The other day, I received an email with the interesting and appealing title “Resolving Trauma. For Good.” It had a huge impact on me; my cheeks flushed and my mind buzzed. I clicked on the link which lead me onto a long and quite convincing message for an online training (or course) that would be “supporting me on my way to Trauma Resolution and Reliance”.
I must admit, such offers usually make me at best reactive, at worst suspicious. I usually have a very instinctive and stupid reaction. Without even reading the offer or the content, I click on JOIN, YES, YES and REGISTER, just to see where it leads, and specially how much it costs. Oui, I admit my full and entire cynicism in the matter! It is my own way of checking in and checking out. You might think this is not fair, not everything out there is quantifiable this way, there are good people asking for a lot of well deserved monies and a lot of not-so-good-people asking for not much. Of course! I get it. But when I land on overrated and outrageously expensive course and I read the flashing buzzing words of healing, resilience, resolution … and with them the modalities they offer, I tend to dismiss them. Maybe I am losing on something great. Maybe I am losing faith. But I know down deep that this is not what people (in need) can afford to do - or can ever benefit from.
There are two things that are really bothering me in the last few years. First, the extravagant money that these therapies cost - but that is another story and I might come back to it in another piece. The second, very troublesome and actually more important, is the vast and extended popularisation and misconception around the concept of trauma. The western model of trauma in psychology, as defined by the experts is quite unworkable for me. Specially in its insistence of offering a kind of utopia wherein all is healed, a myth of the optimal health, associated for example to the commonly used term of detox - a quite terrible term - if you really give it a thought.
We hear the word trauma, almost every day, in a lot of different circumstances. It has become a “pocket” word and as such, it comes in all forms, all sizes, and expands on a vast spectrum. Whether we encounter it in the mouth of doctors, psychologists, teachers, or course leaders, practitioners of all sorts, healers and what more, we tend to label everything with the stigma of trauma. In many occasions, it is counter- effective. It actually blurs any process of getting somewhere with it.
You have trauma? Lets get it out of you! The discourse is so weird. I sometimes wonder if we are using the word trauma instead of the word life?
So what is trauma? How do we quantify trauma? Do we all have trauma? Or like i wrote on the subtitle of this piece it is trauma that “has” us? And what does that mean? Have you gone through a bigger trauma than mine? Am I less or more equipped to endure trauma than you? Some questions are even quite difficult to formulate without provocation or triggering (thats another one to unpack!!!) We all have a different definition of trauma because it is one of these words that entails a huge amount of personal stories inside of it.
And that once we have pronounced the T word, we usually have not even said so much…
Trauma is an inherent part of the human existence; and for me, it can never be resolved. Trauma is not a riddle. Trauma is not a problem to get rid of. It is not a disease or a malignant part that a good surgeon would help you extract or reduce. And to go even further, it is extraction and reduction that are the biggest problem we are facing in our modern world.
Yes, trauma in our bodies and in our soul is sometimes unbearable. It hurts. Bodies. Souls. Minds. Systems. Yes, it is a burden. Yes, trauma and its pain needs attention and care and soothing specially when red and hot, and activated. But also later on, when years have passed. Generations after. Still trauma can be reignited and reinstalled out of nowhere. Society is good at doing that. T needs attending like any other (physical) wound. It needs care like any other injury to any living tissue. We are living tissue. When the skin is cut or a body part is broken, what do we do? We put it to rest, harmonising things around it. We harness it with words and gestures of consolation. But do you ever get rid of the bruise, the scar, the impact, the cut? Long time after, you look at the affected skin - and though you might not see much, there will always be something there; something under the skin, something not visible to the eye. Something hardened, something stretched, on and around the impact. And with time, with support, with awareness, the wounding will not further interfere - it will be quite. It will not to bother you so much anymore.
I love this citation by Margaret Atwood about water. “Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.” I often use it to explain how I see Trauma. Like water. I also use it as a image for healing. They go together.
Healing is not something that happens outside. Healing is inward, trying to love someone or yourself, as much as you can - and this is not an easy task, I know all too well. We are not taught to do that. Radically allowing, listening to all your needs, even the ones that are not seen as glorious in our societies - for example laziness. I know, all this might feel “cliché” if you have read it and heard it a million times. Nevertheless, I feel like expressing this once again. Giving it space and a form. For myself. For sanity.
Care and time. Say it again. That feels necessary.
