Are You Done With Trauma As Culture?
Are you done with trauma as culture? If you’re reading this, I’d hazard that the answer is a yes.
Before diving into an exploration of this, let’s begin with a quick working definition of trauma. For me, the one that’s been most clarifying is from the somatic (body + sensation-based) therapeutic lens.
This looks at trauma as our body’s reaction to an incident, rather than at the incident itself. When we’re traumatized, our bodies become flooded with adrenaline and cortisol - the stress hormones - which mobilize us into fighting, fleeing or freezing.
The reflexive reaction of fawning or appeasing is also trauma induced in response to relational threat.
The rush of these chemicals is experienced as an intense energetic charge through our systems - including numbness, which is the presence of too much charge and overwhelm.
These trauma responses and the mobilization of stress hormones serve an evolutionary purpose when our lives are in actual danger: running from a predator, being robbed, surviving abuse, swerving out of the way of an oncoming vehicle, etc.
But they start causing disease and imbalance in our systems - individually, collectively - when they become chronic, when they become culturally normalized in our bodies, our lives and in society.
We become traumatized when the impact of a trauma response - the energetic charge - is not resolved and released from our bodies and systems but remains frozen or inflamed in place, eventually becoming an identity layer from which we operate in the world, particularly if we experience an event that evokes an uncomfortable feeling tone but is not actually threatening.
Art by Ashley Blanton
When this happens, we have less capacity for life. We’re not in current time because physiologically - and therefore unconsciously - we’re still looping on the stuck energetic charge of a past traumatic episode. Essentially, we haven’t fully processed and integrated the experience and so on a biochemical level, our bodies haven’t realized that we have survived it.
When calcified trauma that forms the structure of identities, beliefs and behaviors is unconsciously handed down from parent to child, it becomes ancestral and intergenerational, creating the cultural milieu of family life.
Meanwhile, the artificial social, political and economic systems that we live in (and are currently in the process of evolving out of), also emerge from millennia-old traumas of oppression, enslavement, exploitation and genocide. One of the rawest wounds inflicted by these systems is belief in the maladaptive lie that we are separate from Nature.
All of this creates the dominant culture that we become marinated in, a culture built by generation upon generation of humans interpreting the world through the distortions of trauma stuck in their bodies and nervous systems.
And from this, we unconsciously create our own beliefs + meanings about ourselves, the world, each other, which then unfold into our individual + collective experiences.
When you look at animals in the wild, they instinctively know how to literally shake off the energetic charge after an event that precipitated a trauma response.
Observe a gazelle that has managed to escape from a tiger. Once she has safely got away, she shakes her body to release the excess charge and calmly goes along with her grazing.
Meanwhile, our culture has colonized us into deeply distrusting the wild wisdom of our bodies. From the earliest of ages, we're taught to sit still, be “good”, not fidget, and most certainly not shake or express any stuck charge or distressing emotion that needs to move through us. Our parents were taught the same, and the ones who came before them, and the ones before them, and so on.
Trauma is not for repressing, becoming unconsciously identified with and consequently creating our culture from. Trauma needs to be tended to, related to and given the space to naturally resolve; it’s a doorway through which we can gain access to more of our Self and simultaneously come to know ourselves as inextricably part of the weaving of Nature.
We’ll be diving deeper into the exploration and practice of dismantling trauma as culture in our bodies, our psyches and our lives this summer in Root + Rise in collaboration with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
I can’t think of a better story with which to be guided by on this journey.
Registration is open and closes on at midnight PST on 30 June.
We meet the new season's story on Summer Solstice.
Join us.