How To Turn Your Trauma Into Triumph
“You know, sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage. Just, literally 20 seconds of just embarrassing bravery and I promise you, something great will come of it.” – Benjamin Mee (We Bought A Zoo)
Trauma. Something we’ve all experienced in different ways and on different levels. No one escapes life without feeling pain, it’s inevitable. These experiences have a detrimental way of shaping our reality and the way we view people, places, or things around us. So, how does someone get to the other side of the darkness?
Find your escape.
Experiencing trauma of any fashion can leave a person feeling lost, confused, and mentally fractured and manifest into various mental conditions or disorders. Spend time finding something that grounds you, whether that’s art, music, writing, or working out. Whatever healthy coping mechanism you find, this will allow your brain the opportunity to ground itself and stop the vicious cycle of thinking or pondering. Your opportunity now begins.
Learn the lesson.
Every experience in our lives, positive or negative, offers us the ability to learn from it. Life has a funny way of teaching us lessons and giving us unsolicited, and sometimes harsh, advice. Take the time to reflect, carefully, on what positive lesson you can extract from what happened. Some situations can be extremely difficult, but there usually always is a message you can take from it. Whether that be to better protect yourself, to take things slower getting into a relationship, or even simply to learn that you never had control of the situation. The most beautiful things in life usually come from our darkest moments. Just look for the light in what you’re going through. This will help change your mental view of the situation from tragedy to being an opportunity.
Relearn yourself.
Everything changes naturally, but even more so after a traumatic experience. You might start becoming more fearful of public spaces, relationships, being alone, or even walking out of your home. Learn each little nuance about your new self. Learn about the way you now handle various situations, the things that frustrate you, the things that you might be okay with, or even how you WILL handle situations in the future. The objective isn’t to take this list as your negatives, the objective is to list out the opportunities you have in front of you to becoming a newer, stronger version of the person you are today. Trauma changes you, but it does not have to destroy you.
Reclaim yourself.
Use your list of goals to work the process of self-development. Using the list you made, identify steps you can take towards achieving a better life through each point you made on your list. If you’ve started becoming more fearful of being alone, try to find activities you can slowly get into that have you spend time alone. Take baby steps and inch your way towards each objective. The goal of this isn’t to push you to having panic attacks but is to show yourself that you have complete control. The goal here is to teach yourself that what you once feared, really isn’t something you need to fear anymore. This, in therapeutic settings, is considered to be a form of exposure therapy. While trauma modifies you, you can always modify yourself.
Trauma has a strange way of gripping our hearts and holding us hostage in our own lives. Sometimes we have to experience the most uncomfortable feelings to be able to begin the process of untying the knots created by the harshness of life. 
