Stages Of Trauma & Healing

Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Thriving Adoptees Podcast. So today it's just, uh, me, um, and today I'm going to be talking about stages of trauma and healing. So this came to me, uh, as I was doing the ironing this morning. Um, I don't know why I need to share that with you, but we have our— sometimes I have my best ideas, or what I think are my best ideas, when I'm not thinking about podcasts I'm going to do. I'm just listening to somebody else's podcast or listening to another audiobook. And I— this was a podcast I was listening to from a mentor of mine called Clare Diamond. And if you want to check her out, uh, she is Clare without an I, so C-L-A-R-E, and Diamond, quite uh, relevant. Yeah, the Thriving Adoptees logo is a diamond, but her surname is spelled Diamond without an A, so it's D-I-M-O-N-D. So, uh, great lady. So I am now 56, and I was thinking about my relationship with trauma. And from my— as I was thinking about my relationship with trauma, I was thinking about that that relationship has gone through certain stages. So for the first 40 years of my life, which is what, 50— 40 over 56, it's 3 quarters, is it? Maybe a little bit more than that, maybe 80%. Uh, I was trauma blind, so I was in the fog. I was unaware of any adoption trauma. So, uh, the In, in simple words, I was unconscious. Uh, the, the trauma was subconscious. It was below the level of my thinking mind. And then I became conscious of the trauma, so I became trauma aware. And that's the process that we talk about, like coming out of the fog. So when the subconscious becomes conscious, uh, and when it becomes conscious, we can then do something about that. Um, we can find a podcast like Thriving Adoptees and figure out our next move. We can read a book that's going to help us understand our trauma and perhaps see how it's played out in our lives. We can join a group of fellow adoptees, and this is great for us because we realize that we're not going mad. Our reaction, our trauma, is a normal reaction to an abnormal event. Most birth mums, most kids, most mums who give birth to kids keep those kids. So it's a tiny minority. Um, I I saw, I think it's 350 million Americans, so 70 million Brits. Those are 2 main countries that the listeners come from. I saw somebody estimate the number of adopted people is 5 to 9 million adoptees. So out of 350 million, going with the 5 million, that's what 1%, is it? That's 5 over 300, 350. No, um, maybe 1.2%, somewhere between 1.75%, 1.2%. I should have done those numbers before I got in, but it's a tiny minority, right? Um, so we, uh, we, we go from becoming trauma blind to becoming trauma aware. Um, we— yes. we, we can then do something about, because we can't do anything about stuff that we're unaware of. If we are unaware of a trauma that's driving our lives, then we can do nothing about it. So in a way, it's a blessing, right? Because now we're aware of it. trauma, we can do something about it. Um, and, uh, disclaimer here, I'm not a therapist. I'm not, uh, I'm not recommending anybody or any particular path. I'm just describing my kind of my own path, becoming trauma aware at 40 through the, the story about the teddy bear that so many of you have heard about, you don't need me to talk again. So I think from, from there, I spent, I spent a lot of time looking at 2 different causes of trauma in my life. The trauma of running my own business. So the ups and downs, the emotional ups and downs of running my own business found very stuff and then the adoption stuff. And after 11 years running my business, finally had a good year, and that didn't bring me the happiness that I thought it was going to bring. Okay, so, um, here in the West where we— society, most of us in society have a belief system that's based on, I'll be happy when X happens. So for me, it was, I'll be happy when I have a good year business-wise. For some adoptees, they, you know, I'll be happy when I meet my birth mother. I'll be— so they, we are, we're we are pinning our hopes on an event in the future, and some of those reunions work out, some of those don't. One of the most important real things I came to realize in my— after becoming trauma aware was that happiness is an inside job, and it's available to us At any moment, because it's innate within us. Now, that sounds very easy to say. I'm talking there probably about something that I've spent months on investigating. And one particular week, it was 8 till 6. Every day for five days on a retreat to get to a lived experience of that fact. So trauma blind, trauma aware. I think I went through another stage which was trauma busting. So I became a trauma buster. I tried to bust bust my feelings because. Now I was aware of these feelings and the source of them within me, and therefore I was trying to bust them, and that didn't work for me. Um, so I, at that stage, uh, I, I moved from kind of being a trauma buster to believing that I was trauma doomed. I read The Primal Wound. I thought, I'm doomed. I've got to, I've got to live my life with this, with this trauma. There's going to be no more happiness. Thought I was— trauma was something that I was stuck with despite all the work that I'd done. Like, I'd been working in Personal development kind of stuff for 8 years, and I thought the primal wound doomed me. And then, um, in that doomed frame of mind, I became a trauma pusher. So I was trying to get people around me, especially my wife, to accept my trauma. And I thought, well, if they accept me with