Trauma Heals Different
I thought I was healing when I found myself seeking a higher perspective. The allure of thought forms expanding me out of the depths of human experience became my trap. I found myself preaching to others in this same fashion. “If you could just think your way to a better solution, you’d be free.” I fell into this trap because I was seeking a way away from actually healing at the level of change. In my own way, I was bypassing.
Trauma heals different because it doesn’t care for your thoughts. It reaches into the depths of forgotten language, of memory, of feelings and sensations to tug us into a place where drowning is the only inevitable solution.
Bypassing doesn’t do it. Disassociation doesn’t do it. Distractions become external barriers to the real work that is going on within.
When I am experiencing healing through trauma I feel it at a biological level. It’s chemical, it’s sensational, it’s often all-consuming. What I experience is my nervous system fragmenting, my spine becomes splintered and I lose connection with reality. I become swept up in a tidal wave of chaos and sensation and words do not have a place here. Words can’t live here because words have never reached here.
There is something deeply primal about healing through trauma. Something old, wise, and ancient. Again, before the formation of words or thoughts. It’s instinctual, it’s guttural, it’s wild. I only notice thoughts able to formulate once stability has reached my spine. Once all swirls and all directions come to meet in the center of me. And this doesn’t happen through will or force or any measure of higher perspective. This occurs through presence and allowance.
Rejection is the quickest way towards fragmentation, in my lived experience. To turn away from a feeling creates the feeling of shame in my system. Why, because I have spent my entire lifetime feeling shameful for having feelings. Feeling weak and less than for sensing any kind of emotion. Feelings were wrong and I identified with being wrong when I felt anything.
Healing trauma is a deeply layered process of unwinding. Unwinding through acceptance of what is. No rejection, no willing, no forcing, no changing. When did these qualities become accepted into our character I wonder? Because no amount of applying these strategies is healing. No amount of rejecting what I’m feeling in favor of another feeling or forcing myself to be in a state of being that I’m not presently experiencing creates the level of safety required to even begin the work of healing trauma.
In this moment I’m imagining the force (if I can use that word) of water. Water dissolves obstacles, not because it forces itself upon them, but because of what water is. The quality of water with time dissolves all barriers. Even the stubbornness of rock. To heal trauma is to be as water—life giving and utterly resilient in its pursuits toward expansion.
And that is what healing through trauma is teaching me most of all, is to expand as water does. To come home to my own biology. It’s in becoming so familiarized with neutrality that any charge can find its roots in a balanced way. It’s in the familiarization of the pace of cellular communication, observing as participant and onlooker the warmth of expansion that moves like honey, being a part of a language that bisects and connects left and right sides. It’s in the noticing of the subtleties that feels like nothing, when given my awareness, reveals the information of everything.
And here I was, so entrenched with finding higher perspective, giving more meaning to things. When in truth, healing through trauma doesn’t care about my meaning or my self-imposed stories. It has its own story to tell. Hidden behind that story lives something purely imaginative, purely primordial, purely present. An ancient architecture of weaving Natural Order. The Original Code, if it were. Wisdom, stored in the body, accessible to all daring enough to face themselves.
