One of the things I hear so many people talk about these days is “trauma” I even went to a trauma summit earlier this fall and it proved one thing to me. We are wanting everything to be trauma-based. This is another thread of the whole woke culture where everyone’s emotions are to be acknowledged by everyone else. This is where you and your feelings are to be validated by people other than yourself.
This concept is very unhealthy and flat-out wrong. Your emotions are not the product or your environment. Your emotions do not come from the external circumstances you are involved in. You don’t and shouldn’t need to have your wife or ex-wife or anybody else for that matter validate your emotions. You are not a parking ticket. You do not need to be validated.
One of the biggest emotions people are carrying on these days is trauma. Now yes there is such a thing as trauma. However, it is nowhere as common as many experts want people to believe. Yes, things that are actually traumatic can happen to you, however, The environment isn’t traumatic. Being told that you are going to die one day isn’t traumatic.
Yet you have people who claim that they are traumatized for life because the girl that was out of their league turned them down. Yes, there is a thing called Rejection trauma. Trauma is supposed to be an extraordinary event. Something that the average person is rarely going to meet up with. Life isn’t always pleasant. That doesn’t mean that it is traumatic. Yeah, it may suck to experience it but traumatic? Really? Your parents not telling you they are proud of you doesn’t keep you from having a relationship. Your parents abusing you doesn’t have to mean you are beholden to being an abuser.
The “Experts”
I point my overly pointy finger at the experts in today’s psychological and medical field. These folks have worked hard to make normal things abnormal. Masculinity is toxic. Relationships are traumatic. Being overweight is a disease. Addiction is a genetic problem. Boys can be girls cats can be dogs and who to say what’s right? I swear if I didn’t know better I would believe I was reading Dr. Floyd Farris’ book “Why Do You Think You Think?”
Trauma is Horrible
When most people hear trauma they believe it is something horrible. There is a reason most people will roll their eyes if someone tries to tell them a broken relationship is the source of their PTSD.
When people hear about trauma they believe one or more three things have happened.
- Physical harm has happened
- Death has happened
- Abuse has happened
If it doesn’t fall into those three things then sorry the normally adjusted person is not going to take the experience of something as being traumatic. Cultural trauma isn’t one of the things.
PTSD comes from a very intense experience. Like a car wreck, a warzone, or a shoot-out. Not from your first girlfriend dumping you for the football captain.
Emotional trauma isn’t a thing Your emotions do not cause you permanent harm. They last on average a minute and a half and they die off. To have emotional damage years later from a relationship or anything else is not the emotions. It is the point that you are in a thought loop and you don’t get out of it.
The effect of a traumatic unintentional life.
There are two ways you can live your life. There is an unintentional way. Some people like Eckhart Tolle will call these people unconscious people. These are people who let life dictate how they are going to feel each day. They just let life happen. Then wonder why they didn’t accomplish anything in life.
People living unintentionally also live life from an emotional childhood. These are people who think that emotions come from the outside and they have no control over their emotions. They run their life with unintentional models. They often avoid negative emotions and wonder why their life sucks.
Then there are those who live life with intention. They make choices as to how they are going to feel. They understand that life is 50% pain and 50% pleasure. You just have to take the bad with the good. You can obsess over bad emotional experiences or you can accept them. Let them ride their time and carry on.
Intentional people see life as a great opportunity for possibility. Yeah, your wife may be wanting a divorce but that doesn’t mean she has control over how you feel. Those control buttons are firmly in your grasp. You can smile out of love for her while she has an emotional meltdown not because you are cruel but because you see her as a human living her life to her best ability.
Unintentional living creates victims of their own making. They have no control over what happens to them because they are doing nothing with intention. So yeah their relationships are going to be traumatic. Their life is traumatic. Everything they touch has a touch of trauma to it. All because they look at life through trauma-tinted glasses. The very possibility of an impending ecological disaster causes emotional trauma to those who are not living their life with an intentional model.
Do you want to be associated with the pain you have in your life? Why do you want to hold on to that pain so much? How is that pain and suffering service you?
So You shouldn’t care about what happens to other people?
No, you can care for people without taking on their emotional burdens. Doing that is setting you up for your own pain. It’s not traumatic. Though you may want to believe it is.
You see things can be traumatic but not cause trauma. Your first girlfriend dumping you can seem traumatic. Getting fired from your first job can appear traumatic. Your grandmother passing away suddenly can be traumatic.
I would ask is it traumatic? Did it cause trauma? The fact that I can ask that, shows what you believe to be traumatic is just a thought about your circumstance. The fact that different people have different experiences with those events shows that what is trauma is just a thought point, nothing more.
These experts that want to push that everyone has trauma in their lives are saying everyone has thoughts. However, they can’t just say that it has to have some drama mixed in for good measure so they call it trauma. Which is bull.
So would you show compassion for a person who believes they have had a traumatic event happen to them? Well, yeah of course. I just wouldn’t carry their water for them. They want to go where I am going they will eventually have to drop their lifestyle of being a trauma-bound person.
Yes, they can drop it. You see they believe they have trauma. That trauma is nothing more than a thought. A belief is a thought perceived to be true. So When they decide to drop their trauma for a better life they can drop it and move on to the next phase.
While they are holding on to that trauma it will appear to be real. Because it is inside their head. So to them, the pain they feel is real. However with love and not buying into their story they can drop the tale of how their emotional well-being is destroyed and let their emotions flow again. And see that yeah they are going to cry over stuff, while also being able to laugh and love other things. The thoughts they have will create the emotions they feel.
However, if they refuse to drop their belief that their trauma isn’t permanent and want to stay in their world of comfortable misery then you may have to decide that the relationship has run its course. If that happens then yeah you will need to leave them to their own devices. If they want to follow they know what they have to do.
What about those with PTSD?
That is an outlier of everyday life. People with real PTSD have been through some actual events in their life. Those who were at ground zero when the planes hit or when the towers fell. That was a very intense circumstance. The men and women in the armed forces who have been in battle have had very intense events happen to them.
Children who were in an abusive environment will often have some form of PTSD. However, seeing a person you don’t like walking down the street isn’t going to give you PTSD. You are not emotionally harmed because you end up in the same room as a celebrity you don’t like.
The Divorce doesn’t have to be Traumatic either
Though a divorce isn’t pleasant that doesn’t mean it’s traumatic either. Yeah, you may have a whole lot of unintentional emotions flying around. You may be in survival mode your ex-wife may be in survival and Scarcity mode. However, you don’t have to let it be traumatic. You can see the 50% pain side and live with it as it is. You can press through it and see that you are stronger for the experience.
The divorce is going to have lots of pain in it. Simply because it is a matter of breaking an emotional bond. That is never pleasant. Yet, you can get through it and be better for it
Trauma can be good?
Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Something as horrible as a traumatic event can be seen as a good thing. Take divorce for instance. It can show you that your relationship skills are a bit weak or that you had the Nice Guy in your life show up and sabotage everything. How do you fix it the next time? You learn from it.
You take the mistakes you made and you fix them. That is how you get better at everything. We are far from perfect. When we fail we correct the failure and try again. You keep trying till you get the results you want.
So trauma or failures are good. For you. If it was all peaches and cream then you wouldn’t appreciate the great things that came along. They would be just normal things.
So If you are going through a particularly rough divorce and you want to see how you can emerge from the other side a better man. Reach out and talk let’s see what is possible.
