Jump on the trauma train

May 12, 2018 1:33 AM

There’s a mantra that I use to remind myself about the power of fear.

Once you’ve seen a ghost, you’re always afraid of the dark.

That’s the nature of trauma. Big or small, we all suffer deep mental and emotional scars from our distressing experiences. And from that point forward, we have to stay attuned to the many reminders of that trauma.

Because any stimuli can become a trigger. And we might not even realize it until the bullet has already left the gun.

Like my favorite comedian once said:

People don’t realize things are traumatic because there’s no music to inform them how they feel.

In the height of my workaholic years, I was driven by the fear that if I didn’t work sixteen hours a day and travel nonstop, I would lose my job and become a failure and have to go crawling back to my parents basement as a broke, lonely and pathetic loser.

It was textbook workaholic mindset. And in fact, it sent me to the hospital several times for stress related injuries, included a collapsed lung.

If that’s not traumatic, I don’t know what is.

And so, I found coaches and therapists and started mediating and attended support groups and did lots of useful soul work on myself. Whatever it took to heal.

But the thing about trauma is, the body has a long memory. And it’s hard to unsee that ghost.

Even years later, there was still a small part of my brain that was afraid of the dark. Things like working and traveling and even certain people were associated with pain.

And for a while, there was a part of me that was afraid of returning to that place again because I believed it would retraumatize me.

It was fucked up. Nobody wants to be scared of the dark.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How has your brain changed since first jumping on the trauma change?

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Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com