Feeling trapped is an unpleasant sensation. The whole experience of being ‘trapped’ involves helplessness, fear, trauma, and the search for options.
It’s especially terrifying when the person trapping you is your enemy. It’s even worse when you trapped yourself and they benefit from your choices.
The whole being trapped experience feels like you’ve been taken hostage. Some of you may think that likening an affair to a hostage situation is extreme, yet the rest of you know first-hand what it’s like.
One reader talked about her struggle with feeling trapped in the affair as akin to ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. She wondered why a part of her longed for and missed that experience.
When relationships go to extremes, you’ll experience emotional extremes. The emotions follow what happens. When what happened is extreme, you’ll feel emotional extremes.
One of the extreme emotions that come with the trauma of being trapped is feeling attracted to the trauma. Like the pull of a magnet, it pulls you into things. You may even surround yourself with reminders of what happened.
Somehow being surrounded by those reminders and replaying the events give you a sensation you think of as comforting. It’s not really comfort, it’s familiarity.
You may even secretly want to go back to being trapped in the trauma. They have a word for this, it’s ‘traumatophilia’.
There are many ways you recreate what you went through. It may be through having relationship after relationship with people reminding you of it. It may be by surrounding yourself with reminders of what happened, or it may be by reliving the events in your mind.
When you’re hurting, the sensation of the familiar gets cross-wired with comfort. This cross-wiring messes with your head.
The reality is that it’s a form of affair trauma. The longer you stay in this pattern, the sicker you’ll become.
Thinking that if you repeat it enough you’ll master it one day only keeps the unhealthy pattern going. The consistent replaying of the trauma keeps you unhealthy on many levels.
The good news is that you can escape the pattern. It can be interrupted and changed.
One place where you start interrupting the pattern and making changes in how you handle the trauma is available at the membership site, Restored Lifestyle. There you’ll find the tools necessary for changing those unhealthy patterns of how you handle trauma in your life.
As simple as it sounds, when you quit doing what’s making you sick, you start getting better.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
