A very special thanks to my friend Marie for holding space for the energy that became this post 🙏🏻❤️
I dislike like the word “trauma” and I’m not too fond of “healing” either. I might even believe that using these words sometimes creates unnecessary suffering. Yet as a developing somatic practitioner (my training program lives at traumahealing.org) I encounter these words constantly and feel I must use them to communicate with potential clients.
What is trauma? Views differ. I like how the Psychedelic Somatic Institute defines it. To sum up their definition: trauma happens when our active defenses (fight and/or flight) FAIL, at which point our body engages its passive defensive responses, literally numbing us out on internally-produced opioids.
Actually, active defenses don’t quite need to fail for the numbing to kick in. If our primary consciousness – a fancy way of describing our basic sense of being a vulnerable mammal on the earth – in its profound and infinite wisdom, assesses that fighting or fleeing are LIKELY to fail, or are TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to the awful situation in which we’ve found ourselves, numbing – the only remaining option – will automatically engage. We have no control over this process.
By this definition, pretty much everybody is traumatized to some degree. That is because, as human beings, we spend many years in a period of time known as childhood, when our “active defenses” mean little in the face of this world’s complex and often mysterious threats. Moreover, once this numb state is in place, it can persist in the background throughout our entire lives, without us even knowing it. That is how human beings are “designed.” Trauma is kind of our thing.
Here’s why I don’t like the word. It takes something very common, normal, and – from a certain point of view – good, and makes it sound scary and bad. Just thinking about the word makes me freeze up. I hate how it has a kind of medical, science-y flavor, with a hint of shame. It sounds so serious and in need of very specialized expert intervention. Sometimes I wonder if it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in that way. The mind is very powerful. The words we use matter.
See, trauma is just experience. It can be very intense and painful experience, sure, but here’s the thing: it already happened. You just haven’t felt it yet. And look, you don’t have to. You can keep using strategies to manage the symptoms. It doesn’t make you bad or wrong. But I will tell you this: experience is what you came here for, and there is no free lunch in this world. Your choice is to live a life of numbing and management, or a life of full-on human experience.
Then there’s “healing.” In this conversation about what it is like to be a human being, I find “healing” a faintly confusing and disempowering concept. First of all, it brings with it the idea of healer, this magical mysterious agent of goodness showing up to work miracles. Now, maybe there is such a thing. I don’t know. But what, ultimately, does that have to do with sitting and feeling your experience? Because that’s what we’re talking about: sitting and feeling your experience. You might need support to do that, you might need education, you might need medicine, but in the end it’s simply a choice you make for yourself.
Second, the word “healing” carries, for me, a faint fantasy of respite, with just a dash of moral superiority and, sometimes, infantilizing, idiot compassion. Oh you poor thing, come rest in these loving arms and everything will be alright. Well, everything is not going to be alright. You’re still human in a human world. Life is going to go right on being mysterious, painful, and difficult – full of ignorance, greed, delusion, heartbreak, and grief.
What, then, is the point? What might the world look and feel like to a less numb, more experienced you? The honest answer is that nobody knows. You will discover that for yourself, if you so choose. And there’s really nothing wrong with choosing not to. Most people don’t, and that’s ok. When you’re ready, your experience will be there waiting for you.
May you know when it’s time.