Self-Awareness

The Basic Anxiety in All Men

Ron Johnson addictions, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, men's issues, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

Since my practice is composed of entirely men, I frequently hear similar things from these men, and surprisingly from men of very different ages. I have come to believe that the central ingredient that men where when they get distress in some way is some form of anxiety. I will discuss the various faces of anxiety in this blog a bit. We will also talk about the secondary effects that these other “faces” of anxiety cause in their lives. I want most importantly to identify what I think is the basic building block of this anxiety, which is not anxiety itself but rather a very important element of manhood. This is not something wrong with men, nor is it something wrong with women or with society in general. We want to look at the causes of men’s anxiety and most importantly look at what can be done to reduce it to zero.

The faces of anxiety

  • Anger. This is, of course, one of the most obvious challenges that most men face. We tend to get angry too easily, speak too loudly, yell and scream, or, God forbid, become physically aggressive in some way.
  • Avoidance. This is the second most common thing men do when they are anxious. If they don’t yell and scream, they go into the man cave, whether that is a real physical place or whether it is just sitting silently on the couch or in front of some kind of screen.
  • Addiction. This is the third most common form of men feeling anxiety without an understanding of what to do about it. Addictions can be chemical or behavioral. Chemical addictions include marijuana, alcohol, or script drugs. Behavioral addictions include gambling, some form of excessive sexual expression, overeating, working too much, not working enough, or playing video games.
  • Physical and medical abnormalities. This would include the simplest headache to the serious heart attack or cancer. With little doubt, anxiety aggravates a man’s inclination to some kind of physical abnormality. Not every man will have headaches, nor will everyone have heart attacks.
  • Dishonesty. Dishonesty is usually not in the form of stealing or outright criminality but rather hiding some activity or outright lying about some small thing in life by a man who otherwise might be a man of quite good character
  • Depression. I don’t not use the term depression, like anxiety, as a “diagnosis” of a mental disorder but rather the extended realm of a man’s unhappiness. A man can become increasingly unhappy with one or more elements of his life, like work, relationships, play, or life in general. They all stem from anxiety.
  • Helplessness. There is a helpless component of depression, but the more serious helplessness is when a man feels that he just can’t do what he knows that he should do. As a result many men work all the time, while others do nothing at all.

Statements that men make regarding their anxiety

I use the term anxiety with care because it don’t see anxiety as a mental disorder that needs to be treated. I see it as a result of men not knowing who they are, how they feel, how to speak, and what to do about the causes of anxiety. Nevertheless, I have heard the following from various men:

  • From a very successful professional man, 55, when I asked him what he felt when he thought his wife might be mad at him: “terrified,” he said
  • From another successful man, 65, when I asked him what he felt when he thought his wife might find out something he did that she didn’t approve of: “terrified.”
  • From many men including a man of 32, many men in their 40’s, and some in their 20’s:

“I feel a constant feeling of anxiety in my stomach (chest, back).”

  • From many men of various ages: “I feel some kind of anxiety every time I make any decision. This could be turning my car into an unfamiliar driveway or deciding what to eat at a restaurant.”
  • “I might have some kind of death fear. I think of the possibility of my dying all the time.”
  • “I think I made some dumb choices in my early years that still cause me anxiety, almost like I think I can turn the clock back and make different choices.”
  • For some parents: “I can’t seem to shake the fear that my son will die for some reason>
  • “I am afraid that they will discover some mistake I made at work and demote me or fire me.”
  • “I’m afraid that they (whoever the unknown “they” might be) might discover that I am a fraud in some way.”
  • “I am afraid that will be impotent in bed with my wife.”
  • “I am afraid that I am a failure in life, despite my apparent success and accolades.”
  • “I just don’t know what to do so much of the time. This could be if to take a shower, go to work today, or tell my wife that I love her.”

