Trauma Bonding: 2020's real tragedy
I should have written this sooner; I blame myself for allowing so many to languish so long without real guidance and language for such a degrading and pesky habit. But, 2020 has indeed taken on a life of its own, and now we are here; trauma bonding like our lives depend on it.
Sadly, most people’s lives in the year of the global pandemic depend on connecting with whoever will pick the phone, answer a text, or agree to yet another godforsaken Zoom call. And, why didn’t more of us invest in Zoom for financial reasons before now? We clearly missed an opportunity here….
What is trauma bonding, you ask? It is connecting to those who are available to discuss anything negative as a means of coping through life’s daily anxiety. So, if you were wondering if this post is for you, honey, just relax your shoulders and come in closer.
To set this up, I have to say that it has been disappointing to observe how we, as humans, perceive trauma in my experience. For those who have been with me for a while and are often in masterclass offerings and group guidance sessions, it’s no secret that most of my clients are white. And while I do eagerly work with all that seek guidance, black women and women of color have not been my most predominant followers.
However, when it comes to trauma, black women and women of color lead with trauma, while my white clients are so disturbed by the very concept that it is completely avoided. I can’t understand this strange dichotomy. Regardless of how you identify, in case you were unaware that you have trauma, you do, my Friend. All too often, we visualize and internalize the word victim when we hear the term “trauma” and quite possibly other negative associations. Trauma is literally what we have been through, past tense. What we should land on in trauma is that it is our lived experience.
The important thing is not how you relate to or define trauma to make it comfortable for you to accept the hurt, pain, or obstacles you have experienced in this incarnation, but to know that trauma is not held in a singular aspect of our lives. We can have many traumatic experiences or situations in our lives that, over time, block us from who we really are. It is our inability and our unwillingness to identify and release the trauma that keeps us emotionally blocked. And allow me to illustrate our pitiful reasons for upholding our roadblocks: denial, fear, resistance, judgment, and also because we survived our trauma.
When we survive our trauma, we believe that we are okay-- even when we know, we are still emotionally triggered by it. We know we are triggered because we are reluctant to identify it, talk about it, and unwilling to get help or be transparent about it. We rarely even pursue a faulty attempt to seek healing. What we are comfortable doing is being in control of our narrative-- which is why we are totally fine deflecting and chopping it up with our girlfriends about all the things that have gone wrong, and something we don’t know how to fix. In other words, we are comfortable in our trauma as long we can discuss it with someone we deem an equal in our pain and suffering.
Isn’t that sad?
Is it any wonder we can’t find our way out of a hatbox when things get really rough?
The writing is on the wall, Friend.
Check out these episodes of the podcast for a bit of grounding: