Which it totally is, but it’s also much more.
There is just no healing.At first glance, The Wisdom of Trauma is a new movie about how your parents fucked you up. Watch this film (link in the comments below), and just consider for a moment. You might not see your people here, but the experiences are present. You might see blame here, but be reassured that is not the message. There is no blame.
This comes at a cost though. When we shut down, and we stop feeling we cut off empathy, compassion, love and wholehearted living. We cut off our vulnerability and in so doing we cut off growth. They serve to maintain the disconnection from who we really are, from those parts of us that we were forced to disown. We maintain the illusion of safety. To feel can be unsafe. Trauma severs the connection to self. Trauma teaches us that we are not worthy, not good enough, not wanted. So we cut off the parts of ourselves that were traumatised. We learn to block emotions, we stop feeling, we stop sensing, we numb. We stop caring as we might. Sometimes we use substances to numb, or we 'shop still we drop', we use workaholism or perfectionism as other common avoidance strategies. I have a view that says as trauma becomes more widely understood, as we begin to understand its pervasiveness and the pernicious impact it has in the repeating cycles of destruction within families, workplaces and society, organisations will to begin to consider how leadership needs to at least be trauma informed. There’s a study called the ACE”s study that explores the relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences and health outcomes. It shows the prevalence of ACE’s amongst 17,000 people. The data is staggering. Translated it means that within the workplace barely anyone will have escaped an ACE at least once before they reached the age of 18. In turn that means that there are adults in your teams who may still be living in some way with the effects of these unhealed experiences. The the cause and effect - the behaviour outcomes are not always obvious or transparent. Understandably for many of us trauma is what is otherwise known as the Big T stuff. Violence, rape, sexual abuse, severe childhood neglect, disasters, catastrophic events and so on. But there are little ’T’s too - bullying (could also be Big T), not being parented or cared for as we should have been, important needs for love, affection and connection not being met, being in situations for which we did not have enough internal resources at the time, being ridiculed and so on. These ‘smaller’ events also have an impact. Especially in sensitive or immature nervous systems.Įach of us is wired differently. It is the nervous system of the recipient that determines the level of impact and, the degree of the trauma response. A young child without a fully developed brain will struggle to manage an overwhelming event without the support of an attuned caregiver. A highly sensitive individual of whatever age could experience a traumatic response to a small T event in the same overwhelming way that a less sensitive person might experience a Big T event. The impact is personal. Trauma is what happens to us on the inside. It is not the event. This is a vital distinction. My work, passion and purpose increasingly has a bias towards trauma. It just seems to show up in my work, not that I name it as such, It’s more of a quiet observation that I make and then, I get to work.