Five years ago my parents had a tiff with an aunt and uncle of mine after moving from a big house with a garden into an apartment. My father was upset because his inlaws had refused something he had asked them to do. This did not sit well with my father, who was personally offended. He still talks about it and their relationship was never the same again. Which would be fine if it were just that, relationships evolve, people drift apart or get closer, it’s the way of life. The problem starts when you’re unable to get passed something that happened or you didn’t agree with.
It has been five years and my father is still just as personally offended, still tells everyone about it, and pretty much refuses to talk to my uncle (who in his mind was the culprit of the situation). It’s uncomfortable when the family meets – from what I have heard since I have very little contact with the extended family (for my reasons). More than that, it is extremely annoying to me whenever I visit – or occasionally when he brings it up during phone calls – because he will go off on a tangent, pretty much walking around in circles repeating himself and complaining about it, simply for the sake of complaining. I once tried telling him that everyone has a right to decide not to do something, even if they love and respect someone, but it did nothing more than make him go into another monologue about why he is right and I am simply naive and dumb for not understanding it.
His behavior bugged me – the being obsessed part, not the calling me naive because that I am used to – so I started to look beyond it, started looking and listening to him whenever he started talking about this incident that happened so long ago, and I came to a conclusion. The problem was not that his inlaws had refused to do something, the problem was that they had said no to him. This had stopped being (about the favor asked) a long time ago and was about something much simpler, but much more difficult to accept: they simply had triggered my father’s trauma and he did not know how to get out of it.
See, my father grew up in an orphanage, after his mother left him there at the age of six without even saying goodbye to him. This started a whole waterfall of trauma in his life. He has abandonment issues and has learned to put himself in the center of attention to feel worthy, meaning that once he was refused something by my aunt and uncle, he felt unimportant. And that triggered a very deep trauma in him.
My father has been wallowing in his hate for the last five years, throwing daggers at anyone who tries to reason with him or, worse, has a good relationship with his inlaws. He only wants to see the bad in them and, without even being aware of it, he’s personifying and blaming his own trauma. Now, getting triggered isn’t necessarily problematic, everyone gets triggered daily! It’s how you handle it, that makes it right or wrong and, in his case, he is unable to deal with it.
It’s human nature to look for reasons as to why something happens. To a certain degree, that’s good, but some of us use it as a safety blanket, much like a child who takes their stuffed toy with them everywhere. Trying to understand why something took place the way it did can be positive if you use the answers to better yourself.
How many of us lose our way and start using “wanting to understand” as a coping mechanism, as a part of our personalities? Especially when it comes to negative things, it is so easy to get into a spiral, putting the blame on the other person, seeing them as evil, or that they did something on purpose. Truth is, a lot of us do this because it gives us a feeling of power in an otherwise powerless situation.
The issue starts when we find ways to blame external things for not letting us move on and aren’t even aware of it. This is why working on ourselves is an ongoing process and so important! I see how this affects my father, he is hurt and he is in his right to feel that way, but he has let it almost control his life and definitely his mood. He’s 80 years old, so I am pretty positive that is best to just let him go into his tangents and let it all out because he is not going to change. But I can, I can use this as an example to not blame my problems or my actions on my traumas. Sure, the first reaction is sometimes really due to trauma, but the way I choose to go on after I stop and think is on me and not my traumas.
I will not allow my traumas to control my life and neither should you! It’s hard, it’s really hard to look them in the eye and say “not today, Trauma! Today, I am in control” but if you want to be free from hate, if you want to be able to really be yourself and heal, you have to stop blaming your traumas. You need to invite them in, sit down and talk to them, really understand where they come from, and most of all, you need to treat your traumas with love. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but trust me. Trust me, loving your traumas and accepting them as part of you and your story is the first step to healing. And we all know the endgame is to undo our trauma, right?