Motherhood & Trauma Healing

„Children don‘t get traumatized because they get hurt. They get traumatized because they’re left alone with their pain.“

Dr Gabor Maté

If people ask how I started to get into trauma work, I say that it started with my daughter - from scratch if you will. I was a few months pregnant when I was caught by a book on traumatized societies by Franz Ruppert.

It was more macro-level which has always fascinated me but it quickly turned me into as micro as it can get: a deep glimpse into my own earliest experiences in my mother‘s womb, my birth, my first few years. This is were the foundation for our psychological wellbeing is set - and eventually that of our whole society & the systems we operate in.

Our psyche develops alongside our body which means that we‘re sensing, experiencing, emotionally active beings from the get go (from conception onwards). We‘re competent in this regard but we lack the capacity & experience to process what happens to us & what we feel without the support of our parents/caretakers.

Which means that in turn we can be quickly overwhelmed/traumatized when that support is amiss or worse if we‘re shamed or punished for our reactions.

The way we were treated & how our emotions & needs were responded to leaves a huge (often unconscious) imprint on our psyche - which is activated when we become parents.

I myself got traumatized when I was very little & my mom had an accident that rendered her incapable of taking care of me. That sudden interruption of me bonding with her, being cared for & nursed by her has left parts of me frozen in that existentially overwhelming experience. There is a sense of fear of death when an infant abruptly looses its mother which needs to be tucked away because it‘s impossible for its small system to deal with it.

I‘d never tapped into that experience again, instead keeping all my guards & coping mechanisms up, if I hadn’t become a mom myself. Suddenly all the pain & fear of my inner 4months-old broke loose while alongside having to protect & care for my own little daughter.

I‘m grateful that I learned about trauma healing when I did so I had the chance (and still do) to slowly unravel my earliest experience & to embrace the many parts of myself that are still stuck there or are relentlessly trying to protect me from ever going there again (to the detriment of my own vitality & happiness).

This way I‘ve slowly build up the safe harbor that I want to be for myself & by extension for my daughter. Otherwise it so easily happens that she carries on the pain which I couldn’t or didn’t want to take care of.

I always want to emphasize: it‘s easy to beat yourself up for not having done enough inner work to protect your child. But you cannot run faster than your psyche allows you to & as precious as it is, it needs its time. Awareness & intention are key: the awareness of your own pain (if processed or not) & the intention to take care of yourself in the truest form so you can release what blocks you from tapping into your full potential - for yourself & all your relationships ❤️