'Releasing Trauma; Remembering and Discovering My True Self'

'Releasing Trauma; Remembering and Discovering My True Self'

I've been through a tremendous healing journey these past 10 months. I believe I had been chasing 'true healing' for the past 6 years. I am currently 30.

In the last 10 months especially, I feel as though I have almost completely shed all 30 years worth of grief, heartbreak, pain, loss, suffering, trauma, etc.

As this has occurred, and I have been able to review my life with a different lens, instead focusing on the love, joy, companionship, hope, success, happiness, dreams, goals, etc that I also experienced, I realized something quite profound.

From about the age of 15 onwards, I had started defining my life and my experience and even my personality by the trauma I had faced. I was aware I had faced a traumatic birth, survived immense trauma throughout early childhood, also key defining traumas began occuring from the age of 4 throughout childhood, into my teens and then into my adulthood.

It was like I was collecting trauma. My experience has been so extreme, very few people manage to relate to me. It seems as though many people seem to have one or two key traumas in their lives. But I was living something entirely different where it was one great tragedy after the next, to the point myself and my family believed we were just moments away from the next life destroying event...

But something significant and damaging happened from ages 15-29. I made the mistake of identifying too strongly with my trauma. As if my war wounds and scars and mental health battles and trauma stories had become all I was. As if that was all I had left to offer to the world... What I had been through... What I had survived...

At 30, now I am shedding the past, working through all of this, making healthier lifestyle choices, letting go of all former attachments and 'stories I had kept telling myself', I realize I am both remembering and discovering my true self.

I am not my trauma. I am not what I have survived. I am not what I have seen or heard or experienced or lived through.

I am not the darkness I have dwelt in.

Deep down, it's the light that I am, the light that never left, the light that would not be put out by any of this.

Therefore, I feel as though I am in a new chapter of my life.

Where I have focused too heavily on the dark events of my existence, it's time to focus only on the light.

Interestingly, when I started this thread, I was going to walk the reader (and myself) through alllllll the traumas I've been through. Now I realize that would defeat the purpose of this thread! It's as if I'm even having to learn to stop referring to all of that bullshit.

For example, over the past 10 months, I've been repeating about this collection of 'pain, grief, trauma, suffering, mental illness, tragedy, loss, setback, failure', etc.

It's as if by referring to it all, even as I feel like I'm overcoming and healing from it and moving on, that even by referring to past things I've overcome might be keeping it alive just a little bit.

Well, no. The darkness has tried to stamp out my inner light for too long. It's time I allow the light to stamp out the darkness!

So, I am on a journey of discovery. Remembering who I was before all of my trauma. Remembering who I was before the world tried to change who I am. Discovering who I am now too.