Thoughts on Trauma

Trauma is a bit of a buzz word at the moment, but we are slowly coming around to the realisation that we all carry trauma, individually and collectively, and that for many, true freedom is at the other side of a door which is scary to open. Many of us have the tendency to minimise our traumas, but as Gabor Maté defines it “trauma is not what happens to you., trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you”, so really something seemingly small and without malintent can still have a traumatic affect.

The thing with trauma is that it lives within us, in our bodies, in our behaviour patterns, in how we relate to the world, and a trauma that causes you to for example have an unconscious fear of abandonment can result in anxious attachment and a whole slew of relationship issues.

Confronting our trauma is a tender journey, and turning towards something painful should always be done with support and when you feel well resourced and grounded. But as and when you feel ready to do it, often simply being with compassion for that pain that you were denying or suppressing, at the other side of it is a freedom and a sense of empowerment that you can only understand once you’ve felt it.

In truth pain isn’t avoidable in life, and our willingness and ability to actually feel it is a true skill to build within yourself. You know the saying “you can only go as high as you do deep”, well when we expand our capacity to feel our hurts - in a safe and held way - we also expand our capacity to feel love, joy and peace.

What follows is a poem by the mystic John O’Donohue, let us know whether it resonates with you.

“For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:

For everything under the sun there is a time.

This is the season of your awkward harvesting,

When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place

You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;

And a time when that bitter tree was planted

That has grown always invisibly beside you

And whose branches your awakened hands

Now long to disentangle from your heart.

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened

When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,

How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns

Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;

You could only see what touched you as already torn.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.

And your memory is ready to show you everything,

Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.

You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering

And according to your readiness, everything will open.

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide

Who can accompany you through the fear and grief

Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.

As your tears fall over that wounded place,

May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.

May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,

Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,

And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.”

― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings