Thinking About Trauma

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make the word “trauma” disappear.

No more “my trauma,” or “trauma response” or “PTSD” or “Big T” or “Little T trauma.” One thing I know. If the word trauma disappeared, so would my and your trauma habit.

With no habit, we would need to think before we spoke. We would need to search carefully our own and each other’s souls to find words that paint a fitting picture of our experience. That picture, not quite clear, hard to view, horrifying with its stark darkness in bright colors, yet more honest and more real than those easy-to-come-by pictures painted by automatic trauma-habit words.

Immense is the experience of the soul—too big for catchall words whose purpose is to reduce unspeakable experience to speaking terms. Shame, attachment-wounds, grief, abuse, trauma, all create comfort by reducing the truth of our experience to ideas.

Ideas can be put on a shelf like a book we don’t dare read. Ideas can be gazed at because we know experience’s frightening power has been made feeble. When staring at safe ideas we can fool ourselves into thinking we are doing important work. But safe work is seldom deep enough work.

Ideas can fool us into thinking about our pain in small and tame ways as if shrinking pain eases the digesting of it.

As long as we retreat into ideas, we miss the benefit of wrestling with our experience and owning it. We miss the benefit of painful experiences finding their place in our story, digested and settled into their home.

Somatic experience and embodied healing expert Lexi Florentina says,

The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed,” it’s aliveness.

The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed,” it’s connection.

The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed,” it’s curiosity.

The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed,” it’s play.

The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed,” it’s presence.

The opposite of trauma isn’t to find perfection, to become a contained or even calm version of ourselves. But rather, it’s where we begin to experience what couldn’t exist when all our body could do was survive.

You want to help people with their trauma? Begin by putting the word “trauma” away. Break your trauma habit. Show up with your aliveness and curiosity and playfulness. Then people can follow you into their own freedom from the pursuit of perfection or forced calmness, free to be alive beyond the limits survival required.