Ten Healing Truths About Trauma
Trauma isn’t caused by what’s happening to us, but by our inability to feel it while it’s happening.
My 21-year-old son—who lives alone in Chicago—was jarred awake by the pounding of ICE agents on his apartment door.
Fortunately, his skin tone did not match the complexion of the man they were looking for, so they did not immediately cuff him. They did falsely assert their right to enter his apartment to search for the man. To my son’s credit, he asked to see a warrant with his name on it, given that he is the solo tenant of the apartment. To their credit, they respected his due process and left him alone.
He called me seconds later via FaceTime. At first, I could see the shocked vacancy in his eyes. He has never been short for words, but for several minutes he couldn't put two of them together.
Then, slowly, the tears started to flow. I asked him what they were saying. He told me he's not sure if his soul can take the meanness and cruelty of the world. I told him no soul can. That's why we close our heart—to protect our soul. Of course, it's our closed heart which then inevitably passes on the cruelty. I told him the task is to close his heart just enough so his soul can survive, without closing it so much that he becomes a mirror of the meanness. Then I stayed on the phone with him until the tears ran out. For now.
I'm not sharing this with you because it's political but because it's painful.
More importantly, I’m sharing it with you because I know something for certain: for my son, this will not be traumatic. I know that because he was able to let the pain of the experience flow out of him in close proximity to the event itself.
You see, the talk about trauma tends to get bogged down in misguided debates about degrees of difficulty. For instance, was it bad enough or creepy enough—or were you young enough—to justify calling it trauma? These questions represent fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of trauma. Trauma isn't actually created by what happened.
Trauma is created when we’re unable to feel what is happening when it’s happening.
It doesn’t matter if it was your best friend moving away when you were eleven, or ICE agents at your door when you’re twenty-one, if you didn’t feel safe enough to feel the pain of it when it was happening, then it became trauma—trapped and stored in your nervous system. In other words, trauma isn’t created by loss, abuse, neglect, abandonment, or any other painful human experience.
It’s created when someone says, “Quit crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Or the opposite: it’s created when someone tries to make you feel happy instead of helping you to feel fully.
Therefore, here are ten healing truths about trauma.
Trauma is any pain we didn’t know how to handle when it was happening. Trauma is simply pain we pushed away in the past and continue to push away in the present.
The unexpressed pain is stored in the body as our original fight-or-flight response to the pain.
Any time our body is triggered into fight-or-flight when there is no present threat to our life, it is like an “X” on a treasure map, showing us where we can find our unexpressed pain.
We keep our trauma out of awareness by taking “control” of our lives. Most of us aren’t control freaks, but we are control sneaks, our minds constantly scheming to not feel what happened and to ensure it never happens again.
Much of our relationship dysfunction is the result of triggered trauma. It’s not a communication issue; it’s your trauma asking to be turned back into pain.
We don’t heal trauma by “healing” it. Rather, we heal trauma by letting the pain back into awareness, learning how to be with it, and learning how to release it.
Feeling the pain again requires a safe space, and usually at least one safe person. That person could be a friend or a spouse or a therapist. It could be God. It could be anyone who is a strong enough container for our pain to flow through, until we grow into that strong container ourselves.
The transformation of trauma back into pain looks exactly like the stages of grief. The first three stages—denial, anger, and anxious bargaining—are all the ways we’ve been trapping our pain as trauma.
The fourth stage of grief—sorrow—is fully feeling the pain. Pain is designed to flow. It starts in your gut, pushes up through your chest, forms a lump in your throat, and it pushes on the backs of your eyes, until it leaves the body as tears. The tears transform the trauma back into pain.
The last stage of grief is peaceful acceptance. It’s the resilience that comes not from being pain-free, but from knowing we can handle pain when it happens. It’s the freedom that comes from not having to design your life to cling to pleasure and to push pain away. It’s being able to fully live whatever is right in front of you.
The bad news: yesterday’s trapped pain becomes today’s triggered trauma.
However, the good news is, once it’s no longer trapped, you’re no longer traumatized. And the really good news is, you can actually prevent future trauma by committing to feeling everything fully, while it’s happening.
Or at least a few minutes after the guys with guns go away from your door on an otherwise ordinary morning in Chicago.
How does this fit or not fit with the way you understand trauma? Is it a helpful or unhelpful way of thinking about pain and trauma? What other reactions do you have to this post? Feel free to share in the comments, and I’ll be sure to reply!
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I wanted to specifically call out this line: “Trauma isn't actually created by what happened. Trauma is created when we’re unable to feel what is happening when it’s happening.” That is such a powerful distinction. It shifts the focus entirely from the event itself to our internal response. So often, we get caught up in trying to measure and validate trauma based on the external circumstances, but what you’re saying is that it’s really about what happens inside of us. I believe this liberates people who might feel their pain is “not valid” or “not bad enough.” It gives them permission to acknowledge what they felt, regardless of how others might perceive the situation. We tend to dismiss or compare our feelings to others, but to read what you’ve written reminds us all that what matters is how we have experienced the events in our lives and what those experiences have done to our souls.
I'm so sorry your son had to go through this, Kelly, and it is also so good that you were present and available to walk and support him through it.
What you wrote today reminded me of the very first book on trauma I read by Peter Levine, I think. In its opening pages, he wrote about getting hit by a car and how he felt as the paramedics arrived. He said he allowed his body to quiver and quake through the pain and shock, and what really grounded him was this passerby who happened to be a pediatrician, I think. She took his hand in hers, spoke gently to him the entire time. He wrote that this made all the difference in how he internalized what happened to him, especially since the first responders were very formal, some quite gruff. But he never forgot the soothing presence of this doctor who accompanied him in this very critical moment.
That was the basis for his belief that trauma isn't about what happens to us but is about whether or not we internalize and store it in our bodies and minds.