I liken trauma to dropping a glass. Depends on the height from which you drop the glass, how badly it shatters. If it just slips from you hand and falls to the floor, the load is not too great, it may just have a couple larger broken pieces that can be more easily repaired. However, if you dropped that glass from a six-foot ladder, the fall to the floor will cause it to shatter into countless pieces. Pieces that must be picked up shard by shard to avoid further injury from its incalculable number of jagged edges.

Much like collecting each tiny glass shard from the shattered glass, picking up the pieces and mending layered trauma can be precarious, taking time and diligence. With the right help and tools in your arsenal, it often takes rewriting old scripts within the walls of our inner world and re-envisioning a different outcome in our corporeal world that has cut our feet far too many times. Healing is messy and the hardest part is that science and faith both agree that one cannot heal from trauma in isolation. It takes a leaning-in and reflective vulnerability to heal from our deepest cuts … when our most primitive reflex is screaming at us to dawn our protective ‘armor,’ and run. Sometimes even from those we know are our ‘safe’ people. No one said trauma made sense because it does not.

Every now and then, we have a chance to re-write an old traumatic even through a different lens when a similar set of circumstances arise, reminiscent of the inciting event(s). I have been doing intensive trauma work, both holistically and allopathically, for a couple of years now. I am blessed with some amazing practitioners who saw an opportunity for me to rewrite some of my ending through several upcoming, typically triggering (and often avoidant) situations that bring to the surface a heavy and familiar hypervigilance. My glass fell from a rather high ladder long ago, it shattered, and there is much to be re-written. In this instance, the combination of gender and role seem to represent five hundred of my thousand old, layered cuts in a billion little ways. In a nutshell, I have numerous chronic health challenges, significant medical trauma, trust issues with males (from a young age) and have had significant traumatic events with certain types of male healthcare providers (i.e., neurosurgeons, therapists, et al).

As fate would have it, I have a rather unexpected upcoming neurosurgery. Ironically, with a male neurosurgeon and I am working through the layers of PTSD that surround it, with a male therapist. They both seem to be wonderful humans and more importantly, safe. I think the universe is telling me this is my chance to right some wrongs and heal my soul, but, the choice to do the hard work is ultimately mine. What if facing my pain and fear through a different lens IS my chance to write a different ending this time? My chance to slay the dragons that relentlessly echo in my head and block my path forward toward a whole-hearted life? To quiet those, “Little Earthquakes” a bit more?

To change our respective stories, we first must do what feels like the impossible … we must show up and be seen. No matter how messy, bruised, battered, afraid, and tear-stained we are; no matter how hard it is. We MUST lean in and show up to move through it. That is not easy stuff.

Throughout this upcoming surgery and its subsequent recovery; I will choose to show up and be seen, knowing it will be uncomfortable and require a much higher level of awareness, vulnerability, and the ability to challenge old feelings of abject shame while quieting the internal raucous of past abandonment issues. This upcoming journey feels tenuous and daunting, but I think it is supposed to. If we stay comfortable in our fear and do not try to courageously peel back the layers and rewrite the stories that caused so many of the tiny cuts, we will never be able to change our ending nor help others change theirs by proxy.

My point being, take the chance to heal some of your cuts if the opportunity presents itself. The jacket will feel too tight at first and but when you see a chance to re-write a previously painful ending and you are in the right place and space to do so … seize it.

Hurt. Heal. Grow. Share. Repeat.

-S. Merek Southwick, PhD