The causes of male anxiety

This is the most important thing I have to say about anxiety, and it leads to our final discussion: What can we do about it? The essence, the foundation, the cause of male anxiety is around the concept of responsibility. Every man feels a kind of immense load of responsibility in life, no matter how old he is. This feeling of undue responsibility starts in adolescence, develops in his 20’s and accelerates in his 30’s as his responsibilities become larger and harder to manage.

This concept of felt responsibility is very hard for me to communicate, especially to women, and certainly to most men because they don’t think about it consciously, but the feeling that “I have to do something, something important, something significant, something real,” is always there in some form. President Truman said it right when he spoke of the responsibility he had as President: “The buck (bucket) stops here.” Most men are not presidents but they often feel the burden of responsibility

  • Adolescence is difficult for everyone, boys and girls because this is a time of transition from the freedom of childhood and the freedom of early adulthood, which is what adolescence is. There are the general challenges of adolescence for guys like what to do with emerging sexual interest, academic interest (or disinterest), and some initial thoughts about one’s ultimate vocation. There are more specific challenges that every boy faces, like the adolescent who doesn’t like reading in school, doesn’t like sports, really likes music, or can’t find anything that he really likes. However good at one thing, like reading, sports, or music, he feels the insecurity and inferiority associated with not being good at something else.
  • The 20’s is particularly difficult because the guy is now in college or the world of work trying to find his way. He also has to deal with the challenge of how to relate to women (or to men if he happens to be gay). Marriage used to come during the 20’s but many men forestall marriage for a live-in arrangement that can be complicated by pregnancy, the partner’s children from another relationship, or the desire not to have children. All of these responsibilities are on the guy’s shoulders with no one really able to help him through these difficult years. A good deal of addiction begins in the 20’s, whether chemical like alcohol or pot or behavioral like promiscuity, video game-playing, or gambling.
  • I think the 30’s is perhaps the most challenging time for men. Some men I see haven’t been married and desperately want to do so. Many men are in the wrong profession, perhaps something that makes them money but not happiness. Marital struggles usually are at their height at this time of life, and children are now a dominant part of the man’s life.
  • After the 30’s a man’s responsibilities continue to grow including vocational, relational, financial, geographical, and ultimately personal. Few men migrate these waters without some form of addiction, avoidance, and anger. Suicide is four or five times greater for men than for women, often because of the burdens that they have without any guidance.

All of this accelerating responsibility and the results of these responsibilities lead most men to a deep-seated feeling of anxiety:

  • Do I want to stay married to the woman I married 10 or 15 years ago?
  • Do I want to stay in the job that makes me money but I hate?
  • Do I really like my children (of course, I love them)?
  • Do I like my house?
  • How do I deal with the fact that the electric doesn’t work in the bedroom?
  • How do I deal with my gaining weight and all that goes with it?
  • Am I having any fun
  • How do I deal with my addiction(s)?
  • Where’s the guy who could help me navigate these rough waters?

How to deal with the anxiety I feel regarding all my responsibilities and questions?

  1. Admit to it. You can’t get to the bottom of feeling anxious, much less cure it without first admitting that you feel overwhelmed
  2. Observe that you either work too much trying to stave off your anxiety or avoid your responsibilities
  3. Note the addictive tendencies you have: eating, playing, working, drinking, gaming, talking, or perhaps the more serious addictions like alcohol or promiscuity
  4. Find someone to talk to. This should most certainly be a male, perhaps a therapist, perhaps a wise uncle, perhaps a clergyman. But not your neighbor, your brother-in-law, or the guy at the bar. You need someone who understands and can help you through this crisis of feeling overwhelmed
  5. If you have a significant other in your life, tell her (or him) but be careful to keep her from advising you. A good way to develop a later intimacy is to learn to talk about yourself and feel vulnerable. Then you will be able to listen with as much love as has been rendered to you by your loved one.
  6. Avoid anxiolytic medication. It is addictive. More importantly, it covers the symptoms but doesn’t treat the problem. The problem is a very male-centered thing of feeling responsibility for everything and everyone.
  7. Begin to notice that you feel better, less anxious and more content. The more you admit to your feeling of anxiety and all the other steps along the way, the better you will get in talking and reducing your anxiety.

