Unresolved Trauma Quotes

The only way to bear the overwhelming pain of oppression is by telling, in all its detail, in the presence of witnesses and in a context of resistance, how unbearable it is. If we attempt to craft resistance without understanding this task, we are collectively vulnerable to all the errors of judgement that unresolved trauma generates in individuals. It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be. This can only be done if we face the reality of what oppression really means in our lives, not as abstract systems subject to analysis, but as an avalanche of traumas leaving a wake of devastation in the lives of real people who nevertheless remain human, unquenchable, complex and full of possibility.

Childhood trauma can range from having faces extreme violence and neglect to having confronted feelings of not belonging, being unwanted, or being chronically misunderstood. You may have grown up in an environment where your curiosity and enthusiasm were constantly devalued. Perhaps you were brought up in a family where your parents had unresolved traumas of their own, which impaired their ability to attend to your emotional needs. Or, you may have faced vicious sexual or physical attacks. In all such situations, you learn to compensate by developing defenses around your most vulnerabe parts.

Imagine the infant who one day cries and gets fed, and the next day cries and goes hungry. One day smiles and is kissed and hugged. The next day smiles and is ignored. This is what psychologists called 'preoccupied or unresolved attachment' with the primary caregiver--usually the mother. There was love one minute and disdain the next. Affection that was given in abundance for no reason and then taken away without cause. The child has no ability to predict or influence the behavior of the parent. The narcissist loves a child only as an extension of herself at first, and then as a loyal subject. So she will tend to the child only when it makes her feel good.

Behind every highly dramatic person lurks an unresolved trauma. Drama is his or her way of asking for love, and begging for help and understanding.

To stop resenting my mother I had to unlearn the idea that our parents are these infallible beings who always know the right thing to do, and do it. I had to realize that she’s more than a mother. She’s a person with unresolved trauma and she’s scared of being alone and she’s frustrated with existence, just like everyone else.

I know that sounds like the perfect life. But as I would soon find out, if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.

Trauma is the great masquerader and participant in many maladies and “dis-eases” that afflict sufferers. It can perhaps be conjectured that unresolved trauma is responsible for a majority of the illnesses of modern mankind.

one thing is clear: life sends us forward with something unresolved from the past.

when we cling strongly to the concrete version of memory we are re-stricted to doing what we have always done in relation to it. The dilemma is that unresolved trauma forces us to repeat what we have done before. New and creative assemblages of possibilities will not easily occur to us.

When we disburden ourselves of old unresolved traumas, energy wasted holding the past at bay becomes available for celebrating daily life.

If parent-figures have not healed or even recognized their unresolved traumas, they cannot consciously navigate their own path in life, let alone act as trustworthy guides for someone else. It’s very common for parent-figures to project their own unresolved traumas onto their children. When even well-meaning parent-figures react under the influence of their own unconscious wounds they, instead of offering guidance, may attempt to control, micromanage, or coerce a child to follow their will. Some of these attempts may be well intentioned. Parent-figures may consciously or unconsciously want to keep the child safe and protected from the world so that the child will not experience the pain that they, themselves, have. In the process, they may negate the child’s wants and needs.

If you are not dealing with your emotions and the unresolved trauma trapped inside of your body, you are revictimizing yourself. Being sick and hurt is the single greatest way we gain power over others, because what happens when we get sick and hurt? Everyone comes to our rescue.

There's a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story. You'll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you.

stop resenting my mother I had to unlearn the idea that our parents are these infallible beings who always know the right thing to do, and do it. I had to realize that she’s more than a mother. She’s a person with unresolved trauma and she’s scared of being alone and she’s frustrated with existence, just like everyone else. But this is how children are forced to bear the weight of their parents’ traumas. This is how dysfunction breeds its way into family lines. You forgive your mother for the things she did wrong, because of the things that were done wrong to her.

Another culprit that leaks joy is unresolved trauma. From the brain’s perspective, trauma happens anytime we suffer alone. Suffering turns into trauma when we are unable to process our suffering with God and other people. Trauma is stored in our brain, in circuits of flesh, kind of like an armed mousetrap.

Fighting and arguing are ways of maintaining contact (albeit of a negative kind). Even throughout the fighting these same individuals harbor reconciliation fantasies. People who have suffered a dramatic loss in the past (e.g., parental death or divorce) may be also reacting to these earlier, unresolved traumas.

