1. Understanding our trauma response more deeply.
2. Learning to identify exactly what may trigger us and when.
3. Identifying our trauma-informed scripts.
4. Recognising what negative messages about the world have been imprinted on us.
5. We can get addicted to feeling powerful during our reactivity or Fight Mode.

What We Covered This Week:

Week 22 Round Up

In this week’s Round Up I explain more about trauma because trauma in our relationships is often not fully understood or acknowledged.

Trauma doesn’t only happen in war zones or during natural disasters. In terms of how it impacts our bodies, we have trauma response regularly in our lives. Not as extreme, but it exists in our lives a lot – especially in our relationships.

We are animals and are always on the lookout for ‘danger’. In our relationships we can perceive danger a lot of the time. It’s so important we realise when we are in trauma mode, because no good can come from us operating from that place.

In my Break Your Patterns series I spoke about our ‘Trauma-Informed Script’. What messages did you receive growing up? There will have been unhelpful messages and we imprint our negative experiences more powerfully than positive experiences, so they really live on in us.

Trauma doesn’t only happen in war zones or during natural disasters. In terms of how it impacts our bodies, we have trauma response regularly in our lives.

Our script becomes part of how we interact with the world, how we view ourselves and relationships, and part of what we expect.

So too in my Anger posts and Losing Strategies posts, these reactions speak of trauma response - fight, flight, freeze.

Something that is not talked about a lot is when we are in reactivity and fight mode – we can feel very powerful.

It feels good to fight back, dominate our partners and tear them down… so when something feels good it’s harder to let that behaviour go. And if in our life and relationship we don’t always feel particularly powerful, these moments will become even more compelling and we won’t necessarily want to ‘give them up’. As humans and as animals we like feeling powerful, strong and invincible.

That’s why I brought in my Communication Skills series this week – how we view our partners, speak to them and treat them either triggers us and them, or creates safety and security. Fault-finding is part of ‘fight’ and we can fall into the habit of complaining so easily.

Just because it feels good doesn’t mean it’s healthy.