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A post shared by Giulia Rosa (@giuliajrosa) on Oct 30, 2016 at 7:09am PDT

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“I don’t have any hidden trauma. If something like that happened to me, I would know about it.”

That used to be my response when anyone asked me if I knew anything about trauma or abuse in my younger years. It is a common response of people who cannot recall their trauma.

Many are quite shocked to realize that there is such a thing as repressed memories, and so was I when I recovered them during a divorce.

This is not at all uncommon. Memories of trauma often get triggered when we go through life changes or we go through an immense amount of stress. This is often not talked about but particularly important to address during these times when so many people are being traumatized with current circumstances.

Remembering my childhood trauma changed my perception of reality, and I realized I could not trust some key people in my life. This realization at first was like a bomb dropping on me and destroying my identity, an important process that helped me to remember who I was.

Traumatic experiences often are shunned and hidden, but when they bubble up, we get a chance to recollect the memories and aspects of ourselves we had pushed away out of shame and guilt.

The process of reintegrating the hidden self allows us to feel whole again over time. Remembering allows us to dive deep into our subconscious to recover insights we had previously no access to.

We gain perspectives of the human psyche and our consciousness, bringing with it a wealth of inspiration and understanding. We gain light and wisdom through diving deeply into our shadow self and when we reemerge, we have become empowered and fully activated multidimensional beings.

I did not know I had hidden trauma. I also did not know I had abilities one would call a gift. I shut it off when I felt it was not safe to be me. In hindsight, I should have known.

There were many instances when people said things to me and pointed out the obvious, but I did not see it at all. I kept rejecting the obvious signs.

These are the hidden signs of trauma based on my own personal observations of my life path. When we experienced long-term, repeated trauma as children, we learn to live in fear mode, meaning that our hormone system is in a constant triggered state or easily gets triggered, meaning we have difficulty relaxing and often look for ways to cope, which may also lead to substance abuse.

Signs you may carry hidden trauma:

1. Extreme shyness, low self-esteem or insecurities, and hypervigilance
2. Denial and automatic rejection of truth without wanting to investigate
3. Feeling jaded or guilty without knowing why
4. Remembering an out-of-body experience
5. A distorted relationship with food
6. Unusual fetishes or being perceived as promiscuous
7. Recurring dizziness or fainting
8. The deer-in-headlight reaction
9. Chronic muscle and joint problems due to stress, like cramps, sciatica, backaches, and fibromyalgia
10. Inability to trust others or oneself
11. Constant worrying, and/or being jumpy and reactive
12. Having anxiety and chronic depression
13. Addictions to relationships, substances, and/or compulsive behaviors
14. Heart palpitations or irregularities, allergies, and recurring bladder infections
15. Brain fog or feeling you cannot remember something important
16. Feeling something touching you or feeling watched and seeing black shadows
17. Recurring dreams and nightmares
18. An emotional hole in your heart and constantly seeking validation or acknowledgment from others
19. Hoping to be rescued by others—repeatedly seeking out disappointments that reconfirm the reality of “nobody cares about me”
20. Strong emotional response to feeling overpowered or someone else deciding over you
21. Breaking out in tears for no apparent reason after sexual contact with a partner and hiding your emotions from others
22. People asking you strange questions about the past or not wanting you to connect with certain family members
23. Inability to live alone or feeling uncomfortable around certain people without knowing why
24. Not feeling comfortable at home, creating impossible schedules for yourself, keeping yourself overly busy
25. Being overly concerned about how others perceive you
26. Having a childhood bedroom that was covered all over with posters
27. Overly worrying about locking doors and windows at home
28. Scars on your body you cannot recall what they were from
29. Your memory of certain events differs from how other family members recall them
30. Family members trying to stop you from talking about the past or asking you about past experiences to see how much you remember
31. Dissociation and memory issues when under stress
32. Cognitive dissonance: having conflicting beliefs that keep you from making choices for yourself, which is a sign of being manipulated
33. Intrusive thoughts, feeling of having more than one personality, and chatter in the mind