The Paradoxes of Life

Ron Johnson Discovery, Feelings, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

A math teacher once told me that there are two interesting things about math and science: (1) “Everything interesting happens at the boundaries,” he said, and (2) “To really understand math and science, you have to grasp the centrality of paradox.” How true he was. The whole idea of boundaries is quite central in math, and for that matter central to a lot of things in the universe, including psychology, of course. As far as we know, the universe has no boundaries although that apparent fact is in great dispute as we explore the universe. The boundary issue in math has much to do with infinity, which obviously has a lot to do with the lack of boundaries. I won’t indulge myself in this matter any further because once I barely got through Calculus 3 and differential equations when I was in college, I was not capable of understand the essentially abstract nature of higher math. I understand the centrality of paradoxes in math a bit better, albeit not much because I am not an abstract person by nature. Let me just leave it with the fact that lot of important stuff in math has to do with how two things that appear to be opposite are actually both true but you can’t quite put them together. Psychology, meaning clinical psychology, especially the understanding of personhood and relationships, has a lot of paradoxes.

What is a paradox?

First, a personal note. I shouldn’t tell you this but Deb and I have used the term paradox in many ways, e.g. jokingly referring to us as a “pair o’docs.” Get it? Pair of doctors.  And we use various forms of paradox in our computer work. Enough of that

The etymology of the word paradox is from early Greek composed of the words para- that means alongside of or in front of and the word doxa that originally means opinion, judgment, or thought. Thus, paradoxical originally meant two thoughts that were inconsistent with each other. However, as the word evolved, particularly in English, it came to mean to thoughts, experiences, or feelings that were seemingly inconsistent with one another.

Paradoxes can be related to feelings, thoughts, behavior, or words. In other words I can have disparate feelings, thoughts, actions, or words where both sides seem to be true. In other words, I may have two feelings, both that seem to be true but they are very disparate feelings. Additionally, there can be a paradox between what I feel and think, what I feel or do, and the other 10 combinations among feelings, thoughts, actions and words. The hardest paradoxes to face and understand in life are those that are within you, like wanting to go somewhere for the day and wanting to just stay home and hang out. Paradoxes can also occur between people, people who are largely in agreement but occasionally find real differences. I mostly want to comment on paradoxical feelings in this blog.

Some personal examples

A few years ago Deb wanted to take a trip on her own where she could hike and explore, which is one of her true passions. She went to Portugal and hiked a long trail along the coast of the country. After she had been there a few days, she called me up and said the following: “I am so glad that you’re not here” and then quickly said, “I wish you were here.” Knowing Deb and understanding the importance of such paradoxical statements, I was not chagrinned although many people have been somewhat bothered when I tell them the story of her call from Portugal. Can you see that Deb felt both of these feelings: she was glad to be alone and she missed me and wished I was there?

Today, I would like to stay in front of my computer and write but I would like to go outside on today’s sunny day, and I want to get out of town and do some duties. I can’t do all these things and so I must settle on doing the right thing. But what is the “right” thing? I have to feel through these paradoxical feelings to do the right thing.

Harder paradoxes to face are in matters of love, liking, communicating, and otherwise relating to other people. There are some people for whom I have strong feelings, like loving and not loving, trusting and not trusting, believing and not believing. Family members can be very difficult and the difficulty often has to do with paradoxical feelings for someone. Note the liking/loving blog I did some time ago, i.e. loving someone but not liking that person.

More personal matters are things that happen. Deb (and I) have just about finished a major remodel of the kitchen. I didn’t really want to do the remodel but it was very important for Deb to do it so I acquiesced on the project because it seemed the right things to do. It has been a chore, not so much the physical work or financial cost but the personal, and ultimately the interpersonal cost. Now as the program is reaching a conclusion I find disparate feelings: I appreciate the new kitchen, largely because it fits Deb so well. And, I “don’t like” the whole kitchen because of the strain it put on me over these past six months.

