What the F*ck Is Your Problem?!: Becoming an Active Worker in Healing Your Trauma

What the F*ck Is Your Problem?!

What the F*ck Is Your Problem?!

Becoming an Active Worker in Healing Your Trauma

Dr. Fanike-Kiara Olugbala Young

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Dr. Fanike-Kiara Olugbala Young

All rights reserved.

What the F*ck Is Your Problem?!

Becoming an Active Worker in Healing Your Trauma

ISBN

978-1-63730-641-3 Paperback

978-1-63730-772-4 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-034-1 Ebook

Young King Faroh, my Blueberry and rainbow baby, may you live a life full of happiness and unlimited possibilities, but never a life of generational trauma and pain. You are everything I prayed for and more. You are the best gift your father could have ever given me. Young Nelz, thank you for being my best friend, number one supporter, and twin flame. You are love in its purest form. You saved me, and I will forever be grateful for your love. Qiana, your care for me has given me comfort throughout the years. Thank you for always riding and staying down like four flat tires. Faye, you are the true source of my strength and big heart. You weren’t dealt the best hand of cards in life, but you made do with what you had. I am grateful for the sacrifices and invaluable life lessons along the way. Lastly, to the extraordinary women who found the courage to share their stories of healing throughout this book, thank you for your vulnerability and trust.

Contents

Introduction 

Chapter 1.

My Introduction to Trauma

Chapter 2.

The Meaning of an Active Worker In Your Healing

Chapter 3.

The Type of Trauma Matters

Chapter 4.

Reclaiming Your Self-Esteem

Chapter 5.

The Integration of Trauma and Your Physical Health

Chapter 6.

My Spirit Needs Some Healing

Chapter 7.

Does Love Conquer All, Including the Pain?

Chapter 8.

The Best Mother I Can Be 

Chapter 9.

Forgiveness is Easier Said Than Done 

Chapter 10.

Being A Trauma-Informed Healer

Chapter 11.

Becoming an Active Worker in Your Healing 

Acknowledgments 

References 

You are not responsible for anything that happens to you as a child but you are 100% responsible for your own healing.

—Johnnie Dent

Introduction 

Within two years, my dad was beaten in the streets of Chicago and died from his injuries, my twenty-year marriage was falling apart, I experienced brutal betrayal that ended in divorce, my mom who was always in excellent health was diagnosed with colon cancer, my daughter was diagnosed with uterine cancer, and then I had breast cancer scares of my own. I was failing in life. It was concentrated trauma at its best. I spent many months in my granny panties curled up in my red pajamas because of those series of disappointments. I couldn’t move, and I didn’t want to move. Life has a way of kicking us when we are down—as if one event is not enough. After experiencing a series of traumatic events, Rachell Kitchen, a life and transition coach, found it difficult to move forward with her life. Dealing with the trauma became so overwhelming it became debilitating. Have you ever felt like this?

I know I have, and it was difficult for me to recover. A person subjected to trauma may respond in several ways, such as in a state of shock, extreme grief or denial, emotional lability, experiencing flashbacks, impulsiveness, strained relationships, in addition to physical symptoms of headaches, lethargy, and nausea (Allarakha 2021). Some people may be affected a lot more than others and entrapped in the emotional impact of the trauma and find it difficult to move on with their lives (Allarakha 2021).

One of the most comprehensive interviews on the impact of trauma that I have ever read was from Maya Angelou in 2002, when Nelson Gonzalez interviewed her at her home in North Carolina. Maya Angelou was a well-known author, poet, civil rights activist, actress, playwright, and more. However, before achieving her many accomplishments, she was raped in childhood. As a result, she didn’t speak for five years following the incident.

I was taken from my grandmother in Arkansas at seven to St. Louis, and I stayed there with my mother’s people, and after a few months, her boyfriend raped me. He was put in jail for one day and released, and a few days later, the police came and told my maternal grandmother he had been killed, and it seemed he had been kicked to death. At that moment, I thought my voice had killed him, so it was wise not to say anything at all just in case my voice would go out and kill people. So, I stopped speaking. Maya Angelou told her family of the rape before her rapist’s death and blamed herself when her uncle killed him. She internalized his outcome as her fault even after he assaulted her. Her coping method at the time was selective mutism, an identified anxiety disorder.

A person’s actions in response to trauma can range drastically. For Rachell, she stayed in bed and found it challenging to get up. For Maya Angelou, she shut down and stopped speaking. However, both women eventually decided to move forward beyond their trauma responses. In the same interview, Maya Angelou shared that while she did not speak for five years, during that time, she read several books and memorized works of poetry—from Paul Dunbar to Shakespeare. She came to attribute her love for world literature to that time and the help of her grandmother and brother.

Like Maya Angelou, Rachell attributed her motivation to move beyond her trauma response to her grandmother as well. I was in a state of depression and disappointment until I remembered my grandmother telling me, ‘You’re not going to move until the nail is hurting you bad enough.’ I had reached the point that the pain of it all was hurting bad enough, and I had to get up.

