Trauma Tales

 A Candid Conversation with Ourselves

“What do you think about processing your traumas? Traumas and triggers are never easy. We can never know which layer will pop out. So with all the self-work you've done so far, where do you think you are?”

“Well, I could never see through some people and their battles, they were most unkind.”

“Hmm, I’ve decided I won’t be kind, but I won’t be unkind either. Full stop.”

That conversation stayed with me.

Perhaps because trauma work is rarely neat or predictable. We often imagine healing as a calm spiritual process — meditation, journaling, deep insights, and suddenly becoming emotionally free. But real healing is layered. One trigger can suddenly bring back emotions we thought we had already dealt with years ago.

Gabor Maté says trauma is not only what happened to us, but what happened inside us because of those experiences. That explains why some wounds remain hidden for years and quietly appear in relationships, reactions, fears, and even silence.

A woman once shared in therapy that despite years of meditation and self-work, she still felt deeply reactive when people dismissed her feelings. Slowly, she realised that her anger was not about the present moment alone. It carried echoes of old emotional neglect.

And honestly, healing can also be unintentionally funny.

You spend months learning boundaries and still rehearse saying “no” in your head ten times.

You meditate for forty minutes and lose your emotional balance because somebody touched your cupboard or ate your leftovers.

And once you finally begin changing, relatives immediately announce:

“You’ve changed.”

Yes. Exactly.

As P. G. Wodehouse once humorously observed:

“It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.”

Humor has a strange way of helping us survive our heaviness. Sometimes laughter enters exactly where wisdom cannot.

Carl Jung once said:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Maybe that is what healing really is — becoming aware of what silently controls us.

Not perfection.

Not becoming endlessly kind or spiritually superior.

Just becoming conscious enough not to pass our pain forward.

Some Gentle Solutions for Processing Trauma

Pause before reacting; sometimes the body remembers before the mind understands.

Journal honestly instead of trying to sound wise even to yourself.

Therapy, meditation, breathwork, and spiritual inquiry can help, but healing also needs patience.

Learn boundaries without guilt.

And most importantly, allow yourself to be human while healing.

Perhaps emotional maturity is not becoming flawless.

Perhaps it is simply reaching a point where we quietly say:

“I may not always be kind, but I will not be unkind either.”