You can see that while there are verbal, factual, cognitive, and behavioral paradoxes, the larger element is in the realm of feelings.

Paradoxes with feelings

Jack loves his wife but says that “the marriage has been over for a long time,” so he thinks they should get a divorce. Yet, Jack doesn’t want to get a divorce. He wants his family and his wife even though the marriage has been hard on them for almost the entirety of their 30 some years together.

Brad is gay and a pastor of a church where “you can’t be gay.” Furthermore, he wants “a family” even though he has never been attracted to women in any erotic way. We could say that he “wants it both ways” that I discussed in a previous blog but this situation is more than wanting it both ways. He is plagued by feelings that pull him apart

Sam is quite honest, but he finds himself frequently being dishonest with his wife. Indeed, he is afraid of her disapproval, a malady that seems to plague all men with the women in their lives. It seems conflictual that he is a man of good character but falls into being dishonest with his wife all the time, usually on small trivial matters.

Peter feels quite comfortable in his home but very often feels quite uncomfortable in his home. He can’t seem to accept that these feelings are both true, not just of different times but more importantly, of significantly different feelings. He can sit on his favorite chair and feel quite at home one day, and the very next day feel oddly in the wrong place.

Max trusts no one but he falls into trusting people all the time and wishes he didn’t trust them. He can’t seem to make sense of these two disparate feelings. He grew up needing to trust no one because no one was trustworthy, but then as now, he found himself trusting people and getting disappointed all the time.

Mel wants to be with his girlfriend and really enjoys his time with her, granted after a good bit of time and an equally good bit of therapy that helped him clarify his love for her. Yet he finds a bug in his bonnet every now and then and needs to “get away from LouAnn,” sometimes for hours, sometimes for weeks. She has a hard time with this paradox. She wants him to say that “he wants to be with me or doesn’t want to be with me.” He has both feelings.

Understanding and utilizing paradoxical feelings

  1. Feelings are never wrong

I have written about this several times over the years. I use the term “feelings” to be roughly equivalent to how my soul/spirit feels. Feelings, at least in my understanding and use of the term, is quite akin to intuition. “I just feel something” or “I just know something” or maybe “I have a gut feeling.” While feelings are never wrong, the words I try to find to express these feelings are always wrong, or more accurately, approximate. We as human beings need to accept the fact that I can never communicate my feelings with words to anyone at any time, not even to myself. This is where so many people go wrong: they say something that related vaguely to their feeling and the words do not communicate. Worse yet, they malcommunicated, meaning that they communicate something that is the opposite of what I feel.

  1. Allow yourself to say words to yourself that approximate these paradoxical feelings, like:
    1. I love my wife and I don’t love my wife
    2. I want to stay home and I want to go out
    3. I want to eat and I don’t want to eat
    4. I am a good person and I am not a good person
    5. I should do this or that and I shouldn’t do this or that
    6. I want to live and I don’t want to live

If you allow yourself to have both of these feelings and dare to use some words—just to yourself, you will find a certain comfort, but you will also be inclined to force one side of the spectrum or the other. Work hard to accept paradoxical feelings

  1. Tell someone your paradoxical feelings.

Be very careful to whom you share paradoxical feelings. You don’t need advice; you certainly don’t need criticism; you just need someone to hear you out. Such people are hard to find. You might have to advise your listener that you just need to say a “few things that feel crazy” to help your organize your paradoxical feelings

  1. Watch the conjunction of these paradoxical feelings.

You might need to say something or do something but you need to allow for the paradoxical feelings to be there for a while before there can be a natural conjunction. Some people jump too quickly into action while others delay action forever. If you allow for these paradoxical feelings to both be there, you will come to a discovery of what you should say or do, if anything. Sometimes you actually do need to day or do anything. You just needed to feel these things and come to a sense of peace about the feelings.

  1. Remember this procedure for future reference.

This means keep track of how you found your way through a certain part of life, very often a very important part of life, by allowing paradoxical feelings to be there. So, when you have other paradoxical feelings, you will be better at having both knowing that both are true in some way.

