Recovery Michigan

Trauma creates a backwards world. Especially repeated trauma. In trauma the ordinary and the extraordinary change places. What seems mundane becomes the warning sign of impending danger. What is dangerous becomes normal. What seems small becomes big, what is big, seems small. If you spend years with this backwards view of the world it can become habit.

This backwards view of the world—mundane is dangerous, dangerous is safe. Small is big, big is small. This backwards view is one of the invisible wounds of trauma. It isn’t listed anywhere on a symptom checklist. There are no medications to change your thinking. But this backwards view impacts your life, your decisions, your work, your relationships.

Being in a plane like my great uncle and getting immediate feedback that everything you know is backwards is a massive wake up call—you know immediately that you are looking at the situation from a vantage point that will impact your life. But when you have lived with the view that the mundane will kill you, but danger is safe long enough you don’t even notice that you are living on the other side of the looking glass. Your backwards world is the way the world is—at least for you.

The only way to see it is to break one of the backwards rules—do the opposite, check to see if your assumption is true.