Trauma & Healing
A big part of what can make our pain so painful and our swirl of emotions so confusing is that we all have been hurt in profound ways.
And we’ve found ways to cope with that pain that are often less than healthy. We’ve developed our own set of autopilot ways of coping (often modeled for us in our family of origin). We are so unconscious of that we may not even see that it’s problematic or think to imagine a better way.
Sadly, many of us can easily and clearly say we have experienced trauma.
For others of us, trauma feels like a word for...other people who had something extremely horrible happen to them.
Trauma, from the Greek root, simply means an unhealed wound.
Dr. Gabor Maté (again, someone with phenomenal insights and lots of free content online—I definitely recommend googling him for wisdom around trauma, addictions, ADD, and healing) offers us a beautiful shift on the way we can understand trauma. He says trauma is not an event that happens to us, as much as “what happens inside of you as a result of traumatic events. Trauma is a loss of connection to oneself and to the present moment."
This definition is also a lot more inclusive of all of us. In a podcast that excellently walks us through the core of his perspective (listen if you have time!), Dr. Maté explains,
“It doesn’t take horrific events to traumatize people. That’s what the big misunderstanding is.
Life brings pain, but pain is not the same as trauma. Pain becomes traumatic when that pain isn’t resolved, when it doesn’t get the support it needs, when it isn’t metabolized, when we don’t learn and grow from it.
Trauma is not what happens to us, trauma is what happens inside us.
Two children could have the same experience of something really bad happening to them, but if one of them is held properly emotionally, and is allowed to express their emotions, and they can go through the process of releasing the emotions and the physical responses that are triggered by what happened, then they are not going to be traumatized. If the same event happens to a different child who is emotionally alone and there’s nobody there to understand and help them go through it, they are going to be traumatized.”
This is a beautiful shift because, as you may notice, it gives us the capacity to heal. If we see trauma as being the victim of some event that happened to us, at some point in our lives, we can or have become damaged goods at the whim of another, and now we’re just...broken—destined to do our best to drag ourselves along with all the broken parts.
But when we understand trauma as what is happening inside us, we have hope because that is a place where we can do something about it. We can be intentional to be emotionally held properly (even if we just have to do that for ourselves), express our emotions, and stay connected. Again, Dr. Gabor Maté:
“The essence of trauma is a disconnect from the self. Therefore the essence of healing is not just uncovering one’s past, but reconnecting with oneself in the present.”
It’s important to note that trauma doesn’t only occur from the presence of difficult events and experiences, but also from the absence of love, safety, trust, belonging, and connection.
“While emotionally abusing a child is like emotionally punching him, emotional neglect is more akin to failing to water a plant. While the emotionally abused child learns how to brace for a punch, the emotionally neglected child learns how to survive without water.” — Dr. Jonice Webb
(If you wonder if you may have experienced emotional neglect as a child and/or as an adult, read this article.)
So with this understanding, it’s a lot less about what happened or happens or doesn’t happen to you as much as:
Can you stay connected to yourself and in the present moment more and more of the time? That is healing.
Healing, from its etymological origins, literally means making whole.
So, trauma is separating, and healing is making whole.
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