Healing doesn’t mean the past didn’t happen—it means it no longer controls you

Hello beautiful people. Hope you guys are having a wonderful weekend. A topic in particular came to my mind and I thought this would be appropriate, especially for, you know, speaking to young men, grown adult men, and growing men out there, and even women, you know, this can be a general topic, but especially I wanted to touch on overcoming trauma in your life. Now so often, you know, one thing about us as humans, life is relative for all of us. We can all relate to each other. We might be different in many ways, which is normal. We still have things that make us similar, things that make us similar. And so particularly today, as I was contemplating on things I wanted to touch on, the topic trauma kept coming over and over in my mind. It kept playing over and over. Let's address trauma. How do you truly overcome trauma? Now a lot of people that I've communicated with, who see their therapists and different things like that, they have a way of sometimes leading their patients or these people into compartmentalizing the trauma. So deciding, you know what, I'm going through trauma right now. I've had this terrible experience in my life. I'm going to park it there and not have to ever deal with it anymore. And whenever it's brought up, it becomes triggering for me. So I either got to avoid ever speaking on it or, you know, that becomes a difficult experience in that moment for me. Now, personally, I can understand some people have different ways of dealing with things. So I guess in many ways, I wouldn't say, hey, this is how you need to deal with it. But I've come up, in my opinion, with a way that I believe is more effective because in life, again, to each his own. So I'm not going to be trying to push nobody into any direction necessarily, but I am sharing my experiences because like I said, we all have relative things in our lives that makes us similar. So for me in particular, I've had trauma myself. And my way of having overcome trauma and dealing with trauma has been to be able to freely and confidently discuss it so that there's no triggers. There are no triggers for me. Particularly for me, on the trauma that I've been through in my personal life, I spent time talking about it. I spent time revisiting it. And not because I want to discuss it and just talk about it fervently, but because I spent time identifying areas I too could have been better. I've spent time finding ways to be accountable. I spent time revisiting those experiences over and over, playing it in my head and trying to identify different ways I could have improved in those situations. And from my experience, by continually revisiting that experience, not because I'm finding something that puts me into a corner or makes me feel down about myself, because sometimes it's an experience that when you think about it, you think less of yourself. It might bring you down lower than you would like to think of yourself. Like I've talked to some friends who say that, hey, whenever I think of my trauma, it makes me feel like I'm worthless. But I've come to a space where I feel like it's important to go past that thought of being worthless. Because at different points in our lives, we all have had experiences that have made us feel less of ourselves. But what is important is to go back to those experiences and find a way to identify what is it you could have learned? What is it that could have been beneficial for you? And tie your thought processes to that, saying that, hey, that's what I'm looking for. Not the fact that I made mistakes, because mistakes, to be human is to err. We are going to make mistakes. We're going to make mistakes as humans. However, what is it in that mistake that I could have done better? Where can I grow? So instead of going back to those experiences, for me personally, and then go down on myself, I go back to those experiences continually to identify areas that I need to learn something. And that becomes my focal point. Not what the other person did to me or what they have done to me, but what is it I could have done to be a better person? What is it I could have done to have rewarded that? What is it I could have done to have been in a better situation, a different situation? And from my experiences, by going back constantly and identifying areas I can improve, whenever I have those thoughts, it's no longer triggering for me. It's more so that I'm acknowledging areas that I was not as strong and I could have grown from. And now I have grown from those areas and becoming a better person. And these thoughts that you're identifying really does not have to do with the other person. It really doesn't have anything to do with them. It's more about you identifying faults in yourself and the areas you need to grow, regardless of the other person. And from my experience, by doing those things, now it becomes less and less triggering for me until it's not triggering at all. Because whenever I reflect on those experiences, I reflect on areas I could have improved, areas I could have grown. I take accountability. And right then and there, those are the thought processes I resonate to and less of the other person and what they had done to me during those times in my life. And from my experiences, by continually referencing my past and finding ways to identify areas I could have grown, I've been able to get into a space where it's less about the trauma, it's less about how less of a person I felt in those moments, and it's more about how much I have grown, what are the things that I recognize that I could have grown from. And so that is my process of being able to get myself farther and farther away from having triggers and traumas that carry on. So even as I grow into present relationships that I'm going to be delving deeper into, I don't take those traumas with me because those are conversations I'm comfortable having, because it's mostly about identifying areas I believe I have grown over time and less about triggers that occur because I'm not looking at that other individual anymore. I'm looking at myself. So for those of you who are out there, feel free to leave a comment who have been through trauma. I know a lot of us have been through trauma. Most of us have. Leave a comment. Let me know what you think about this process of revisiting your trauma instead of compartmentalizing and locking up in a room where one day when somebody touched that door, boom, you explode, and it becomes a trigger that you live with for the rest of your life, as opposed to opening that door yourself, figuring out all the nicks and kinks to that door and the things that are within that room so that now you're more comfortable having that conversation. This is less about the other person and more about what you have learned through those experiences and the better person you become over time. I want to thank you all for following me here on Instagram. My YouTube channel, of course, is Building a Legacy Brick by Brick. And of course, my Facebook is the same thing, Gerald Addy. You can find me on all platforms, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, Gerald Addy. Thank you for listening. Leave a comment below. Let me know what you think. Love.