At any age, we tend to rationalize trauma, to minimize it, suppress it, repress it, and most of all deny it.

The adrenaline rush of fear shuts down the cognitive thinking and reasoning part of our brain. When we are afraid, we automatically go into denial because our brain seeks homeostasis whenever possible.

Some people equate trauma to something big like war, death, extreme acts of violence, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or natural disasters. While those are all examples of trauma, trauma doesn’t have to be big like that.

Trauma has a way of overwhelming us. When we are threatened, our first response is fight, flight, or freeze.

My trauma changed who I was as a person.

The fear and the excitement responses in our brains are exactly the same.

If you are not dealing with your emotions and the unresolved trauma trapped inside of your body, you are revictimizing yourself. Being sick and hurt is the single greatest way we gain power over others, because what happens when we get sick and hurt? Everyone comes to our rescue.

Unaddressed trauma survives in a vacuum, fueling our thoughts and behaviors, so we inadvertently re-create the same feelings we had when we first experienced the trauma. We call this the Worst Day Cycle.

For those of us who haven’t been taught how to deal with our trauma, we get stuck living in the worst day ever. The intense feelings of those moments replay themselves throughout our life because, in an effort to heal, we unintentionally and proactively seek them out and re-inflict them upon ourselves.

No matter what kind of childhood we’ve had, nobody escapes trauma while growing up.