A Snapshot of Healing

Grateful to have captured snapshots of my journey on my blog!

While I am working on additional Trauma-Based Therapy posts, I thought I would reflect on healing. This post is a reprint from my blog post in November of 2017. It was written when I lived in Colorado and beautifully captures the physical aspects of healing from the impact of childhood trauma. At that point, I had not yet published Brave and still had many more years of healing. It perfectly describes the feeling that maybe I was seeing the world for the first time. Mixed with my gratitude is the very real grief that comes with the realization that I had been surviving—not thriving—for so many years. I am thankful that I saved these snapshots of my healing!

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Is there anything more beautiful than a sunset? I am not sure, but butterflies and the ocean waves come close. Is there anything more peaceful than a warm fall day with leaves floating around on a gentle breeze? Then there is the exhilaration of getting to the top of a hill and seeing a valley with a meandering creek below. But then there are the soaring hawks who float on the breeze and waterfalls. Or maybe our joy is greatest when immersed in a hug from someone who cares deeply for us. All of this. Every sensation was meant for our joy. It is how we were created to experience our world.

One of the tragic results of childhood trauma is the need to dissociate from what can never be understood. Children are born to experience life through their senses and we all love their excitement when they see a rainbow or splash in the water. For a child, living is a whole-body experience—so is trauma.

I watched a video that explained sensory processing and the ways our senses learn about and help us navigate the world. It was such a delightful video that everyone should watch. There are more than five senses!

We take in information in more ways than we think—tactile/touch, body position, balance, sight, sound, taste, and smell. As young children, our entire body is dependent on all this sensory input—for everything. When abuse occurs early in life, all the happy scenes in the video turn to terror and the world becomes a dangerous place. That is really too much for a child’s subconscious to handle.

I now understand that I was hypervigilant. I thought the world was dangerous. This was especially true since every incidence of abuse occurred in places where I should have been safe. When this happens, you simply cannot be cautious enough.

I still struggle with relaxing. I read an interesting study and wish I would have bookmarked it (or remembered where I put the information). At the end of yoga, there is a time of total relaxation called Shavasana. I always knew this was difficult for me, but I didn’t know why. In the study, they put monitors on the participants during Shavasana. The bodies of those who reported that they had been abused never fully relaxed. Exactly. I am not even sure if I know what total relaxation would feel like. I am getting better, but I know I am not there.

You see, trauma is in the body. I have said this before, but not fully explained the result. Because it was in my body, it was necessary to remove myself from those body sensations. The trauma was embedded in that entire sensory list. It involved feeling (skin and touch), seeing, body positions, balance, and movement, smells, tastes. As a child, our senses are intended to help us engage with the world and the people who love us. When that goes wrong, our bodies become the enemy because our senses experience the unthinkable and wired us to fear every sensation.

I knew my senses didn’t always register correct messages. All the identify-the-smell activities in school were lost on me. I cannot identify any ingredients in food by taste. My balance and spatial sense are almost laughable. My skin reacts to everything and at times, it literally hurts to be touched. All my senses were affected, but sight is maybe the most interesting.

All my readers know that I love pictures. As I healed, I realized that taking pictures enabled me to enjoy the moment at a later time when I wasn’t trying to navigate out in the world. My iPhone captures color so well! I have become so enamored with color that I just want to capture it and save it forever. I never knew the world was so beautiful.

In the process of dissociating myself from the frightening sensory sensations I experienced as a child, I also dissociated from the beautiful world in which I lived. I sat right outside of experiences and watched my life unfold through a haze. I could enjoy pictures at a later time because my senses were no longer running for shelter.

As I began to heal, I saw the world around me for what I felt like the first time. I was like a small child discovering the world. There was one moment when I met a roadrunner (my favorite bird) face to face. My cousins had to drag me away! I filled my phone with thousands of pictures—not because I couldn’t enjoy the moment, but because I wanted to save it. This shift was so subtle that I almost missed it.

Today, I am thankful to be able to fully experience the world in which I live. The Colorado sky on a clear sunny day is a thing to behold. There was snow on Pikes Peak yesterday—maybe it had dressed up like a ghost for Halloween. The world is yellow because the fall in Colorado is very yellow. And my new puppy, Weber, has the softest rusty-color fur. It is such a peaceful feeling to enjoy the world around me.

I am grateful to have captured this! Seven years later, my body can finally relax and I am still obsessed with taking pictures. My Substack stories have given them purpose and a place to share what delights me. Sometimes I take pictures of things that would make no sense to anyone else. It is almost always about colors, shapes, and textures. Case in point. . .