Recently I experienced a healing meditation where the violent or traumatic experiences of the past were given back to source. And from that experience, I heard some words that stuck with me. “Control issues.” As in people who have experienced trauma may find trying to control their environment is a way of coping and surviving.

To me, PTSD, is an acronym for Person Thriving and Surviving Daily. I had never hear that the  need to control one’s environment was one of the things people might do to survive. It makes perfect sense to me. I called it boundaries. As in I created strict boundaries around myself in which to survive. They became ridiculous at times because they made no sense.

For instance, I stopped looking for a job because I applied for hundreds of jobs back in 2009-2010. My control was to avoid the trauma of rejection but never applying for a job. It makes no sense. None whatsoever.

Have you ever stopped eating a food because you had one bad experience? Stale bread with a peanut butter sandwich turned you off of experiencing the best peanut butter sandwich of your life.

Rewire the brain. Detach from the negative experience. Laugh it off if it is appropriate. Scream about it day and night until it finally fades. Honor the experience. Send it flowers. Write a song. Paint a mural. Send back to the creator. The source from which it came. Ask for help if needed. Ask every guide, teacher, friend, animal, tree and particle of dust to help.

Don’t let the experience stop you from THRIVING. Re-wire the brain to how it feels to THRIVE! It’s much different from simply surviving.

I’m working on this . . . always a work in progress. I’ve been the recipient of much traumatic experience. Some obviously traumatic. Others interpreted incorrectly.

And then.

And then!

And then there are the experiences where the initial experience wasn’t traumatic until someone told me that it must have been horrible. Someone told me it was tragic and wrong. Someone told me how to feel about it.

For instance, what if I was driving along and veered off and smashed up the side of the car. And then it took an hour or more before someone found me. At the time, it was just a matter of figuring out what to do. It wasn’t negative. There was nothing WRONG with what happened. Not until rules, regulations and judgements come into play. Perhaps it was conditioning from childhood such as a parent getting angry for not driving safely. What the parent was expressing was sadness over the thought of their child getting hurt or not having a vehicle to get to work and not going to work meant not getting paid and not getting paid meant not feeding the children or not paying the mortgage. See how it’s all connected?. It really had nothing to do with the car. It was all about LOVE for you. But it gets twisted in the mind later into, “Oh, I am a bad person for not driving safely.”

And then there is the instance of extreme empathy turning a situation into something that does not belong to the person. Such is a case of witnesses of violence. This happens to me quite frequently. I was in Nebraska a few months ago and I came upon two vehicle collisions. There were ambulances, police cars, etc. I was safe and had no reason to get upset. But I found myself pulling off the side of the road to sit for a while, shaking like I had been the one in the accident. I was completely safe, nothing happened to me. The extreme empathic response was very real for me. Physically I was shaking and I felt completely drained an hour later. Just because I had picked up on what was going on with the people involved in the accidents.

I am sure all of these instances have been written about over and over again in psychology papers. Personally, the realization that not all responses to experiences are the truth.