Trauma’s Inner Voice
Clinical Psychologist Yağız Karataşoğlu
You feel like it will never pass. When you start a new day every morning, you wake up with the burden of what you have experienced and you find yourself already on your back. It’s hard..it’s not easy to live with such a burden. Thinking about whether it will happen to me again every minute of every moment. Seeing them again and again in their nightmares and feeling them again. Sometimes you don’t need to be asleep to see all this; there comes such a moment in the day; becomes alienated from the environment and himself; You feel like you’re reliving that event. It’s like the world has stopped spinning, the clock has stopped and everything is frozen. Only you and that event are alive. It is just like a dream. If you shout, your voice will not come out. If you try to get rid of it, it’s like you’re the most tired person in the world. It’s not limited to that, of course, all you’ve been through. You don’t want to do anything, even breathing is difficult and unnecessary sometimes. Why are you living? Why are you here? Why did it happen to me? A large part of the time is spent searching for a suitable answer in their questions. Of course, you can neither do your job, nor spare time for your family, nor continue your education in such a situation. Life becomes so shallow and meaningless that you have neither the energy nor the will to think about your surroundings. At first, you try to explain it to others from time to time, you force yourself. Sometimes words get stuck in your throat, you think, maybe you move your lips, but the words don’t come out of your mouth. Most of the time you know they won’t believe it even if you tell them. Maybe you have experienced this; You told me either you were not understood at all or you were not believed. It is always like this, when what happens to you is the work of God, those around you sympathize with you and understand you; When it comes to human work, they are mostly spectators. Some blame you; Why didn’t you resist, why didn’t you prevent it. It is very easy for someone who has never experienced such a thing to construct these sentences; They say it’s easy, just like that. What they do not know is that the situation is so difficult and painful that it directly targets the self-defense system of the person. It is neither possible to resist nor to flee, one just freezes. You often find the following answer to the questions you ask, “you deserved it”, and things get more complicated when you start giving this answer. You often start to think that if you are not satisfied with yourself, you are not worthy of living. You caused all this; You think that a behavior of yours, a thought is effective in their emergence. I say you think because it’s just a ‘mistake’. Because those who do this to you are not because you are; they did it because they weren’t mentally healthy. If it was someone else, not you, they would still do the same thing. Sometimes just knowing and realizing this is healing for you.
You want to forget, not to remember at all… you want to be distracted by other things. Or using something like alcohol or substance. You look for short-term solutions with them. You get numb or when you use it too much, you’ll leak and get through that night. This solution does not take long; Now you have multiple problems. Addiction that you start getting used to and can’t let go is your new problem. As things get more complicated, life starts to get harder for you. You have withdrawn from everyone and everything. You are looking for a safe harbor for yourself, but it is not easy to find such a harbor after what you have been through. One day something happens in your life; a spark, sometimes a friend, sometimes a family member. Someone wants to support you to stop this change in you, which is very easy to notice. Here is the second part of the story; You will be surprised when you encounter such a situation first. The pessimism and desperation towards life increased so much that; You believe that nothing is possible. Now there is something you forgot too: “As long as you breathe, there is always hope.” Finally, you are convinced. You decide to embark on a journey with a therapist who will share this burden you live with, tell you about, understand you and can carry you. This road can be long, you should know that. But as you get closer to the end of this road, perhaps it will be the most beautiful thing in the world for you to experience how the darkness you live in can turn into light. I won’t take too long. It’s time to act. It’s time to put this hopeless acceptance aside and do something for yourself. And before I forget, I will remind you, believe me, “Hiding is harder than telling.”
