Recognizing Relationship Trauma – Past & Present

Acknowledging the impact of trauma on you and in your relationship

Everyone experiences trauma differently. Frequently, folks don’t recognize or acknowledge their trauma, either. This episode will help you understand how you may–or may not–have processed trauma, and why you may be recreating it, too.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS EPISODE:

• The body/mind connection when trauma is experienced
• 3 immediate responses most people have to trauma whether they recognize them or not
• 3 additional stages of trauma and their symptoms
• How trauma creates a habitual dis-ease that can be healed.

You cannot separate the mind from the body. They are constantly interacting and informing one another. When you have experienced trauma, both your mind and body are affected. And, you may not have realized what happened to you.

Dr. Gabor Mate said, “Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”

When you see that clearly, and you relate it to your experience, you can choose a healing and recovering journey. Vital to recognize if you’d like to change your life!

Want to talk about your relationship? . I’m here to help.

MACHINE TRANSCRIPT

Tonight, we’re going to be talking about recognizing relationship trauma, whether it happened in the past, or it’s currently happening. And this is such an important topic, it seems so obvious I know. But many times we have diminished our pain, we have discounted our pain, we have thought that it would be silly to be affected by something like that. And we’re not like that. Or maybe we just don’t recognize it took one to help make it abundantly clear what might be going on in your body in your mind, with your emotions, that would help you clearly see that, in fact, there has been some trauma.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about tonight, recognizing relationship trauma.

And it’s really important to know that trauma affects every person differently, often when they’ve experienced the exact same thing. So you can have siblings growing up in a home where there is abuse going on or violence going on or emotional upset going on. And they will all be affected differently perhaps. And so one person’s trauma is not another person’s trauma necessarily. And that’s such an important thing to understand. So very important because our trauma needs to be recognized. And just because someone else said, Oh, well, you know, it wasn’t a big deal. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big deal to you. And I hope you’ll own that. I have lots of things that I want to share with you today. So I’ve written them down, usually I just talked to directly. But today, I want to be very sure that I get all of these pieces in because we cannot separate the mind from the body. So what’s going on in the mind what’s going on in the emotions cannot be separated from how it affects the body, and what the body is feeling and sensing and what the body needs and what the body is taking in and what the impact on both are. So underneath we may have underlying anger and undealt with underlying anger actually leads to autoimmune disease and cancers. And Dr. Gabor Mate’s research shows us that now. I used to live in Canada. I think most of you have heard me talk about that. And I’ve lived in the United States now for 23 years. So I follow Dr. Mate’s work for the last 30 years. Brilliant work. He’s he’s from Vancouver, Canada.

And so I want to share some of his thoughts on this with you to know it doesn’t matter mean that everybody is going to get an autoimmune disease or, or whatever. But you have to recognize that there is an impact of your emotional being on your body because you can’t separate the mind and the body. So Peter Levine has done a lot of work in the world of trauma. And he says this, the first symptoms that are likely to develop immediately after an overwhelming event included hyper arousal, constriction, dissociation and denial, as well as feelings of helplessness immobility or freezing. I’m going to go through those things with you.

But remember the last episode when I was talking about why you may be stuck, feeling, feeling stuck, frozen or powerless. Well, this is adding more information to that to help you go a little deeper and understand these things. So immediate symptoms after experiencing a trauma, hyper arousal so your heart rate gets faster, and you breathe in the top of your lungs. So you’ll get a shortness of breath. Because you’re you’re in motion, and you may feel tingling may feel tingling in your hands or in Your feet or just a general sense of tingling or this immediately after, and you feel muscle tension.

Now, of course, you may not be aware of all these things. But if you were or if you reflect back on them, you may remember having these feelings immediately after trauma, and now immediately after trauma. And also, when you are re traumatized or something reminds you of the original trauma, you will feel these things every time. So if you’re feeling these things, is a good thing to look at what has happened to you.

So increased heart rate, shortness of breath, tingling, muscle tension, and then things happen, you have repetitive thoughts, you can’t quite stop thinking about it, you can’t stop replaying something, you can’t stop a fear that keeps going over in your head. And that is coming from your racing mind, which often leads us to worry. So all of these things are the result of trauma. Now they can be result of other things too. But they are the result of trauma.

