We tend to think of trauma as having to do with people who’ve been to war or suffered terrible abuse in their past. What we don’t collectively realise (but I believe are waking up to) is that our basic standard of reality in the current world is trauma-inducing.
Trauma – when there is a disconnect within ourselves, between ‘us’ and our bodies and our capacity to feel – happens when our basic, developmental needs of love, closeness, care, secure attachment and being seen are not met and we are not able to process the emotions around this.
Life as it is now is the result of a downward spiral of trauma creating more trauma – how disconnected we must be from our bodies and from life to live this way… children being brought into the world in cold, sterile hospitals, inadequate maternity and paternity leave, high divorce rates, no community, little access to nature, parents carrying inter-generational war trauma unable to attune to their children’s needs properly, boarding schools, the rigidity of top down approaches to learning and punishment…
Nearly everything we are taught and everything around us, encourages us to be disembodied. Our Capitalist, profit driven paradigm depends on it, in order to survive. We are taught to look outside of ourselves for answers, whether from parents, doctors, teachers, politicians…We spend our entire education valuing rational thought, with a total disregard of the richness of the emotional experience. We are glued to computer screens. Everything is rushed and there seems to never be enough time. We live surrounded by concrete, and ‘pleasure’ is reserved for rewarding ourselves for having worked so hard. We go to yoga once a week so we can temporarily feel a little better and continue the insanity of our disembodied lives…
Normalacy is a myth. Pathologizing some people as suffering from trauma and some as ‘normal’ misses the point that the very way we are living is totally disembodied and trauma-inducing.
And yet even though we are embedded in a system that creates and perpetuates trauma, we cannot just continue plodding along, because we are constantly being confronted by wake up calls: we become sick and realise our body is trying to speak to us… we feel depressed and realise there is something within us we’re not listening to… we feel numb during sex, or our genitals don’t behave the way we want them to, or our relationships collapse because we regress to behaving like scared children… or we hit rock bottom with our addictions… or get sick of feeling numb and having no energy. Life is constantly sending us messages to reveal that we are disconnected and something needs to change.
Maybe admitting we are all totally fucked is our saving grace.
We walk through life in a kind of bubble of pseudo bravado, just getting on with things, quietly managing our addictions, trying so desperately hard to appear functional and confident as though we have a grip on things. Meanwhile no one really has a fucking clue. We pretend we are kind of invincible, ignoring how weird and scary and intensely vulnerable it actually is to be a human.
Maybe the world doesn’t need more confidence or bullshitters. Maybe it needs more of us to admit we struggle or admit that we’re totally fucked and how vulnerable it is to acknowledge our trauma. Maybe then we can experience a different kind of strength and resilience that comes when we admit our brains wont be able to figure it out and there’s nothing left but to feel our brokenness and tenderly hold ourselves and ask for support, knowing we can’t heal alone. Maybe strength can be having the courage to feel all the scared, confused, small and helpless parts of us, and realise how precious and delicate life really is…