Did you know trauma can stay with you for a long time? It can leave a lasting impact on your habits? Even, trauma you didn’t experience can make an impression.
Now I’m talking all kinds of trauma from a parent or adult telling at you to the unimaginable. It can be big or small, but either way it makes a huge difference on who you are as a person.
My therapist once shared a story with me when we had hit a point in our session of “why am I like this?” I so desperately searched my brain for a pivitol moment that changed the way I was. Searching and searching there was still nothing that came to mind. So she shared with me that it might not even be something from my past. Studies have shown that grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, while they were not alive during the the Holocaust, still felt trauma impacts generations later. Just let that sink in for a minute.
Something we didn’t even experience can influence how we act. How we think. How we process situations. Crazy.
Or it can be something minimal that happened in your life when you were young. For example, I was interviewing this farm wife in her early 60s one day and for the article she had to make something so I could take pictures. She was making banana bars and she went to Crack the egg. She grabbed a coffee mug, which I thought was odd because normally you just put it right in the bowl. She begins to explain like it felt like she had done many times before about a time when she was little baking with a bunch of church ladies and from what I can tell she was scolded for
putting it right into the batter. Why? Because of the egg has a blood spot or is fertilized or something else is wrong with it you would have just ruined the entire batter. So the coffee mug was to Crack the egg and check it before putting it in with the rest of the ingredients.
So here she is 50 years later and it still seems to her like it was yesterday. Now we all have our own sorts of traumas and impact moments, but the key is to recognize them. Once you recognize them you can either take steps to make sure they don’t control you or your actions. It takes time to analyze yourself and sometimes it’s not pretty, but for me at least it’s been very helpful as I continue to grow each day.
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