I would like to share an excerpt with you from the book "The Body Keeps The Score" by Bessel van der Kolk. It highlights the importance of being able to acknowledge and name what has happened to us so that we can start our healing journey. It is just as important for the body to heal from trauma because trauma is held in the body at a cellular level. Doing more body-based therapy like breathing techniques, pilates, stretching, having massages, dancing and other movement based practices, have proven to be very effective at dealing with lingering effects of trauma. However, it starts with talking about it and being able to express how you feel and what happened to you.
Van der Kolk posits:
“Activists in the early campaign for AlDS awareness created a powerful slogan: “Silence = Death”. Silence about trauma also leads to death - the death of the soul. Silence reinforces the isolation of trauma. Being able to say aloud to another human being, "I was raped" or "I was battered by my husband" or "My parents called it discipline, but it was abuse" or “I’m not making it since I got back from Iraq," is a sign that healing can begin.
We may think we can control our grief, our terror, or our shame by remaining silent, but naming offers the possibility of a different kind of control. When Adam was put in charge of the animal kingdom in the Book of Genesis, his first act was to give a name to every living creature. If you've been hurt, you need to acknowledge and name what happened to you. I know that from personal experience: As long as I had no place where I could let myself know what it was like when my father locked me in the cellar of our house for various three-year-old offenses, I was chronically preoccupied with being exiled and abandoned. Only when I could talk about how that little boy felt, only when I could forgive that little boy for having been as scared and submissive as he was, did I start to enjoy the pleasure of my own company.
Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized lights up our limbic brain (emotion centre) and creates an "aha moment." In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit. Or as John Bowlby (the “father” of attachment theory) so memorably put it:
"What can not be spoken to the [m]other cannot be told to the self."
If you hide from yourself the fact that an uncle molested you when you were young, you are vulnerable to react to triggers like an animal in a thunderstorm: with a full-body response to the hormones that signal "danger." Without language and context, your awareness may be limited to: "I'm scared." Yet, determined to stay in control, you are likely to avoid anybody or anything that reminds you even vaguely of your trauma. You may also alternate between being inhibited and being uptight or reactive and explosive--all without knowing why.
As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself. Hiding your core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy, it saps your motivation to pursue worthwhile goals, and it leaves you feeling bored and shut down. Meanwhile, stress hormones keep flooding your body, leading to headaches, muscle aches, problems with your bowels or sexual functions and irrational behaviours that may embarrass you and hurt the people around you. Only after you identify the source of these responses can you start using your feelings as signals of problems that require your urgent attention.
Ignoring inner reality also eats away at your sense of self, identity, and purpose”.
End of excerpt.
We know that Jesus is our Healer and together with Him we can overcome anything. However, He is also an advocate for the truth and to be authentic. We can hide from people but we cannot hide from God. He has put us in family and in relationship because He knows we cannot do it alone in this life. We need others to be there for us, to be life-giving resources to us. So I want to encourage you to be honest with yourself, find someone trustworthy to reach out to and start the process of healing. Engage the Spirit of Truth to reveal the hidden things, that you may not even be aware is holding you back from a wonderful and "alive" life.
Blessings in Christ!