How to Talk About Trauma: Why the Tongue Has the Power of Life and Death (Anxiety Series, Pt. 1)
The tongue has the power of life and death. That's not a metaphor to me. It's Proverbs 18:21, and it's also, it turns out, basic physics.
When I was a child, I heard that scripture as a warning: be careful what you say, or you might kill someone with your bad words. Keep your mouth shut. Simplistic, but that was the message.
Over time, I embraced it differently. As an invitation to speak life into my surroundings and circumstances. I say positive things to help manifest positive outcomes. You'll often hear me repeat EIP, or Everything is Perfect, a practice my life coach, Melanie Clark, taught me. It helps me recenter, and it reminds me that even when outside forces seem chaotic or terrible, everything is always moving in order, because imperfection is our perfect state.
Meeting My Shadow Self
As I walked along my healing path, I eventually encountered another part of myself I needed to embrace and integrate into my wholeness. I call her my shadow self. She's the part of me that was hurt along the way and learned to hide in the shadows to avoid discovery. For a long time, she was most of me, and I was so busy hiding her, I was always hiding myself.
As I began to nurture my relationship with this shadow side, I realized something vital: talking, my tongue, has the power of life and death. And death is not all bad, or something to fear. It's sad, and a real loss for those who didn't die. But it's also a natural part of the life cycle, on a planet where energy is always conserved and cannot be created or destroyed.
Let me say that a different way. Life, or the energy we use while we're living, cannot begin or end, because it cannot be created or destroyed. I'm not spouting new-age nonsense. This is the first law of thermodynamics.
How Talking Changes the Energy
I learned that the way to put death to the shame that had kept me hiding those shadow parts of myself was to talk about it. Talking allowed me to change the energy associated with those memories and thoughts, on a cellular level, to the frequency of the life I'm creating now.
I needed to speak about the rape I experienced at 20, and how I felt about my father's absence during my young life. I had to talk about how it felt to be in an abusive relationship, and its roots. It wasn't until I pushed myself to say aloud what occurred to me, how it felt, and what it was like to be so powerless, that I could begin to regain some sense of the power I had lost.
A Caution Before You Start
Please, please, please, do not take my words to mean you should start telling everyone about your most traumatic experiences and deepest feelings. Find someone trustworthy who can hold the space for you to let it in safely. Many people would use these experiences against you, or use your perceived weak points for their own selfish reasons.
Don't assume that because someone holds a title like mom, sister, or best friend, they're automatically a safe place to talk about these things either. Most people cannot give you the trauma-informed responses you deserve.
So take your time to identify a therapist, coach, or counselor you resonate with before you begin the hard work of saying these things out loud. But don't deny yourself the medicine you need. It's the medicine we all need. Capitalism has done a number on our collective psyche, and there's a lot for all of us to work through.
One Step of Many
The most important thing to know is that you are precisely perfect just as you are, in your imperfect state. The next thing to know is that it will take time to adjust your thinking to embrace that, and that's okay. Give yourself grace, time, and consistency to get there.
Talking is just one essential step. This is the first in a series on exactly what needs to be consistent, and I'll address the rest one piece at a time.
Before you keep going: I'm an unconventional Christian and a recovering conservative. Expect a little Bible, a little cussing, a few joints, and a lot of challenging social norms along the way.
Question of the day: What do you do when anxiety and negative thinking take over?