Time after time, the amazing fact is uncovered that sons and daughters are unconsciously re-enacting their parents fate— all the more intensely the less precise their knowledge of it.

It is hard to believe we feel pain for the world if we assume we’re separate from it. The individualistic bias of Western culture supports that assumption. Feelings of fear, anger or despair about the world tend to be interpreted in terms of personal pathology. Our distress over the state of the world is seen as stemming from some neurosis, rooted perhaps in early trauma or unresolved issues with a parental figure that we’re projecting on society at large. Thus we are tempted to discredit feelings that arise from solidarity with our fellow-beings.

Kahlo’s paintings offer a visual vocabulary with which trauma and pain can be transmitted or communicated with dignity and compassion. Through the language of her innovative art Kahlo gives voice to silenced, unresolved traumata. She thus obliterates the barrier between the individual experiencing pain and the viewer, and evokes empathy for our shared human fragility.

Your pain may never be adequately acknowledged by those who injured you. Profound feelings of grief might strike you as you work through unresolved feelings of resentment or disappointment.

At least until those war refugees threaten to cross our own borders, and then generations of suppressed material is activated, erupting into racial hatred, mass outrage, and social volatility, manifestations of unresolved fear and pain.

There’s one more symptom we need to look at before looking at how trauma actually gets into the body and mind and causes long-term problems. This one is a little less straightforward than the others. Here’s one of the more unusual and problem-creating symptoms that can develop from unresolved trauma: the compulsion to repeat the actions that caused the problem in the first place. We are inextricably drawn into situations that replicate the original trauma in both obvious and less obvious ways.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.” One hand goes up and makes a fist. Barbara can tell it hurts Olivia to do that, but she does it anyway, closing her fingers tight, nails digging into the thin skin of her palm. “Keep it,” she says. “Keep it as long as you can. It’s your treasure. You will use it up and then you will have to rely on the memory of the ecstasy you once felt, but while you have it, keep it. Use it.

How do we be with the paradoxes our people bring? We can align with one side of the conundrum and dismiss the other in an effort to relieve the unsettling experience that the logically unresolvable contradiction brings to us and our people. However, if we do this, we are stepping away from our person's experience because he or she is living inside the paradox and can't move away. Staying present asks us to hold the full paradox within our own minds and bodies, to enter the suffering that entails. If we are able to do this and remain in a ventral state, it seems that something happens and we may be able to enter a state in which the paradox begins to reveal its value a little differently than ever before ... As we settled into this broader acceptance together, I believe we made room for the possibility of the arrival of a resolving third thing in its own time.

These initially adaptive responses to immediate danger turn into inflexible and pervasive procedural tendencies when trauma is unresolved. Once these actions have been procedurally encoded, individuals are left with regulatory deficits and “suffer both from generalized hyperarousal [and hypoarousal] and from physiological emergency reactions to specific reminders” (van der Kolk, 1994, p. 254). Traumatized clients often experience rapid, dramatic, exhausting, and confusing shifts of intense emotional states, from dysregulated fear, anger, or even elation, to despair, helplessness, shame, or flat affect. They may continue to feel frozen, numb, tense, or constantly ready to fight or flee. They may be hyperalert, overly sensitive to sounds or movements and easily startled by unfamiliar stimuli. Or they may underreact to stimuli, feel distant from their experience and their bodies, or even feel dead inside.

Likewise, trauma is a psychic injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment. It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls: the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies.

Even children born of the same parents, in the same family home, who share a similar upbringing, are likely to inherit different traumas and experience different fates. For example, the firstborn son is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the father, and the firstborn daughter is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the mother, though this is not always the case. The reverse can also be true. Later children in the family are likely to carry different aspects of their parents’ traumas, or elements of the grandparents’ traumas.

need to listen to my anger to know that I’ve had a boundary violated. I need to listen to my loneliness to know that I need to invest in deep relationships. I need to listen to my anxiety to know that I have an unresolved trauma that needs to heal. I need to listen to my depression to know that I need care for my heart’s deepest wounds. I need to listen to my fear to know that I may need to create safety. I need to listen to my stress and irritability to know that I’m out of balance and need rest or reprioritization. One common experience, however, keeps us all stuck. Instead of moving toward our pain and listening to the valuable messages it has for us, the vast majority of us move against or away from it. We ignore it, deny it, feel ashamed for feeling it, resent it, or attempt to numb, deflect, or dismiss it. We’ve been well taught to not listen to, or even feel, those yucky, hard feelings. Suck it up, buttercup. Be a man. Big girls don’t cry. Stop your whining or I’ll give you something to whine about! You can see why I believe we suffer from a very serious leprosy of the heart. And it’s killing us.