And if you’ve had trauma before this relationship, and a Hijackal relationship makes it much worse. But it’s familiar trauma. And that’s a big deal to think about. Because familiar, really rates kind of high with most people, it may not be what I want. If I use my logical mind, is not what I would choose if I use my rational mind. But that emotional familiarity, that it came from our childhood, it will trump those other things quickly.

So hyper arousal, this one, second one is constriction. And that means constriction in your body, it means you narrow your perception of events, you don’t see the whole picture, you don’t employ go global thinking, you tend to get very nitpicky and focus just on certain parts of something and forget the rest of it. And the constriction will happen in your body. That’s why you have shortness of breath and muscle tension. And it can stay there for a long time. And it alters your breathing. And it alters your posture. You know, when I’m working with my clients, I talked to them about, you know, be very aware if you’re constricting, if you’re pulling yourself in, if you are trying to make yourself smaller and visible, because this is a clue that when something goes on that reminds you of the trauma, you immediately pull back from it.

So this constriction will occur again, and your breathing will be altered your posture, your muscle tension, and your organs and your digestive system. All of that will be constricted. You know many times I know this is not something we all want to think about. But many times people will be constipated. Many times people can’t eat. All kinds of things happen, because the mind and the body cannot be separated.

And the third one that Peter Levine talked about was dissociation and denial. Like I was reminded by Peter Levine’s work of that Woody Allen quote, and he said, I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. Now that’s dissociation. I don’t want to know what’s going on here. So I take my mind elsewhere. And it keeps us from being overwhelmed in the moment, which is a good thing. And it helps us secrete endorphins to soften the pain of what’s going on. And that’s a good thing. And it can be helpful in extreme circumstances, which is a good thing. But you can’t live in dissociation and be healthy. You can’t live in dissociation and be happy. Nor can you live in denial. Now, yes, it’s possible for quite a while but it will catch up to you. And denial is just denying something happened or denying that the something that happened? Hurt. So all that didn’t matter. No, that never happened. And Dr. Levine reminds us that frequently chronic pain represents a part of the body that has been dissociated.

When women have been raped, it is so overwhelmingly awful that they take their mind elsewhere. That’s an example of dissociation. So there we have the three big ones, you know, the hypersensitivity, the constriction, and the dissociation and denial. So any of this ringing true for you? Or somebody that you know that you realize it’s gone through this? Or are you currently going through this? Is this what is happening to you? I’m going to say lots of things tonight to really help you hone in and see what’s going on or what has gone on. Because those feelings of helplessness or immobility or that freezing sensation, is a feeling of being collapsed. I was working with a client a little while ago, new client, and she was explaining things to me about how she felt and all. And after she did it, it was so emotionless. And I said to her Do you remember when you emotionally flatlined, and she just immediately was flooded with tears. Because she had been holding that at bay for so long. That she could tell the story she could tell it without emotion, she could tell it without tears. She could tell it as though it didn’t matter. But when I pointed out to her that she came across as emotionally flatlined. Couldn’t hold it in any longer. We don’t want to live emotionally flatlined, afraid to have feelings. If you’re with a Hijackal, they deny your feelings. They don’t like the one you have. And they want you to choose another one. You familiar with that? It’s nasty. It’s nasty, much of what Hijackals do is nasty. And that is nasty. So, you know, when we talked about last week’s episode of stuck, frozen and powerless, you can see how it relates to having had previous trauma. So let’s talk about how this trauma actually shows up. Because it goes in stages. And a lot of the research supports this, that there’s a progression from when the trauma happens and what happens to you. And then what happens a little later. And then what happens as you continue to experience it, but it’s really you think, in your rearview mirror. So I talked about what happens immediately after an event. But then what happens that you can recognize is that you will become hyper vigilant. You know, we call that walking on eggshells. That’s part of what it means to be walking on eggshells. It means that you’re always hyper aware of what’s going on in your space. Where are people? What are they saying? What’s the tone of voice? What’s the look on the face, you know, looking at the clock deciding, you know, everything, you are just hyper vigilant to everything that is going on. And when you’re hyper vigilant, then you have a high startle response. You know, a car backfires outside when you’re hyper vigilant, and you’re sure that the neighborhood is just going up in in a lack of minefield, then your startle response is so acute, that you almost have to recover from a car back firing outside.

