Trauma is a liar
It starts with distortions, the kind you don’t even notice at first. They shape the way you move through the world, the way you interpret love, loss, and everything in between. In my younger years, I moved like a force of destruction. Nothing in my path was safe—not relationships, not opportunities, not even myself. I was angry, defensive, protective, and reckless in ways that were sometimes thrilling but mostly unhinged. Every loss felt like a death. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t enough—enough to hold onto love, a job, a friendship, or even a fleeting sense of stability. What I didn’t know then was that these thoughts and feelings were trying to teach me something. But I wasn’t ready to listen.
I was, as they say, a bad listener. I chased what I couldn’t have: the guy who said no, the people who mistreated me. I ignored the reality they showed me because I wanted something else—a version of them that didn’t exist. That’s the thing about trauma: it distorts not just your past, but your present. It dulls your senses. It makes you deaf to reason and blind to truth. You can’t see the patterns you’re repeating, can’t feel the depth of the rut you’re digging. Trauma has a way of trapping you in a loop, like a needle stuck on the same broken record. You can’t break free until you break down—or, as I now see it, break through.
When the breakthrough came, it wasn’t pretty. It never is. The pain didn’t disappear, but its meaning shifted. I began to understand that it wasn’t about anyone else—not the person who left, not the job I lost, not the money that slipped through my fingers. The pain was mine, rooted in my desire to be loved, to be seen, to be rescued from myself. I believed for so long that someone else’s love could pull me out of the wreckage. That, I now know, was the lie.
Love, for all its beauty, cannot heal what trauma has broken. Not until you’ve done the work yourself. Trauma warps the way you see yourself. It whispers lies that feel like truths: that you’re not good enough, that you’re too much, that you’re unlovable. It feeds off patterns, the kind you don’t realize you’re repeating. You reach for things that hurt you and call it love. You cling to what you should release and wonder why you feel so empty. It’s only when you become conscious of these patterns that the real work begins.
Healing is not clean or linear. It is grief—grief for what happened to you and grief for the person you were when it did. It is uncomfortable and messy. But in that discomfort, there is also a kind of reconciliation. You begin to see the hidden parts of yourself, the parts that acted out, desperate for attention, desperate to be understood. You learn to listen to them, to give them the understanding they never had. You begin to reassemble the pieces of who you are.
Healing trauma is about learning to think, feel, and be in new ways. It’s about grieving the past while celebrating the person you are becoming. It’s slow work, the kind that feels impossible at first. But I can tell you this: it’s worth it. Every step, every stumble, every moment of doubt—it’s worth it. Because on the other side of it all, you’ll find something you never thought you’d see again: yourself.