Defining Trauma in the Human Experience
By: Courtney Faye Brown
Tags: PTSD, Trauma, Healing, Mental Health, Spirituality

Defining Trauma in the Human Experience

In order to believe something as human beings, we want the math to add up. We want to calculate a+b=c. We want answers, to everything, because reason serves as the basis of our understanding. When we understand something, we can identify and conceptualize meaning. From here, we form our beliefs based on what we know (or think we know) to be true.

We all know there is good and bad. Everyone experiences happiness and sadness. This spectrum of emotion is the human experience. Every human will have varying experiences on this spectrum of emotion. No one person will have the same exact experience being human. Everyone is endowed with their own minds to conceptualize their human experience, which shapes the way each person perceives their human experience.

We all wear our own unique glasses, looking through different lenses to view the same world.

In this looking glass of the human experience, we see light and dark. With our different minds, we develop varying consciousnesses that conceptualize the contrast we experience being human. This is how the emotional spectrum of the human experience is formed. Every human being has different experiences in their lifetimes which expose them to the contrast of the universe — the light and the dark.

The extent to which someone experiences contrast determines the extent to which someone will experience the spectrum of being human.

Human beings who experience a lot of darkness in life have more contrast to sift through as they perceive the world. Like every human, in their perceptions of contrast, their minds must conceptualize their experiences. When you are exposed to more contrast, it can become harder to conceptualize your experiences.

Through the lens of grave contrast, some people’s minds become limited to only perceiving their experiences. When someone has traumatic experiences, they witness darkness their minds cannot conceptualize.

Even the traumatic experiences that “logically” have some reason for taking place — like generational trauma — familial cycles of abuse and poverty — those who experience this trauma are thrown so deeply into the emotional spectrum, it completely transforms the neural pathways of their minds.

Traumatized human beings have to totally reprogram the very basic functions of their brain — how it perceives and conceptualizes their inner and outer worlds.

Integrated Learning Systems takes the definition of trauma and expands upon it, defining it as:

“The response to a deeply distressing or disturbing event that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, diminishes their sense of self and their ability to feel the full range of emotions and experiences.”

Traumatic experiences cannot be conceptualized. The horrific events some people experience strips their brain’s ability to feel their full range of emotions. Although emotions have been diminished, controlled, and manipulated by society at large — our emotions are the very elements that define what it is to be human. Emotions are the GPS of our human experience. When someone experiences trauma, their brain cannot make sense of the complex emotions that these traumatic events induce.

Trauma affects each person so adversely, how each person responds to trauma varies greatly. Every person, whether you’ve experienced trauma or not, will travel the spectrum of emotions differently. This is why traumatized human beings will either experience no emotion at all or become completely overwhelmed by their emotions. Anger, sadness, or indifference become the defining emotion(s) of someone’s life.

Reason has historically served as the basis of our understanding.

As I’ve defined the human experience, it is a journey of perceiving and conceptualizing our experiences.

As human beings, reason has historically served as the basis of our understanding (a+b=c). Most of the world defines their lives by the elements they can form reason out of. If I have a job+I’ll have money=I’ll be secure. From this, we try to add emotions like happiness to the equation. If I have a job+I’ll have money+I’ll be secure=I’ll be happy.

This is a failing formula for the human experience.

Yes, what you conceptually know about your life can, and for most people, does determine the life you perceive. This is especially true for survivors of trauma. This terrible thing happened to me (or a loved one)+I am helpless=I will never be happy again.

Everyone, trauma survivors, and those without adverse life experiences form their perceptions of themselves and the world by this means of understanding through reason. This is where trauma survivors are left feeling totally helpless and out of control since traumatic experiences cannot be conceptualized.

Unable to feel their full range of emotions and make sense of the darkness they’ve perceived, trauma survivors battle being human at all.

Looking for answers as a trauma survivor

As a survivor of generational trauma, child abuse, poverty, and domestic violence, I constantly found myself asking why these things happened to me and my family. Evolving into adulthood, I frequented the depths of my soul and traveled the earth searching for answers. I dove head-first into the academic and medical world of trauma. Even as I learned the cycles of trauma and abuse, and could intellectually understand the history of violence and poverty I was born into…

I was still left with wounds that no logic could heal.

Since I could remember I’ve been a very sensitive and emotional person. On the spectrum of human emotions, I would become overwhelmed by mine, most times I couldn’t even identify the complex emotions I was feeling. Even when I was happy, I harvested deep loneliness that’s stayed with me for most of my life. Being mocked for my sensitivity as a child, I wished to not feel anything, to be hard and cold, so I could never feel anything again.

Still, my emotions took center stage (it’s the Pisces in me). I found ways to express myself and my pain through my passions — yoga, music, writing, and friendship. By the grace of God and my own endeavors, I discovered healthy outlets to experience a fuller range of my emotions. In 2014 I took my first yoga class at my university, this led me to develop a spiritual practice that I now define as the centerpiece of my healing.

Healing trauma through my spiritual practice

Founded in India, the varying practices of yoga are established in Eastern philosophies and religions. Most famously known is Buddhism. Yoga introduced to me these millennial-aged spiritual practices that changed my life forever.

