Are you worried about the state of the world? I am too. That's why I want to share with you everything I've learned about healing trauma in the past two decades of working with survivors and undergoing my own healing journey.
When we live from the present with all our awareness, flexibility, strength and kindness, we can build a more gentle way to be with each other and with the beings of nature.
I don't have time to write another book--I'm still working on the first one--but by sharing these "dispatches" I hope to help you become a wise trauma healer, one who can help yourself and your community in these times of need.
HEALING TRAUMA IN AN IMPERILED WORLD
Dispatch # 1: Safety and Connection
Whenever I teach Trauma Healing groups or workshops, and ask--What does a terrified person need?--, the answer I am looking for is safety.
But the world isn't safe. The world is traumagenic, it generates trauma. Just read the headlines and you'll find plenty of evidence.
Last week a friend and fellow seeker of social justice reminded me that the only way any of us is going to be truly safe, is if we end oppression. If we achieve liberation from racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, from the human supremacy that is destroying the environment...
But so, how can we even talk about safety in a dangerous world?
A refugee cannot begin to heal while they're still on the run with the clothes on their back, their belly empty, their old life in flames. When we flee or fight, all the lifesaving mechanisms of our central nervous system are at work. We are hypervigilant. We cannot feel all our pain. We cannot even digest or sleep. We need to keep going.
A refugee may begin to heal when they have food, and a place to sleep, and some hope for their future. When they have landed and their basic needs are met. When they are in the company of those who will not try to hurt them.
When I've taught trauma healing to a circle of indigenous tribal members, they say, "What safety? Everywhere I look, colonization is staring me in the face."
When I've taught trauma healing to a circle of houseless folks, they say, "What safety? I sleep on the streets every night."
So I've refined my concept of the kind of safety needed for healing. After all, I healed my own trauma while still being the recipient of racism and sexism, while still living in a world where I could be the victim again of sexual violence or femicide.
I say to the indigenous tribal members, "The way you feel when you are in this circle, in the presence of your loving elders."
I say to the houseless folks, "The way you feel when you are in this circle, in the presence of your peers and the Homeless Garden Project staff."
I am talking about being safe for now, safe enough to allow our nervous system to rest. I am talking about being connected to others in a loving, nonjudgmental way.
Our earliest sense of safety comes, as newborns, when we pattern our breath on our mother's breath and our eyes look into her reassuring eyes. If all went well, if we were that lucky, her relaxed breath and slow, steady heartbeat signaled to us that it was ok to rely on her to meet our needs and let us cry ourselves back to calm when the world was overwhelming.
In order to open up just enough safety for healing to be possible, we need to do for each other what the mother does for the newborn. That safety--even if temporary--, accompanied by a sense of connection, is all we need to begin the work of healing ourselves, our communities and our world.
HEALING TRAUMA IN AN IMPERILED WORLD
Dispatch # 2: Defining Trauma
It's become a big buzzword, but let´s understand what it is. Trauma is an equation between a person's experiences of terror, loss and violence, and their internal and external coping resources. Trauma happens when a person's ability to cope is overwhelmed by their experiences of terror, loss and violence, resulting in emotional injury.
There are many different kinds of terror, loss and violence.
Around 2002 I used to attend Jennifer Freyd's trauma lab at the University of Oregon. She wrote the book Betrayal Trauma, where she explains what happens when the very people who are supposed to take care of you, abuse you.
When parents abuse their children; teachers abuse their students; doctors, their patients; police and government officials, their citizens; priests, their parishioners. You see the pattern. This can all generate betrayal trauma.
Sometimes betrayal trauma does not happen with a lot of physical force, but rather with power, influence, emotional manipulation, and by grooming.
When the Weinsteins and Nassars of the world abuse their victims, they don't need to hold a gun to their head. Their power is the gun.
Abuse, and certainly sexual abuse, is a crime of power and access. If you are an influential person and have access to another who is less influential, less powerful, less likely to be perceived as a believable witness by our skewed legal system... chances are you can get away with abuse.
