Trauma Informed I don’t think I even knew it was a thing until I started using it as a hashtag. It’s funny the things that I know that I now presume that other people know, just because I know it.
Trauma Informed is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s being informed about trauma. It probably sounds incredibly complicated? Messy or indeed difficult to work with. I come to this conclusion because I have found my own experience of trauma quite isolating. Nobody is interested in helping you with your trauma. It’s considered to be a social pariah much like depression was a few years ago. Nobody wants to hear about your shit, it is an inconvenience to what could have been a nice day. Few people have the skills to listen to unrestrained emotion that often comes with the trauma loop. How do you break the cycle. I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself this week.
It takes a concerted form of effort to become a trauma healer. It takes patience, the ability to witness rage, live within the transformative nature of the more extreme emotions and hold space for people there. To accept all emotions as valid and equal. That whatever someone has to say is true. It is their truth and you would be at pains to deny it. Being trauma Informed is the simple act of accepting that everything that everybody says is true. It’s astoundingly that simple. What if you just believed somebody? And didn’t desire to get your needs met through the desire to be seen, heard or acknowledged yourself? I know it’s just a wee bit revolutionary.
Right now, as I write this I am bordering on the edge of raging. Internalising a long held dialogue about the trauma bonded relationships that I have had and how they have manifested. How the stagnating shadows of others can be mistaken as your own.
The thing is as much as we’d like to believe that trauma can stem from unanticipated events in my experience it is far more likely to stem from dysfunctional family systems as a result of systemic trauma. That an appreciation of the systemic tends to speed up the healing process. Of course trauma healing is complex. Yet I continue to say that it is witnessing, listening and hearing of trauma stories that leads to the deeper understanding of trauma.
These days though much trauma work is hidden under the guise of both physical and mental illness. As what psychologist would state as the presenting issue. The real trick to trauma work is you quickly and deftly move past the presenting issues. Presenting issues being things such as anxiety, depression, burnout, chronic fatigue and even Fibromyalgia. There is now increasing evidence to suggest that these ‘Illnesses’ or dis-ease can now me better understood through neuroplasticity in the brain. Through learned dysfunction trauma responses the are hardwired into the brain such as addiction, narcissism and even tendencies of abuse. That most of these ingrained Hardwires are informed by primitive brain functioning. Fight or flight responses that are dependent on adrenal secretion and in fact adrenaline addiction to survive. That the treatment of trauma is largely about getting people to experience their limbic systems for the first time and indeed get them into working with high functionality by engaging the higher brain. Fucked up and true story, it’s like trying to run a car engine on coal fuel. It is this kind of information that large swaths of the population are desperately in need of in order to take control of their emotional and physical health. Yet much of the medical profession are in deep denial about the corrupt medical systems that keep ‘patients’ dependent on unnecessary medication. When tea and a good chat might suffice.
