This blog candidly discusses the impact of trauma over time and how to minimize the pain of traumatic anniversaries.

When it comes to trauma, the body keeps the score. Old injuries can echo back months, years, and even decades later. Likewise, repressed trauma can exert influence on one’s life. It can re-emerge ages after you think you moved past something and hold you back from moving forward in life. Traumatic anniversaries can be particularly painful times that recall memories of loss, violence, and pain. But do they always hurt in the same way? Does trauma ever go away?

There is no rule book for trauma. That means that healing occurs differently for everyone. Some people can compartmentalize their trauma and carry on with their lives. Others feel crippled by their losses. Many people fluctuate between varying states of acceptance, denial, pain, desperation, relief, and even normality. However, it is very difficult for the body to ever let go of trauma. No matter how much it can be reduced, true trauma lives inside as at least a kernel of what happened, though sometimes it feels like a boulder pressing down on you. However, this weight can be minimized and managed.

To lessen the impact of trauma and the grief of traumatic anniversaries, it is essential to face what happened to you. Many people cannot do this alone. This is why counselors, therapists, and support groups are so popular. People who cannot afford these resources can also seek out like-minded individuals online whom they can share their experiences with for relief, comfort, venting, and companionship. However, it can also be dangerous when one comes to base their identity around their trauma and only gravitates towards people who understand it. This can isolate people from those around them and cause them to become obsessed with what happened to them.

But how do you avoid becoming obsessed with your trauma? Trauma is by definition something that overwhelms one’s ability to cope. It is a terrifying phenomenon that robs someone of their past life and forces them to carry on in the wake of immeasurable loss. One of the best ways to minimize the importance of trauma is to not feed it. What we feed grows. Obsessing over the trauma can be just as harmful as pretending it never happened. In order to reduce the power the trauma has in your life, you need to face it and take your power back. You need to learn to not let it define you.

One of the strongest ways to reclaim your life from trauma is to give it meaning. Rather than allow trauma to become your identity, use what happened to you to help other people who are struggling through similar crises. Let people know that they are validated and that they are not alone. It can also help to give your traumatic anniversary new significance. That date will always represent something terrible that happened, but it can also become remembered as the anniversary of something positive. It’s possible to make your trauma anniversary bittersweet instead of devastating. It’s also perfectly alright if you don’t feel sad on the anniversary of something traumatic. All people deal with things differently. There is no normal.

One aspect of trauma that can break a person is the isolation it causes. You can walk through the very same life but be wracked with disconnect. That is why it is essential to process what happened to you, whether you do so with a counselor, a friend, a stranger, someone online, or in your own journal. It is necessary to face your trauma and come to terms with what happened. This is the essential step needed for not allowing trauma to defeat you.

The truth is that trauma is always going to be there. But you are not always going to be the same person. Many people feel overwhelmed by grief and loss, especially when it is fresh. They cannot imagine ever moving past what happened to them. However, it is possible to rebuild from even the most devastating situations. Rebuilding doesn’t mean forgetting what happened, because what happened is always going to exist inside of you. But it is fully possible to create a new life in which the trauma is not the dominating factor. You can teach yourself to lessen the impact of your pain by building new things in its wake.