Trauma and Clarity: Building Bridges to Better Futures
I have this weird trait that makes it hard for me to know what I want until something else forces my hand.
When I was a kid, I’d become overwhelmed when it was my turn to choose what to eat or what to watch on movie night. I often looked for outside influences to force my hand. I eventually developed a decision making system that involved me picking two choices, telling my sister to hold her hands behind her back with an option in each hand and then I’d blindly choose. Once she told me which one I had selected, I instantly knew what I really wanted.
I’m a grown adult now and I still do this.
We all crave freedom and yet, a blank canvas can be the most vulnerable situation of them all. When it comes to desire, most of us (especially women) are used to determining ‘what we want’ around forced variables. These ‘fixed’ options help us determine what we want within the confines we’re offered or create.
Trauma, whether our own or someone else’s, is a forced variable that we sometimes don’t even recognize. We can inadvertently plan our desires and goals around this fixed variable.
This only becomes a problem when we’re actively healing and suddenly realize we don’t know who we are without *that toxic relationship, *that eating obsession, *that workaholic lifestyle, *that high needs child/spouse/health issue… and so on.
This is not something to be ashamed of or discouraged over. On the contrary; it’s part of the healing and growth process.
Trauma becomes the pain we’re familiar with; we know it’s triggers, issues, the pain points and so on. We become skilled at maintaining and dealing with its presence in our lives. And then comes this point in the healing process where, we’re essentially asked ‘ok, what do I want now? Who am I going to be now that I’ve leveled up and learned how to deal with this in a healthy way?’
And that question, whether literal or implied, can trigger the overwhelm I felt as a child when it was my turn to pick a movie. There’s something comforting to us, in many ways, about having our hands a bit forced.
In “art school”, where I received my BA in Fashion Marketing, I was trained for two years in studio art classes. In my first year of classes, they never gave us a blank canvas, or paint, or any of the cool art supplies. Instead, these classes were all filled with ‘forced elements’ like, “make shapes from only this black material and arrange them according to these guidelines on the paper”. As students, we all went through the same process and constantly dreamed about the day when we’d be ‘set free’ to create something amazing without all these confines.
Turns out, creating on a blank canvas is very overwhelming, that’s why we first had to be trained in elements of design, technique, lighting, color, composition and so on. It wasn’t necessarily easy or super romantic but the ‘forced’ elements of those assignments helped prepare me to begin to even have a clue of what I would ever put on a blank canvas, and not just what but how. Those classes helped me develop a style, a perspective, and a chance to learn myself in new ways before being thrown into the deep end of ‘blank white canvases’.
The healing journey, I find, is quite similar.
Trauma is one of the many ‘forced’ elements we learn to create around and when it’s time to approach our ‘blank white canvas’, it can bring up unexpected anxiety.
This is the process we go through, on repeat, throughout our life.
We go through this when we go through our trauma, we repeat it later in life when we decide to ‘heal’ from this trauma, and then, we go through it again when it’s time to discover who we are and what we want outside of that trauma.
My decision-making-system as a child that involved my sister hiding options behind her back and my first year of art school having something in common; they built a bridge between two extremes that helped me be clear on what I wanted.
Tuning into the purity of who we are and what we truly want is one of the most important, freeing frequencies we can ever be attuned to in this life. Most confusion, struggle and suffering is simply a sign that we are disconnected from or are leveling up in our attunement to that sacred place inside ourselves. This is possible through repeated processes of clarity.
The final season of the year often brings about reflection. This is a time of year when triggers for trauma may arise, when we might see how far we’ve come, when we practice our skills a little more or when we start dreaming of the person we want to be in the future.
This is a season where we might find ourselves perplexed at the anxiety that comes with learning how to paint on a blank canvas.
If that’s coming up for you; congratulations. You’re healing. You’re moving. You’re right on time and right on target. And now that you understand this source of anxiety a little better, you can begin to build your own little ‘bridges’ to help you decide what the next ‘masterpiece’ of you is going to look and feel like.
I’m here to support the bridges, the overwhelm and the masterpieces; wherever you’re at, I’m here for it.
To your total fulfillment,
Jesska Layne Herfst, MAPC