Excerpt from blog by Elisabeth Corey.
I talk with survivors of complex trauma all day. While we all have a past, those of us with complex trauma have a haunting past. It is like living our worst day over and over again despite what is actually happening in the present moment. And that worst day is bad. We feel stuck in the past. We feel stuck in traumatic experiences. But even on the good days, there is a feeling of “stuck”. It is one of the most common feelings we have. It seems that life is not moving forward. It seems that we will never get where we are going. We don’t really even know where that is. But when we bring awareness to what is happening, we can begin to make movements forward. If you are a survivor of complex trauma, here are seven reasons you may feel stuck.
Your emotions are flashbacks. Unless you are going through a traumatic event in your current life, your emotional state is likely a flashback. Traumatic emotions don’t need dramatic triggers to come to the surface. Often you don’t see the patterns and events that cause them to rise up. You can spend your days in an emotional state stemming from an unresolved past and you don’t realize it. This will cause you to repeat the patterns that started in childhood. And you can struggle to get out of the patterns because your emotional state manifests them.
You unconsciously believe you need to repeat the past to resolve it. I am not suggesting you are walking through life with a conscious desire to repeat the past. Nobody wants that. But you likely have a very active unconscious world. It is often full of unwarranted self-blame. And you have at least one inner child who wants to figure out what they did wrong. So you will unconsciously choose situations that repeat the past in an attempt to figure out what went wrong. This never works because you didn’t do anything wrong. The abusers from your past were never going to give you what you needed. And the abusers in the current moment aren’t either. Read more on my blog.
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