It’s become a commonplace to talk of trauma as bad shit done by evil persons with evil intent. Yet trauma is much simpler to understand, and simpler to talk about.

In western medicine we incorrectly categorise trauma by the events that happened-
when in fact, trauma is the effect left within us by our experience .

-Dr Robert Scaer, The Trauma Spectrum

Trauma is not the thing that happened, it is the effect left within us by our experiences.

That effect is very real, and in every way: physiological, psychological, sociological, it affects every aspect of our mind, our body, our relationships with ourselves, with others and how we experience and move in this world.

Every experience changes us, changes our brain, even our DNA. To be traumatised is to be left wounded by our experiences in ways that can leave us stuck in a response pattern that makes like overwhelming, painful and prevent us from moving forward.

Trauma is not something we remember it is something that we relive.

To be “triggered” is to have those painful moments flood over us in a great tsunami of emotion, pain, confusion and disconnectedness and  powerlessness.

Trauma is not the thing that happened it is the effect left within us from our experiences.

That we are still here means that we have survived, that we are surviving – that we are are survivor!

We can also learn to heal, and we can learn to support others as they heal.

If you are interested going beyond  categorising, diagnoses and disorders to a deeper understanding of the very human experience of living with and healing the wounds of life they you may be interested in our new workshop Healing Our Woundedness.

https://recoverynet.ca/2017/01/29/workshop-healing-our-woundedness/

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