People Who Have Been Injured Know How To Survive
Watch out for people who are injured, they know very well how to survive. Their skins have been tanned by many conflicts and their hearts are protected behind a rusty but resistant shield. They no longer allow lies or selfishness, they know how to defend themselves against the words that hurt and they are self-reliant even in the most complicated situations.
Such known critical intersections can arise due to various factors. We can talk about traumatic events, today if there is one dimension that is spreading like a relentless virus, it is emotional pain. Life hurts, and in many ways. In fact, it is not always necessary to have a painstaking and devastating attack to experience a deep wound, a wound that no one sees.
There is a very illustrative book on this subject entitled Microaggressions in everyday life , which talks with precision about those small aggressions that we can experience daily through language and treatment, without directly affecting our bodies, and which cause a crucial detriment and an emotional impact. bring sadness.
Life hurts and increases its grip in different ways and through multiple mechanisms. So much so that many people walk on the street with open wounds, without the ability to recognize them, but who suffer from these consequences through defenselessness, bad mood, bitterness and extreme fatigue.
However, those who have been able to identify these wounds, heal them and learn from them, are now made of different materials. At the core of their hearts, they possess an almost magical component: resilience.
Resilience makes us special: it makes us heroes
Traumatic events, whether they are the result of accident, loss, abuse, or destruction from a loving relationship, have the potential to change us. This change can manifest itself in two ways: on the one hand by forbidding ourselves to enjoy life or on the other by inventing ourselves stronger after everything that has happened. The latter allows us to get new and wonderful possibilities.
It’s a strange paradox. Emotional pain is like watching a Gorgon day by day, the mythological creature with snakes instead of hair that can turn us to stone. However, if we are provided with a shield, we will see the monster through its reflection in order to defeat and destroy the creature.
Heroes and brain chemistry
Psychologists and neurobiologists know that not everyone can take this step. Not everyone can activate the survival mechanism installed in our brains as resilience. Hans Selye, a Canadian biochemist of the early twentieth century, showed that resilience is primarily an adaptation to a stressful situation. Our sympathetic nervous system needs to ‘calibrate’ itself in order to regain calm and balance. For this, it instructs certain hormones to restore homeostasis.
When fear conquers, we are blocked. We then turn to stone. Factors such as our genetic inheritance often make us resilient or not. A traumatic childhood also has a certain impact on our brain chemistry.
Toxic stress disrupts the normal development of a child’s brain, increasing emotional vulnerability in adulthood. The good news, however, is that while resilience has a neurological basis that defines us, the mechanisms of resilience can be trained.
Heroes are not born as authentic heroes, they arise in times of adversity.
Those wounds taught you how to survive
The word ‘trauma’ literally means ‘pain’. It is a damage that is not visible, but whose impact reaches all aspects of our existence. Richard Tedeschi, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina and a renowned specialist in the field, explains that when a person is hurt inside, they are the first to lose faith in the world.
His whole faith collapses and his confidence in the future completely disappears. There is no present, let alone a tomorrow. The work of ‘reconstruction’ is thorough and complex, it does not consist of waiting like when a broken bone grows back together. In reality, it’s like having a broken soul and having to pick it up piece by piece to put the soul back together.
dr. Richard Tedeschi When a person was abused in his youth, when a man has to deal with the loss of his partner in a car accident, or when an abused woman finally leaves the abuser, it is common for us to feel sorry for them .
Moreover, there are those who, without saying it out loud, think; ‘ this can never be overcome, they must be broken inside, their life ends here’ .
This thinking is a mistake. We should never underestimate people who have been injured. Neural plasticity is infinite, the brain is reprogrammed and the resilience makes us reinvent ourselves, that we are strong and find new shields to face Gorgon. We build our own way to find new happiness.
