Healing is a wise, wild, natural unfolding. Healing trauma is worthwhile, meaningful, and possible.
traumATIC Stress impacts how we experience life:
We may find it hard or impossible to relax, rest, sleep.
We may feel keyed up or irritable. Scared, anxious, or panicky.
We may feel exhausted, numb, shut down, or checked out.
We might feel that trusting others is dangerous. Leaving our home might feel difficult.
It may be difficult to be playful or feel social. We may lose interest in things we used to enjoy.
We may feel reactive, quick to anger, judgements, rage, or violence.
We may feel braced and tense, hypervigilant for signs of danger and threat.
Or, we may feel lost, fragmented, scattered, internally cacophonous.
what is meant by the word “trauma?”
The word “trauma” refers to the impacts of experiences of danger or life threat, or perceived danger or life threat: experiences which overwhelm us or which threaten to overwhelm us. Trauma includes personal and interpersonal events, cumulative frontline workplace stress, and collective trauma - both historical and contemporary.
Trauma is our experience of the event, rather than the event itself. Trauma is the impact of the event on our nervous system, like an imprint on our nervous system.
Trauma compounds, with cumulative effects.
Personal and interpersonal events
We experience trauma in relation to many types of events and prolonged stress situations, abuse and neglect, as well as chronic illness, invasive or sudden medical interventions, conflictual relations, endings, and divorces, and deaths of loved ones. Relational trauma events in early life often occur within important attachment relationships, making later love and intimacy feel complicated or dangerous.
Work place impacts
The work of medical professionals, health and mental health care first responders, and military service is also regularly stressful and can be deeply traumatic both in terms of single events as well as the cumulative impact over time.
Collective Historical Trauma
Large waves of collective trauma, such as - wars, the Holocaust, slavery, colonization, genocides, the Indian Residential ‘School’ system, impact direct survivors who lived through the original events, and also impact descendants for many generations.
Our bodies remember the feeling of danger long after, and can continue to relive instinctive survival patterns over and over. As children of survivors we come to carry the trauma in our nervous systems as well.
Historical trauma events are often part of ongoing socio-cultural legacies of harm, collective traumas playing out over time: pogroms, colonialism, racism, xenophobia.
Collective Contemporary Trauma
Systemic oppression is traumatic, enacted through powerful, pervasive forces of marginalization, exclusion, denigration, violence, and gaslighting (minimizing, denying, silencing reality).
Oppression is a violation of our relational-ecological integrity, a violation of reciprocal relations. It is a soul wound, that comes with a great deal of grief, frustration, and confusion.
Systemic oppression has a profound cumulative toll on our psychological wellbeing and our physical health. Oppression is also often enacted in interpersonal dynamics, in microaggressions and explicit interpersonal violence.
Many of us also internalize these ideologies in some ways which cause further stress: such as shame, or patterns of freeze related to fear, or depression related to despair.
These forces impact our nervous systems, our embodiments, and our sense of self in relation.
It is also true that we are living in a time of disconnection from community, and of disconnection from Earth. A time of climate destruction that can be painful and frightening to acknowledge. We may feel helpless in the face of the danger. We may feel anxious, or overcome with grief.
Climate crisis is a collective contemporary and future trauma.
Trauma is part of all of our lives, and often manifests as anxiety, depression, addictions, family conflict, and other health issues.
Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. it does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.
— bell hooks
maps for healing trauma through psychotherapy
restoring embodied resilience
Our bodies are wise healers, adept at repairing injury. Our psyches also.
Weaving healing through holistic methods means welcoming mind and body, emotion, and spirit. We come together to rekindle inner rhythm: the supple flow, the healing re.source that we all hold at the center of our beings.
Breath and movement, centering and grounding, boundaries and release, rest and relaxation, enlivening play, creativity, and connection.
These are the methods of Old Healing Wisdom, which humans have made use of throughout the centuries.
We can draw upon these wise supports as we turn towards the places where we feel overwhelmed, hurt, exiled, dead, buried, agitated, tangled. These methods offer us sturdiness and voice as we work with the experiences that ache to be released and tended.
healing trauma anxiety and depression
In trauma work, in tending anxiety and depression, we are relearning flexible capacity for modulation. We work with small aspects of life experience, in the present moment, through mindful exploration.
We metabolize trauma and uncoil anxiety, restoring supple yield and strong push, getting unstuck and restoring supple flow.
This is enlivening, deep, gentle work, which can be subtle and can be intense, which supports and strengthens embodied resilience.
Releasing trauma held in our nervous systems, reinstating capacity for active defenses, rediscovering capacity to relax, rest, and engage.
This is transformative experiential therapy. The old places of contraction and fear, numbness and collapse, receive soulful tending that restores ease, dynamic flow, and a sense of belonging.
tending grief and loss
We create sanctuary together, to feel the emotions that need to be felt, gather the meanings that can be gathered, spending time with the mystery, honoring truths.
Grief is an experience that cannot be denied. Grief is potent, and requires soulful attending.
Ceremony, ritual, art, poetry, music, movement, Ecology, relations with Earth Mother… grief has a rhythm and a sacred flow.
Tending grief and loss is crucial: to be whole, real, known to oneself and others. Tending grief is a path for deepened belonging in the fabric of life. Tending grief deepens our life force.