3 Ways to Know if Trauma is Running Your Life
I’ve been doing a lot of trauma coaching lately, with 6 new clients in a little over a week. It’s been wonderful to see these amazing individuals step up to take charge of their lives in a deeper way. It takes courage to go to the root of our pain and to walk right in and then through it to the freedom awaiting on the other side. And, it’s worth it – see the story of my life via this live interview.
I feel very honored to be able to do this kind of coaching. As I work with these amazing leaders, I note the patterns that occur across these and the many other cases I’ve worked on in the last few years. It’s clear to me that trauma runs our lives if we don’t consciously witness it and begin to uproot it from our subconscious minds, emotions, and bodies.
There are ways to know if trauma is in the driving seat of your life. Here are three of those ways:
- You’re afraid: I know it sounds cliché but anything that isn’t love comes from fear. Fear often masquerades as other emotions, including anger, worry, impatience, frustration, and other intense or controlling feelings. Love helps us trust and surrender, while fear puts us on guard, wanting to control people and outcomes.
- You’re in a pattern: If you notice that the same types of things keep happening around you or to you, then you’re living a reactive life based on triggers that come from trauma. Hiring the same type of people, getting into the same types of arguments, dating the same type of person. Often you will recreate the same thing that happened to you in the past: abandonment, betrayal, or other intense and dramatic situations.
- You’re inauthentic: You are not living the life you were born for, and this is painfully evident in your love life, your career, and in the way you feel each day – miserable, irritated, and despondent. You are being someone you’re not, either to fit in, please others, or because it’s easy to hide in that lifestyle. All of these choices come from fear.
Of course, you could be in transition away from these ways of being and into a more authentic space. Most of us are somewhere on this path. There’s still work that remains to be done though, at the deepest levels, without which we remain blindsided by trauma. Like a hamster on its wheel, we keep running but our circumstances don’t change much.
If you notice these signs are present in your life to some extent, and if you’re really ready to make a change, let me know and let’s get started on the hardest and most rewarding work you’ll ever do.
3 ways to know if trauma is running your life…Photo Credit: Luis Galvez on Unsplash.