These are the first things that happens. And then you may find yourself having abrupt mood swings that you didn’t have before. And people say what’s wrong with you, and you don’t know. Because there’s this shift taking place. And you you are not in tune with it, you’re not in touch with it. Because you haven’t acknowledged the trauma yet. Or you didn’t even realize what happened, but your body is taking over. Because remember, we’re gonna remember this forever your account separate the mind and the body no matter how hard you try. So we may have some abrupt mood swings. And then we may feel shame. When trauma happens to us, we may internalize it that, oh, I’m a terrible person. I should never have let that happen. You may not have had any choice in the matter. But you will that will be a go to place for many people that I should have known better. I shouldn’t have done it. It’s my fault. No, no. Guilt is when you made a mistake. But shame is when you think you are a mistake. And that’s an important distinction. Guilt is that you made a mistake, but shame is when you think you are a mistake. And so you start taking responsibility for something that was done to you by somebody who was abusing you. And that is a quick response that you have to the trauma then your self worth suffers. You have that internal dialogue of shame. And you start being the one who tells yourself, you are not worthy. You don’t deserve love, you don’t deserve to be spoken to differently, you probably brought it on yourself. And there are lots of people who will be happy to tell you that. Happy to tell you that, you know, I was talking with a client this morning, a new client, using her be a client.com $97 First one hour for new clients. And she told me that when she went to her mother with the trauma and true trauma, terrible trauma that was happening to her in her relationship, her mother’s response was, we all you chose it, you live with it, you thought you were so smart and clever. So there see, well, how does that help yourself worth other people or then if you go to the wrong people, or you have the wrong people in your life, they are going to affirm your lack of self worth for their own purposes, because it makes them feel more powerful. And that’s double nasty, right? It’s just double nasty. And so we don’t want that. So when we have a lack of self worth, we start cogitating, we’re hyper vigilant, so we’re kind of on edge all the time. So what’s going to happen, you’re not going to be able to deal with stress effectively, or appropriately. I mean, you just can’t, you can’t have all those plates spinning in your life at the same time, and the body doesn’t know what to do. So it can’t deal with the stress effectively. And then you may have sleep problems or health issues. So these are the first things that once you have experienced the trauma, then when you start seeing it show up in your life, these are the things that you’re going to see are all of them, perhaps I’m giving you big lists, but some of them may ring true to you. They may be that moment when you put things together and say something really did happen. Because of dissociation, because we wouldn’t get any buddy to believe us. We may have put it on the backburner, and we don’t remember it. And yes, there’s a whole lot of controversy about retrieving memories and all that kind of thing. But I’m not helping you do this, you’re doing it right now. Are these things that you felt are these things you experienced? Then think about what may have been the trauma, think about when these things started. And just allow yourself to be aware, there was trauma, something did happen. It doesn’t have to be something huge. Really, it doesn’t. Because when we’re looking at emotional abuse, it’s over time, it’s not the one time something, somebody said something nasty, it’s abuse that happens over time. And that’s the real danger in it. It’s not just the one time.

