Post-traumatic stress and forgiveness

Forgiving ourselves can be one of the hardest tasks in reconciling past events, whether others are involved or not.  The activators of guilt and shame loom large and seem to prove overwhelming amid triggers of post-traumatic stress.

Post-traumatic stress interacts with and is often though not always indicated by depression, anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, addiction, and cognitive dysfunction, just to mention a few.

Post-traumatic stress is a real thing, it’s in normal people like you and me.

Post-traumatic stress isn’t a made-up thing, or an idea that comes up in our head, or something we can even prevent.  It manifests like glue sticks.  Simply add trauma.

The instinctive reactions that come out of us in circumstances where the four trauma responses—fight, flight, freeze, fawn—can emerge, operationalise this stress.  It’s normal to be hypercritical around these triggers and judge and condemn ourselves or others when we or they (over)react.

Whilst judgement and condemnation might be the default, they’re hardly helpful.

What’s the most complicated about all this is the post-traumatic stress triggers are autonomic and can’t be controlled easily.

UNDERSTANDING POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS 
IS ACCEPTING IT TO FORGIVE ITS EFFECTS

Post-traumatic stress should never be pathologised.  It’s a product of cause-and-effect.  

There is a path of causation that explains the reasons why it’s there.

Especially when it’s in others, we can attempt to understand why they have responded the wrong way when they have, if only we give ourselves that same latitude.  This requires us to get beyond our hurt.  If there’s an explicable cause in why a person has behaved a certain way, we can find it easier to forgive, and we offer them and ourselves grace as a result.

Importantly, this is about being less judgemental towards others AND ourselves, giving others and ourselves the scope of leeway to get life wrong occasionally.  Forgiveness is the second chance we all need when we desire it, especially when we’re prepared to try hard to learn from experiences.

There are many negative events in post-traumatic stress that require the maintenance of forgiveness.  In this way, if we don’t forgive ourselves and attempt to understand others, the stress in us and them can build.

If we seek another person to be compassionate with us, we need to understand that we have a contribution to make in being compassionate persons ourselves.

The commitment to forgiveness is necessarily a commitment to maintaining a soft heart.

Equally, it’s important that anyone bearing post-traumatic stress seeks to heal it.

Life will hurt anyone who gives themselves to compassion, because to “suffer with” involves hardship, and some of that hardship is having our grace shoved in our face.  So we can see that forgiveness is not the easy life, but a remarkably hard commitment toward maintaining that soft heart.

It’s why it’s so important to commit beforehand to being a forgiving person.

The person who is committed to forgiveness beforehand is fortified for healing.

One of the gifts of having suffered post-traumatic stress is we see how directly it occurs as a by-product of trauma.  Trauma is a vast injustice that overwhelms the body and mind.

The traumatised person can never be responsible for having been traumatised.  It always happens against the traumatised person’s will.  When we see this, we have empathy for the traumatised person, and we can extend forgiveness, which when done right, helps us to heal our trauma.

We’re never to be forced into forgiving, however.  It can so often be a process that can take years. But the willingness to forgive is important.  The willingness and want to be there is enough as a down payment on achieving the whole deal to heal.