4. Give it a name
Think carefully about your body’s responses and what emotions they indicate. People usually associate feelings of fear and pain with childhood trauma. But there are a great many other emotions that you could have experienced. For example, you felt helpless watching your father physically abuse your mother. You felt angry when no one listened to you when you tried to tell them you were being sexually abused.
In order to identify your own emotional responses to your experiences, understand what your emotions are. Know what each emotion means so that you label yours accurately. It is natural that you will have felt a myriad of emotions. You need to catalog them all and acknowledge them all. Try to capture every emotional nuance of your experience so that you can process and deal with all the emotions you went through.
Your journal is vitally important at this stage. Write down each emotion as you feel it or as you recall it. Write down statements such as ‘I felt angry when my feelings were dismissed after my dad died, I felt hopeless when I realized that no matter what I did my uncle would continue to touch me, I felt frightened when I heard the gunshots that killed my mother, or I felt hurt when I was bullied at school.’
Writing statements such as these give a constructive label to your emotions and the events that gave rise to them. As you think about and mull over the events that traumatized you, you will surprise yourself by expressing emotions you hadn’t allowed yourself to feel at the time. Trauma can take away your ability to feel anything but numb, so when you process it, a lot of emotions may be unlocked.