Tending to Trauma
Someone asked me the question: “Do you think we need to visit all past trauma on a deep level, or can it be overcome quietly?”
No easy answer there. Why? The thing about “trauma” is that it’s always going to be an individual experience.
The same event could happen to two people. One becomes completely traumatised, and tormented by it for years.
The other doesn’t experience it in the same way, deals with it more easefully, and isn’t bothered after a short period of time.
The response was dictated by the experiences that preceded the trauma, and how that related as a constellation with all other life events, circumstances, and the mindset of the individual.
Doesn’t this tell us everything we need to know about how to approach this topic?
It’s all about facilitating the unique individual to come to terms with what has happened, and to move on from it.
It’s never going to look the same, every person and every circumstance is so unique.
Trauma (mental, emotional) is an injury, and I think it’s helpful to treat it exactly as such. With (physical) injuries the ultimate goal is to get to the point where you effortlessly “forget” you were hurt.
And when you do remember, you don’t feel anything other than appreciation for your inner strength and the healing you have done.
With that in mind, I don’t think it’s healthy (for the mind or body) to continually hyperfocus on the past (eg. regression or perpetual “shadow work”) or worse, create an identity out of a trauma. That is like picking at a festering wound, and never allowing it to heal over.
The final stage of healing from a past event, is the ability to consciously “put it down” and be free.
Yes I know, easy words to say and very difficult to hear when you’re experiencing the pain and struggle of serious trauma. Yet unfortunately, the difficulty doesn’t change what needs to occur.
Keeping up the analogy – trauma is the big wound on your leg after a serious accident. It may shake you to your core. But regardless, in the immediate time after the injury, you’re going to need to take care of the wound.
You’re bed bound, completely incapacitated by it. It may be really gruesome and hard to look at the wound, or to even accept that it has happened at all. Treating it may be painful and difficult. But the only way out is through.
As the leg begins to heal and scar over completely, you have to do less and less care. But the scar is still there, a constant reminder. Sometimes you feel twinges of pain, maybe it hurts when you touch it, sometimes the pain is rather intense and aches from the inside out.
Focusing on the pain and the memory of the trauma doesn’t ever really help though, does it? Doesn’t change the past, doesn’t make it heal faster or better.
The only thing that really helps is accepting that it happened, and continuing to live your life regardless.
More time passes and the wound and scar becomes so faint, maybe you forget it happened for the majority of the time.
Not always, sometimes there are strong reminders – but finally when you think of it, when you touch the scar, you’re not tormented by the trauma of the event anymore. You have healed.
Time doesn’t “heal” the wound. It allows us the space to make peace with the scar.
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” — Carl Jung