# Discovering my trauma Created On: 07-10-2023 03:32 pm Up:: [[My Trauma]] Tags:: #note/evergreen🌲 #thoughtful Topics:: Related:: --- This note is intended to capture my personal experience of unearthing my repressed trauma: ![[2023-04-07#^1521fb]] It was the night of April 7th, 2023 and [[Chloe]] and I stayed up a little later than normal talking and watching a movie. I don’t remember what movie it was, because it honestly hardly mattered: we were spending so much time talking that we were constantly pausing and unpausing the movie! 🤣 Nevertheless, I asked Chlo about some of her favorite childhood memories and she began talking about one them. She began talking about being outside in the warm fall evenings with her brothers while the storms rolled over them… And in the moment that those words came out of her mouth, almost like checking boxes: outside on the porch, check, storming, check, fall, check, it felt as though my mind and eyes locked into place while someone sat me down into a chair. In that moment, I was gone: Chlo kept on talking, but I was mentally somewhere else, which was even outside of my desire - I couldn’t *escape* what I was feeling. Then, I began seeing images and videos in my mind. It was almost as if someone else controlled the clicker or the remote to move to the next mental image/video; I didn’t have any control over what I did see, how long it was there, and what I was feeling… I remember feeling like I wanted to get away from it and or bring back some autonomy in my attention, because it truly was as if I didn’t have control over my mind... I was locked in and couldn’t escape it. Eerily similar to [[Plato’s Cave]], but in a reverse sort of way. Yet, one of the most intriguing things is that the images and videos weren’t the only thing… It is extremely difficult to put into words, but it was almost as if, I *could* feel what that person felt… That young me… So it wasn’t just images and videos, but it was fresh awareness of feelings that are also associated with those memories, which began to flood my mind, good and bad. There was a constantly *looming* nature of all of it; it was dark, moody, and foreboding. As I was watching all of the [[My Trauma#^efe93c|events]] of my trauma unfold, I was struggling to make sense of it all, especially whether or not it was real or something my mind was manufacturing. Through [[Ignorance]], I became less and less bought into the idea that this was something significant. However, when [[Chloe]] finally saw that I was mentally somewhere else, she asked me what was going on. I told her initially that it was nothing and I was just having some flashes of imagery in my head from my past that doesn’t make any sense. She asked me to repeat it back to her, so I did. Once I got to the end of explaining everything I’d saw and felt, the process of simply reiterating it made me feel even more compelled to downplay it and toss it to the side as, “meh, probably nothing”. But, as I looked up at [[Chloe]], her eyes welled and she said, “Mason… You need to know that what you just talked about did happen to you…” …Experts say that trauma is stored in the body and that it be felt releasing when confronted… I had that experience. As [[Chloe]]’s words washed over me, I felt an indescribable series of energy releases in my body… I was overcome with the shock that all of that was real… That until that moment, I’d lived 24 years of my life [[Am I running towards something or away from myself|running away from myself]]… That I never truly knew myself… That my motives were born from deeply rooted and repressed trauma that almost destroyed me… My trauma and the lack of awareness that I had from it is directly tied to the depression to the point of suicide consideration that would plague me throughout my twenties when I could never indicate why… The why was me… The why was that I was so out of touch with my [[Actualized-self]] that all I did was try to generate meaning in other ways that proved fruitless and fleeting… I put my career before my family because I believed doing that would give me the meaning and the subconscious redemption that I felt I deserved... But, the only thing I truly deserved was knowing and loving myself. And given that the further I distanced myself in age and mind from recognizing that I was raped, the further I was from truly knowing myself… I [[Living mindlessly|lived mindlessly]] and I could never see it. Therefore, while 2023 was a hard year, it was a year to tear down and rebuild my mind… To be the person I truly want to be because it is born from a deep and true awareness of my story and how I’ve been shaped by it… That’s beautiful… Therefore’s, it’s easy to say: [[I'm thankful to have been raped]]. For it is easier to accept our story than to fight it and allow it to shape us in an embraced way. To feel one with ourselves, with our [[soul]].