Post Traumatic Stress

photo by patricia

Unprocessed trauma causes severe and long lasting injury. Trauma commonly goes underground for children sexually abused because no one wants to acknowledge their own shame in committing the acts or for not protecting her from them. A child is critically wounded and no one comes. She’s bleeding and hanging on to life, but you don’t see the blood. She needs help and immediate intervention yet is left stranded and silenced. Yet life goes on. 

An entire piece of her is locked away and behind the chains are all evidence of the child she was or the person she would have become. She does what she can to survive. Her brain deals with the sudden impact of life and death attacks internally. Over and over the mind spins with no relief. Nerve impulses create unhealthy pathways, deep grooves that become repetitive, permanent patterns.

Without intervention the child lives a lifetime of struggles and challenges. She wouldn’t had someone intervened and talked to her. Allowing the traumas to come up and to be expressed over and over again until fully processed heals the brain. It no longer has to protect her with all the ways it uses in adrenaline filled moments. Her mind and body can be released from carrying these horrific burdens. There’s a chance to recapture her childhood, innocence, and belief in the world because she feels cared for, protected and safe once again.

That doesn’t happen. She lives with the feeling of death around every corner, even when she is supposed to be safe in her own home. Her brain becomes hard-wired to emergency because emergency is all it knows. She finds means of survival that help her cope but are detrimental whether it is an intake of numbing agents or choices in relationships.

When we turn away from a child’s trauma’s due to our shame we commit her to a life of loneliness and hardships that need not be.