It’s Only Trauma Until we Heal

Trauma is a concentrated lack of love that reshapes our internal world. The traumatized individual no longer believes the world is safe, and understands seemingly safe experiences to be alive with potential danger. It is the emotional equivalent of an herbivore who understands that there is no such thing as a peaceful moment that guarantees another.

Trauma not only lives in the moment; it plants seeds that will spread to your relationships, your functionality, your behaviors, your beliefs. It reshapes your life from within so that pain governs your life the way love once did. This is what makes trauma so insidious — it not only takes up the space in your heart where love should have been, it takes over the function of love by governing your heart.

Where love opened the doors to your heart, trauma locks them shut (avoidance), builds a wall around it (defense mechanisms), toxifies the environment (self-sabotage), and reactivates whenever the present harkens the past (triggers, projections). Finally, trauma recreates its own effects by ensuring we view the world in terms of it (self-fulfililling prophecies). Hence those who chase love (anxiously attached), avoid love (avoidantly attached) or sabotage love (pre-emptive abandoners) create realities that vindicate the beliefs that both respond to and perpetuate trauma.

While some traumas stare at you from every corner of the room, others stalk you in silence. Freud taught us of the latency effect (not the sexual latency phase) in which a person suffers a trauma and represses it for years, rendering it, seemingly, dormant for decades at a time. One day, it roars into activation with all the force of unexpressed years. The patient who does not recall having been molested until the middle of life feels as if the trauma came out of nowhere when in truth, it was waiting the whole time.

Whether overt or covert, trauma molds your internal working model so that love cannot stay, cannot grow, cannot be believed or cannot be real. That is why trauma, if it exists, is a crucial focus of treatment in any meaningful analysis, otherwise, the depth and intractability of symptoms go unappreciated, and the pathology lives on. The average patient, meanwhile, believes all minor symptoms are idiopathic in sentences that end with ‘for no reason.’

• I’m depressed for no reason.
• I have nightmares for no reason.
• I feel unsafe in love for no reason.

“‘No reason” means ‘no reason I will let myself feel.’ When what appears to be a lingering malaise becomes a chronic dysfunction, you are witnessing a learned behavior. Someone had to teach you that being alive is painful and that love can only offer a temporary respite. This is because we tend to believe the most intense experience of our lives.

For myself, it was touching my father’s coffin at 8. That was real. What Jesus did for Peter with faith, my father did for me with pain. His tumor may as well have walked on water for all the impression it made on me. Everything else in childhood felt banal in retrospect. So I knew then that death was real and that life was pretend — pretending we would not die. But I knew the feeling death would bring, and it felt more real than life. So I committed myself to having a life that would feel as real as death. That was how trauma became a tool and not only a torment.

When you therapize a woman who has been gang-raped or a man who murdered his kin or an addict who has committed acts of total despair, you are asking them to believe in the reality trauma denied them. You are asking them to believe in love.

I say love and not peace because trauma is only a concentrated lack of peace when you describe it ‘accurately’ from faraway, the way AI will eventually come to consummate the human condition with words. No, once you are beaten by parents or molested by clergy or disowned by family, it’s not the lack of peace that confronts you, but the silent awareness that you now live in a world without love.

I remember learning as a child about mushroom clouds: how the detonation creates a vacuum: a bubble in the atmosphere with no air in it. Air had been there for billions of years, and now, not. And then the air pressure compresses the bubble to nothingness and the vacuum itself is no more. But even the atmosphere bares its scars as the mushroom cloud forms. Even air can have trauma. And to boot, with the synchronicity of a mushroom: fungi that evolved to consume the dead.

Even then, there is a reminder of life returning, of healing. The mushroom is the reproductive appendage of the fungus. It means death, but it is life.

This is what we trauma therapists remember: that trauma isn’t everything, it only feels like it. We carry this memory until the patient heals from their amnesia: not of the brain but of the heart: the memory of feeling safe in love.

Once trauma heals, we are able to let our guard down. Perhaps this means finally being able to be in a relationship, or out of one, or in a stable one. Perhaps it means love feels so normal, it’s as if it weren’t there because it’s everywhere. The cosmic balancing point of taking something for granted while forever serving it. The way we stop feeling the waves of the ocean after a few hours, only to go home and, in the stillness, close our eyes, and feel it within us.

Also read What we do with our Pain, Skid Row is Heaven, Love in 4-D, and Anxiety is the Rent you Pay for Repressing your Secrets.

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