Trauma is painfully normal

This month, I graduated my Masters (goodBYE academia) and closed a decade of education in conflict studies and human rights, yoga and yoga therapy and trauma and mental health. These topics were probably always pertinent, but it does feel like we’re having a moment with them right now, as a world, doesn't it?

I’ve written hundreds of papers and read thousands of pages of research. Most of my real learning, though, has happened in sitting with survivors of all kinds of traumas, from various backgrounds, and hearing how it is to be human. I have the privilege of sitting with people who have walked through a living nightmare, and I get to see them come out the other side. It’s rarely pretty, but it is always beautiful.

My friend and teacher Malina Dawn recently asked me - how is to sit with such pain and intensity? And honestly, it is a relief. While I obviously wish that the terrible things that bring my clients to me never happened in the first place, I am grateful to be there to be with them in the tenderness of the aftermath. I am grateful for the honesty that can emerge when everything crumbles. When all we’re left with is the jagged ache and our dreams reduced to silt in our hands. 

Living with my own traumas and mental health struggles since childhood, I feel way more disturbed by how we gloss over our pains, how we mask our hurts, and how that means that we often carry our hurts alone. We feel that nobody can understand, often because the people around us don’t. We often think, consciously or not, that we are uniquely fucked up, and we learn that if we can shove that pain down far enough, and perform well enough, then we can be seen as good, and that will be good enough, or at least it will look good enough.

This is not only a missed opportunity for care and connection, for reclaiming our inherent worth and dignity, it is dangerous. That type of shame kills, and wreaks havoc on our lives, communities and our world. 

Trauma is a part of life

Remember when we all read the Body Keeps the Score in 2017-2021 and realized we all had trauma? Lol, I’m joking, but only partly. While I’m sure we can agree that there are varying levels of severity when it comes to trauma, the reality is 70% of people worldwide will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime. Even if you are somehow spared, the people around you won’t be. 

When sharing that percentage in a presentation to my class of fellow new therapists recently, they were (and even our professor was) surprised about how high that number is. 

Few of us actually identify with the term “trauma survivor”. And many of us struggle to validate that what happened and the events thereafter were traumatic. And even when we do, so many of us carry the voice of doubt within us, including the (very understandable) fear and pain of not being believed. 

If you think that what happened of you wasn’t that bad, and so “who are you to identify with the word trauma”, you’re not alone. 

In fact, pull up a chair and join the club, because you’re just like the rest of us. I hear the same sentiment from people who have been through the tragedies we collectively agree are "actually traumatic”.

Turning towards our wounds

That would be fine and well if we as individuals, and a society, benefitted from dismissing the gaping wounds in our ancestral lines, our lives, and communities. But, we don’t (see: My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem). Instead, the cycle continues time and time again. Hurt people hurt people, as we know.

While it’s normal and healthy to avoid traumatic material when we don’t have the capacity to handle it (such as through dissociation, avoidance, distraction), in general we benefit by looking towards what hurts, little by little and with support, so that we can offer ourselves and each other the care that is necessary to heal what can be healed. To repair what can be repaired.

Sitting with survivors of the worst abuses I can imagine, I’ve learned that with the right support and resources, anyone can heal. There is hope.

We need space to heal, rest, and reimagine what is possible for ourselves and each other.

This next chapter of my work is dedicated to helping us tend to our wounds, traumatic or otherwise, so that we can access who we are underneath our survival responses. So that we can access more care, more connection and more creativity in our inner and outer worlds. I do believe a better world is possible, but obviously, we’ve got work to do, and we need support to do it.

Week by week, I’m building a free library of resources, right here for us, to heal what can be healed. You’ll receive a combination information, practices, poetry, reflections, podcasts, book recommendations, research and probably some other stuff.