What has happened, cannot be undone..

What has happened, cannot be undone but it’s very hard to come to terms with that. Trauma impacts your mind, body and soul. The impact leaves you in a state of high alert all the time. Something snaps within you and that very feeling that you were in charge of your life goes away. You no longer engage, you no longer associate. There is a total disconnect, you don’t feel your body is you because the circuit of connection snaps.

Trauma victims stay in the past. We call it ‘then and there’ and they are unable to come to ‘here and now’. There’s no present, just past for them as they are unable to differentiate that. They react to trauma in different ways from panic disorders, to flying into rage to completely shutting down. It like being “pushed outside your window of tolerance”. The rational brain shuts down which we call the conscious mind and the emotional brain is working all the time. Whenever a trauma occurs, the rational brain shuts off and the emotional brain takes over. It’s the emotional brain that makes you experience the gut wrenching sensations and the heart pounding feelings, the breathing becoming shallow and the mouth turning turning dry and your throat is unable to swallow and you have difficulty in speaking. A rape victim feels that any guy who is walking up to her will just rape her. A child assaulted by his parent will just cower down at the sight of that parent. This is a state of collapse, a state of freeze, when all your defensive gears no longer function.

In therapy we make the client visit the trauma, in a disassociated form ie he is watching the traumatic incident from above, he is witnessing it, he is an observer and he’s no longer a part of it. From hypersensitivity we desensitize him. We work to disassociate him from the trauma. He watches it like he is watching a film, he’s not a participant, he’s watching. Why is that important!!! Because the client who is still associated with the past realizes it in the therapy that it (incident/ incidents) was “there and then” and “I’m here, in the now” the trauma is over. Of course we do counselling also but again it takes time. It’s not a one time affair with the therapist. It is an association which begins to bear fruit over the time.

In 1998! when my car met with a head on collision, with a bus, it took me a very long time to come out of the fear and the trauma. I was in depression for a long time. In fact that was the beginning of my depressive phase. I would freeze looking at a car coming from the front and my mouth would turn dry, my heart would race, my stomach would churn, a wired kind of current would run through my body. At home I’d cry for no reason and sometimes yell too. My son was nine and would get terrified seeing me in that state. I had never heard of therapy that time. There were only anti depressants. Well I was lucky because I met Guruji who was alive at that time. A different journey began for me... I could recover and recovered well.💕💕💕

Hello Zindagi 💕💕