Past Traumatic Experiences and How to Manage Them
Those of us who have had traumas in the past know that these traumatic experiences can keep haunting us for many years.
No matter how much we try to move forward the thoughts from them don’t seem to go away!
This can be extremely frustrating and painful because we want to treat them as something from our past and move forward but it just doesn’t seem to be happening.
So how can we help ourselves out of these kinds of constant negative, sad and nagging thoughts from our past?
Well, one exercise that can be very helpful in helping us to move forward is journaling.
Journaling helps us to vent through writing.
This is called “Testimonial Therapy”.
By writing an account of our traumatic experiences over and over again we help ourselves to get those feelings that are trapped inside of us on to a journal.
If we can do this consistently it will help us to reflect on what we have written down and to process them in our minds.
This will gradually lower the burden that we have been carrying inside of us for so long.
It will help us to feel that we are more in control of what has happened to us.
It will also help us to keep reading through what we have written and to reflect on how to manage them better.
When we keep doing this over and over again, we will find that our coping skills of how to manage those traumas are getting better.
With time we will also find that our story is gradually changing from “an account of a victim” to “an account of a survivor”.
Isn’t this wonderful!
None of us can escape from what life decides to throw on us.
Sometimes these traumas are self-imposed – not because we wanted to deliberately hurt ourselves but because circumstances pushed us into it - and sometimes they may have been completely out of our control.
No matter how they happened, remaining there as a victim gets us nowhere except into a world of fears, anxieties, and depression.
We must move on with life and we must move on as a survivor!