  1. Allow for some other paradoxes in life, like:
    1. You feel one thing but think another
    2. You act in a certain way but don’t like your action
    3. You say something that is not entirely true but somehow seems to be the right thing to say.
    4. You say one thing one day and another the next day

Enjoy the paradoxes of life. They can be revealing, instructive, and healing.

 

Resolution of Trauma

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, love, Mental, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

Not long ago I wrote a blog entitled “the only mental health diagnosis” identifying it as trauma-related, and hence PTSD. This remains my opinion of the plethora of diagnoses that are so popular these days. As I previously noted, people simply want to make sense of ails them, whether their feelings, their behavior, their thinking, or their relationships. In almost all cases the ailment is due to the traumata that they have had in their lives, particularly the emotions associated with the traumata. In this blog I want to suggest how a person can get over the causes of his or her PTSD, ideally without even labeling it as PTSD, much less anything else. We will briefly discuss the following:

  • What is a trauma
  • What is PTSD
  • Finding the trauma
  • Facing the trauma
  • Feeling the trauma
  • Finishing the trauma
  • Forgetting about the trauma
  • Forgiveness regarding the trauma

What is a “trauma”?

A trauma is any unsuspected event that has deleterious effects on the individual. This negative effects could be physical, emotional, cognitive, or relational. In other words traumata are not restricted to the physical assaults, like sexual assaults, that occur to people or the physical wounds that one acquires in the theater of war. The essence of a trauma is not the event or the damage done to the individual, but rather to unexpected nature. In other words, we are traumatized by something harmful to us in some way that we did not expect. The general categories of traumata include:

  • Physical trauma includes sexual abuse, physical abuse, physical damage that occurs in the course of a day, or physical damage that occurs because of war
  • Emotional trauma is perhaps the most significant part of traumata and it is the most subtle. In fact, the large majority of PTSD comes from emotional trauma such as:
    • Not being given the privilege of feeling sad or angry when traumatized. Many children are simply not given the opportunity to feel these emotions.
    • Being given too much privilege of feeling these things. Some kids are given too much freedom of expression, which has the effect of their failing to govern their emotional expressions in adult life
    • Having an overwhelming feeling of fear during a trauma. This can cause an overwhelming feeling of not being safe in the world
  • Cognitive trauma is less frequent but occurs when an individual is not allowed to think, express these thoughts, and experiment with engaging the world with appropriate thought.
  • Relational trauma is usually mixed with cognitive and emotional traumata. Its essence is in the failure of an individual to develop meaningful relationships with other people.
  • Neglect trauma. More prevalent in undeveloped countries, this is the phenomenon of an individual, usually an infant, who is not given enough nurturance or comfort to allow the brain to develop. Romanian orphanages are full of such children due to the former regime’s demand that Romanians have more children.

You can see that all of these traumata fall in the realm of the unexpected. I do not expect an adult to assault me, neglect me, or fail to allow me to think or feel.

What happens with one is traumatized and suffers PTSD? I encourage you to examine the many resources available, like Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and the many articles that fall under treatment of PTSD, like EMDR. Very simply put, when traumatized, the brain has a reaction that ideally allows the mind to make sense of what has happened. I could be traumatized by seeing a child drown but not suffer PTSD if I am allowed to feel through, think through, and perhaps act through this situation. Again, very simply put, there is a brain function that occurs with any trauma, which is first emotional, secondly, cognitive, and thirdly behaviors. Of these three operations the usual cause for PTSD is the failure to feel the emotion associated with the trauma. Thus, most PTSD is the brain’s having failed to find, face, feel, and finish the emotions associated with the trauma, and then go further to forgetting and forgiving as deemed necessary.