So then we have those things happening. And they’re the first symptoms of having had trauma. But then as we go along without getting any help for that, without getting any closer to recognizing or realizing it, we get another set of symptoms on top of those ones, and they’re bigger. So you may find yourself getting panic attacks. And that’s just a way of saying I’m overwhelmed by this situation. And I, my body and mind cannot handle it. And so you allow yourself to just go into a place where you can’t control it now. I mean, you’re allowing yourself, it happens. And you can, as you all know, breeze yourself back from much of it. So it goes and use and can take some control of it. And I hope that’s the case for you because some people can’t. Some things are just too overwhelming is very, very difficult. But if you can and you you know the techniques for breathing yourself down from the beginnings of a panic attack, really that’s so important. When you first feel it, then you can use some techniques and if you don’t know those techniques, you know, come and we’ll talk about it. You know that you can always find me for that new client one hour opportunity for only $97 at be a client calm And if you want more information about what I do, you can go to my website for relationship help.com. Lots of things there for you, including my free checklist, one of which you really want to check out is, am I with it? Am I in a toxic relationship? So important to calibrate that, right? So important things here. So we’ve got the second wave the second level of what happens if we don’t get help if we internalize our, our trauma, or we just live with it, and we don’t get help. So then the second because, and these are in no particular order, we may find ourselves panicking, anxious, for sure, but may turn into panic attacks. But that anxiety may be there most of the time. Right? So your shoulders are a little closer to your ear lobes all the time, because of that initial hyper vigilance and hyper arousal. So you’re, you know, what’s that? What’s that? What’s going on? What’s that look on your face? What do you think? And what are you going to do right now, you know, that kind of thought pattern that’s happening in your mind, an uplevel from the internalization of shame, and the startle response, and then the mood swings. Now, you’re getting more involved body and mind. And maybe you’ll develop some phobias, maybe you’ll develop things that are not okay, maybe, if you have a tendency to want things in particular order, you may get a little further along and exhibit some OCD rituals, things that you have to do in order to feel safe, these things can happen. Or you may feel really spacey, you may feel spaced out and not sure what to do, and can’t make a decision. Don’t know what you think or feel don’t want to, but you feel foggy, really foggy. And that is a very common response to repeated trauma for sure. So if you have that sort of brain fog, that’s an important thing to notice. Then you may find yourself avoiding people or places or events, or even when you’re alone, avoiding certain memories. And you may need help for that, you know, I told you to go to be a client calm if I can help you. But you may need help. Because at that point, you may be a little far from the trauma, and you don’t, you are beginning to constrict and withdraw. And you will avoid people and places and events and memories. And family gatherings. Perhaps if it happened in the home gatherings, you have to go to if you’re presently with someone who’s caused your trauma, and you just want to shrink, you just don’t want to put yourself at that what you see is risk. And that’s part of understanding the trauma and recognizing relationship trauma. And another way to space out becoming involved with addictive habits, alcohol drugs.

Because then you can take a pill and you can be not present. You can numb out it will make you so you don’t have to experience the pain or the spread or the pain, or even the fact that you’re thinking about it in your mind. And You’re reliving the pain by by that recollection. That is a really sad response to an old trauma. But it’s easily and readily available. I hope you’re not doing it. But if you are doing it, I really hope you get help to look to see what trauma may be driving that. Now it’s a slow process. I realize that takes a lot of work. But you’re worth it. You’re worth it. Your children are worth it. If you have children, you know, do it. We often hear it said and I definitely applaud it, that we don’t want to raise children who need therapy for their childhood. So if we’re raising children, we want to be the best models that we can be. And if some of these things that I’m talking about are actually going on with you. Please don’t be embarrassed by it. Please don’t feel shamed by it. Please say, oh, that’s what’s going sideways. I can get help for that. It’s not shameful. Somebody else did it to you. It’s not you. So get help. If you broke your leg, you’d go to the doctor, right? You wouldn’t expect to be able to help yourself and make your leg heal. The same thing is true about emotional trauma. Give yourself that right To get help and to know you deserve help, and that someone else did something to you, that you do not want to be reliving on any level. So we’ve got avoiding places and addictive behaviors, but you may in that fog become quite forgetful. That fog causes you to not remember what’s going on or what’s expected of you, or conversations. And if you’re doing finding yourself in that situation, it could be an example of trauma that you have not understood or recognized, or that you are still experiencing expressing. Many times I have people come see me, who are just learning that they’re with a Hijackal. And they say, No, I just, I just forget things all the time. And it must be me, I must be crazy, because I’m forgetful. And I in they always couple it, it seems with the brain fog, I just don’t feel like myself, I don’t feel like I can nail anything down. I don’t know exactly how I feel. And when we start taking that apart, we start to find that there are underlying things that have happened, that maybe even happened so long ago, that you are not seeing that it came from there. And it’s been perpetuated. That’s why this particular episode is so foundational to understand and recognize relationship trauma, whether it happened when you were tiny, it happened when you were growing, it happened when you’re grown, all of those things are important. And with that, that forgetfulness and that feeling of lacking himself worth, you can have an inability to bond with other humans and love in healthy ways. No, people asked me all the time, what is the normal relationship and I, I say let’s change that normal is meaningless, and relationship. Let’s change that to wanting a healthy relationship. Not a normal one, but a healthy one. Because we don’t want to be like everybody else. We want to have a healthy relationship with ourselves in it fully engaged in healthy ways. And you know, the second stage of how you react to trauma, not all these things, but many of these things may be so for you, when you look at them, you may then take that final step in the second stage, which is to start hurting yourself. You know, and you can do that subconsciously, yes, it can be related to the brain fog. But you know, you bash into things, you catch yourself on the coffee table, you happen to fall down. Things happen, anything, I don’t I don’t remember that happening. But that’s a sign. That’s a sign that you are not fully present.

