Because these thoughts sometimes run through my brain. People get trapped in the trauma’s that happen to them. Like every day being Ground Hog’s Day they are forever in that moment when something happened to them that literally impacted them so hard they can’t move past it. They lost someone, they had something ripped from them or forced into them, they zigged when they should have zagged or someone else did and the world is forever different, but they can’t seem to move forward no matter how much time has passed.
Well, so a thought popped into my head: “Why doesn’t that happen with other traumatic things?” I mean there other events in life that are just as impactful, but we don’t seem to get stuck in them the same way. Take childbirth. Yes, even when the event is planned I understand that it’s a pretty surreal event for Dad. In fact I not so subtly chuckled and laughed every time I met up with my friend who was on the road to being a first time Dad. He was almost always blissed out and yet in shock and you could see him slide into “I’m going to be a Dad” and he would simultaneously begin to beam and poop his pants (not literally we were in public.) However, once his son arrived healthy and happy my friend adjusted nicely to being a Dad, transitioning into not only the doingness but the beingness of his experience in the role of Dad. Hence he was able to help create the new normal of life for himself and co-create it with his wife to become “baby makes 3” and then there was 4 which was less traumatic to a certain extent and life just becomes more and more rich and rewarding and exhausting.
So what if we responded to events like that the same way we respond to say the death of a loved one or a divorce or a car accident? What if we responded to these events by getting stuck in them. What if my friend, from the moment he and his wife created a life, started proclaiming to anyone in almost any conversation that he was becoming a father. And forever after the event he would let people know that he had fathered a son back on the 2000’s? What if that event was the only event of his life that mattered going forward? More important than his relationship with his wife, with his son, with any other children? It would be hilarious at first, like a crazy SNL skit, and then it would become very, very sad, I think.
We have the innate ability within ourselves to transform after an impactful, traumatic experience. We don’t do it in a vacuüm, we need the support of our family, our friends, our community and our society. Hence it’s easier to adjust to being a Dad, an expected event that is welcomed and appreciated in our society, than it is to be a returning soldier or a survivor of rape. We may also need the help of healers in a variety of ways when the process becomes stuck. But we can do it. The ability is within us and today can be the day we take that step forward.