Finding the trauma in PTSD

This can be an easy task or a difficult one because the trauma could be forgotten or repressed in memory or for some other reason, like having suffered something that seemed right at the time and necessary. Some people artificially “forgive” a parent for abuse or neglect because they love their parents and understand that their parents were not able to avoid physical abuse or neglect given their parents’ own personal history or other circumstances. A woman whom I see in marital therapy was raised in an environment where she was not allowed to have any expression of sadness or anger in addition to her mother being delusional. There are other more complicated cases when a parent is physically or mentally unable to properly care for a child. In wartime soldiers often think something like, “this is necessary to do, and there is not time or place for feeling sad, angry, or afraid because I need to the job at hand.” Circumstances like this impairs the individual from feeling, thinking and doing something in the face of the trauma. In almost all such cases the child does the right thing to keep feelings, thoughts, and behavior to a minimum to avoid being more seriously damaged. I just met with a young woman who knew that her mother was inclined to rage and abuse, so she wisely kept her feelings and thoughts to herself and “managed the situation quite well,” as she said. This wisely keeping thoughts, feelings, and behavior to oneself is the cause of almost all PTSD.

Find the trauma or trauma in one’s life can be taxing. First, you don’t want to do it. Naturally, you don’t want to dredge up “dirty laundry” and “focus on what was wrong,” admirable behavior but also emotionally costly and ultimately costly. A man a recently saw for a neuropsychological evaluation said such things about his childhood, which was evidence of his good character development, but also evidence of why he suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is well established as caused by PTSD. So, finding the trauma can be traumatic in itself as you try to see where you were first traumatized. Furthermore, if you suffer PTSD, you have had one or more experiences of being re-traumatized over your lifetime. This means that you had the original trauma, say being left alone for an extended period of time, but you have been “left alone” for necessary reasons many times in your life since then, and perhaps many of these felt traumatic. Read Van der Kolk’s book on how the brain gets re-traumatized.

Finding the trauma or traumata can be challenging. First, of course, you don’t want to do it because it will bring up painful memories. Secondly, you can’t do this alone. You need a competent therapist to assist you in the process. Let’s go on to the process

Facing the trauma

Facing the trauma takes a bit of time. This could be seconds or days but not months or years. Facing something that you have perhaps lived with for years is a challenge because it has become part of you operating fabric while not really a part of the fabric of your soul. Facing the trauma is naming it for what it was: traumatic. You might be able to label it more specifically as abuse, neglect, or indulgence but that may not actually be necessary. Yes, indulgence can be traumatic because you weren’t given the opportunity to see limits of life and feel sad by not having what you want. It is enough that you find the origin of your PTSD the best that you can. In fact, you may not be able to find time, place, or person involved in the original trauma, but you can find how you felt.

When you face the trauma, you will face the three things that we have discussed: feeling, thoughts, and action. In other words, you will see how you felt emotionally, what you thought cognitively, and what you did as a result of being traumatized. You need to recognize all three of these elements of trauma in order to resolve the trauma because you ultimately need to feel through the trauma, think through the trauma, and possibly take some action in your current life. You may, for instance, fallen into a dangerous relationship with someone that you need to end because the individual re-traumatizes you; you may be in a job that is not good for you because it re-traumatizes you; or you may need to move out of you home state or back to your home state. In all of these actions, you thinking must be clear, not affected by emotion. But to be able to make a good rational decision as to what to do, you have to do the hardest part: feeling the emotion that is always associated with traumas.

Feeling the trauma and finishing it

This is the hard part, but the essential. It is hard to find the trauma and face the trauma but it is truly challenging to feel the trauma. What it mean to “feel the trauma”? It means to feel what you were unable to feel when you were originally traumatized. Furthermore the feelings, primarily the emotions, that trouble you in your current life were the feelings that you had when you were traumatized. The emotions were three, and possibly all four of the basic four emotions that we have as human beings: sorrow, anger, fear, and joy. The most lasting emotion that you have is fear, which then migrates into some form of anxiety. The frequent emotion that occurs with PTSD people is anger, often taken out on other people and oneself. The most important emotion you felt was sadness. Generally, you retain the fear most of all, the anger, secondly, the sadness thirdly. You might even have some residual joy in the experience odd at that might sound. Sexual abuse victims sometimes have to admit to themselves that they had some sexual pleasure when being violated, and army veterans have to admit to having some pleasure in killing people. More often, however, the predominant emotion is fear, which constitutes the bulk of the phenomenon of PTSD: people retain the fear associated with having been helpless in the traumatic situation. Feeling this fear is the hardest part because your brain most certainly does not want you to feel fear of any kind and will work against you feeling this emotion. If you feel fear and stay with it, you will then gravitate to the next stage of emotion, which is the heart of trauma resolution: feeling sad.

