Trauma Doesn’t Disappear When You Ignore It: Prepare to Face Your Pain

As I often tell my clients, "Trauma doesn't disappear when you ignore it." Of course they don't want to hear this. I can always tell they know it's true, but they don't want to give up the hope that ignoring their pain will make it disappear.

We all do this; we just have different ways of pushing our pain aside. Some of us overwork, overexercise, overeat, overconsume TV or social media, indulge in idle chit-chat and gossip, use drugs, drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes and sometimes we engage in multiple forms of distractions and numbing to push our pain aside. But it never works. We may get relief for a moment, but our pain is always there to tap us on our shoulder and remind us that it hasn't gone anywhere. So, we continue to try to push it away, often to the point when multiple aspects of our life begin to suffer (e.g., health, finances, career, relationships).

It's understandable why we avoid our pain. As the name implies, it hurts. However, moving beyond our pain requires moving through it. It requires facing our pain head on and acknowledging where our past continues to live in our present life. In this video, I discuss why ignoring our pain doesn't work and why self-care is essential to ensuring that we can handle our pain when we begin to acknowledge it, instead of pushing it down further into the deepest recesses of our being where it can fester and wreak havoc.

Self-care is essential to ensure you have tools to handle your pain. If you need ideas for self-care practices to deal with facing your pain head on, I recommend you read or listen to my book, Transformation After Trauma: Embracing Post-Traumatic Growth, where I detail the tools I used in my healing journey. Sign up here to begin reading the Introduction and Chapter 1 for free: serotinouslife.com/transformation-after-trauma-book

If you want to read or listen to the full book, you can find the ebook, audiobook, and paperback on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/1950336204