Your Trauma isn't A Personality Trait

Dear Evolving Reader, 

There is a question beneath every challenge life presents us. Where people get stuck is because they ask questions like why me? But rather they should be asking: What will I choose to do with this?

That question determines more of our lives than the event itself ever could. I have seen lives washed out because people do not take agency over their life; they allow life to take agency over them. Agency is perhaps the most overlooked element in human transformation. We talk about discipline or mindset, but neither of those matter if we have already surrendered authorship of our lives. It is the decision to stay actively engaged in your life, even when under certain circumstances you would prefer to disengage… where it would be easier to blame life.

Two people can experience the same loss, the same betrayal, the same delay, and emerge with entirely different futures. One becomes defined by the event. The other allows the event to become part of the story, using it as fuel for growth and learning. The circumstance is identical but the agency is not. People think agency means control. It doesn't. In fact, aspects of life remain outside of our control no matter how hard we try to hold on. Even with high agency, life will still surprise you; people may still leave, businesses can still fail, plans will still look different to how you once thought. Agency was never about controlling what happens. It is about refusing to let what happens become the sole story of who you become next. It is about not allowing what happens in our lives be the dictator of the type of life we live.

Living from a place of trust, in yourself, that regardless of what happens you will still make a beautiful life out of it. After years of analysing ways to live a life most fulfilled; I notice that the quality of someone's life is often determined less by what happens to them and more by what they believe is possible afterwards. Some people experience hardship and immediately begin asking, What can I do now? Others spend years asking, Why did this happen to me? One question creates movement. The other creates paralysis. And whilst neither person chose the circumstance, they are creating very different futures from it.

This is where I think a lot of personal development unintentionally fails. Sometimes we become so focused on understanding ourselves that we forget the point was never to endlessly analyse ourselves. The point was to become more at ease within ourselves. To move through life with greater peace, greater presence and a greater capacity to experience it fully. The goal is not to become trapped in our self-awareness because awareness without change just causes pain. Knowing exactly why you are the way you are, but darling to believe you can change causes further inner conflict. The moment an explanation becomes a reason you cannot change, it costs you.

People become experts in explaining themselves. Which is my polite way of saying, people become excellent at making excuses for themselves! They blame everything but themselves; their childhood, trauma, attachment style, astrology, diagnosis the list is endless. None of these things are inherently bad: Understanding ourselves matters. But the moment an explanation becomes a reason you cannot change, it begins to cost you your agency. Ultimately, costing you your life. I understand this may sound direct; I perceive the responsibility we can take over our lives, as a gift. It is a blessing to the highest degree that we have been gifted a consciousness capable of observing itself. That we can step outside of our conditioning. Question our impulses. Rewrite old stories. Choose greater for ourselves again and again.

There is something extraordinary about being human. I don’t say this because we can control everything that happens to us, but because we can optimistically participate in what happens next. We have been given the ability to consciously shape a life rather than simply inherit one. To me, that is agency. That is one of the greatest gifts we will ever be given. Not complete control over our circumstances or immunity from pain or a life where nothing falls apart. But the ability to meet life as a creator rather than a captive. To continually decide who we become in response to what happens: To remain the author, even when the plot twists unexpectedly.

On this great walk of self-mastery I have come to understand that it will never about controlling life. What it is about is refusing to surrender authorship of it. If we fail to see this, the very thing that was supposed to help you understand yourself starts becoming the thing that keeps you stuck. We often speak about healing as though our power is waiting for us on the other side of it. As though one day we'll finally heal enough and suddenly feel empowered. That is not how it works. The agency was already there the moment you decided to heal. The moment you chose to stop repeating the same pattern. The moment you admitted you wanted more from life. Healing doesn't give you your power back. It increases your capacity to hold it. I also think many people misunderstand what self-mastery is.

Self-mastery is not becoming untouchable. It is not reaching some enlightened state where nothing affects you anymore. That isn't peace. The goal was never to stop life from affecting you. The goal is to keep widening the space between what happens and how you choose to respond. Because that space is where your becoming happens. There are always two lives unfolding at once. The life that happens to you. And the life you create in response. Most people spend years trying to control the first one. Trying to make sure nothing painful, uncertain or unexpected ever arrives. But it is quintessential to understand no amount of success, spirituality, money or manifestation will ever give you complete control over life.

Life will still ask things of you that you did not choose. It will still take things from you that you wanted to keep. Sometimes what falls apart is not punishment. Sometimes it is preparation. Life has aided me to realise there is a bigger blueprint trying to move through you than the one you had planned for yourself. Agency was never found in controlling any of that. Agency begins the moment you stop arguing with reality and start choosing your response to it.

As you move through this week, meditate on this… Where have you unknowingly handed your agency away? It may be a circumstance, a person, a fear or an old story or set of beliefs… Because the moment you take responsibility for your response, you take ownership of who you become. That is self-mastery. Not to attempt to control life but refusing to surrender authorship of it. 

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Until next Tuesday... 

With great love,

Summer