Hush!
Not too loud
The hour grows late
And the darkness is creeping
We all make mistakes,
things we regret.
We survive grievances,
things hard to forget.
Time heals many wounds,
But some scars
Can haunt for a lifetime.
Every evening
When the shadows are longest
A numbness steals upon me
I can’t feel the soothing breeze
Can hardly hear the birds retreat
And barely notice the sunset splendour
For this is the hour of my trauma
When flashes of memory flick through my mind
Images muddled by fear
Incoherent and indistinct
I can not see it all
But I feel it
The distress
The panic
The horror!
Every evening
When the shadows are longest
My trauma comes alive!
As I sit here
Sharing these terrors
Holding the hands
Of those who understand
Fear conducts through us all
Dispersing,
Diluting,
Until the numbness thaws
And warmth returns
So hush
Not too loud
As I tell my tale
To let this darkness creep out
Many times,
We cannot conquer our demons and fears,
Not on our own.
But through sharing,
Seeking and accepting help,
We take a giant stride,
On the path to healing.
© judeitakali
Hope you appreciate this.
Have you ever battled with trauma?
How do/did you go about it?
Leave a tip in the comments section.
Stay safe, stay loving.
Time seldom heals but makes it easier to cope.
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Thank you Sadje, I think you’re right.
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You’re welcome 😉
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Sharing experiences, not rejecting the offers of help, working through day by day. Not an easy road.
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Yeah, it is a long difficult road.
Thank you Chris 🙏🏾❤️
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These terrors come in darkness or dark times, as memory returns, which you describe so vividly, Jude. Prayer, communion with God who has the power to heal all trauma and pain, gives a peace that passes understanding, and love to sustain us and to help others.
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Oh thank you Dora. God really does and will help. Many people who believe find healing in him. 🙏🏾❤️🧡😃
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Seeking and accepting help, as you have rightly said, is the most important I feel .. time heals …
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Thank you Ru. I think time can heals but if the past catches up to us, that wound opens like it was never healed
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This is an intense poem, Jude. I’ve suffered trauma a few times in my life, when I was held up at gun point, and when my children were very ill. You have to stay positive and be accepting of things. There is not point in brooding and holding on to negativity. Life is a series of good and bad events and moments.
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Thank you so much Roberta. It must not be easy to share that. It does look like you won against the gunslinger, and your children against the sickness.
But the other hurdle is recovering when you lost out against a traumatic event.
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Yes, that is exactly right, Jude. The road to recovery can be a long one.
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You’ve captured the expressions of fear, very well, Jude. When shadows are the longest, true. 🙂
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Thank you so much Kitty. I had to add a bit of drama.
Speaking of which, I think it’s about time for a horror Collab?
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You are welcome, Jude. Horror poem, that’s something new for me, will give it a try. How about we come up with a garland horror cinquain?
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Wow that’s challenging,
But lucky for us I’m a bit familiar with horror.
Send me 2/3 cinquains, and we make it work
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Sure, in two days time.
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Reblogged this on Love and Love Alone.
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You have described the triggers and the terror well. A Christian-based support group that I’ve belonged to for several years now has helped me understand the dynamics of my trauma. Having those others near that have been through it and can empathize is balm for a damaged spirit. It never really ever goes away but it does help a person to be able to cope with it better. Thank you for asking, dear Jude.
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Thank you so much Jade, people do criticize faith and Christianity, but the powers of therapy that faith possesses are unmatched,
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You’re welcome. I agree, at least for me it works.
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General society continues to misguidedly perceive and therefore practice human reproductive rights as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
A psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.
“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” Childhood Disrupted, pg.228.
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AMEN to everything you say here. I can’t argue with a word of it.
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The only way I knew how to survive was by becoming the light. Your poem is beautiful. Thank you for sharing it!
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Thank you so much. Becoming the light is broad but I get the gist. It’s great advice Melanie. Thank you ❤️
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You have expressed pain beautifully, Jude. The path to recovery is long and rocky but the healing process begins by recognising the trauma and accepting it as a part of life.
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That sounds very sound.
Thank you so much Punam 🧡🤗
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My pleasure. 🤗💙
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This is something that should not be faced alone. Your words contain the tension, but also the relief when there is a hand to hold. (K)
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Thank you so much K for the appreciation and emphasis
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As a child with no one to talk to I withdrew my words and put them on paper. It is hard to gift respect to elders who do not believe you when a trauma occurs. But as you say venting helps. However I have learned that only those who actually go through similar trauma will let you tell your tale as often as you need. Those who cannot fathom your tale might listen once and offer sympathy, but they do not want to hear you as often as needed. When push comes to shove – so to speak one needs to find the ‘right’ ears.
And then we grow. First by not blaming ourselves. Then by forgiving ourselves, and then if we are able by forgiving others..
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This is so wonderful and heartfelt advice. I totally totally agree. Thank you so much for sharing, Jules🤗💜❤️
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I’ve had my share of trauma in my life with loved ones dying. I take it one day at time and keep myself busy. I also listen to music to drown out my own thinking.
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Definitely worth a try. Thank you so much for this, Eugi💓
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Amazing poem, Jude. I think I’ve dreaded trauma more than the trauma itself. When it came, it was almost a blessing. Dealing with it afterwards with many tears or none at all depending on the trauma. Numbness? Rushing to fill a void? I wonder what became of it. Did my body just absorb it? Did it come out in anger? I don’t know. I march on and do what I need to do each day and enjoy the beauty in the world.
