I was reading the newspaper on the weekend and I saw an interview with Bessel van der Kolk. It was one of those Q and A style interviews and he was talking about MDMA therapy which is very interesting but he was asked a few general questions about trauma. In one of his responses he said ‘I don’t know a single person who doesn't have trauma’. This stopped me and it got me thinking about our definitions of trauma, the clinical definitions and then what we understand about it in popular culture.
We've inherited a story about trauma that is too narrow, too dramatic. We imagine it belongs to people who've survived catastrophe, war, abuse, disasters, big accidents. Yes it is associated with those things but there are many more categories that we work with in somatic experiencing practice. What I have noticed with many clients is that we place it at a safe distance from ourselves and from our ordinary yet very complex lives. The reality is most of us carry something we don't have a name for. A tightness that arrives without warning. A habit of bracing. A way of going quiet in rooms where we used to feel at home.
Trauma isn't the story of what happened to us. It's what happened inside of us in response to what happened or a series of things happening. It is the imprint it left on your nervous system, the way your body learned to brace, to shut down, to stay small, to stay safe. It doesn't care how big or small the event looks from the outside. It only knows what it felt like to be you, in that moment, without enough support or safety to absorb what was happening.
That's a very different thing and when you understand that it changes your meaning making around the topic of trauma.
Because if trauma is that ordinary, that universal, it means we are all, to varying degrees, navigating life with some part of us still keeping watch, still waiting for something or maybe still braced for what might come next.
Sometimes it is also about things that didn’t happen. Not being attuned to, not feeling like we are being seen or heard. Not receiving physical touch. Not feeling like we belong and having to disconnect from what we feel in our body to survive the environment we are in.
It widens the lens on it a bit doesn’t it?
There is a huge cost to all of this. It costs us presence. It costs us the easy pleasure of being in our own bodies. It costs us spontaneity, delight, the capacity to be genuinely moved by something beautiful. Not because we don't want those things but because a nervous system that has learned to protect you from pain will, inevitably, protect you from the full depth of joy as well.
Let me tell you what I know about healing. If trauma lives in the nervous system, so does healing. Healing doesn’t only happen through processing pain, it lives and grows through joy, connection, pleasure and co-regulation.
We seem to have created this story that healing trauma means processing pain and diving into it which is not strictly correct. In my somatic world it definitely isn’t. We’ve over-associated healing with pain processing and under-recognised the role of pleasure and connection. I understand why because trauma often narrows interoception; we feel less, or only certain ranges. But did you know that pleasure expands interoception? We begin to feel more safe and co-regulation gives the nervous system a lived experience of safety in relationships.
So joy isn’t superficial, it is regulating, organising and restorative.
Another really inspiring thing happened last week that motivated me to write this blog. I was watching the Artemis landing and I had been following the astronauts a little when they were in space. Jeremy Hansen the Canadian astronaut made a comment:
"Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up, by creating solutions together instead of destroying."
He said seeing the Earth from space helped them all realise this. This brought tears to my eyes, especially with all the crazy shit going on in the world at the moment.
We are not here to be unaffected. We are not here to have gotten it all sorted. We are here, nervous systems and all, to feel as much as we can bear to feel and to help each other bear a little more. We are here not just to heal ourselves, but to help each other feel safe enough to come back to experience and feel the fullness of life.
This is what helps us metabolise and integrate the overwhelm that we all experience often each day.
This is what I mean when I talk about integration. It is not fixing, not erasing, not arriving somewhere unblemished. Integration is the slow, patient process of your nervous system finding enough safety to loosen its grip. To let a little more life in. To discover that aliveness is available to you again.
The signs of that are most often quieter than you might expect. A moment when you actually taste your food. A laugh that surprises you from somewhere low in your belly. The ability to receive kindness or a compliment without immediately deflecting it. A morning when your body doesn't feel like something to manage, but something to inhabit. A changed reaction to regular dysfunctional behaviour you experience from another on the regular.
Coming full circle on my thoughts at the start of the blog, when you understand all of this it really changes how you view all the people that come into your life each day. I think it brings us more compassion toward each other and it makes us reflect on what we can do to support each other.
When we understand that everyone is carrying something; that the person who cut you off in traffic, the colleague who snapped at you, the friend who disappeared when you needed them, the parent who couldn't quite get it right. When we understand that all of them are navigating some version of a nervous system that learned to cope, we start to see and feel our world a little differently.
I am not talking about excusing what isn't okay. I am talking about a kind of tenderness that makes more room for yourself and others. For the whole complicated, tender mess of being human together.