Life is hard.

Everyone has difficult experiences in this life.

That’s how we get stronger.

But sometimes, those experiences are harder than we have the resources to handle, so we blow a fuse.

That’s when we experience psychological trauma. We who have trauma can be recognized by a triumvirate of symptoms:

• re-experiencing some part of our past
• avoiding things that remind us of that past
• scanning our environment for threats that could bring us back into that past

But what makes trauma trauma is when someone we have an overwhelming experience that dissociates the part of ourselves that holds the emotional distress of that experience in order to allow the rest of ourselves to keep driving on with life—just like when an electrical circuit overloads and blows a fuse in the electric panel. This mechanism is designed to prevent a house fire and to allow the home owner to tend to affected circuit without having to rewire the whole house. Trauma is essentially an important survival mechanism that allows us to not burn out every time when we don’t have the emotional tools and social support we need to overcome a struggle.

Where most people go wrong is not in blowing a fuse, but in never fixing the fuse. Blowing a fuse—like trauma—is designed to be a temporary coping mechanism, not a way of life. We are meant to go back to each traumatic memory to process those emotions with another person (whether God, a therapist, a family member, or friend), thereby fixing the fuse and resuming healthy function. When we tend to those emotions, we re-integrate that dissociated part, thereby becoming whole again.

Of course, it’s not helpful to replace just one fuse if the whole circuit breaker is affected, or if your wiring is faulty, or if your power source is unreliable. That’s why knowing what kind of trauma you have is very important.

Check out my other posts in the Health Category and “trauma” tag for details.