Clutter, Trauma and My Brain

This picture is of my spare room. Yes it really is a room in my house. It is not even at its worst. This room became the “oh throw it in there,” room after Brian died.

I cannot tell you how many people have offered to either help me clean it or to clean it for me. The problem was, I could not handle making decisions nor did I have the energy to let anyone help. I could not help myself for a long while.

You see having someone else do it would have required me answering “what about this….?” I could not have answered that question nor did I want to.

Looking at that picture you could not tell I spent 2 hours in there today. But I did not get the whole room in the picture. Half of the room looks much better. I have full bags of recycling, garbage and thrift store items.

It was as I was sorting and cleaning that it came to me that the room was an analogy of my brain these past 6 months.

It has had so much information, emotions, trauma, and recovery flung at it that it is totally full. Nothing has been sorted, filed or handled. It is a huge mountain of mess with everything tossed in on top of the heap.

I would go in the room or walk by it and cringe at the sight and yet I could never do a thing about it.

The same thing was happening inside me. I would come across one more thing to do or take care of, or one more decision, or one more doctors appointment or one more lab test, or one more time of healing. I was not able to handle at one time everything or even some things that were going on. Life literally was tossed onto a pile that someone, me, would look at later.

You know… that is okay, it is absolutely fine and there is not one thing I could have done differently. Maybe the folks who saw the room might not have thought that but I was okay just looking at it. But I had not caught the fact that the room and my brain had similarities.

When someone you love dies traumatically, you also suffer the trauma. It is as if you had a traumatic event happen in your own body. The same is true if you lose anyone by any means there is huge trauma associated with a loss.

If you are diagnosed with a condition or disease that also it traumatic.

Trauma is a Greek word for wound.

The definition of trauma is:

severe and lasting emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience. A physical injury, usually caused by an accident or attack, or a case of such injury happening.

There are three main types of trauma: Acute, Chronic, or Complex

Acute trauma results from a single incident.

Chronic trauma is repeated and prolonged such as domestic violence or abuse.

Complex trauma is exposure to varied and multiple traumatic events, often of an invasive, interpersonal nature.

There is a list, a very long list of what trauma can do to your body. It will affect your body in some way(s) guaranteed but you probably will not have everything on the list. It is kind of like my room.

Kind of messy and not everything in there belongs there, trauma does not belong to you. Trauma happened to you. It is up to you how you process it, who you process it with and when you want to do it.

It’s been 6 months since Brian and Martha passed, 5 since my diagnosis and 1st surgery, 4 months since my second surgery only 2 months since my medical treatment and the nasty reactions it brought, and only weeks since my body has come into some kind of rhythm. It’s been a heck of a packed 6 months.

I kind of think me tackling that room today was a major shift in my healing. I was able to make some decisions, I sorted and chucked and saved. This is the same process for releasing the “stuff” packed in my head and in my body.

All of it needs to be looked at, questioned, because questions are always there, dealt with and put into a safe place where it will not harm me again and where I can go forward freely.

I am NOT out of the woods yet health wise but I am working on a better state to walk forward in. The process is messy, the emotions are messy but it has to be done if I am going to walk in freedom and not live as an emotional hoarder.

“There are a million chemical and electrical interchanges going on in each of us this very moment. There are intricate moral decisions and spiritual transactions taking place. What are we becoming? More or less?” (Run With the Horses by Eugene H. Peterson)

In this whole process I have swung in my relationship with God, with people and with myself. It was all in the pile. I was close to God, in awe of God, mad at God, fighting with God, was convinced He was mean, then I was convinced that He was not speaking and that He had forgotten me. In my mind I became the “forgotten woman”. I wanted people, drew back from people, did not like me, loved me, fickle is the word best to describe my emotions for this past 6 months.

We are always growing each and every minute. The question is… into what? More in love with God or more like an accusing Israelite in the desert? Do I really want God Himself or what He can do for me? That is an honest but difficult question to ponder.

Look at that pile in the picture again… how could I possibly hear God in that mass of confusion and mess? He was not silent, I was lost in a pile. How could I decipher what I needed, literally who knew, I sure did not. God knows, He sees me. I am not forgotten. I am simply in a messy place.

I wonder how many of us are carrying wounds packed into our hearts and brains and bodies that we do not have to be carrying around if we would only spend the time sorting and cleaning out our emotions and hearts.

It takes time, patience and the right help but it is essential to our health and wellbeing in all ways. The other option is to become an emotional hoarder and hold onto everything. Very messy, very heavy and not healthy to stay there long term.

Song/video to remind us that God sees us, He is with us. Link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sz81dIfwf4Y