If you face the trauma, you will face the fact that you lost something that you loved. Most importantly, you will see that you lost a piece of yourself. You will see that your basic self was assaulted in some way and as a result you no longer felt entirely human. As a result of trauma, many people developed “dissociation,” which means a kind of separating their thoughts and feelings from reality, something that they learned to do when they were in the traumatic situation. Feeling the emotions associated with a trauma is difficult because you probably dissociated in some way at the time of the trauma in order to get through it. Indeed, you did “get through it” but at the cost of your having to repress the feelings of fear, anger, and sadness. Repression of these emotions is the heart of PTSD in your current life but you brain “helped” you get through the trauma by doing that very thing. Naturally, you don’t want to feel these emotions now, and your brain will try to keep you away from them, but the task is to feel all of them in order to be restored to your true self. Facing the anger you felt (but couldn’t express) is the easiest part, even though it is difficult, and fear is much harder to feel, but the most important thing you have to face is the sadness associated with the loss you suffered. If you lost a leg in war but weren’t allowed to feel sad, you need to feel sad now in order to resolve the trauma. If you lost a sense of self, or perhaps self-respect, when you were sexually, physically, or emotionally traumatized, you need to feel the sadness of having lost a part of yourself.

Fear is the most basic emotion we have and it keeps us alive. Sadness is the most important emotion we have and it allows us to love, lose, cope with loss, and love again. You want to love again, but you will be able to do this only when you no longer hide the sadness you have from the original trauma. You can feel sadness and it will end but you most certainly don’t want to feel this sadness. No one does. You need a good therapist to help you through this grieving process. Perhaps you lost an arm, your voice, or something physical like your favorite toy, but the most serious loss you have suffered in the loss of self. Grieve the loss of self and you will find self. You will be free to love again, lose again, and love again all over again. You have finished your grief. When you have finished grieving, you can think clearly and then take action. It is not enough to just feel sad. You need to see how what you might need to do in your current life that takes courageous action based on wise thinking. You can think wisely and act courageously when you are not burdened by old hurts. You’re almost done. You need to forget and maybe to forgive.

Forgetting the trauma and forgiving

I have to be careful in discussing the forgetting process of trauma resolution because it is not a failing to remember the event or events that were traumatic in your life. Rather, it is no longer focusing on them, no longer being dominated by the unfinished business of grief associated with old traumas. People who have “finished” the feelings associated with sexual trauma, for instance, remember the time, place, and person during the trauma but they are not fixated on this event. It is history but it is not current events. What they have done is to have faced the fact of the trauma and faced the feelings associated with the trauma. Now, they don’t have to look back at this horrible time in their lives with fear, anger, or sadness. It is history. When a war veteran can speak of having killed some 13-year old boy who was shooting at him in Afghanistan, and then allow himself to feel the fear, anger, and sadness related to this event, he will not forget the boy nor having killed this boy but he will be free of the emotions associated with this tragic event so he can go on with his current life unburdened by old emotions that belong in the past, not in the present.  He might even go further: he might need to forgive….

But what is he forgiving. He is forgiving the boy for shooting at him, the Taliban who recruited this boy to shoot him, and American President who started the war in Afghanistan, and the captain who ordered him to kill this boy (or be killed by him). He might even need to forgive himself, although forgiving oneself is a bit more complicated and not a part of this discussion.

Find, face, feel, finish, forget and forgive. That is the resolution of traumata and resolving the PTSD that often results from it. Find a good therapist who can help you do these things.