Written by: Yvette Troyna, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
With such talk of superheroes gracing our screens, it’s clear: greatness is our birthright. But what’s an everyday hero to do when life gets crazy? Let’s be real. Nobody could foresee the global havoc a microscopic virus could wreak. And who could predict the super-bloom of heroes shortly after the world went dark? We are all superheroes. Scientific research proves that our strengths contribute to happiness. Together at Superpower School chapters all over the world, we activate these strengths to love life again—cape optional.
I’ve witnessed devastating forest fires living among legendary, old-growth redwoods. They leave wild-eyed, frantic victims in their ashen wake. Shallow breathing, blank faces alternating with jabbering and yammering to untold heights of description. Stephen King would shudder at the detail of such harrowing stories. Imagine enjoying your summer, perhaps with wrangling pool floaties and popsicles or maybe something a bit more mature, when suddenly your entire foundation has quite literally gone up in a puff of smoke, leaving you alarmed and shaken, with literally whatever you can quickly carry during hurried, panicky evacuation orders. That can never be enough. Don’t even get me started on the myriad of heart-wrenching stories about searching for panicked pets during a firestorm.
Once you’ve held an evacuee in your arms until they’re ready to release the hug, you’ll see life in a different light. Beyond the hazy, hideous, burned light eerily dulling everything in sight for miles and miles, there’s a divine arc of gratitude that may make you feel just a little bit woo woo from there on out. That most certainly happened to me.
Amidst the height of the pandemic, we sheltered an evacuee from Oregon for three months. He was a nervous wreck and behaved like his atomic clock might’ve been permanently jostled. The night was day, and the day was something bizarre, like roasted garlic blueberry ice cream. Or computing algebraic equations for fun. Bizarre disruption of his entire psyche. It was all-inclusive, severely intrusive, and abusive. The man was untethered, unraveled, and there was no end in sight.
The fire season a year earlier and further south burned entire cities to the ground. One survivor with wild eyes and that classic state of perma-panic (which seeps through every pore like fire traveling through electrical lines) clung to me as she told her tale. I might as well have been rescuing a drowning woman for all her strength. Wired and tired. Ready to pounce or flee. My arm carried her black and blue handprint for a week. I hope she’s found peace since our last encounter.
Meeting fire evacuees after watching my family recover, rebound, and/or recoil from several harrowing experiences surrounding the incessant southern California fires got my brain juices bubbling. I realized that this entire generation is hopscotching between one disaster and another, some natural and others self-inflicted by hungry humans. Yet, we’re coping better than ever, in my humblest expert opinion.
See, despite the increasing natural disasters and manmade calamities at hand, we are a happy, loving species as a vast majority. We so vehemently abhor the minuscule percentage of evil-doers actually mucking up the works that we make them a common topic, thus giving them more breadth and bandwidth in theory than they actually hold in reality, sort of like a lowly little Oz behind the puffy curtain.
I love that about us, and yet we must do better. We must begin supporting those who have suffered trauma. We must become openly insistent upon supporting each other, and we must do so today. We must do so while it’s still weird and uncharted behavior and so terribly awkward in its newness that we’ll definitely hurt feelings and royally mess up. Repeatedly. I’d be disappointed if we didn’t botch it up because if it went flawlessly right from the gate, then we didn’t cast a big enough embrace to envelop everyone in need. I mean, let’s face it. Not everyone who has been slapped in the face by life is benevolent. When someone with a mean streak has been hit with trauma, they often come out kicking and screaming at the nearest do-gooder. When we’ve embraced everyone, we’ll know it.
How do we decide who has an unresolved trauma trajectory? Who has suffered and not received the right amount and type of help afterward? That’s the easy part: most of us. Truly. We grin and bear it. We fake it until we make it. Boys don’t cry. Girls who compete with boys don’t cry either. We must show faith. We must be strong—so much accolade for suffering. Oh, for the love of anything holy, let’s stop. Let’s stop the masochistic/sadistic celebration of martyrdom and victimhood.
Let’s stop perpetrators by speaking freely about what happens, giving support to both perpetrator and victim, so the pain simply stops repeating. Arsonists must be held accountable just like terrorists and child abusers. They also need special mental care to help unravel the trauma that may have triggered their flame-throwing urges. Whether trauma springs from a humanitarian crisis or a natural disaster, trauma can be deeply seated within the beautiful hormonal cocktail, aka the human body. We must realize that trauma manifests in the body as a mental and physical disease. Uncorrected, it’s deadly.
Trauma damages our systems long after the act is over, and it’s up to us to recognize and address these issues early and often. But what if the trauma we endure compromises our ability to know we need help? This is often the case. A sense of senility or dementia, aka brain fog, often sets in after we suffer, leaving us in a childlike state of defenselessness. In some cases, this can be called learned helplessness, while in other settings, there might be a physical hurdle to regaining memory and logical thought.
With all this knowledge in mind, I took a step toward healing myself first. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I needed help. I found a specialist whose list of troubling symptoms matched my own. I did my homework to ensure he is a legitimate expert. I followed his orders to the best of my ability, and in the process, I healed, learned valuable coping skills, and got to know the real me. In time I chose to simply start viewing the world through a new lens in order to no longer behave like a victim nor go the other extreme as some do, by becoming the very bully I despised. With some minor calculations, I determined that at least half the population in my sphere of influence has lived with some form of untreated trauma or suffering.
With that modest figure in mind, I decided to assume half of all I see will be in that category and therefore need to be treated with extra loving care. When I see a briskly moving business maven, I smile and step aside to let her pass. Travelers with a cardboard message receive a genuine smile and respectful eye contact, and if appropriate, a chat about hope for a better tomorrow. I don’t care if my passenger lectures me about how they’ll just use my gift for drugs because I know this is not always the case. Many of us are simply a few paychecks away from homelessness, and a quick survey of colleagues provides quick validation. Who among your colleagues would turn to heroin if their business went belly up and they found themselves bankrupt? Think about it. Why default to such negativity when the vast majority of us default to behaving positively in any given circumstance?
The natural progression built within this type of thinking becomes extra loving care for all because we certainly can’t tell who is running their lives with big smiles on the surface while suffering inside. That was me. Until I saw the fire victims' faces and mannerisms change, I couldn’t see my own need for help. I, too, had an unchecked trauma trajectory that was literally killing me. I am grateful for the trials of trauma because I can call out what I know to be true. I am an expert in the field of positive living amidst all odds. I invite you to join me in my quest to support others who may be walking through life, needlessly suffering. We can support each other with loving-kindness. A listening, compassionate ear. A long hug. A non-sexual cuddle session. A sincere pep talk. We can do this. Together. We have the capacity—and we have a collective, global 2020 vision. Let’s do this—cape optional.
Yvette Troyna, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Positive Living Maestro, Yvette Troyna, is a serial entrepreneur who grew up in the Pacific Northwestern United States. No matter how tough life can be, she bounces back with genuine happiness. Who knew that decades later, her unique brand of positive living would translate to heavy-hitting, science-based strengths training in the form of her new B Corp, Superpower School Inc?
When she isn't training new Superpower School chapter owners, you can find Yvette using her Psychology degree to write about positive living, traveling for speaking engagements, celebrating her loved ones' latest wins with ridiculous fanfare, and generally savoring all that the Good Life has to offer. Her brand of positivity is neither religious nor political in nature. Just authentic tips and scientifically proven insights into what it takes to activate your superpowers to love life again. Cape optional. What are her superpowers, you ask? Love, perspective, creativity, humor, gratitude, parallel parking, and fitting 15 pounds into a 10-pound bag.