At that moment, Rachell decided she had had enough, and she wanted to heal what her traumas had broken. She set her sights on how to move forward once she was ready. This act of decision-making is critical in that healing is a choice, and it isn’t an easy one. There are hard truths, recognitions, and realizations one must face during the healing process. You will find the strength you did not know you had, the courage you weren’t aware of, and the pain points you hadn’t noticed existed. The biggest reward is you will change during the process and grow emotionally. In the introduction to his book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, psychologist Peter Levine (1997) writes, … trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative.

To get to a place of transformation, you must first resolve to begin healing the side effects of your trauma. It requires you to understand what trauma is to acknowledge you have experienced it and it has negatively impacted you. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (n.d.) defines a traumatic event as an event or series of events that cause a lot of stress. These events are marked by helplessness, serious injury, a sense of horror, or the threat of tremendous injury or death. Traumatic events can affect the survivors, family, friends, witnesses, and rescue workers and impact them firsthand directly, observing or through media sources.

You must be able to identify the trauma so you can assess how it has affected you. If you have difficulty recognizing or understanding the role trauma has played in your life, I recommend you seek the assistance of a professional so you can move forward in your healing process. You do not have to begin or go through the healing process alone, and help is available. However, if you are aware and can identify, you must look back on your life to gauge how your trauma has shaped who you are and how you respond to yourself and others because of it. It is about identifying how the side effects of the trauma show up in your life, which might manifest as negative self-talk, criticism of yourself and others, self-harm, low self-esteem, limiting beliefs, fear of success, feelings of unworthiness, distrust, anxiety, and several other signs.

Once you can identify the trauma source and the side effects, you can begin healing those parts of you and combating the side effects. There is no specific formula or one-size-fits-all approach to working on your healing. There are no shortcuts or easy answers. Throughout this book, you will read about women who all decided to work on their healing. However, each of them found different modalities and combinations of such that were uniquely useful for them. They each used multiple methods and owned their role in their healing, but most importantly, they did not rely on anyone else to commence their healing process. They may have used trained professionals as a tool for guiding the process, but they all owned their power and accepted the challenge. They did not wait for permission from someone else to start the process; instead, they decided to become Active Workers in their healing.

For Rachell, she decided it was time to work on the side effects by focusing on herself, her needs, and the lessons she had gotten from enduring the traumas. It was a matter of accepting the changes, using them to prepare her for the next turn of events in her life, and employing this as an opportunity to go after her goals. I had learned disappointments happen and can come and knock me off my game at any given time, but I felt ready because of everything I had already gone through. I had developed resilience and a regimen of journaling, walking, and reading self-help books to get me by. The trauma had changed me and deciding to work on it changed me even more. I wasn’t the same person willing to settle. She was able to identify which coping tools worked for her and was therefore active in using them when needed.

Trauma inevitably changes us but becoming an Active Worker in your healing allows you to determine the path to your recovery and acquire the skills and coping tools needed to overcome future traumas. Rachell became involved not only in her healing but in that of other women as well. She left her engineering career at the age of fifty and started a life-coaching business. Changing careers represented a more remarkable change in her personality and another coping tool for her, which was using the adverse events in her life to help empower the lives of others.

Enduring trauma doesn’t make you exempt from experiencing it again at a later time, though. Often, it resurfaces at unexpected moments, and you must decide, as you did before, if and when you want to face it to begin the healing process…again!

Rachell experienced this at a speaking engagement two and a half years after her father’s death. The day my divorce was finalized, I bought a new outfit with a blazer, and that turned into my Superwoman Cape. I had finalized registering my business with the state and had signed up to go to live speaking events in Nevada and northern Arizona. I remember it was almost my turn to go up to the mic and speak, and I got a call on my cell from the state’s attorney. I take the call, and the state’s attorney tells me after two and a half years of going back and forth to court and reliving my dad’s death every time, we could not get both of the defendants on first-degree murder. He tells me they couldn’t prove it was murder for the second guy, and they were going to charge him with just the robbery.

The news was devastating, to say the least, and brought up memories and emotions from the initial traumatic events. Rachell had worked diligently to cope with those emotions but found herself feeling some of them again. I lost it all over again, Rachell explained. The disappointment I had felt previously came rushing back. I felt like I was back home in my granny panties curled up in my red pajamas. I wondered how I could now go back and report to my family after going month after month to court to say this guy will get away with this. After luring my dad and beating him in the streets, he was going to get off. That started another avalanche of disappointment. All I could think was I wasn’t successful in bringing my father’s murderers to justice.

Rachell had managed to identify and begin to work on her trauma initially but was then faced with other trauma. We never know when things are going to take a turn for the worse and affect our lives. Although she had utilized her coping skills initially,