Dancing With the One that Brought You

"Stay with me,

Let's just breathe

Practiced on my sins, never gonna let you win, uh-huh

Under everything, just another human being, uh-huh

I don't want to hurt

There's so much in this world to make me believe"

Willie Nelson

Good morning and Happy Easter weekend. Easter represents for me the bringing of fresh new life, a coming out of the darkness so to speak. What is fresher than a Willie Nelson song that sings of cherishing relationships. I had a thought yesterday, and stay with me on this, what if the song was referring to the relationship between you and your triggers? With that new context in mind read those lyrics again...what comes up for you? It is a peculiar question indeed but the way that we feel when thinking about our triggers is something worth leaning into. Every emotion, every physical sign that comes to us when reflecting on those triggers is how our body alerts us of the hidden trauma wounds that exists deep within.

The healing of trauma wounds is not something that we should take lightly as it can change the entire trajectory of our lives. Sound good? Want to learn how? It is simply by leaning into and sitting with the trigger that comes up for us. The trigger is a guidepost to our trauma wound that needs to be healed. It is kind of like that saying, "You have to dance with the one that brought you". What I mean is we have to be aware enough of our trigger to offer it a space in our minds to figure out what it is rooted to. In my profession the golden rule is, "We cannot run from it. We have to feel it to heal it". This does not mean that we want to go back and re-experience all the things that wounded us but we do need to be alright with feeling the trigger and asking ourselves, "where did that come from?" By the way, just to bring clarity to the topic, Gabor Mate says that, "Trauma is not what happened to us, instead it is what happens inside our body when something happens." When I refer to Trauma here I am talking about our trauma wounds.

Let me break this down in a way that you might understand the cycle of healing our Trauma wounds. Let's say that I experience something that is horrific, maybe I lose my husband to a very terrible accident. My brain has one job; to keep me alive. In an attempt to secure my survival my brain puts that away for me kind of like a book being placed up on the top shelf. I spend years knowing that inside that book is all of the pain and the hurt of the event but I find it easier to maintain my life if I just leave it without processing anything it has for me. In the spirit of that really bad advise, "Time heals all wounds", the book remains untouched for many years. Then one day something happens to trigger that book and it falls off of the shelf. It lays open on my desk spilling all of the pain on me. I slam the book shut and stuff it further on the top shelf. Even after the pain comes alive for me I still hold fast to the idea that, "I'm Fine, thanx for asking" because showing the real storm inside of me feels like defeat. I don't want to feel the pain let alone share it with anyone. If I had a dollar for every person that looked me dead in the eye and asked if I was ok I would be a millionaire. The irony of it was that pretending I was strong enough to weather that storm alone actually made me weaker.

 When our trigger drops that book of pain it can go two ways: We can do our Trauma wound or our Trauma wound can do us. We can get to know our trigger with the goal of getting to it's root or we can ignore the open book and deflect the pain onto others causing more damage. Believe me, after years of picking up books, re-stacking to the top shelf and ignoring 25 years of triggers, I know that my life would have been exponentially better had I just opened the book and danced with what had brought me. As a mother the reality of passing that pain to my children haunts me everyday and adds another task to my healing list; tending to the scars left behind.

I know now that when it comes to healing first comes the pain and then the progress. The progress depends on our ability to sit with and understand our triggers. Here is the beauty of that dance; once we listen to our triggers and bring awareness to where they are rooted then there no longer exists a trauma wound. Instead it becomes another experience that exists in our lives but doesn't effect us. Our greatest power lies in showing up and gaining awareness, leaning into and understanding our triggers.

I am going to let you in on a little secret, after helping many clients find the courage to come out of the darkness and dance I have learned to listen for the tell tale signs of unhealed trauma. My Spidey senses tingle when I hear someone attempting to portray themselves by painting a picture that everything is perfectly "Fine". What I know to be true is that "time" does not heal all wounds. That is a myth that people say to the broken hearted encouraging us to silently wait out the storm. It is, trust me friends, bullshit of the highest power which serves no purpose in healing! Time actually fosters the growth of the wound every time we ignore that trigger and fight silently. Each time we attempt to hide our storm with the response, "I'm fine" the pain festers and grows deep down inside of us. It waits for the perfect opportunity to drop the book in the hopes that we will finally listen. And just so that we are perfectly clear here, when the top shelf fills up with too many books the shelf is going to break. Each book will fall hard and fast and the weight of the pain will be massive when consumed all at once. Take it from someone who woke up at the age of 51 trapped under the weight of all of my books and a life that had imploded.

So if you are reading this I encourage you to come out of the shadows, listen to your triggers; they are telling you something important. Open that book and dance with the one who brought you. Read it from cover to cover like its on the New York Times Best seller list. Dance with your trigger like nobody is watching. Dance like your happiness and peace depend on it... because it does. "Stay with me, Let's just breathe, Practiced on my sins, never gonna let you win, uh-huh Under everything, just another human being, uh-huh"

Anastasia Jorquera-Boschman is a retired teacher, principal and educational consultant. She spends her time speaking, writing and holding space for others to heal trauma. Currently she can be found singing along to Willie while she dismantles her home library and dances with the one that brought her.