Trauma as a Doorway

There is so much focus on trauma these days, and I’m really glad of that. Trauma has been the elephant in the living room both individually and collectively. I believe it’s essential to become trauma informed, to understand what causes trauma, its consequences, and how to integrate the parts of us that have been fragmented due to trauma, how to come back to our essential Self.

And yet broaching the topic of trauma can trigger our trauma. Am I broken? Is there something wrong with me? Why do I feel so alone, so different from others? Why do I have intense feelings of grief, anger, fear, numbness, and shock? These questions naturally come up when we’re talking about trauma. Is there some far distant state of ‘healing’ that I need to be going for so that I can be a healthy, un-traumatized person?

This is where things get very sticky. Because the truth (as I understand it) is that there’s nothing wrong with us. Whatever feelings and behaviors we’re left with after a traumatizing experience, a traumatizing childhood, those very adaptations kept us alive when our nervous systems were overloaded with more stimulus than we could handle, and without someone there connecting with us, holding safe space for us. 

Trauma happens not just from what happens to us but also from what should have happened but never did. What should have happened when we were children, our biological need, is having an adult (and ideally more than one adult) who is capable of holding a safe space for us while we feel our feelings, someone who doesn’t try to fix us, but trusts us and knows that what we are feeling is healthy and right. I know very few people who had this experience as a child, and if they did, even fewer who had it consistently.

It’s not that our parents didn’t love us (and maybe for some they didn’t), it’s more that our parents' trauma was passed on to us, nervous system to nervous system. Without healing our trauma we perpetuate it with those we relate with, including our children. It’s just how it works, even with positive intentions to do it differently.

Knowing all of this, can bring us to a place of hopelessness, unless… we realize that our trauma is the doorway to our evolution, and that it’s never too late to bring self-compassion in for ourselves. We evolve by connecting with our fragmented parts and giving them space to be, feeling the sensations in our body, with compassion and kindness. Then our fragmented parts come back into wholeness, we bring them out of the basement into the light of love. And in the process, we become the one we’ve been waiting for, we learn to give ourselves what we were meant to have.

It’s a tall order to go into our shadow and do this work, especially because in our culture we’ve been taught that we should be ashamed of having these unwanted feelings and experiences. This shame causes us to hide our unwanted feelings from others, and especially from ourselves. Shame is very painful. It’s how we’ve allowed ourselves to be controlled, to move away from our authentic experience, so as not to feel it.

It is my firm belief that trauma healing can only happen in the presence of a safe other who can do for us what we never received as a child, can hold a non-judgmental, gentle, and safe space for us to explore our inner reality. We were never meant to do this on our own! I want to emphasize this again… we were never meant to do this on our own!!!!

Trauma happens in relationship, and its healing happens in relationship with one or more safe others. It is so important to find those others that you can create friendships and community with.

Our trauma holds the key to becoming all of who we are, our authentic selves. All of us deserve love, all parts of us deserve to be seen, heard, felt, witnessed, so that we can come back to our authentic selves, come back home to who we are. 

Integrating our fragmented parts happens when we get that there’s nothing to fix, only feelings, thoughts, experiences wanting to be witnessed compassionately. This brings so much peace and joy, this is what we wanted as children and never got. We have the opportunity of coming home to ourselves. When we bring self-compassion to ourselves, we naturally have it for others.

There is no more urgent work I can see that’s currently needed on the planet. What we push away inside of ourselves, we project as ‘other,’ and a war inside of ourselves easily becomes a war on the ‘other.’

May we come home to ourselves, one step at a time, with the compassion and connection that is our birthright.