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Photo by Molly
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You know what my heart holds with the deepest gratitude? Of course, the list is endless. What I am addressing here is my profound gratitude for all that supports me — and supports us all — with growing our capacity to embody love. Love is indeed the greatest medicine. And, sadly, I also notice its absence so pervasively in our culture and beyond which surfaces each and every day in the endless impacts of the many faces of unaddressed trauma.
My heart celebrates, even as it aches, with each new piece to the great mosaic that I am able to connect and which holds us all, all of life. There is such mystery, wonder, beauty, and madness in our world. The curiosity of my spirit, and the depths of the caring within my heart and soul, inspires me to hold onto the sacred thread which leads me deeper and deeper into awakening, consciousness, love.
Not that this is an easy path. It is not. It is not, for instance, easy to recognize, see, feel, and increasingly understand the impact of trauma all around us. And within myself and those I love. But today I get to see, to know, to be aware of more and more of these different mosaic pieces and how they fit together. And that is such a gift. Such a gift. With each new layer of understanding and healing, my capacity to embody compassion and love and the wholeness of my sacred being increases. It's also been a long journey to get to where I am today. And this journey continues. It is lifelong...
For all of the deep sorrows that I am able feel today, which were once out of conscious reach, I would not trade in the fullness of my emotional world, the richness of my life, and the depths of my growing compassion and wisdom and love for anything. It is a myth that there is any such thing as being "comfortably numb." That is but a delusion. A house of cards. I know. I used to live in that numbness, those addictions and distractions, that deeply fractured and disconnected state.
Decades ago, when I was in the early years of my sobriety, I remember reading somewhere that there would come a day on this path of heart when the richness of a life fully lived would grow stronger than any pull to go back. So true. So true. And it took me many years to cross over that line where going back was simply never to be an option again. There is too much beauty and wonder, laughter and joy, connection and belonging, meaning and purpose, awareness and authenticity, wisdom and truth, and sweetness and love in my life today. There is so very much to be grateful for.
And, yes, there are losses. There are tears. There are years of hard work shedding so many illusions, fears, shame, and obstacles that I had built within myself against love. I had no idea then just how fortified I was. Not a clue. Because I could not have imagined a different way of being in the world. I could not have imagined my life today.
Of course, what I have come to realize along the way is that it was harder work to stay numb, disassociated, unaware. It was more painful to keep the trauma I unknowingly held in the depths of my heart and my body at bay. It just takes so much energy to keep everything down. Carrying the imprint of unaddressed trauma is such a heavy, heavy weight to carry, one that so many of us often don't even know is there. I certainly didn't in years gone by.
And we also have no idea of the unimaginable freedom and profound gifts that come with letting go of years and generations of ancestral and cultural trauma and pain that had been denied and held in secrecy, even from oneself. And at such a tragic price.
The related excerpts below from Gabor Maté's latest book, The Myth of Normal, are an empowering gift — a gift that I am called to share. As we face rather than deny the trauma that we carry as individuals and collectively, within our families and communities, and in our culture and world, we are freed to root into paths of wholeness and love.
May we individually and collectively come to more deeply understand trauma and its impacts — and inspire and support one another along the way. May courage, curiosity, compassion, and ever growing consciousness be contagious. This is the journey of transformation and love. This is the journey of healing, resilience, and grace. 🙏🙏
With heartfelt blessings,
Molly
What Trauma Is and What It Does
Trauma's imprint is more endemic than we realize. That may seem a puzzling statement, as "trauma" has become something of a catchword in our society. To boot, the word has taken on a number of colloquial valences that confuse and dilute its meaning. A clear and comprehensive reckoning is warranted, especially in the field of health — and, since everything is connected, in virtually all other societal domains.
The usual conception of trauma conjures up notions of catastrophic events: hurricanes, abuse, egregious neglect, and war. This has the unintended and misleading effect of relegating trauma to the realm of the abnormal, the unusual, the exceptional. If there exists a class of people we call "traumatized," that must mean that most of us are not. Here we miss the mark by a wide margin. Trauma pervades our culture, from personal functioning through social relationships, parenting, education, popular culture, economics, and politics In fact, someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society. We are closer to the truth when we ask: Where do we each fit on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been? And what possibilities would open up were we to become more familiar, even intimate, with them?
A more basic question comes first: What is trauma? As I use the word, "trauma" is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves. "Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you" is how I formulate it. Think of a car accident where someone sustains a concussion: the accident is what happened; the injury is what lasts. Likewise, trauma is a psychic injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment. It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls; the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies.