this trauma, they come to a realization about how traumatized I am, then, then hopefully it'll make my life better, easier, because they'll understand me. And I see, because I made that mistake with my wife, Uh, I, I'm very conscious of the fact that becoming a trauma pusher doesn't work. See a lot of people trying to do it. Um, we're trying to change the way the world thinks of us, and it doesn't work. Uh, we're trying to push our trauma on them, and they— their plate is already full of their own trauma. And because their plate is full, there's no space for ours, however much we try and persuade them to listen to us. Uh, the place— I, I, so I, I found that, I found that process futile. Spent a lot of time, a lot of years trying to change that, but the place is always to go back inside. So I went back inside. I was still in groups, groups looking at the essence of who we are rather than our feelings, separating who I am from what I feel, separating who I am from what I think, separating who I am from my trauma. And, and I realized through that process— I, I call this phrase, uh, traumatized body-mind. So I'm separating who I am and who we are, the diamond of the Thriving Adoptees logo, from the fist that hides that diamond. And I saw for myself that however hard I tried to bust that trauma, um, it stayed with me. In fact, the, the further— the harder I worked trying to bust the trauma, the bigger the trauma became. And I separated. I'm talking here about separating, uh, seeing that we are not our trauma. Now, that I've been told that is re-traumatizing for people. Um, if that— if, if that is you, I sincerely apologize. I don't mean to trigger anybody here, and I'm just sharing my Experience, right? So traumatized body-mind is about saying, look, um, Simon is traumatized, his body-mind is traumatized. But Simon Benn hasn't always been Simon Benn. Before that, he was David Anthony Flower, and before that, he had no name. These names are labels given to us by others. They're labels given to us by our birth parents and our, uh, and our adopted parents. And we are not our labels. So check— I mean, check out this guy Rupert Spira that I've mentioned other all the time. If this is— because he's far more articulate, articulate at separating who we are from how we feel. But it's this idea that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. The spiritual being is the diamond. The human experience is the trauma. Separating who we are from And then the next stage, the stage that I'm working on at the moment, is what I call the truth, truth stage. So this is looking at, with a, um, a therapist and reading audiobooks and listening to audiobooks, stuff like that, um, looking at it. So one in particular, No Bad Parts, by a guy called Richard Schwartz. He goes, there's Dick Schwartz is the founder of Internal Family Systems, is saying there are no bad parts. So a part of me is wounded, but as Dick says, he— the essence of me is that uppercase S Self. Uh, the metaphor that I've come up with this For this is one way to express it, is that it's that piece, it's a circular piece used in to represent ourselves in Trivial Pursuits. So it's a circular piece of plastic that has holes for 6 segments of cheese, so little triangular bits, and you put the You, you, as you get the question right that goes with each piece of cheese, you get the cheese and you put it into your, you put it into your plastic, uh, plastic cheese box. There are no bad parts. So the traumatized part of, of, of Simon is the, the cheese bit, and we're saying That we're looking at the whole of Simon here, which is there are no bad parts. So there's no bad cheese, there's no cheese that has gone off, right? There's no cheese that has, uh, you know, some cheese is very smelly even when it's still completely fresh. Um, so what we think as, as bad cheese is just cheese made to a particular recipe, and that cheese has a strong smell, but the cheese is not off. There's no bad parts. So I hope that gives you an understanding of these different stages, and there's no judgment. in these stages. There's no judgment one stage is better than another. This is me explaining the stages that I've been through, and what's been helpful for me is to do this stuff in, in, in community, to do this stuff with other people. 99% of my work, my stages work, has been done with, uh, with non-adoptees actually, because the, uh, the Western world— most of us here in the Western world are traumatized by something. So we're traumatized by the death of a parent perhaps, or a divorce, or being bullied, or neglect, or being raped or being abused or being neglected. Most of us have endured some form of trauma. So I, I've been learning stuff outside of the adoptee community. I'm a relatively recent entrant into the adoptee community. Um, what I've seen is that as adoptees, we're great at describing trauma, but we're not so great— and I call— I count myself in on this as well— at describing, uh, healing, at describing the whole, the unwoundable whole. that, uh, the essence of who we truly are, we're unable to— it's, it's hard to put into words. I'm struggling for words here. Words were developed to describe trees and bushes and rivers and all this stuff that's been around for us for ages, and, and now words describe iPhones and Teslas. Tesla electric cars. This stuff is, is tricky to put into words. That's why we have metaphors. So, um, I hope that's been useful, and we'll speak to you again very soon. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.