And you know, maybe we’re worrying about the American Express, I don’t know. But if it’s happening, and it’s happening frequently, is worth a look. So we looked at the immediate things, then the next fifth wave of things that happen. And the third, now we’re going to talk about the fourth wave, which is when that trauma has really lived in you for a while, you will take that constriction, and that avoiding people and maybe withdraw, maybe your responses to totally withdraw. I don’t want to see anybody you may become agoraphobic. Maybe you won’t, maybe it’ll just be uncomfortable. Maybe I don’t want to risk it. Maybe everything seems like a risk. Or you will do what I was talking about at the beginning. You will emotionally flatline I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure it was fine. I don’t remember, don’t want to remember either. I’m sure that everything is as it should be your use all these phrases that will allow you to go flat. Just like brainwaves go flat. When somebody is physically dying. We can go emotionally flat. We don’t believe our own emotions anymore. We don’t believe we’re entitled to them. We’re not listening to them anymore. And so other people may have told us Oh, well, it’s all in your mind or something. No, it isn’t. It’s gone into your body. And your mind may not be recognizing it right now. But it’s important. And then you may find yourself in that horrible place where you can’t make decisions. And you can’t make commitments you really don’t know what you want. You really don’t know what you should do or what you could do or what you want to do or what you need to do. Now this is some pretty deep stuff that you’re getting into here as a result of trauma. Now wherever you go and all these things that I’m talking about, they’re all worth looking at If they’re happening to you, as I said, you don’t need to have all of these, you don’t need to go through all the stages. But I want you to have the information. So in this final stage, we don’t want to be going flat, we don’t want to be withdrawing. We don’t want to be unable or unwilling to make decisions or commitments. But then our body starts to take over. And you may have chronic fatigue, you may be just too exhausted, to think too exhausted, to do things, you may have come down to just doing rote kind of tasks, you’re going through life in a very robotic way emotionally. And this is all protection, that you are trying to protect yourself from the impact of a trauma that you may or may not have recognized. And that becomes super important to do. So you could have chronic fatigue, you could have immune system problems or imbalances, you might get headaches, or migraines or back and neck pain. Because if you’re living in hyper arousal, your shoulders are somewhere up near your ear lobes much of the time. So there’s a ton of tension, when your your shoulders are up here, you can’t breathe deeply, I mean, just go ahead and try. You can’t. But if you take a deep breath, when you’re up here, your muscles will relax. That’s why I often offer my clients certain breathing exercises to do, as I said, because your body will respond in positive ways, and allow you to step outside the tension. And that’s super important. And then going on from there, you may have chronic pain, you may have fibromyalgia, for instance, or asthma, sometimes it shows up on your skin, and you get skin disorders because you’ve just been vibrating so much and, and you’ve been in tension and in constriction and hyper arousal, and your body gets inflamed, that’s what’s happening, all of these things are related to inflammatory conditions. So you may get skin conditions, you may have digestive problems, you may sink into depression, momentarily or for a while, or for a long time. And you may detach, you may detach from yourself, you may detach from others, you may detach from your feelings. And these are all important to notice.

