A Comment on Trauma

I would like to take a moment and address those of you who might have come here because of “trauma”. And I do not mean the general trauma that is the subject of all therapy. I am referring to somatic/body and psychic trauma coming from overwhelming, shattering, or neglectful experience in childhood or adulthood. The body and psyche can be left in a state that is no longer congruent functioning. A car accident, the death of someone close, prolonged or severe neglect—any event that breaks the continuity of self. Some people say there is small t trauma and big T trauma. In that sense, I work with big T trauma.

Trauma usually has a way of living our lives for us. It may be aksldjfl;ajsdj quietly organize our life from the background. People who carry this kind of trauma usually know it. Triggers are some of its primary signs and black and white avoidance of situations or experiences or driving directly into what we find unpleasant again and again.

That said, while trauma can be severe it is within trauma that new and deeper forms of self recovery can be found. In this way trauma presents gift from the painful dark - those chosoing move towards in regulation and safety can recover even more than was lost. 

A client and I once found an image: trauma is a vase that has cracked, sometimes in many pieces, sometimes along one deep seam. Therapy is the careful mending of those seams. When the work is thorough, the vase from the outside looks whole again, perhaps even uniquely itself. Only the vase remembers the cracks and the labor it took to hold together.

This is beatuful imagry. But it is missing one piece. As we fix the cracks in us we more deeply find the roots of that which gives us life. This both recovers life energy and clears the blocks between us and the life energies outside of us to come in.

I cannot do the mending for you, but I know this terrain well enough to sit with you while we find what needs discovering and what needs mending. The goal alwasy being more life, safer, fuller and braver - the pathways for the freedoms of self love and love from others.