What Is Trauma? And Why You Have It Too, Even If You Can’t Remember It…

What is trauma?

You hear a lot about trauma these days, but what does it actually mean? There are plenty of medical definitions out there that make trauma seem something scary and abstract that people often don’t identify with even when they are traumatized, this is because the criteria for the keywords around trauma are subjective. Keywords such as extremely disturbing, distressing and frightening which are used to define the meaning of trauma can mean different things to different people.

To me the essence of trauma is better captured when seen as unresolved emotions and pain or wounding that one still consciously or subconsciously struggles with today.

Trauma is about emotions that you have not been able to make peace with yet, often because these emotions were so painful that you consciously or subconsciously pushed them away in order to ‘survive’ the experience even when you weren’t physically at risk. If there’s something in your life that you cannot seem to put behind you, it’s because that experience was traumatic to you or it retriggers a previous trauma that was left unresolved. Sometimes we can clearly remember the experience, while at other times we don’t remember the experience but it comes out in how someone makes us feel and those feelings trigger the repressed emotions in us of experiences that we may not remember consciously but that the subconscious did not forget happened to us.

An experience doesn’t have to be extremely disturbing, distressing or frightening to be traumatic although often traumatic experiences are experienced as such. Trauma can come in many shapes and forms that do not involve violence for example and can still be traumatic, which is why the definition should focus more on the aspect of unresolved emotions than on the experience itself as it is not the experience itself that causes the trauma but our emotional reaction to it. In fact it is our emotional state that determines the degree of trauma that is created.

How does trauma affect us?

Trauma limits us and when we carry unresolved trauma we carry it in all our bodies of existence mentally, emotionally, vibrationally and physically. Trauma is what blocks our chakras, our meridians and in the end Kundalini energy from rising (read this teaching for more information on how trauma affects the physical and vibrational body).

When we carry unresolved trauma it creates a trauma filter through which we perceive and interpret our life and experiences. This means that until we have wiped this trauma filter clean, we can not see life as it is – we can only see it through the lens of our own unresolved pain.

Please read that again.

Until we heal our unresolved pain, we cannot see past it because it colours our perception of reality. As long as we can’t see reality, we are caught in illusion. Hence healing our unresolved pain, dispels the illusion that keeps us from seeing the absolute truth because on a soul level there is only one ultimate truth and one ultimate reality. Our unresolved pain keeps us from seeing this ONE truth and most of all from embodying it – and that One truth is that we are all ONE.

Accepting this to be the truth, or mentally knowing it to be true is not the same as living it as the truth. Our unresolved pain keeps us from being able to live this truth because it keeps us stuck in our stories of blame and victimhood. Our unresolved pain keeps us in the illusion of separation, which is why the ONLY way back to Oneness is to heal the wounded ego so it can become One again with the soul. Once we become one within, we become One without. As above, so below (the inner marriage of the ego and the soul) which creates as within, so without.

Why do people think they haven’t experienced trauma?

The problem is that we can’t heal what we can’t see. As I have indicated before, most of our trauma is held subconsciously which means that unless we go look for it, we won’t find it. When it comes to trauma (which is nothing more than unresolved pain) you don’t know what you don’t know. But there are other reasons why we may feel that we don’t carry trauma and that is because of our own interpretation of what trauma looks like. Here are seven ways in which we tend to negate or minimize our painful experiences, this is even more so when we have survival mechanisms that demand we come across as perfect or invulnerable.

#1 We are looking for Trauma with a BIG T

Most people when they think of trauma, they think of trauma with a BIG T. They think about the extreme stories that make it on the news and compare their situations to those. Trauma doesn’t only come from extreme cases where someone is chained up in the basement or beaten on a regular basis. Small trauma experienced daily over a length of time can be just as traumatizing as one big event.

But also situations that involve no abuse whatsoever can be traumatizing, when I was little (4 yrs old) my mother went for a three month trip to the United States. Her leaving wasn’t traumatic, not seeing her or being able to speak to her (mobile phones didn’t exist back then) for three months became traumatic because to me she was just gone too long and I felt abandoned by her, especially because unbeknownst to her she had left me with my abuser.

Even normal everyday parenting can create trauma, Dr. Alexander Loyd calls these popsicle memories based on a client that couldn’t get a promotion because of a subconscious memory of a popsicle incident. When she was 5 years old her sister had gotten a popsicle after lunch, but she didn’t because she didn’t finish her plate. She threw a temper tantrum and imprinted the belief that her mother favored her sister above her. Later in life that same memory kept her from being promoted until it was found and neutralized.

#2 We minimize our traumatic experiences

In order to survive our experiences and not have to face the negative consequences of acknowledging our reality we will minimize our traumatic experiences. Children will do this when they are being abused by their caregivers, and partners will do this within situations of spousal abuse. This is a coping mechanism, designed to be able to maintain the relationship with the abuser. Children have no choice but to do this, because they depend on their caregivers to provide for them as they have nowhere else to go.

Adults have their own reasons for doing this and that is because if they would acknowledge to themselves that they are being abused, it would mean they would have to leave their partner which they may feel incapable of doing for a myriad of reasons. Telling themselves that the abuse isn’t that bad allows them to stay in the relationship, even if it’s less than ideal.