I’m acutely aware of the modern stigmas that one may have in regard to religion and spirituality. I am not here to force a belief or a way of life that holds no resonance for anyone reading this. My intention is to share my story in healing trauma, in hopes a fellow survivor or loved one may gain another tool in their toolbox for healing.

As I began exploring spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, mindfulness, grounding my body, connecting with nature — I became reconnected with my mind, body, and soul. I truly believe that the spiritual path is the journey of healing. I believe no matter who you are, or what you’ve gone through, we’re all healing from something.

Like everything, spirituality holds stereotypes implying that everything is all rainbows and butterflies, all light and love and peace. When I made the conscious decision to embark on my healing journey and the spiritual path, I began experiencing the darkest nights of my soul. Making this decision to dive into yourself, confront your wounded beliefs and insecurities, and willingly traveling the darkest places inside of you — this is what the spiritual path is. This is what healing is.

Healing is finally feeling all the pain your mind couldn’t and wouldn’t let you process at the time.

The ugly truth of healing

Meditation shows you the lies you’ve been telling yourself. It shows you the war that’s been raging inside of your mind, without you even being conscious of it. The stillness forces you to stop distracting yourself and get to the root of why you hate yourself, why you don’t feel good enough, why you desperately seek validation from everyone (hello, daddy issues).

Healing is ugly. It’s hard and unforgiving. Healing requires you to look at your wounds for the first time and not run away in fear of how big they are. It’s looking every demon in the eye that’s ever haunted you and kept you up at night. Healing is discovering that your soul only gets darker the deeper you go. When you begin healing, you don’t stop. Your pain demands to be felt. It demands to be seen and heard and listened to. Your pain will rule your life, subconsciously or consciously, until you finally stop to tend the bleeding.

For trauma survivors, healing is finally feeling the full range of emotions you weren’t able to feel before. This is grueling, agonizing, and some days the trauma will win. Some days the darkness will grab you and keep you down. Healing is getting up out of bed and trying again the next day.

Healing is holding the little girl in your arms that hid terrified behind the couch as her whole world came crashing down. It’s letting her cry for the first time.

How a spiritual connection assists your healing

Like trauma, healing is hard to conceptualize. This is where my spiritual practices showed me universal truths that transformed my healing journey and my experience being human. Opening yourself to the possibility that there are cosmic forces that govern the light and darkness on this planet, can help you finally begin to conceptualize the answers you’ve been looking for.

Exploring a connection with the divine, god, source energy, light, whatever you want to call it — helps you make sense of your place in this world as a human being. A spiritual connection offers you the whole picture of your human experience that your human mind has been failing to understand.

When I woke up to the truth that we are spiritual beings, having a human experience; that we are more than our bodies and our minds and all the terrible things that have happened to us — this is when the light bulb went off.

A relationship with the divine grants you a higher perspective your pain has prevented you from having. Spirituality doesn’t change your problems, it changes your perception of your problems. It gives you a different lens to look through. Your darkness becomes something you view from a higher vantage point. Strengthening your spiritual connection strengthens you. When you tap into the eternal love that creates worlds, the love that created the miracle that is you; this is a force that can defeat any darkness. You are shown that you have everything you need within you to truly heal.

Trauma and tragedy cannot be justified or reasoned but with a higher perspective, you develop the ability to give purpose to your pain. The universe has equipped you with every resource, every experience, every person, every ounce of strength, and willpower you need to heal. Your healing is only defined by you, it will look different from everyone else and your healing is on a timeline unique to your soul. Through exploring your spiritual connection, and in turn the connection with yourself, in time you discover all you need to overcome the darkness that’s kept you down all along.

Starting therapy and receiving my PTSD diagnosis

Although healing and mental health has been the focus of my life coming into adulthood, I didn’t start therapy until March of this year (2020). The many healing tools I’ve mentioned so far, spirituality, yoga, music, and journaling brought me to a place where I was personally ready for therapy. Even though I was consciously healing my childhood trauma, like most people, I didn’t think I needed therapy until I needed therapy… ya know?

Above all else, therapy gave me that final reason for why. Why I’ve had nightmares and insomnia my whole life, why I’m anxious all the time, why I can’t have a healthy romantic relationship, why I respond and react the way I do, why I feel like this big, reckless spiraling ball of emotions sometimes.

For me, personally, therapy painted the true picture of my upbringing and the various roles my family plays in my life and my traumas. After my first therapy session, I was diagnosed with PTSD. When I first heard those words, I was taken aback. I proceeded to fill out a simple 10 question survey by the American Psychology Association and I started laughing to myself. All the symptoms and experiences I thought I was just destined to suffer through “being me”, were all pieced together right in front of me.

The day I received my PTSD diagnosis is a day I will remember the rest of my life. It was the day the invisible enemy became clear.

For the first time, I was holding my fear, instead of it holding me.

For the first time, the shadows of my soul were fully brought to light. That night I did hours upon hours of research on PTSD and it’s effects on the brain. This gave me so much power that I’ve never had before. As a human being, I could finally conceptualize why I perceived everything the way I did.

I received the power to remove the lenses life gave me and put on a new pair of my own rose-colored glasses.