Glimmers are defined as the opposites of triggers. When you are experiencing a trauma trigger, your nervous system amps up and your stress response activates. The stress response is commonly known as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. All of these symptoms of the stress response are common to experience when your trauma gets triggered. You may experience just a few or all of them. Trauma triggers amp up your nervous system. Glimmers, on the other hand, calm your nervous system and bring a temporary feeling of peace, joy, relaxation, or safety. Glimmers are small moments that disrupt stress and hypervigilance.

Kimberly Shannon Murphy shares her harrowing story of confronting and healing childhood sexual abuse in her memoir Glimmer: A Story of Survival, Hope, and Healing. She, along with many other family members, was sexually abused by her grandfather. She now refers to him as “Him”. Kimberly’s story is the definition of cycle breaking. Her book demonstrates how family members' unresolved trauma gets passed down to the next generation. The trauma of child abuse silenced adult family members that should have protected her. The unresolved trauma of the adults enabled the abuse to continue.

Essential self-care you need to break generational cycles of trauma. You can’t heal your childhood trauma without learning how to prioritize and take good care of yourself. This is one of the big areas that therapy for cycle breakers addresses. Most cycle breakers struggle with this because it wasn’t modeled to them in their family of origin. Experiencing childhood trauma also has the impact of creating beliefs that limit your ability to relax, trust in yourself, and give to yourself.

Examples of traumatic grief cycle breakers experience. Cycle breakers experience deep grief on their journeys to learning how to heal and support themselves. It’s often complicated grief that involves recognizing the depth of what has been lost. This includes what was lost in the past, what isn’t accessible in the present, and what the future has lost. This kind of grief isn’t necessarily about losing someone who has died. It’s about losing relationships, losing your childhood, losing certain hopes for the future, and reckoning with the reality of what is true.

Being a cycle breaker is painful and lonely. There are periods of massive self-doubt and not knowing what the right thing to do is. For example, what do you do when you’ve emotionally outgrown your current space? How do you know what seeds to plant that will help you grow and thrive? How do you know that the seeds you plant are sustainable? Cycle breakers are having to break away from their family norms and unlearn what was modeled to them by learning brand new ways to operate. This could mean learning to set boundaries, learning how to support and take care of themselves, and learning how to move past the trauma of their past so generational cycles don’t repeat themselves.

C-PTSD is a form of PTSD that results from a person (especially a child) experiencing inescapable trauma over an extended period of time. This trauma is often inflicted by family members or communities that either abuse them directly or do not protect them from abuse. The abuse is ongoing and creates an environment that is lacking in safety. What can cause C-PTSD?

Witnessing domestic violence

Sexual Abuse

Neglect

Emotional Abuse

Physical Abuse

Religious Trauma

Racism

We tend to repeat a lot of the same patterns and cycles that were modeled for us as children because it’s what we know and it's how we learned to survive life. Cycle Breakers are different.