In the end there isn’t much difference between a spouse that beats you up or a spouse that trashes the house every-time you’re in an argument, but someone minimizing their abuse will tell themselves that because he didn’t hit her but the wall next to her, or that he did punch her but she didn’t have a black eye or needed medical attention that the abuse isn’t that bad…

#3 We don’t consciously remember the traumatic experience

It’s very common not to consciously remember traumatic experiences, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t there. This can be true for childhood experiences but it is especially true for transgenerational aka ancestral trauma and past life trauma. You will not find this type of trauma unless you go looking for it, because it is always held subconsciously.

To better understand the difference between conscious and subconscious let me give you an analogy. Conscious is everything that you can see with the naked eye, subconscious is everything that is there simultaneously that you can’t see with the naked eye but is there nonetheless. In other words, the subconscious is what is there but what we have not consciously acknowledged being there – it’s there but we can’t see it.

#4 We don’t recognize the experience as being traumatic

I recently worked with a client who could not remember any trauma in her childhood, this was because she was looking for abuse or other things done to her. Then later she remembered a fire as a child that destroyed their house. She saw herself and her family standing outside on the neighbours lawn watching the house go up in flames and then she remembered being outside of her body watching herself wring her hands while she looked at the burning house.

It took her over 50 years to recognize that this had been a traumatic experience for her, this is because we have to self identify trauma. No one can identify trauma for us, because trauma is a subjective experience. In our session together we saw that in a previous lifetime someone she had loved had literally sacrificed her to gain spiritual clout in the community they lived in and this had led to her being burned on a stone altar as a sacrifice to the Gods as a teenage girl.

Her reaction to the fire as a young girl now was very telling because she left her body and was watching herself wringing her hands, repeating what she remembered from the previous lifetime. Because what would your first reaction be to being burned alive? You would immediately try to exit the body in order to not have to feel the pain.

Losing your house and possessions to a fire can be very traumatic on its own, but if you were burned alive in a previous lifetime and that memory becomes subconsciously triggered it becomes even more traumatic without necessarily understanding why. As we are not consciously aware of the past lives we have lived, the deeper context is often missing that helps us understand the connection between then and now. It’s not that the deeper context isn’t there, it’s that we don’t see it because it is held subconsciously.

#5 We are subconsciously hiding the trauma from ourselves

Sometimes we disconnect from our unresolved pain (trauma) so deeply, we lock it up in the dungeons of our subconscious and throw away the key. This often happens in cases of early childhood sexual abuse and incest, but it can also happen with horrendous experiences later in life that the memory is completely blacked out in order to be able to survive the experience, not even so much physically as well as mentally and emotionally survive what has happened to us. In medical terms this is referred to as dissociation.

Often when we are mentally and emotionally strong enough to deal with the unresolved pain, it will start to resurface in order to be faced. It can also be brought to the surface through healing modalities that work with the subconscious mind.

#6 We deny to ourselves it ever happened

Other times even when we are confronted with the truth, it can be hard to stomach. I had one client once that saw that she was sexually abused by her father as a baby in our session, because she didn’t want to (or couldn’t) face the consequences of this discovery she told herself that she had felt forced by me to make things up.

Of course she had not been forced to make things up, but it was easier for her to tell herself this than to acknowledge that what she had perceived herself in our session was true. It was much easier to deny it and pretend that it never happened, at least that was what she thought. In reality, this childhood sexual abuse had set her up for the man problems she was facing in her life which included a boyfriend expressing his desire to be sexual with her then nine or ten year old daughter! Instead of this being a giant red flag to her, she chose to continue her relationship with him even though he had left her for a younger woman and only used her for sex.

When I go into a session with a client I know nothing, I simply guide them to what wants to be seen. It is when she saw the sexual abuse by her father that she said that it made sense because her boyfriend had recently said he fantasized about having sex with her daughter. After the session she chose to stick her head in the sand in order to be able to maintain the relationship with her father and the boyfriend who kept her around for the sex but was now engaged to marry another woman. The only way to do that was to deny what she saw, if it wasn’t true what she had seen then she didn’t need to act on it. But there was of course a reason why she was attracting a man that only used her for his own sexual gratification in the same way her father had when she was a baby. The subconscious mind often recreates similar experiences to help us heal the underlying pain.

#7 Our defense mechanisms won’t let us admit to….

Certain defense mechanisms such as the inability to be wrong, the need to be seen as perfect, or the inability to be seen as vulnerable can make us negate our real trauma as well. We may claim victimhood but in an inauthentic way, that is meant to further hide the true underlying causes instead of face them.

This often results in denying, deflecting or projecting one’s trauma onto someone else in an attempt to protect one’s self against the pain of the underlying wound. We see this in more pathological states such as narcissistic personalities and other personality disorders that serve to protect the person against the immense underlying pain that is driving the person’s pathology. We can’t heal what we refuse to admit and so it’s very difficult to get people with this type of wounding to face their pain, because they have basically hardwired themselves to avoid the underlying pain at all costs.

