How Past Trauma Shows Up in Midlife: Reclaiming Your Gifts and Vitality

Posted on July 16, 2024 by Loretta Walker, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

In midlife, all of the silenced and wounded parts of yourself, the parts life required you to ignore so that you might survive and live successfully in the world, rise up to be given their due. They gather at the door of your conscious mind to be seen, acknowledged, and embraced.

This happens because patterns of trauma are stored in our minds and bodies in a disorganized way. Our system continually brings them back to the surface so that we can meet them and properly organize them in the light of present day. These patterns can be observed as individual parts of you.

You may not notice these parts of yourself at first. Quiet and barely discernible, their rising voices blending in with the usual cacophony of life – the demands of bosses, children, spouses, partners, family, friends. There might be a moment when tears start running down your cheeks and you just don’t know why. You find you’re too tired to go to your favorite restaurant. You don’t feel like doing the things you used to love to do. You get short tempered and wonder why. Often, these moments are followed by that familiar and oh so uncomfortable feeling of “I’m not good enough”.

You may naturally try to ignore or push aways these emotions and sensations. This simply makes them intensify and you feel even worse.

With the rise of this discomfort, you may notice you no longer love that “perfect” job you’ve been doing for years. That “thing” your partner does that annoys you becomes unbearable. Maybe you notice that all the responsibilities you’ve taken on in the past no longer fill you with pride, but instead leave you with a sense of somehow being violated or taken advantage of. You begin to feel “stuck” and struggle to identify what you’re really wanting.

Feelings of anger, frustration, grief, and “not enough” are extremely normal. They are indicators of our inner “rule sets”, both conscious and unconscious, that we have been living by. They represent the parts of ourselves life told us we had to abandon and they are now knocking at the door demanding to be heard and acknowledged.

Opening the door to these feelings gives you access to all of these parts of yourself, allowing you to step into the wholeness of your being and end your story of “I’m broken”. Once you say, “I see you, I hear you, I’ve got you”, there is a blessed inner sigh of relief. A new path is revealed and becomes available for your choosing.

Reclaiming the gifts of the parts of you previously left behind, embracing the truth of your light, within the hurts of the past, and uncovering the beauty of your essence, allows you to create a life of inner freedom, wholeness, vitality, and renewed purpose.

You get to start choosing joy, rather than the martyrdom required of you in childhood to stay safe. You get to say yes to doing things that bring you peace. You get to say no, without guilt, to the things that make you feel “less than”. You get to celebrate all you have done in your life. All the ways you survived are demonstrations of your strength and courage. Today, in this moment of rising up and choosing your glorious life force, you and the world thrive. No longer are you, or anyone else, deprived of the gifts you were born to share with this world. This is how you bring yourself joy, peace, and self love.