We react constantly through life. Breathing, noticing, thinking, swallowing, feeling, and moving are all reactions. Most reactions are not really observed because they are commensurate with their stimuli, but a triggered reaction stands out because it is out of sync with what is actually taking place. When we are triggered, we have unresolved pain from the past that is expressed in the present. The present is not seen on its own terms. The real experience of the present is denied. Although reacting to the past in the present may make sense within the triggered person’s logic system, it can have detrimental effects on those around them who are not the source of the pain being expressed, but are being punished nonetheless. They are acting in the present, but are being made accountable for past events they did not cause and cannot heal. The one being falsely blamed is also a person, and this burden may hurt their life. The person being triggered is suffering, but they often make other people suffer as well. There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, both parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this.

One form of insecurity of attachment, called "disorganized/disoriented", has been associated with marked impairments in the emotional, social, and cognitive domains, and a predisposition toward a clinical condition known as dissociation in which the capacity to function in an organized, coherent manner is at times impaired. Studies have also found that youths with a history of disorganized attachments are at great risk of expressing hostility with their peers and have the potential for interpersonal violence as they mature (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobwitz, 1999; Carlson, 1998). This disorganized form of attachment has been proposed to be associated with the caregiver's frightened, frightening, or disoriented behavior with the child. Such experiences create a state of alarm in the child. The parents of these children often have an autobiographical narrative finding, as revealed in the Adult Attachment Interview, of unresolved trauma or grief that appears as a disorientation in their narrative account of their childhoods. Such linguistic disorientation occurs during the discussion of loss or threat from childhood experiences. Lack of resolution appears to be associated with parental behaviors that are incompatible with an organized adaptation on the part of the child. Lack of resolution of trauma or grief in a parent can lead to parental behaviors that create "paradoxical", unsolvable, and problematic situations for the child. The attachment figure is intended to be the source of protection, soothing, connections, and joy. Instead, the experience of the child who develops a disorganized attachment is such that the caregiver is actually the source of terror and fear, of "fright without solution", and so the child cannot turn to the attachment figure to be soothed (Main & Hesse, 1990). There is not organized adaptation and the child's response to this unsolvable problem is disorganization (see Hesse et al., this volume).

THE INTERCONNECTION OF MEMORY IMPRINTS THAT FORM COLLAGES OF SHAME As shaming experiences accrue and are defended against, the images created by those experiences are recorded in a person’s memory bank. Because the victim has no time or support to grieve the pain of the broken mutuality, his emotions are repressed and the grief is unresolved. The verbal (auditory) imprints remain in the memory, as do the visual images of the shaming scenes. As each new shaming experience takes place, a new verbal imprint and visual image form a scene that becomes attached to the existing ones to form collages of shaming memories. Children record their parents’ actions at their worst. When Mom and Dad, or stepparent or caregiver, are most out of control, they are the most threatening to the child’s survival. The child’s amygdala, the survival alarm center in their brain, registers these behaviors the most deeply. Any subsequent shame experience that even vaguely resembles that past trauma can easily trigger the words and scenes of the original trauma. What are then recorded are the new experiences and the old. Over time, an accumulation of shame scenes is attached.

When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.

Withdrawal occurs once a person stops eating any addictive food. Though abstaining from foods is a contentious subject in the scientific literature, there is no question that it will cause a level of discomfort that often drives addicts back to eating... Feelings of deprivation, obsessions about food, and anxiety arising from unresolved trauma that was being 'medicated' by the addictive foods may appear like spectres that linger, worsening before they get better... It may seem that life without one's comfort foods is simply not worth living. Even problematic eating is seen as better than feeling bereft to the point of suicidal thoughts. But others might find the symptoms so common they are not even recognizable as withdrawal... The good news is that detoxification is not a long process; it only lasts for a relatively short period - between one week and four weeks... Cheating by having a bite here or a spoonful there is also an excellent way to suffer withdrawal in perpetuity. Withdrawal will not end if the substance is constantly being reintroduced back into the brain reward pathway.

