Week 45 - "No experience is a cause of success or failure" - Alfred Adler
For much of my life, I believed that my actions and behaviors were shaped by past events or experiences. As a result, my lasting emotional response, or “trauma”, would dictate how I approached future situations. Additionally, I would start to assign myself labels or characteristics that I believed were inherent to me. Phrases like “I’m the type of person who ...” or “I’m this way because …” would subconsciously be ingrained in my brain because of what I had been told I should feel like.
But after hearing a recent perspective on trauma, my understanding of how our past influences our present actions has completely changed.
“People Experience Trauma. I would just erase that. Things Happen - Alex Hormozi
Now that’s an interesting way to look at things. Instead of thinking of your experiences as trauma with impacts on your current self, frame them as things that simply occurred. Learn from them if you can, but if not, don’t carry the emotional baggage they may have given you for the rest of your life. In other words, although trauma may be real in the sense that your way of thinking and brain can change as a result of an event or experience, you can still change your mindset about what happened to you to help better serve yourself.
For example, say your parents told you that you were worthless when you were young. You have the right to claim that because of the words they said, you have trauma that created low self-esteem issues. No one can object to that. And if you want, you can carry that trauma with you for the rest of your life. Whether it’s in your relationships or career, you have the right to always come in with low self-esteem issues, and blame it on your parents. At the end of the day, it’s not your fault. You’ll never be confident, and that’s ok.
Is it?
Odds are, if you’re truly the person I described, you’d have a problem with that last statement. Probably because you want to be confident, but because of the trauma you tell yourself you have, you’ll always have a reason to be insecure. But what if you changed the way you thought? What if you simply accepted the way your parents used to treat you as something that happened in the past and moved on? You wouldn’t need to always bring that “trauma” into new scenarios and could instead, move past it and grow.
I think that kind of mindset is so powerful because it makes you realize that you don’t need to use your “trauma” as an excuse or crutch for the future. You can just accept it as something that happened, and nothing more.
Trauma is the way we respond to what happens to us, and although that’s out of our control, how we respond isn’t. Therefore, you’re in control of your trauma, not the other way around. Don’t forget that.
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