The Memory I Thought Was Trauma… Until It Changed Shape in the Most Unexpected Way

29 May

Written By Deb Mackay

It’s strange how the mind holds onto things we’ve spent a lifetime trying not to feel.

Not because they are gone.
But because they are stored.

And sometimes long after we think we’ve understood our past, they surface again.

Not as overwhelm.
Not as collapse.

But in a way we never expected…

It’s interesting, and it always surprises me, that memories we try to avoid or protect ourselves from remembering sometimes even after 45 years can still surface.

Not forced. Not searched for. But arriving organically.

And this memory, which prior to doing the work I always assumed “was my trauma,” now sits in a different understanding. Of course, we learn it’s not the event itself, but how we process and store the emotion and the experience.

But what if, as the nervous system begins to regulate and we begin to soften, the memory complete with its shock, sadness, grief and trauma can finally be seen and felt differently? Even as a blessing?

To give context instead of speaking in riddles…

Tonight Raevyn came home unwell from school and asked to be held. I took the time to sit completely with her, holding her in the way I would comfort and hold her as a baby.

But my mind didn’t bring up a memory in the way it once would have.

It brought up a memory of me on my father’s lap as he passed of a heart attack at the age of 46. I was 6.

However, I didn’t try to make the thought go away.

You know the way we sometimes shake the body as if it’s an Etch A Sketch that can erase the thought or the awareness.

Instead, there was curiosity.

A quiet asking within: why is this memory here?

And I listened.

And there it was the sensation. The felt sense. The meaning beneath the image.

And then something unexpected happened.

A thought arose:

I wonder how he must have felt in that moment to be in a moment of love.

And I smiled.

And then this warmness this softness, this joy, this strange but profound sense of blessing, moved through me and overtook what has always been held within that memory.

I share these glimmers, and even the triggers and struggles, because sometimes it is hard to articulate what true healing looks and feels like. And for each of us, that moment of realisation can be seen, felt, and experienced differently.