Parents do best when they can keep themselves relaxed and maintain themselves as the pacesetters in the home. Taking deep breaths and talking in a reassuring manner to children helps children to gear down, to match their parent’s calmer states. Even if children do not calm immediately, because of unresolved trauma or neurological damage, they still feel more secure with a settled parent. Parents also balance their own needs. Telling children that they are safe without visual contact gives parents some minutes to use the bathroom in peace or to get the mail. Within just a few weeks after placement, some of these routines should be established for everyone’s benefit.

The thing about long-term or unresolved anger is we’ve seen it reset the internal thermostat. When you get used to a low level of anger all the time, you don’t recognize what’s normal. It creates a kind of adrenaline rush that people get used to. It burns out the body and makes it difficult to think clearly—making the situation worse…. When the body releases certain enzymes during anger and stress, cholesterol and blood pressure levels go up—not a good long-term disposition to maintain the body in.

It gets stored as a frozen sense memory (body memory) with little reason or understanding attached to it. These painful memories may not get processed, understood, and placed into the overall context of one’s life. They may become banished from consciousness by one of our psychological defenses of dissociation or numbing. They may get “forgotten.” But unfortunately, what we don’t know can hurt us. What we can’t consciously feel or remember can still have great power over us. As children from families that contain trauma, we may find ourselves moving into adult roles carrying unconscious or only partly conscious burdens that we aren’t fully aware of, that interfere with our happiness. In other words, unresolved pain from yesterday gets transferred onto the relationships and circumstances of today without our knowing how or why. Part of what gets us into trouble is that our honest and genuine reactions to previous painful events may be unavailable to us, hidden even from ourselves. Consequently, we may be unable to trace back to their origins our strong reactions to the circumstances in the present. In other words, we don’t know that we don’t know.

Intimacy, with its accompanying feelings of vulnerability and dependence, brought up every insecurity, unresolved wound, and frantic hope I had stored in me. All chickens came home to roost.

Reenactment patterns. It is a natural phenomenon of unresolved and unconscious pain that gets recreated over and over again in what psychologists call an attempt to “master pain.” Memory is state dependent, so we tend to re-create familiar patterns when confronted with like circumstances.

Unresolved past is destiny; it repeats.

The more I worked with clients’ grief issues, the better they were getting. Additionally, trauma was not being talked about as a relational issue; it was talked about as if it happened just within a person. It was during this period that it also became clear to me that the trauma I was seeing in clients was the direct result of relationship pain, and that if it remained unresolved, it would continue to drive dysfunctional relationship patterns.

The wounded inner child is filled with unresolved energy resulting from the sadness of childhood trauma. One of the reasons we have sadness is to complete painful events of the past, so that our energy can be available for the present.

Children from dysfunctional families often have no allies, no one to whom they can express their emotions. So they express them in the only way they know—by “acting them out” or “acting them in.” The earlier the repression takes place, the more destructive the repressed emotions are. These unresolved and unexpressed emotions are what I refer to as “original pain.” Original pain work involves reexperiencing these earliest traumas and expressing the repressed emotions.

Unresolved trauma can keep us excessively cautious and inhibited, or lead us around in ever-tightening circles of dangerous

So little has been written abou tthe ways in which living in racial apartheid damaged the psyches of black folks, creating in some of us a pathological fear of whiteness, a fear rooted in unresolved trauma, that there is little open discussion of the way in which this psycho history, the legacy of racialized trauma keeps many black folks fearful of whites, convinced that all white folk have a deep seated will to harm us. This fear and the profound mistrust it engenders is especially intense among poor folks.

We live in a world of unresolved Black traumas and a society where our response to trauma is punitive violence rooted in inflexible perspectives about the people who experience them, and those inflexible perspectives can never make room for our children to exist freely.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

Mortality on the Atlantic produced a crisis of enormous proportions, as Africans labored under the cumulative weight of these deaths that remained unresolved. . . . Entrapped, Africans confronted a dual crisis: the trauma of death, and the inability to respond appropriately to death. This indirect violence, arguably, was the most abject experience of the captives’ Atlantic crossing.

trustworthy guides for someone else. It’s very common for parent-figures to project their own unresolved traumas onto their children. When even well-meaning parent-figures react under the influence of their own unconscious wounds they, instead of offering guidance, may attempt to control, micromanage, or coerce a child to follow their will. Some of these attempts may be well intentioned. Parent-figures may consciously or unconsciously want to keep the child safe and protected from the world so that the child will not experience the pain that they, themselves, have. In the process, they may negate

She’s distant and emotionally unavailable. I could never go to her for support. She never loved me in the way I needed to be loved.” Tricia’s rejection of her mother was the culprit behind her relationship failures. What sat unresolved with her mother unconsciously resurfaced with her partners, eroding the bond they shared and the intimacy they desired.