That’s a lot, right. It’s a lot. But if you’re thinking about this as we go, which I know you are, and you’re thinking, okay that a little and there’s some of that. And I remember when that happened, take note of these things, you know, we’re not making up our trauma. Yes, people can do that. But that’s not what I’m encouraging you to do here, I’m encouraging you to recognize the symptoms, that something may have happened to you. So there’s a really, really big issue that Dr. Levine talks about. And he has a book called waking the tiger, and healing trauma and things like that. So if you’re interested in his work as Dr. Peter Levine, but he said this, we are inextricably drawn into situations. Now here, this is really important. We are inextricably drawn into situations that replicate the original trauma in both obvious and less obvious ways. We’re drawn into situations that replicate the trauma, in obvious and less obvious ways. We had trauma in our childhood. And we find ourselves with a Hijackal. We had trauma in our childhood. We’re with somebody who is competitive with us, and always has to be right like a Hijackals. So if we were abused or neglected in childhood, we’re going to be drawn to a Hijackal spouse is familiar. Remember, it’s familiar. You wouldn’t go out and choose it. You wouldn’t say yes. Give me one of those I want to be heard. It is subconscious is what’s happened to you in your earlier life, that your mind says no, but your body says, I know what to do with this. It is familiar. I’ve talked about that before. So I’m not going to go into any depth with that right now. But it is important. We reenact our earlier childhood or earlier trauma. We reenact it we replicate the circumstances. We replicate the relationships, the good news, we don’t have to anymore. When we start to recognize what’s happening. Yes, we need to get help because you can’t do It is not an inside job, you need leadership in that regard, you need someone to ask you questions and put the dots into formation, do all of those things to help you, but you’re worth it, you’re worth it to invest your time in doing that, so that you can be free, and know that you will not go out and replicate the earlier trauma. Super, super important. So our our post traumatic symptoms show us that our body just wasn’t able to cope with the trauma. And so we have leftover fear. And we operate from that fear has started to my taste said earlier, when I read his quote, we operate from fear. And so we may not remember our initial trauma.

But we can remember sometimes when we started to feel fearful, when we started to feel less than when we started to second guess our own intuition, we can remember that. And as I said, in the last episode, that we received a charge from all of that. And if we’re unable to discharge it, and what kid can discharge it, it’s coming at you from a great height, these are the people who are supposed to help you survive. And they put this charge on you, if you’re not good enough, you’re stupid on neglect you any of those things that Hijackal parents do, you have nowhere to deal with that, to discharge that. And so it gets locked in. And that’s what causes stuck, and helpless and powerless or frozen. It gets locked in there. And we don’t have a way to discharge it. Because they’re bigger than us, and we need them. And many times as adults, we have that same feeling that we’re with somebody who is abusive. And we feel like they’re bigger than us. And we can’t do anything about it because we need them to survive. And they have caught us at our most vulnerable, played on it and turned into what becomes a trauma bond. They are the person that you think loves you, they are the person who hurt you. And then they sweep in and want to be the rescuer, who pretends like they love you. And that’s basically the horror of the trauma bond. So when you have pain then from leaving them, what do you want to do? Go back to them, because they are the ones who will comfort you and they’re gone. And so that’s why people go back. And it’s very usual. If that’s something you’ve done, don’t beat yourself up about that. The research actually shows that many, many people go back as often as seven times before they finally leave and abuser. Now that’s a big deal. So it’s important for us to do that. Because trauma creates a habitual dis ease in you a habitual dis ease. And it’s a long term discomfort that can be mild, and it may be debilitating. So here’s another quote from Dr. Khobar. Marti. He said, trauma is a psychic wound that hardens us psychologically, that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you are acting from pain. It induces fear, and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside of you, as a result of what happened to you. That’s huge. And you didn’t do it. You didn’t do it. It’s not your fault. That didn’t happen. So if you find yourself minimizing trauma, Oh, it wasn’t that bad. And yet your stomachs and flip flops? Oh, well, it’s it happens to lots of kids. So you, you globalize the trauma. We all people have been through similar things and they survived or it’s not that bad. Other people had it worse. So you minimize the trauma. You globalize the trauma, you try and disperse this energy. It doesn’t go anywhere, but it’s still within you. And then you may be live in the trauma. You retell the stories. Like when clients come to me I say to them, I only want you to tell me your story, each part of your story one time because every time you reach out story, it reminds every cell of your body to relive the trauma. And if you go around telling your story to a whole lot of people your painful story, you are telling your body over and over, this hurts, this is awful, now you’re re injured. So it’s very important not to live in the trauma and let it define you. You know, you don’t want to build a condo and live in the past where the pain was. So you don’t want to be doing that. And you don’t want to be living with the trauma. Because if you are staying with a Hijackal partner, and you are reliving the trauma that you had, from having a Hijackal parent, or you are experiencing the trauma the first time and it’s awful, and you feel terrible, and you have these signs and symptoms I’ve been talking about, you deserve better than that. So to your children.