Jennifer Freyd said, the more terror there is in trauma, the more likely the survivor is to experience high levels of anxiety. The more betrayal there is in trauma, the more likely the survivor is to experience high levels of dissociation.
Dissociation is the fracturing of our consciousness and it occurs in a continuum. Sometimes it means we avoid remembering certain painful experiences. Sometimes it means we lose memory of entire years of our lives.
I will return to the topic of dissociation in future dispatches. Suffice it for now to say, that anxiety and dissociation are protective, lifesaving mechanisms. The problem arises when they stay with us, long after the time when we need them.
Healing trauma involves learning to access our relaxation response again, and creating integration where there has been fracturing or dissociation.
HEALING TRAUMA IN AN IMPERILED WORLD
Dispatch # 3: Expressing emotion
When an animal is being attacked by a predator, it tries to flee or fight. If it cannot do either, it freezes and plays dead, to try to convince the predator that it died from disease or poisoning and is therefore not good to eat.
When the animal survives, once it is safe enough from the predator again, it shakes and shivers. By doing so it burns up the stress hormones that remain in the body and resets its nervous system.
This mechanism, which we humans as animals also possess, is very effective at protecting life. It is an involuntary and unconscious body response.
The thing is, our bodies don't know the difference between being pursued by a mountain lion, having a big deadline, being stressed about money, or being bullied by other humans. The stress response works, regardless of the stimulus.
Our bodies are meant to enlist our fight-flight-freeze response when confronted with short-term danger, but being exposed to incessant or long-term danger makes it more difficult to return the nervous system to balance.
And yet, our bodies are wired for health. If we had freedom to shiver and shake, to cry and rage and express emotion freely, we would return to balance faster.
The social pressure to perform, to function, to never fall apart, gets in the way of our natural tendency to heal.
Because we are not free to feel the fullness of our emotions after a traumatic experience or loss, we use up a lot of our available energy to suppress and avoid those emotions.
When we experience terror, loss, or violence, we feel sad because we have been injured. We feel angry, because an injustice has occurred. We feel fearful because we are scared it might happen again.
For as long as we don't express the emotions stored up in our bodies, it feels like the terror, loss or violence is happening all the time. This is the repetitive nature of trauma. Even though we try to avoid it, we play it over and over again in our minds. We have flashbacks and nightmares, and we unconsciously reenact situations reminiscent of our trauma.
HEALING TRAUMA IN AN IMPERILED WORLD
Dispatch # 4: Emotional injury rather than mental illness
Trauma theory developed in the 1980s, when health providers discovered that women who had survived domestic violence had a lot of the same symptoms as soldiers who had returned from war.
Dr. Sandra Bloom, author of Creating Sanctuary, one of the best books you'll ever read about understanding and healing trauma, made an important discovery when she ran a psychiatric unit in Philadelphia in the 80s.
Instead of asking a mysterious patient she had misdiagnosed as schzophrenic her usual question, "What is wrong with you?", Dr. Bloom asked, "What happened to you?" And her whole world changed.
The client was not schzophrenic, but had an extreme history of childhood trauma.
Dr. Sandra Bloom began--for the first time--to take extensive trauma history of all of her patients and discovered that 100 % of her patients were survivors of serious trauma, REGARDLESS OF THEIR DIAGNOSIS.
The mental health system had been diagnosing people without asking them about their lives.
When you listen to a person's story, it becomes clear that their "symptoms" are more often a result of emotional injury than mental illness. Depending on how a person was hurt, we can understand their reactions and coping attempts.
What is called anxiety disorders are related to the fear a person has felt in response to situations of danger and terror, physical or emotional. Depressive disorders are related to the grief and impotence a person has felt in response to injury and injustice. Alterations in perception are often connected to trauma memories, which are different from regular memories (more about this later).
So-called personality disorders, considered incurable by the mental health system, clearly have their origins in early childhood trauma. Tell me what stage of development was disrupted by experiences of terror, violence or loss, and I will tell you which "personality disorder" you resemble.
Why didn't we realize this sooner? Because we had normalized the violence that surrounds us.
But when we realize that most people are not mentally ill, but rather emotionally injured, we know healing is possible.