It feels like a fire, a white hot heat. A continual burning. A reverberation. A infinite, excruciating state of being.

Emotional pain, the unwelcome presence, a feeling of it, almost as it is an entity that attaches itself. Like a parasite that grows, sickens, consumes.

Life isn’t the same once it arrives, nor are we.

The word “overwhelmed” is an understatement.

It feels all consuming, maddening, devastating and permanent.

But what it if its’ not?

Trauma in its baseline, explained in the simplest of terms is a cataclysmic shift unique unto the person. Incomparable.

It changed us.

A house, beautiful in its own right consumed by a fire, will never be the same. “What we lost in the fire we found in the ashes.”

Hope, healing, recovery. Though these words sound like a fairytale. Sound foolish, impossible. It is achievable.

We will never be the same.

It’s okay to grieve the loss.

But we needn’t stay there.

The Lord is close to broken hearted, to those whose spirits have been crushed, so says the Psalm.

Our feelings are not fact, nor are they truth and they don’t predict the future.

It hurts, I know.

Suffering is as awful as it sounds.

No one deserves it.

No one asks for it.

It just is.

And if you wake up everyday, I thank God that you’re still here, you’re still alive, still breathing…no matter how heavy that weight. No matter the shame, the guilt, the failure, the grief, the pain. You’re still here.

And the brain, your brain on trauma, that’s not going to look like order and pleasantries. We become hypervigilant for a reason. We became afraid and on guard, why? Because when the worst case scenario happens, there materializes a truth that, if it happened before it will happen again. Almost as if there is a cosmic target painted on our backs.

Trauma knows no time line. It feels fresh. It demands attention. It is an invisible wound that demands triage, healing and help. We can drown it out in the noise of life. We can self medicate, we can ignore. But it will always ask for us to pay the price as reimbursement for what it cost us.

Trauma stays until it is healed. Those memories that we can’t forget, the brain knows no clock, it only knows what’s’ hurt and the need to survive. 911 for our bodies, but not for our hearts and souls?

Those lonely nights of tears, those days spent depressed, those years we deemed wasted? It wasn’t all for naught. Surviving is judged and thriving idolized. But in order to get to healthy it is to assess the unhealthy, it is to confront the bad with the hope of embracing the good.

It is not an inventory of failure.

For our brain, our heart, our soul, our bodies….healing is real.

No matter the past. No matter the diagnosis. No matter the memory.

Even it feels like our identity, it isn’t.

There is no easy way out. There is no willful ignorance that will help.

Suffering is raw, it’s messy.

Healing is real and tangible. It’s possible to work through everything that ever hurt, without reliving and relapsing. It is possible to wake up without regret. To live a life filled with peace.

Healing is not for the purpose of being ready to experience more trauma, it’s a replacement process. Where there was once pain, there is a salve. Where there was anger, there is relief. Where there was anxiety now peace.

Identify the root. But not mere extraction alone. it is an emptying and a filling.

When it was once hopeless, the transition comes to hopeful. Pain to painless.

When you can tell your story from memory not from pain. When you can relay the information as if it was someone else’s life as the grip of the suffering has lost it’s hold. When you go to bed and wake up in peace. When you know where you were but you are excited for where you’re going.

DON’T GIVE UP.