Psychology and Mental Health

Here’s a Delayed Childhood Trauma That Burst in a Graduate School Class.

Effects of a presentation manifested as a healing cause.

Childhood traumas haunt us. Some of us notice them at earlier ages, and some of us suppress them for a long time, resembling the difficulty of keeping beach balls under the water.

Unfortunately, untreated traumas can cause severe physical and mental health issues. Emotional memories always stay in the body. We can’t erase them, but we can change the meaning of those memories that might resolve our underlying issues.

There are many types of traumas. Some are complicated situations such as violence, disasters, physical abuse, sexual abuse, bullying, and medical conditions. However, there are also minor events that children perceive as exaggerated emotions and register as trauma in their memories.

In this story, to give you an example, I briefly touch on a perceived trauma in my childhood that I recognized in my adulthood in a similar situation. Frankly, it was difficult for me to write this personal piece.

However, since it is an essential topic for everyone, I thought it would be valuable to share my experience and perspectives to create awareness of this topic.

I was an above-average student from an academic direction in primary school. My favorite subject was biology.

I was particularly fascinated by animals and plants and had a few pets that I looked after with fascination. In grade four, we had an interesting assignment to reflect on ideas from nature. I decided to create homework based on my interesting pets.

In my assignment, I decided to include my three favorite pets, a sea turtle, a lizard, and a bird. An unusual idea came to mind as I read many science fiction books and watched many movies on the discovery channel.

My idea was to integrate my pets and create a new pet combining their features. By collecting their sperms, mixing them in a tube, and incubating them for several months, I naively thought I could create a new animal that might swim, fly, and move fast on the ground simultaneously. It was made up of an innocent childhood imagination inspired by my readings in biology.

I spent days creating a narrative with a report accompanied by graphics, pictures, and photos. In my mind, it was perfect homework. I put more effort into it than in my previous assignments.

With enthusiasm and immense excitement, I started introducing my project in front of the class. The teacher was looking at me with full attention, but there was no smile on his face.

When I completed my presentation, the class started laughing loudly. The teacher, with an indisposed look, made a strong comment finding the idea “evil”. He asked me to stop thinking unnatural and harmful things. In short, he found my assignment abnormal.

It was the first time I felt such a rejection for something I thought I excelled in. With sudden disappointment, I lost my voice. The first time I felt frozen in front of the class, unable to say a single word or move out of my position.

My mind went blank. I did not know what to say or how to act. Life lost its meaning. It was the first time I felt extreme emotions in my stomach. It was like a knife stuck inside. In hindsight, those emotions were a combination of guilt, shame, and fear. I did not know what those emotions were at the time.

I heard the teacher say he would talk with my parents and ask them to supervise my assignments. He gave me a small piece of paper asking my parents to see him the next day in his office.

This warning terrified me as I was always independent in doing my assignments and only shared my success with my parents. I was expecting to get another A+ from this assignment, but my efforts were null and void.

My best friend even scared me further. According to the teacher, he said if my parents saw this assignment, they might penalize me as what I did was wrong. But he was on my side.

We brought a box of matches from his home, and we burned the papers together in his garden as his parents were not at home. When my parents wanted to see the assignment, I told them my friends tore them as the teacher did not like them. They were curious, but they did not force me to explain further.

The impact of this incident was too strong on my childhood psyche. I felt terrible guilt, shame, anxiety, fear, disappointment, and even anger at a later stage. For several days I had nightmares about my teacher’s hurtful remarks and the laughter of my friends.

Even though I loved science, this incident was buried as a wound in my heart and soul. These intense emotions were coded as a traumatic memory in my body. The injury disappeared from my conscious mind, but it was active in my subconscious mind.

However, like all other children, I forgot about the event after a while and never remembered it until I was in graduate school. As an elective in my computing degree, I attended a robotics subject covering the artistic aspect of building handmade robots.

I loved the subject. At the end of the term, we were supposed to build a robot and present it to 44 students and three supervisors in front of the class.

I created a dancing robot using wires as the base materials. I spent months creating the algorithms to make the objects dance like humans. It worked well in my lab. I was proud of the results.

When I presented in front of the class, there was a burst of massive laughter from my classmates. The lecturer said, “Your algorithm is robust, but I wonder if you have ever seen humans dancing before. You don’t seem to learn anything from the aesthetic lectures throughout the term. So, your final score for this project is 50%”.

As an adult, getting feedback was always something I welcomed. But I had a sudden freeze in front of my classmates. The frozen state turned into a sudden emotional burst in a few minutes that I couldn’t control.

Tears started dropping from my eyes, my chest had burning feelings, and I felt like choking for a moment. I felt the same knife in the primary school incident, but it moved out of my stomach.

In a moment, I had a vivid image of my primary school incident and saw my teacher’s face in my lecturer’s face. I lost control of my thinking and emotions as a mature adult.

My friends at school always saw me as cheerful and logical. But I was soaking in front of the class in a technical presentation. It was a shock to friends and supervisors.

One of my favorite classmates, Kylie, hugged me so firmly for a few minutes with no words, which felt like an eternal hug to me. I felt in the arms of an angel. However, suddenly, it was as if ten thousand kilos of load had disappeared from my shoulders.

The suppressed beach ball surfaced on the water. I felt so euphoric. No shame, no guilt, no embarrassment, even though my behavior logically looked weak and absurd.

The tears turned into joy. The euphoric moment was an indication of my healing. The lecturer felt terrible about his comments and apologized as he did not mean to hurt my feelings. His apology also became a catalyst in this healing process.

I felt obliged and dared to tell them about my childhood trauma in primary school. When I told my story with boldness, there was dead silence in the class. As soon as I finished the story and thanked them for listening, I heard a sudden sound of claps from the students. The noise of claps and cheering sounds shattered the lab. Some students and lecturers from other labs came to see what was happening. They thought that we had a breakthrough algorithm.

With her cheerful voice, Kylie said, “yes, we had a breakthrough healing, thank heavens”. Some friends commented that humans were sensitive creatures with accumulated memories and emotions. We are not robots, even though we deal with robots. Ironically, I healed my childhood emotional trauma in a robotic class.

The healing was so apparent that my terrible lower back pain, stomach upsets, and chronic stress were significantly relieved in a few days. I felt like a newborn. My empathy and compassion for others considerably increased. I have always become more mindful of people’s emotions, especially in public.

Later I shared this experience with my mentors Janine and Henry, who provided valuable feedback. Both confirmed that the best way of addressing traumas was through re-living them in similar conditions. Janine and Henry were qualified psychiatrists. They were also into natural healing, as mentioned in my previous stories.

My examples might sound trivial to some people, but we all create our own meanings in life. In hindsight, my primary school experience looks so insignificant in my adult brain. However, as a child who knew nothing about ethics, my teacher treated me as an adult who should have known about right or wrong. This mistreatment damaged my childhood dream.

As a child, I perceived the teacher’s criticism as threatening my survival. The survival mechanism with no real-life experience caused me to react irrationally. It coded the intense emotions of the incident as trauma that became a burden to my psyche for many years.

This trauma caused me to have irrational thoughts that I couldn’t interpret and explain before the healing moment in graduate school. After the trauma, those irrational thoughts appeared in the sunlight.

My adult brain took the courage to reveal my emotions despite the risks of being judged as weak and vulnerable. Kylie’s affectionate hug felt like an angel at the right moment, manifesting healing from incapacitating childhood trauma. Now, I have the courage to share it with the world as I hope my story might initiate healing thoughts in some people suffering similar torment.

Thank you for reading my sad yet empowering story.

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