Trauma

How long, O Lord? How long must I wrestle with my human things? With the same human things that seem to keep coming around and ruining every single season of my human existence? 

We're talking, of course, about trauma. It's a bit of a psychological buzzword in today's world, and it's often not used correctly. The younger generations use it to mean anything that made them upset or didn't give them what they wanted, talking about things such as, "I asked for a cup of milk one time when I was 3 years old and it took my mom and hour to get it for me and that trauma has stuck with me forever." But I'm not really talking about this kind of "trauma." I'm talking about real trauma. 

We live in a fallen world. We know this. We are assaulted by micro-traumas every day, the small slights and inconveniences that happen just by living as fallen men and women in community with other fallen men and women. The stuff that's just...life. And no matter how much we want to talk about them as these major traumas and labor to eradicate this kind of stuff from the world, we never will. As long as we are human, we will wound each other in small ways every day without ever meaning to. A little grace covers many microtraumas and keeps them from becoming pathological. For most of us. 

But some of us know real trauma. We have stories. We have pasts. We have the really heavy stuff that we always seem to have picked up again somewhere, no matter how many times we've thought we've laid it down. 

That's what we do, right? We get into these good seasons when things finally seem like maybe they are starting to break open, like maybe there's a little space for us to breathe again. Like we can see a little bit of the sun through these dark clouds and all of a sudden, we raise our faces heavenward, take a big, deep, healing breath in, and blow those dark clouds all to smithereens because here, now, we're finally in a place where we can do that. Where our trauma doesn't have to follow us into a new season. Where there's nothing but wide open future in front of us, and we'll be damned if we're going to let the past poison that. 

And then, we look up, and there's that stupid cloud again. Without our permission. Without our conscious thought. Without our want. And we're screaming all over again - how many more seasons of my life does this junk get to ruin? 

And the answer is...complicated. 

Because the thing about trauma is that this is what it does. It follows you around. It goes with you. And it does this until you deal with it in a healthy way. 

Unfortunately, you can't deal with trauma in a healthy way when you're busy adding to it. When you're in dark seasons, unsafe seasons, traumatic seasons, broken seasons - you just don't have the resources (physical, mental, spiritual, emotional) to actually deal with the trauma, so it keeps following you around. And all of these little things keep triggering this stuff in your mind whenever it seems safe to do so, reminding you that it's there and that you need to deal with it. 

It's that same feeling you get when you walk into the kitchen and know you went there for a reason but can't remember what that reason was. Trauma nudges you just enough to move, but you can't remember what you're doing there. Because it's not obvious and you don't have the resources and there's nothing really to do, but trauma keeps reminding you that you need to go to the kitchen. 

Until, of course, you're in a season in which you can actually just go to the kitchen. That's why the bad stuff always seems to get into our good seasons and bring its poison with it. You're never more likely to survive a poisoning than when you're at your strongest, so as soon as you get into these strong seasons, these good seasons, these days you've been waiting for, your trauma is like...I've been waiting, too. I've been waiting for you to be able to deal with me. So here I am! It's me! I came to live in your good season with you so we can do all the things together! 

Ugh. 

How many more seasons do you get to ruin for me? 

As many as it takes until your heart can truly untangle it and work through the mess and take out the knots that life has made in the you that was knit together with tremendous love. That's how many.