I Am Traumatized!

 

I Am Traumatized!

This is hard to admit — or is it? Or is it just another form of victimhood that I can hide behind while avoiding responsibility for the decisions I made that maybe weren’t that great? I think both are true, and honestly… I’ve done both 😄

Okay, I’m not proud of it, but I want to write about something else now. About how deeply uncomfortable it is to admit to myself that I am traumatized.

I don’t know about you, but I always imagined trauma as something that happens after a huge life event that happened to someone else — war, losing your whole family, a car accident, losing your husband after 30 years of marriage, etc. But my own life always seemed “ordinary” or “normal” to me. What happened to me happens to many people around me, and they don’t see themselves as somehow broken or strange. They just continue living without feeling… DIFFERENT.

So I often found myself wondering:

“Why am I the weird one?”

It’s difficult for me to write this, mostly because I grew up in an environment where therapy was considered a terrible thing and going to a professional meant you were crazy and would never be normal again. And somewhere inside me, I still carry that belief — even though I’ve had a therapist for over two years now (and wanted one for years before that), and even though I lived in countries where talking about therapy is as common as talking about food.

So when I touched this topic again in therapy and had to admit to myself that I carry trauma inside me, it hurt deeply. Because I was judging this part of myself — judging it for carrying so much pain and fear. And this part is my little Janka, who still lives inside me. It’s the little girl who lost her father. The little girl who felt alone and believed that she could only cry by herself, with nobody truly understanding her. And even though today I know that little girl was not as alone as she believed she was… I still carry that feeling of loneliness inside me.

For most of my life, I carried a deep sadness inside myself. Sometimes I even romanticized it and thought it made me special or different from others (oh dear, the ego always wants to stand out somehow or achieve something big 😁). But only now am I realizing that the unresolved pain inside me — especially that unresolved sadness — didn’t really allow me to feel long-term joy from simply BEING ALIVE.

I’m not talking about being constantly happy (although honestly, at one point I thought that was the goal of life too 😆). I’m talking about feeling:

that I am alive and that I want to live.

To live even when things are hard. To live even when I cry. To still want to live even when something painful happens. To simply live every day that God has given me.

Back to trauma.

Everyone carries some wounds from childhood (usually many of them), things that were never fully processed or understood because as children we simply couldn’t understand life the way we potentially can now — if we choose to look at it. So those things stayed inside us.

And I’ve been working with this for a long time now. Looking inside myself at what beliefs, pains and sadnesses I carry — things I didn’t even know were there — yet they quietly (and sometimes very directly) influenced the partners I chose, the life paths I followed, the jobs, the friendships, and probably many other things too.

For a long time I reflected mainly on this in relation to romantic relationships — trauma bonding. I was afraid of it in every relationship, and in many ways my fear became reality. But only recently did I truly understand what it meant for me. In my case, it was:

choosing a relationship over myself

and over the direction I deeply felt my own life wanted to go.

I chose relationships out of fear of being abandoned. I abandoned my own life out of fear that if I truly faced it, I might discover that the life I created for myself was boring or maybe not fully aligned with who I really was.  Maybe I was more afraid of the ordinary silence of my own life than of the wrong relationship. So instead, I squeezed myself into relationships without honestly asking whether they fulfilled my most basic needs. 

And here I return to trauma again. Here I return to little Janka again. Here I return to my beliefs that I am alone (among others, of course), that I have to carry everything by myself. But I didn’t want to anymore. So I went toward men with this silent hope: please finally save me, hold me, let me not be alone for so long.

Now I am alone — but not only without a relationship. I am often alone within myself, in silence. And I realized that I love this more than the drama I created in relationships, more than the intensity I searched for in men who were unsure about me, more than escaping myself by focusing on everything outside of me and everything that was wrong with my partner, more than my fear of an ordinary life when I kept running from one festival to another.

What I actually seek now is an ordinary life.

But honestly, I don’t think it’s ordinary at all.

I feel it is LIFE in its fullness, depth and lightness. A life where what matters to me is whether I am in alignment with myself — with what I say, what I do and how I live.

And maybe that is the key to the beautiful life I am finally beginning to live.

Now.

And maybe especially now, during this difficult period… I am truly alive. 🌿🤍