Trauma is part of us. Trauma is an element of life and in many ways. My own story is one example out of millions - I am not exceptional. But I would like to say that this is the part of what makes me strong and fuels my motivation to move on. Don’t get me wrong: I do not say that it is good to have trauma. I don't advocate for anyone to be -to become -or to stay traumatised. But in a fast-track, fast-thought, fast-fixing society, it is so easy to think that you can resolve it or get rid of it - specially not once and for all... I would not work with transgenerational trauma if this was even possible….I don’t believe it is even necessary. Of course, heavy luggage should be not carried anymore. Of course, we should do all what we can to lift off our shoulders some of the unnecessary burden of our own trauma, our own past, our history and even sometimes we need to lift off the trauma of our ancestors.
As a survivor of childhood abuse, I know just as much as one should know about that.
Healing in its deeper levels happens as we listen more deeply to the more vital and joyful dimensions of life, and let these natural forces invade our minds, hearts and bodies, and influence more and more the way we live and act in this world. It is a process, not a destination. It requires a metabolic movement- I don’t see any other way.
I understand we live in a brutal and mechanistic world and it loooooves pretending to “fix” people once and for all but I cannot get used to it.
What if T is the invisible force that shapes our lives? What if T is the shaper, the one that measures the way we make sense of the world? What if T is the big composter that turns everything into soil? Then maybe we should not be concerned with fixing behaviours, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms or judging. Then maybe we should sit together and attend our wounds?
There are moments when your trauma will help you - in one form or another. Yes, there are moments when you will be more drained or reactive. But there will also be moments where it will show you the way. The way to your strength, your power, your resilience, your capacity to mother yourself, to be a fierce warrior, a priestess, a witch, a farmer or whatever you want to be.
I will leave you with the words of my (adored) teacher Bayo Akomolafe, who is always delivering so much wisdom to my heart. You can also catch up with an amazing seminar The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound with SAND that took place some few weeks ago - while I was writing this piece and in fact comforted me a lot with getting out what I think about this delicate subject.
“For a long while, I have been very wary about the ubiquity of 'trauma' discourse and the concomitant flourishing of a subculture that focuses not only on healing as a self-evident and exclusive response and/or entitlement but on the human body as a fixed and static matter conforming to our habits of perception.
As a cross-cultural ethnotherapeutic researcher (by training) and a recovering psychotherapist (by the unexpected goings and comings of unknown gods), I have felt the need to say more about the colonial dynamics at work within the discipline of psychology: how it 'manufactures' its object of analysis, how it is value-laden and culturally composed (instead of being - as is often presumed - an epistemologically superior glimpse of the 'true nature' of the psyche), and how it is entangled with a politics of sameness and control. To that last point, a dear colleague of mine - and Professor Emerita of psychology - goes so far as to suggest that "psychology is the policeman of capitalism."
With colleagues, with elders, through my studies and readings, along with my students in postgraduate classrooms, in conversations I am privileged to have around the world, and through shockingly generative social media encounters, I have nurtured an urgency to decenter western psychology; I feel the urge to unpack the fascinating histories of trauma as a concept, to denaturalize trauma as a world-building project, and to sit with trauma as a globalizing trope.
A couple of months ago, I composed a small post here (facebook) about trauma - but from an animist, postactivist perspective. I ended my post with: "The thing to note then is that we are not traumatized subjects after all, we are subjects within trauma. We do not have trauma. Trauma has us." Someone posted a comment in response to my post - a comment so alive and inviting that I immediately sought to meet her, a dear sister I now consider a friend. When we eventually met, after sharing fascinating stories about a black man "building muscle to look formidable", the curious phenomenon of 'go-bags', as well as the intergenerational patterns in her family, she ended by saying something I'll never forget: "Bayo, trauma is not just the meteor hitting; it is the sculpting of bodies to take the heat." She was crafting a notion of trauma that was more-than-experiential, more-than-personal, and more-than-human.
I have shocking and potentially disturbing things to say. About triggers. About trauma. About healing. About the cultural phenomenon of cancellation. About modern subjects. And about how wounds are co-produced.
Thankfully, I won't get to say these things alone.
If you sense a certain indigestibility around the topic of trauma and healing, embodiment and justice, and the prolific binaries that preserve modern impasses, I invite you to join us at a 4-day web gathering I call "The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound" - much to the chagrin of the guardians of brevity. My friends will be coming: Tyson Yunkaporta, Vanessa Andreotti, and Sophie Strand.
A different signal is churning the landscape, zigzagging through the cracks, offering a fragile suggestion to wary ears: another path is possible.”
Bayo Akomolafe