumatic childhood events that could trigger mental health struggles later on – I stopped counting at like seven or eight. These were big T Traumas. These were all things I KNEW I should probably go to therapy for.

I managed to work through a lot of the big T Trauma on my own, because the emotions associated with them are well documented and I was able to identify them, connect to them and release them.

And then, when I actually went to therapy because I couldn’t get to the bottom of certain things, we started working on random - seemingly small - things. That’s when I noticed I had only just scratched the surface before. It’s all connected. It’s all intertwined. And holy crap did that swallow me and spit me back out.

As I wrote in my book – feelings matter. And those emotions can run super deep. I mean, you can’t travel in time, but your body really does store all those unprocessed feelings for you and when you unleash them, that’s when it gets really tough. In my case this happened inadvertently recently. There was no indication that a more “harmless” memory was going to go this deep, this fast.

It was intense. It took four weeks for the body to recover fully. The memory has now been reprocessed, and I feel like myself again.

Experiences/people that you thought were positive, might just be the most toxic

I always felt like being able to go live with my grandma when my sister was in the hospital and staying there until after she’d died was a good thing. I was away from all the pain and sorrow. I totally agreed with the decision the family had made. Turns out that I also missed out on the grieving process everybody else was going through.

That came back to bite me in a major way decades later.

Seriously, question EVERYTHING.

I was not ready for this at all. I had stored it as a 100% positive experience. Imagine the cognitive dissonance of me thinking it’s positive but my nervous system going “excuse me – that’s not entirely accurate”. No wonder there was weird pain involved that nobody could figure out way back when.

Your world is going to be shattered many times over

You’ll be discovering an entirely different life. A life where your core beliefs have been thrown out the window and you’re having to reinvent yourself. Again, this feels like being swallowed whole, thrown up in the air and then hitting the ground/water really hard – your entire body broken, shattered by the experience. And you do this over and over again.

It’s exhausting but wonderful once you come out the other side feeling lighter and more in control of your life.

There are so many things we believe about life and about ourselves that are reactions to situations in the past. Reactions that were necessary at the time, but that have now become maladaptive and harmful.

Breaking through your core beliefs and realizing that there is another life out there? Hang in there. It’s tough but worth it.

Perpetrators are not as big a factor in healing trauma as you might think

I’m not gonna start on forgiveness. If you wanna know my take on that – read my book 😉. Healing is about those feelings and emotions that are stuck in your body. If there was a perpetrator, they can be part of you calling up a memory, but then it is all about the feelings you have that are connected to that memory. That’s where your focus is and that’s where it should be.

For me the *who did what* has become very unimportant. I’m focusing on me and on how situations made me feel. That’s the part I can control. That’s me reclaiming my life.

Approaching Tromsø - December 2024 (my picture)

Be gentle with yourselves. Be ready for ice bergs. Pretend you’re a penguin as you brace for impact. Penguins rule. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.