No doubt you have been told to “just get over it” in relation to something.  Maybe it’s the bothersome boss, the messy divorce, the partner cheating, the death of a loved one.  Whatever it is, you find yourself talking about it to anyone who will listen, or who is just there, over and over.  Eventually, you get told to get over it. So, what’s going on? 

Firstly, why do you keep talking about it? The reason we bang on about something traumatic is that we are trying to understand the experience and how we fit into it.  We do this is in a number of ways such as dreaming about it, imagining it with different endings or where our responses are different, and talking about it.  Each time we do this we hope to find another piece of the puzzle that helps us understand why it happened in the first palace.  Was it something we did, said or didn’t say or do? Was it our fault?

This analysis happens for a reason: we are bonding animals and if anything threatens our ability to bond, we immediately drop into defence (fight/flight) because it is now something we need to survive.  We have learnt through thousands of generations that we survive better in groups, particularly bonded groups, so any threat to that is serious.

The second reason is around the question of who we are now as a result of the experience.  If we don’t know who we are given the trauma, then we don’t understand how to respond to our world i.e. we don’t know how to be “me” any more.  We also desperately need to solve this, so we talk about what set this up constantly.  We talk about the bad boss, the breakup, etc endlessly because maybe the next time we talk about it we will understand it that little bit better and importantly find our place in it.

This is what unresolved trauma and experiences does.  This is why it remains unresolved and this is why we stay in a sustained fight and flight response. If we don’t know who we are any more, we don’t know how to respond and are scared of it happening again in the future.  We don’t trust ourselves to respond appropriately because we don’t know who we are and how to be, given what has happened to us. Now the only choice we have is survival.  Just in case. The drive to understand the experience is so compelling it can become all-consuming.  Our friends and loved ones get compassion fatigue and eventually say “get over it”.  We even question our own ability to get over it and this further erodes our sense of self, our capability, capacity and trust to move forward into our future without limitations.  So, the next time your best friend tells you for the umpteenth time about her break-up, know that she is just trying to understand it, her role in it and who she is as a result.