Now, you’ve heard me say many times, there are equal numbers of male and female Hijackals. So I’m not talking about women or men, I’m not talking about any individual, I’m talking about the human who goes through this. And so we don’t want to be under the sum of a Hijackal. And you know, they don’t only want you under their thumb, they want you under you their whole hand. So they can suppress and control and manage and manipulate. And that is so so very, very difficult. So the good news, as I said is that trauma can be healed. And healing doesn’t mean that you forget, you have the DIS ease. Let’s not think that because I remember the trauma, I am not healed, is how you feel when you remember the trauma that calibrates your healing, and your recovery. You know, when you look at the wound on your arm, hopefully you have recovered and healed to the point that you see this car. And you say, instead of saying, Oh, look, Rose wounded, it was terrible, terrible saying. Recovery means that you look at that. And you say, Oh, that’s a reminder of how I healed. And that’s where we want to get to, you’ll remember the trauma, but you won’t have the charge when you have dealt with the trauma. And you need to resolve the unpleasant feelings and memories, you know, you may have been avoiding them. And it’s just had that charge in you all the time. But you you need to resolve those pent up unpleasant feelings, and the memories and and no longer let them have a charge over you. And you need to discharge the fight or flight that you couldn’t at the time when you had it. And you need to learn to regulate strong emotions, so that you feel good that you can handle any situation. And you can forgive yourself for past things. But you have new tools to handle current and future things. And your ability to trust, other people will go up. And those are things that happen when we allow ourselves to recognize we had trauma. Just because somebody else didn’t have trauma from a very similar or the same incident does not mean that you don’t every person processes trauma differently. So I hope this has shed some light for you on what may have happened, what things may have developed as a result of it. As I’ve said several times, I’m not saying that other things don’t cause these things, I am just talking about the possible things that you will respond with. When you have had trauma in your life. I’m always here to help you you know you can go to be a client calm and participate at any time. And there it is, be a client calm. That’s a one time one hour session with me for only 97 US dollars. If you’d like to be part of my empowered, empowered, emerging empowered community, you can go to join into data comm and come on over there safely off all social media on my website. There’s so many good things about being a member over there. So think about these things. Thank you to the people who became patrons of the show. This week that was lovely to receive those. If you’d like to support the show with a monetary gift you can do that one time or monthly at patreon.com/save your sanity. If you’re on YouTube, of course and you’re experiencing this broadcast, you can always use their system To send a gift I appreciated, it lets me know that I’m helping you and that you’re finding what I’m doing valuable for your own situation. So until we speak again, take very good care of yourself. You’re precious, and you matter. And I’ll look forward to talking with you soon. Thank you for joining me on the save your sanity podcast today. I hope you’ve had some new insights, some ideas and strategies to help you gain clarity and confidence from moving forward toward greater emotional health and safety. You deserve that and so to your children. If you found value here and would like to support this podcast with $1 of five each month, please do so at patreon.com/save your sanity? Learn more about how to work with me via video conference, join me optimize circles or subscribe to this podcast on my youtube channel at my website, transforming relationship.com Talk soon