Part One, The Benefits of Healing from Relational Trauma

Resisting  our past traumas can affect our quality of life

Transcript

Trauma Unpacked, Episode 1.1
Wed, Mar 29, 2023 11:05PM 7:52SUMMARY KEYWORDStrauma, relational, life, talk, inger, souls, feel, experienced, abuse, cook county, healing, condemning, quality, relationships, person, topic, perpetration, share, affects, negative energy 

00:03
Hello, welcome to trauma unpacked. My name is Inger Andress and with me I'm Anna Sorensen. And we are actually trying to bring awareness to the obstacles of unresolved relational trauma in our lives. And to look at it because we want to see the benefits of healing from that relational trauma that we sometimes knowingly or unknowingly keep hidden. Our goal is to have a conversation about several topics around relational trauma to share with you how it has helped move us through our process of healing, in hopes that it will help you as a listener to grow through your process of healing.

00:39
Now, just to let the listeners know, a little bit about ourselves on it, can you share what it is that brings you here today? Yeah, well, I've been in Cook County for about 14 and a half years, my husband and our two children live here. We love living here. It's a wonderful community. About three years ago, I found that I was in need of a support group and didn't have one available for me to go to and I was in enough need that I decided to try to start one on my own as a unprofessional just as someone who needed relational support and decided to use creativity or art as a means to bring out the feelings and help process some of the feelings that are going on with myself and individuals with a background trauma, specifically family and sexual trauma or abuse. And that's actually where Inger and I met and both decided that after watching the progress and empowerment from that group, we realized that there was hope and wanted to help others bring a voice to their story. 

Inger01:45
Do you want to share a little bit why we're going the route of a podcast. While we thought it was important, I think trying to normalize this topic. Throughout the times of giving presentations across Cook County in the last few years, there has been several times where afterwards people will come up to me and share things that are going on or have happened in their life and how much they appreciate this being talked about yet it becomes still getting in something to feel shameful about. And it's time to be released of these really lies is what I look at them as that have kept us from enjoying our life from enjoying the fullness of what a relationship can be. Anybody who is courageous enough to look at it is someone that I highly regard even though it might be uncomfortable, it is going to be one of the most freeing things to help them enjoy their life in a more fulfilling way. 

Inger, let's talk a little bit about the benefits of healing from trauma and how it can improve your quality of life. Okay, great. I think that there's so much internal suffering that comes with being victimized and that part of the perpetration is to make you doubt yourself and to turn on yourself in various ways in order to accept the abuse that's going on with you. So that has a way of playing tricks on us in our brain sometimes where we feel that we're less of a person or we have to overcompensate in another way to keep us away from some of that pain. 

Are you talking about a way to cope with the pain? Yes, yeah. So that actually keeps the negative energy with inside of us as we're thinking that we have to sort through that all by ourselves, or we're crazy because of thinking that somehow we are to blame through it is how it's been turned on us. And really, we're here to help each other, finally, expose and bring to light, what can free us and to have a much better quality of life, I think one thing you're relating to is the misuse of authority. Often abuse can happen from a teacher or a parent or grandparent, and the survivor or the person who was abused often feels that it was their fault, and then therefore doesn't talk a lot about it. And there's a lot of shame related to it, and that you'll possibly be rejected from your family. If that's becomes out in the open, they have either threatened you or I'll see you either internalize and think that something even worse is going to happen if you let it be known. And that might be something that started as a child and still as an adult. Now, you know, the threats, not real, but you continue to convince yourself, it's better not to talk about it. And then that inner blame eats away at our souls and causes us to even turn in on ourselves, which makes us think that we have to keep this a secret, all the while it's eating away inside. I think when you said it affects our souls that's really important to repeat, because it is something that affects our souls. I mean, that's who we are, and then affects our body and our mind as well. So it's an attack on our souls. I had never thought about it affecting my soul until we worked through that at the support group. And that that was a big connection for me being able to say Perhaps this is why relationships are so challenging. So summarizing why one of the benefits from healing from personal relational trauma is quality of life.

05:00

is it's very hard to even recognize, but part of my journey, it wasn't until I was 39 or 40 yrs old that I even knew some of these patterns in my life actually, were trying to point me to the trauma that I experienced when I was starting at age four, if we can assist others to unpack some of their behavioral patterns in a compassionate, non condemning way, look from a third person view and just go, you know, why, why do I do this? Why do I have this certain tendency, you know, I seem to hold a lot of negative energy around this topic, I seem to want to get up and walk around, I get very anxious, I get panicky, I think I want to get out of the place, I feel trapped, any of those kinds of indicators start to either make you feel crazy. Or if you have a place for them, you start to recognize, you know what, maybe there's a reason that they're there. Maybe it's because of something else. 

And that's all we're trying to do right now, just to bring an awareness of your own life without condemning yourself without making a judgment call of good or bad, none of that, right now, it's very important to lay that aside for your soul to feel safe with yourself that you're not going to lock it up in a room, but you're actually going to want to care for that person inside that's been traumatized. And you want to bring them out into the light to help them know that there's warmth and love in that area of their life, instead of thinking that it has to be kept far away in a dark place that can't be nurtured or loved on, how did it affect your quality of life, when you started being aware of those behaviors that you were talking about? And you started dealing with them, paying attention to them? How did it change your quality of life, the glimpses of realizing the lies, were actually causing me to feel very bad about myself. And it was keeping me from reaching personal landmark of confidence and growth because I would always hit those walls, and how do you feel your quality of life has improved? 

Oh, wow,  I get to get to have my energy go in a direction of positive things that are are what I want to experience, I get to choose how my energy gets used in the direction where I want it to go instead of always happy to allow fear to dictate what I do. That's a huge change. I've experienced something similar to that as well, where I feel like I don't have to take on the experiences of others unless I want to. I think I've been able to develop boundaries with my emotional and mental experiences with relationships that has improved my quality of life tremendously.

07:29

We know that some of this information can be very hard to hear sensitive raw feelings. Want you to love yourself if there were any of those kinds of emotions drawn up when listening. We're in this together. Thank you for listening today. We hope this encourages you in your journey of healing and that you feel loved and cared for. Cheers