If parent-figures have not healed or even recognized their unresolved traumas, they cannot consciously navigate their own path in life, let alone act as a trustworthy guide for someone else. It's very common for parent-figures to project their unresolved traumas onto their children.

Feelings of deprivation, obsessions about food, and anxiety arising from unresolved trauma that was being “medicated” by the addictive foods may appear like spectres that linger, worsening before they get better. The

Unresolved trauma is like a magnet for spirits. The trauma itself resonates at a frequency that attracts spirits whose own unresolved issues are a vibrational match, and who will then guide our life events to affirm

Unresolved trauma is like a magnet for spirits. The trauma itself resonates at a frequency that attracts spirits whose own unresolved issues are a vibrational match, and who will then guide our life events to affirm the trauma and the beliefs it creates

Listen, their cruelty towards you has nothing to do with you. It has to do with how cruel the world has been to them. It has to do with their inability to deal with their pain. It has to do with their unresolved trauma.

To stop resenting my mother I had to unlearn the idea that our parents are these infallible beings who always know the right thing to do, and do it. I had to realize that she’s more than a mother. She’s a person with unresolved trauma and she’s scared of being alone and she’s frustrated with existence, just like everyone else. But this is how children are forced to bear the weight of their parents’ traumas. This is how dysfunction breeds its way into family lines. You forgive your mother for the things she did wrong, because of the things that were done wrong to her. You expect your children to do the same. Everyone’s backs ache under the weight.

dissociation, “the escape when there is no escape.”An infant typically seeks his parents when alarmed, so when a parent actually causes alarm the infant is in an unsolvable situation in which it can neither approach or avoid. Neurobiologically this represents a simultaneous and uncoupled hyperactivation of the sympathic and the parasympathic circuits. This is subjectively experienced as a sudden transition into emotional chaos. Sieff asked what might cause a mother to behave in such a harmful way with her baby. Schore answered that this is not a conscious voluntary but an unconscious involuntary response, and that typically women who cannot mother their child in an attuned way are suffering from the consequences of their own unresolved early emotional trauma. The experience of a female infant with her mother influences how she will mother her own infants. Thus if early childhood trauma remains unconscious and unresolved it will inevitably be passed down the generations. Additionally, Sieff asked what role the father plays in a child’s emotional development. Schore explained that children form a second attachment relationship to the father especially during the second year. The quality of the attachment to the father is independent of that to his mother. At eighteen months there are two separate attachment dynamics in operation. It also appears that the father is critically involved in the development of a toddler’s regulation of aggression. This is true of both sexes, but particularly of boys who are born with a greater aggressive endowment than girls. Afterwards, a long discussion followed where Schore highlighted the damaging effects of long bouts of unregulated shame for the toddler, the differences between shame and guilt, and the enduring consequences of early chronic shame. Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of

The only person he’d ever told was Henry, and they’d both been drunk. “Not like it’s something that comes up in conversation. ‘Hey, wanna talk about my unresolved childhood trauma?’ It’s a lousy icebreaker.

We all carry unresolved trauma. As we’ve seen, it’s not necessarily the severity of the event itself but our response to it that determines the imprint it makes.

The great teachers understand that where we come from affects where we go, and that what sits unresolved in our past influences our present. They know that our parents are important, regardless of whether they are good at parenting or not. There’s no way around it: The family story is our story. Like it or not, it resides within us.

Stress is more than just a mental state; it is an internal condition that challenges homeostasis, which is a state of physical, emotional, and mental balance. We experience a physiological stress response when our brain perceives that we don’t have adequate resources to survive an obstacle or threat (which is the general state of affairs when it comes to unresolved trauma).

trauma is a psychic injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment. It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls: the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies

I realized that I had unresolved traumas from my childhood that continued to affect me every single day.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state.

It’s very common for parent-figures to project their own unresolved traumas onto their children.

The research is unequivocal: people with unresolved trauma get sicker and die younger.