They may seek help, but only for the form of appearing to be willing to work on themselves. Meanwhile if you come close to their deeply held pain they will lash out. I had such a client who for example could not be perceived as vulnerable, when I after many group sessions with her gently tried to help her see this – she accused me of making it up just to have something to say about her… These types of clients (people) can become very vindictive and lashing out becomes a way to deflect the attention away from their own wounding, they’re not the problem – YOU are! The more they go after you, the more you know you have hit the nail on the head because they become so combative and defensive.

Why everyone carries unresolved trauma

Whether it’s childhood trauma or ancestral trauma, all trauma is in the end past life trauma that we are seeking to resolve in our current timeline through our current life childhood and life experiences. No one is exempt from this process, we all carry unresolved pain and emotions with us from lifetime to lifetime.

This unresolved pain and emotions are carried from lifetime to lifetime in our karmic templates that are held in the causal body, an etheric body outside of our physical, mental, emotional and vibrational body.

As soon as we have experienced something in a previous lifetime that we were not able to resolve it is brought with us into the next lifetime in an attempt to heal it. More often than not, reliving the circumstances of our unresolved pain retraumatizes us causing us to accumulate more trauma on top of the previous trauma that we then bring into following lifetimes.

How unresolved trauma creates havoc in our lives

In order to help us alleviate ourselves from the unresolved emotions and pain that we carry, the subconscious mind pulls in the people, situations and experiences we need in order to retrigger the pain so that we can heal it this time around.

This starts as early as the families our souls choose to be born into because they are working through the same (past life) soul themes we are – but also the kind of childhood experiences we have that mold us into the personalities that fit our past life experiences so that we can finish up what was left unresolved before.

Sadly, because the context of the past is missing we fail to see how our current life experiences are in fact attempts to heal our past life issues and instead of healing them, they create deeper wounds that remain unresolved. This starts a vicious circle of attracting in even more people, situations and experiences that are meant to help us see the unresolved pain and emotions we carry in order to heal them and often end up only feeling vicitimized even further by the very dynamic that is meant to help us heal what was left unresolved in the past.

Until we heal these places inside ourselves they will continue to hijack our current reality, simply because we are subconsciously always seeking to express the wholeness that is our true nature and these unresolved painful memories and emotions keep us from expressing the innate wholeness that we embody on a soul level.

This is a process that cannot be bypassed in any way and especially not by magical or wishful thinking, this is because it doesn’t matter what we consciously believe – it matters what we subconsciously believe as the subconscious mind creates 95% of our reality experience.

Because we share “the self” across all timelines with our soul’s predecessors (the past life versions of our soul) any fear or false belief they imprinted through unresolved pain and trauma is passed down to us as if it is our own. It’s these subconsciously imprinted fears and false beliefs that keep us from embodying our wholeness that is encoded within our Divine Blueprint without us really understanding what, why or how on a conscious level.

How to heal unresolved trauma once and for all

Which brings us to how to heal such unresolved trauma once and for all, as you can’t simply make it go away by denying its existence or telling yourself it’s not real. Instead, one has to go to the original story that created the fear or false belief which we have often been playing out over multiple lifetimes over and over again.

Simply doing a past life regression doesn’t bring us to the original wound per se, it can be simply one of the many previous lifetimes in between that we were playing out the same wound. Instead, we have to go to the very first lifetime that started the pattern which sounds easier said than done because it’s where the deepest original pain is held. Often we are shown all the other lifetimes in which we were playing out the same wound before we can access the root cause, the original experience that started it all.

I don’t know any other healing modality outside Soul Embodiment™ Therapy that can take you to this original wounding, this is my specialty within the Akashic Records to bring clients to the original wound of their pattern in the Breaking Karmic Loops sessions. Through seeing the original wound for what it is either a misunderstanding or something that you were still holding against yourself instant healing can take place, like with my client Dannielle who stopped her lifelong pattern of doubting herself in one single session where we went to the original wound that had started this pattern. As soon as she saw the lifetime that had created the pattern, the pattern dissolved and she came out of the session feeling certain of herself and the self doubting never came back.

Because the Akashic Records are the chronicles of our soul it allows us to directly reprogram the fears and false beliefs that are keeping us out of alignment to fully embodying our soul and our Divine Blueprint. It’s I believe the most powerful healing modality available to us at this time, yes there are many other beautiful and powerful healing modalities available to us at this time but of all of them I have found working directly within the Akashic Records to be the most powerful.

I pray this Soul teaching has helped you get a better understanding of the concept of trauma and helps you identify where trauma is still keeping you from fully embodying who you are on a soul level. Within the spiritual community there are a lot of people that talk the talk, but not so many people that walk the walk. As the Carl Jung quote that I started with indicates, we need to do the actual work of making the darkness conscious to reach enlightenment. The darkness he talks about is not only our own darkness within, but even more literally what we can’t see about ourselves because we are holding it in the darkness of our subconscious. Just think about it, it’s not that objects in the dark aren’t there it’s that we can’t see them because the darkness hides them. While most people are on the path of imagining figures of light as their spiritual practice, there’s a growing group of people on the Ascension path embracing their inner darkness to transform it into light.

Which path are you on?