From Trauma to Triumph
When I look back over my life, there are many things I wish had never happened. I don’t think there is anything wrong with admitting that. I certainly wouldn’t choose some of the experiences I went through, and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone else. But I also know that those experiences affected the person I became, including some of the ways I learned to protect myself without even realizing that was what I was doing.
As a child, I learned to become a peacemaker and a people pleaser. There was enough tension and chaos around me that I didn’t want to add any more to it. I learned to escape into schoolwork, books and music, and I became very good at keeping things going. At the time I wasn’t thinking about trauma or coping mechanisms or any of the words we use today to describe those things. I was a child trying to figure out life and trying to feel safe in the middle of circumstances I couldn’t control.
The problem is that some of the things we learn in order to survive childhood don’t simply disappear when we grow up. I carried many of them right into my adult life. I still wanted people to approve of me. I still wanted to keep the peace. I struggled with boundaries, and for a long time I took responsibility for things that were never really mine to carry. There were also beliefs about myself that went all the way back to childhood. Even after I knew something wasn’t true in my head, getting that truth down into my heart was another matter entirely.
That has probably surprised me more than anything about healing. I used to think that once I dealt with something, I was done with it. I prayed about it. I forgave. I gave it to God. Then years later something might happen and I would realize there was still some hurt there. I used to get frustrated with myself over that. I thought I ought to be farther along than I was.
Over time I began to understand that healing doesn’t always happen all at once. Some things in my life took years. God dealt with me in areas as I was ready to deal with them, and sometimes He brought me back to something I thought I had already settled. I don’t see that as failure anymore. I see it as part of the process of unlearning things I believed for a very long time and allowing God to replace them with truth.
Forgiveness became a very big part of that process for me, and I want to be careful when I talk about it because I know how easily we can make forgiveness sound simple when it isn’t. I have forgiven some things many times. Sometimes I thought I had forgiven someone only to discover that bitterness or hurt still remained. I learned that forgiveness was a choice for me long before my emotions caught up with that choice.
I also discovered that one of the hardest people for me to forgive was myself.
I could look backward and find plenty of reasons to criticize myself. Why didn’t I see something sooner? Why did I make that decision? Why did I stay in that situation? Why didn’t I know better? I became very good at giving grace to other people while expecting myself to somehow know everything I know now.
That kind of thinking kept me in bondage to things I could no longer change. I finally had to recognize that if I truly believed Jesus forgave me, then I needed to stop continually condemning myself. That didn’t mean pretending I never made mistakes. Of course I did. It meant learning from them without making them my identity.
I also had to learn something else about forgiveness that I wish I had understood much earlier: forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. Neither are forgiveness and trust. There are people we forgive and continue doing life with, and there are other relationships where boundaries are necessary. I spent a lot of years thinking that being a good Christian meant I needed to keep giving people access to my life even when the relationship continually brought chaos and hurt.
Learning to set boundaries was difficult for me because it went against that people-pleasing part of me. At first I questioned myself constantly. But when I finally began setting appropriate boundaries in certain relationships, something changed. There was peace where there had been turmoil. I could forgive someone and turn that relationship over to God without feeling that I needed to put myself back into the same situation again. Some relationships in my life have been restored. Others have not. I still believe God is working in those places, but I no longer believe I need to force the outcome.
So when I talk about going from trauma to triumph, I’m not talking about reaching some place where the past disappears and everything suddenly feels wonderful. That hasn’t been my experience at all. I remember what happened to me. I remember what happened to people I love. Some of those memories still make me sad. Triumph doesn’t change the fact that something wrong happened.
What changed was my understanding that what happened to me does not get to determine the rest of my life.
That distinction matters to me.
For many years I survived. I did what needed to be done. I worked, raised my family, solved problems and kept moving. There is strength in surviving, and sometimes survival is all we can manage for a season. But I don’t believe God brought me through everything I went through simply so I could spend the rest of my life surviving it.
I believe there is more.
For me, that “more” came little by little. I learned things about myself that I needed to change. I learned things I needed to unlearn. I learned that some of what I believed about myself came from the words and actions of other people rather than from God. I learned to forgive. I learned to set boundaries. I learned that I didn’t need everyone’s approval. I’m still learning some of these things, by the way. I don’t want anyone reading this to think I reached some magical point where I never struggle anymore.
I haven’t.
What I do know is that I’m not the same woman I once was.
My relationship with the Lord became the one constant through all of it. I accepted Jesus when I was eight years old, and even as a little girl I learned to run to Him when I felt lonely. I certainly haven’t walked perfectly with Him every day since then, but when I look back over my life I see His faithfulness again and again. There were times when I didn’t understand what was happening and times when I wondered how anything good could possibly come out of the situation I was facing. Looking back gives me a perspective I didn’t have while I was living through it.
That brings me to something I wrote about in Through It All. The final chapter asks, “Your Mess or Your Message?”
For more than twenty years, I felt God impressing on me that I needed to share my story. I didn’t particularly want to tell some of it. Writing meant going back into places I would much rather have left alone. But I also knew that if telling the truth about what I went through helped someone else feel less alone, then perhaps my story could serve a purpose beyond me.
I think that is where the word triumph means the most to me.
Triumph doesn’t mean I’m glad the trauma happened. I’m not. It doesn’t mean God needed those terrible things to happen in order to use my life. I don’t believe that either. People make choices, and those choices affect other people. What I do believe is that God is able to take what happened and refuse to let it remain nothing more than a source of pain.
The very things that once made us feel ashamed may eventually help us sit beside someone else without judging them. The things we thought no one else could possibly understand may allow us to say to another person, “I understand more than you know.” Sometimes our story gives another person enough hope to believe that their present circumstances don’t need to become the rest of their life.
That is why I tell mine.
Maybe you are reading this while you are still in the middle of your own story. You may not see anything that resembles triumph yet. I understand that. There were many times in my life when I couldn’t see very far beyond what was right in front of me either.
You don’t need to know how the whole story ends today. You don’t need to pretend something didn’t hurt. You don’t need to rush yourself into some version of healing that makes everyone else comfortable. Start where you are. Ask God to show you what you are carrying that no longer belongs to you. Ask Him what lies you learned to believe about yourself. Ask Him where forgiveness, truth or a healthy boundary might begin bringing freedom.
Then give yourself permission to grow.
I spent a great deal of my life looking at what happened to me. Somewhere along the way, I began looking at what God was doing in me and what He might still do through me.
My past remains part of my story, but it no longer gets to tell me who I am.
And perhaps that is where trauma begins turning into triumph.
— Michelle
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