When a wound doesn't mend on its own, one of two things will happen: it can either remain raw or, more commonly, be replaced by a thick layer of scar tissue. As an open sore, it is an ongoing source of pain and a place where we can be hurt over and over again by even the slightest stimulus. It compels us to be ever vigilant — always nursing our wounds, as it were — and leaves us limited in our capacity to move flexibly and act confidently lest we be harmed again. The scar is preferable, providing protection and holding tissues together, but it has its drawbacks: it is tight, hard, inflexible, unable to grow, a zone of numbness. The original healthy, alive flesh is not regenerated.
Raw wound or scar, unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological. It constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people. Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment's riches, limiting who we can be. By impelling us to suppress hurt and unwanted parts of the psyche, it fragments the self. Until seen and acknowledged, it is also a barrier to growth. In many cases, as in mine, it blights a person's sense of worth, poisons relationships, and undermines appreciation for life itself. Early in childhood it may even interfere with healthy brain development. And, as we will witness, trauma is an antecedent and a contributor to illness of all kinds through the lifespan.
Taken together, these impacts constitute a major foundational impediment to flourishing for many, many people. To quote Peter Levine once more, "Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering."....
Trauma Alienates Us from the Present
If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma....
Awareness of the moment has become something to fear. Late-stage capitalism is expert in catering to this sense of present-moment dread — in fact, much of its success depends on the chasm between us and the resent, our greatest gift, getting ever wider; the false products and artificial distractions of consumer culture designed to fill in the gap....
Ultimately, what we are distracted from is living.
The past hijacks and co-opts the present again and again...
Trauma Fosters a Shame-Based View of the Self
Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion for oneself. The more seer the trauma, the more total that loss....
The negative view of self may not always penetrate conscious awareness and may even masquerade as its opposite: high self-regard. Some people encase themselves in an armored coat of grandiosity and denial of any shortcomings so as not to feel that enervating shame. That self-puffery is as sure a manifestation of self-loathing as is abject self-deprecation, albeit a much more normalized one. It is a marker of our culture's insanity that certain individuals who flee from shame in to shameless narcissism may even achieve great social, economic, and political status and success. Our culture grinds many of the most traumatized into the mud but may also — depending on class background, economic resources, race, and other variables — raise a few to the highest positions of power....
It Didn't Start With You
...Trauma is in most cases multigenerational. The train of transmission goes from parent to child, stretching from the past into the future. We pass onto our offspring what we haven't resolved in ourselves. The home becomes a place where we unwittingly re-create, as I did, scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small. "Traumas affect mothers and mothering and fathers and fathering and husbanding and wifeing," the family constellation therapist Mark Wolynn told me. "The repeated traumas continue to proliferate from that — as a result that they never get healed." Wolynn is the author of the aptly titled It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Trauma may even affect gene activity across generations, as we will see....
Blame becomes a meaningless concept the moment one understands how suffering in a family system or even in a community extends back through generations. "Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain," wrote John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who showed the decisive importance of the adult-child relationships in shaping the psyche. No matter how far back we look in the chain of consequence — great-grandparents, pre-modern ancestors, Adam and Eve, the first single-celled amoeba — the accusing finger can find no fixed target. That should come as a relief.
The news gets better: seeing trauma as an internal dynamic grants us much-needed agency. If we treat trauma as an external event, something that happens to or around us, then it becomes a piece of history we can never dislodge. If, on the other hand, trauma is what took place inside us as a result of what happened, in the sense of wounding or disconnection, then healing and reconnection become tangible possibilities. Trying to keep awareness of trauma at bay hobbles our capacity to know ourselves. Conversely, fashioning from it a rock-hard identity — whether the attitude is defiance, cynicism, or self-pity — is to miss both the point and the opportunity of healing, since by definition trauma represents a distortion and limitation of who we were born to be. Facing it directly without either denial or over-identification becomes a doorway into health and balance.
"It's those adversities that open up our mind and your curiosity to see if there are new ways of doing things," Bessel van der Kolk told me. He then cited Socrates: "An unexamined life is not worth living. As long as one doesn't examine oneself, one is completely subject to whatever one is wired to do, but once you become aware that you have choices, you can exercise those choices." Notice that he didn't say "once you spend decades in therapy." As I will present later, we can access liberation via even modest self-examination: a willingness to question "many of the truths we cling to" and the "certain point of view" that makes them so real as a famous Jedi master's Force ghost told his dispirited young apprentice as a pivotal moment in a galaxy far, far away.
— Gabor Maté
Excerpts from the first chapter "The Last Place You
Want to Be" in The Myth of Normal: Trauma,
Illness, and Healing In a Toxic Culture
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