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This is very honest Marsha. A combination of letting it all out and Time.
Very much worth a deeper assessment
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It is beautiful, Jude.
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Oh, Jude!!! Your words are mesmerizing and powerful. Stinging of tears also came to my eyes. Yes I have survived trauma and have found my greatest strengths have come of the horrors I HAD as I came face to face with the demons that resided within. Not too many I shared my horrors with yet the love I have in my life enabled me to find the courage to face those demons. Now I have befriended them, and they no longer haunt me. Incredible write you created ….. I can truly feel your heart in this one!!! God bless you!! I also really like your new avatar! xo
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Thank you so much Amy. I’m glad you empathize with me, and I with you 🤗
Love does have all the power, doesn’t it?
Thanks for telling me about the avatar too, 😃💜
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You are welcome!! xo
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This comment was a joy for me to read, thank you for sharing your vulnerability!
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Notable adverse childhood experiences—including immense daily schoolyard stressors like chronic bullying—suffered by adolescents can readily lead to a substance use disorder. This, of course, can also lead to an adulthood of debilitating self-medicating.
The greater the drug-induced euphoria or escape one attains from its use, the more one wants to repeat the experience; and the more intolerable one finds their sober reality, the more pleasurable that escape should be perceived. By extension, the greater one’s mental pain or trauma while sober, the greater the need for escape from reality, thus the more addictive the euphoric escape-form will likely be.
If the adolescent is also highly sensitive, both the drug-induced euphoria and, conversely, the come-down effect or return to their burdensome reality will be heightened thus making the substance-use more addicting.
As a child, teenager and adult with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—a condition with which I greatly struggled yet of which I was not even aware until I was a half-century old—I learned this for myself from my own substance abuse experience. The self-medicating method I utilized during most of my pre-teen years, however, was eating.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I now strongly feel that not only should all school teachers have received ASD training, but that there should further be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of a child development course which in part would also teach students about the often debilitating condition.
It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with ASD (including those with higher functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a choice.
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Very informative and extremely useful assessment. I agree.
Childhood is a very delicate stage, especially at home, but also at school.
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I’m glad you feel that way.
I believe that high school is also the proper place to teach young people at least the basics of child development science.
A memorable line from Childhood Disrupted (pg.24) reveals: “Well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development …”
Yes, people know not to yell when, for instance, a baby is sleeping in the next room; but do they know about the intricacies of why not?
For example, what percentage of procreative adults specifically realize that, since it cannot fight or flight, a baby stuck in a crib on its back hearing parental discord in the next room can only “move into a third neurological state, known as a ‘freeze’ state … This freeze state is a trauma state” (pg.123). This causes its brain to improperly develop; and if allowed to continue, it’s the helpless infant’s starting point towards a childhood, adolescence and (in particular) adulthood in which its brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines.
How many potential parents are aware it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, and not the intensity, that does the most harm?
When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic—such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound—the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes.” (pg.42)
Also, how many of us are aware that, since young children completely rely on their parents for protection and sustenance, they will understandably stress over having their parents angry at them for prolonged periods of time? (It also makes me question the wisdom of punishing children by sending them to their room without dinner.)
I did not know any of the above until I researched the topic for the specifics.
Still, general society continues to misguidedly perceive and therefore practice human reproductive rights as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
A psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter—and therefore basic child development science and rearing should be learned long before the average person has their first child.
By not teaching this to high school students, is it not as though societally we’re implying that anyone can comfortably enough go forth with unconditionally bearing children with whatever minute amount, if any at all, of such vital knowledge they happen to have acquired over time?
Such curriculum would enable our young people to understand (even if just the basics) how the child’s mind develops. Therefore, they could understand how (with curriculum examples) a seemingly-minute yet consequential flaw in rearing/environment, perhaps something commonly practised/experienced, can have negative lasting effects on the child’s sponge-like brain/psyche.
While such curriculum can sound invasive, especially to parents distrustful of the public education system, I really believe it’s in our future generations’ best interests.
______
“It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” (pg.228)
_______
(Frank Sterle Jr.)
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Very impassioned and valid.
Thank you so much for sharing.
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“When the shadows are longest
My trauma comes alive!”… this is so true and beautiful…time may not necessarily makes us forget or totally heals us, but somehow it can help us accept and process our traumas clearly
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Thank you Michelle, a very compelling reason
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Loved the poem! I really liked the end about accepting help because that is really the only way to get better.
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Thank you so much Pooja💓I also think religion and spirituality can be priceless, especially with those who believe.
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Yeah I agree- I have found spirituality very helpful in my journey.
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I can definitely relate to this poem. Dealing with my own trauma now and it’s extremely difficult to move past. God is helping me through it though.
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I’m so glad this means something. And I’m happy you have God and faith. That’s a very good place to start.
In case you’re comfortable, I’d like to know what kind trauma you’re dealing with 🙏🏾
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Here is a post last night that talks about the trauma and a mountain that was moved!
https://wavyandanchored.com/2021/02/02/freedom-and-hope-in-jesus/
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Thank you 🙏🏾
I’ll definitely read.
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God has been my anchor through this storm and the One who has held me together.
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Amen🙏🏾
Thank you so much for sharing Aimee
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This is beautiful Jude. The poetry flows so easily and touches the heart ever so gently.
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Thank you so much Smitha, this has left a huge smile on my face ❤️🍁💜
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