Unresolved trauma will leave you stranded in survival mode. Forever feeling off balance because one foot is always out the door. Enough is enough. It's time to start confronting your demons. You are deserving of a life that you don't consistently feel like you need to run away from.

life sends us forward with something unresolved from the past

It’s also important to realize that unresolved trauma will always catch up with us. “Merely forgetting early traumas and early neglect is no solution,” Alice Miller writes.23 Instead, we have to go back in time and deal with the true feelings we had as children. Only then can we free ourselves from overwhelming fear, shame, guilt, anger and frustration.

know that sounds like the perfect life. But as I would soon find out, if you carry a well of shame and unresolved trauma inside of you, no amount of money, no measure of success or celebrity, can fill it.

When we don’t face our feelings and learn how to release them, each time a situation comes up that is similar to an experience that caused strong feelings in the past, we become “triggered” by all of the old, unresolved feelings, and we have a tendency to respond in a knee-jerk habitual fashion to the new situation instead of finding innovative, healthier ways to respond.

the mind unconsciously relives what was unresolved in an attempt to resolve it.

This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.

Unresolved traumas can overwhelm families, communities, and even countries for generations and keep getting passed down to each subsequent generation. As you continue to shift, you become less emotionally reactive. You start to see these behaviors for what they are—ways of coping with pain. And you can stop taking them personally because you can see they didn’t originate with you.

Treating covert depression is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Underneath the covertly depressed man's addictive defenses lies the pain of a faulty relationship to himself. And at the core of this self-disorder lies the unresolved pain of childhood trauma.

I was warned unresolved trauma could fester inside like a rotten apple, sprouting poisonous spores that grew veined and thorny, drilling deep down only to surface further along in ugly and unexpected ways. I approached each new emotion cautiously as though I were entering a dim and unfamiliar room, one tentative foot feeling in the dark, the ever-present sense of something lurking in the shadows, waiting to lunge at me. In my present state, it seemed unfathomable that I could function at all, yet somehow I managed.

A clear indicator that someone has unresolved trauma is that his life and personality are repetitive for an extended period. But as he faces, opens up about, becomes more aware of, and ultimately reframes his trauma, he allows himself to take a positive and mature view of his past. His present and future will then stop reflecting his past.

Much of the violence that plagues humanity is a direct or indirect result of unresolved trauma that is acted out in repeated unsuccessful attempts to re-establish a sense of empowerment..

What you resist persists. Previous traumas that are unresolved or hidden have a significant influence in amplifying current traumatic events and hindering recovery.

Attuned parents support increasing age-appropriate independence and autonomy. Highly anxious parents undermine their children’s developing need for independence because of their own unresolved fears. They prevent their age-appropriate movement toward autonomy in order to “protect” their children.

The Army was looking for lads like me. What’s that you say, young man? Parents divorced? Mum’s dead? Unresolved grief or psychological trauma? Step this way!

Unresolved trauma causes the stress response to be left in the “on” position,

Other times, belief works against humanity’s best interests. When mental instability, substance abuse, and unresolved trauma mix themselves into our belief systems, our view of the world can become warped, and the actions of individuals with strange beliefs become a threat to everyone unlucky enough to cross their path. The strange, delusional things humans believe, or can convince others to believe, are infectious—and in terrible cases, deadly.

When we are not allowed to remember, to express our feelings and to grieve or mourn our losses or traumas, whether real or threatened, through the free expression of our Child Within, we become ill. Thus we can consider viewing a spectrum of unresolved grieving as beginning with mild symptoms or signs of grief, to co-dependence, to PTSD.

Unresolved trauma can take a significant toll on your physical health. Unresolved childhood trauma is particularly insidious, with effects that are both gradual and cumulative.

The AAI scoring system (Main and Goldwyn 1994) classifies individuals into Secure/Autonomous, Insecure/Dismissing, Insecure/Preoccupied, or Unresolved with respect to loss or trauma—categories based on the structural qualities of narratives of early experiences.

The journaling helps because your brain stores trauma, unfinished actions, and powerful memories in areas that can trigger strong emotions and subconscious stress responses. Often these unresolved events can trigger anxiety for no apparent reason. When you convert your feelings into words, it prompts a neurologic change. MRI scans have proven that the act of speaking or writing about feelings that are top of mind can move stored experiences away from the emotional reptilian parts of the brain, where they continually recirculate up to the rational parts of the brain, where they begin to dissipate. This effect can be invoked any time you convert ideas into words, regardless of whether you are speaking, writing, or typing and regardless of any feedback you receive.

Unresolved trauma is like a shadow that hinders the healing light. Shine God's light on every hidden pain, allowing His compassion to mend the broken pieces.