Waypoints of Trauma

I want to talk with you about an idea that involves life as a journey or a trip. By the title, you know where I’m going somewhat. So, first, a caveat: This is not grounded in science. This is grounded in experience, observation, and professional work. This is not meant to replace professional help. This is meant to help you conceptualize the things that have happened to you, see their connections in your life, and give you perhaps a different way of looking at them.

Please, if this post brings up something to you that is difficult or perhaps if you’re facing things that are alluded to in this post, seek professional help. There are lots of options out there, including many online offerings that have a trial basis (one of which is Better Help that has all kinds of options).

In this idea of life as a trip, say some bad things happen along the way. Time passes, and more bad things happen. Eventually, you reach your present age with lots of life from birth until now and some scattered bad things throughout.

Now, we’re pretty negatively wired as it is. There’s a good Ted Talk that addresses this. For this post, we will label those bad things “trauma.” As children, this falls under ACEs, or Adverse Childhood Experiences. For this post, we’re trying to keep things as simply as we can. With us being negatively wired, those bad things tend to stick in our brains and roll around much more frequently than the good things we experience. That’s not to say good things don’t happen to a lot of us; however, we’re basically naturally focused on those bad things that become bad memories. The bad can start to outweigh the good.

For the sake of simplicity, I did not try to create life as it’s actually represented graphically—you know the image, with things as we expect as a straight line and things as it is as a bunch of squigglies? Yeah, no. What you’re going to see is a birth point, some random ages throughout and a continuation arrow, indicating life is still happening.

You’ll also see waypoints above the ages, indicating trauma events at those age.

Finally, you’ll see a connecting line between those waypoints.

The events are connected. New trauma brings up old trauma. Then, it becomes like trauma is perpetually reactivated, which can make it difficult to move through on one’s own. As new “bad events” happen, they can kick up the old events, creating a cycle of reliving and reexperiencing them. This can keep us stuck and can keep us from progressing the way we want.

While there are many things you can do on your own to improve your mindset (such as grounding, relaxation skills, knowledge of cognitive distortions, EFT tapping, body work, the Havening technique, etc.), please consider getting professional help. We all need a little help sometimes, especially if you find yourself stuck at one of the waypoints of your past,

My biggest encouragement to you is to look ahead and consider all the possibilities and good things that can be just ahead of you. In my lifetime, I’ve tried to use my waypoints as ways of helping others that were passing through similar places in their life journeys. My hope is this is a comfort to you and helps you with understanding your waypoints. Helping others often helps us, too. Keep your eyes and focus forward on those new, cool things coming your way.