No more shall we bind up the nation’s wounds[1]--it is time to actually heal them. We need to be a trauma engaged nation which means that we must fundamentally change the conversation about trauma. Changing the conversation about trauma means moving away from the simplistic idea that the trauma we are trying to heal is the result of any one single event or one single story. Most traumas aren’t a single event but instead happen so frequently that they are woven into the fabric of our lives. We need to stop discussing trauma as if it were a short-term trauma, like a car accident. Most traumas that we humans experience are what I call repeated trauma. Repeated traumas are the traumas of child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, racial and ethnic violence, community violence, and war. Traumas that happen for months, years and generations. These are the traumas that we as individuals and we as a nation need to heal from and it is impossible to heal if we don’t understand the distinction between single incident trauma and repeated trauma.
Single incident trauma produces a predictable physiological effect on humans—startle response, increased arousal, narrowed attention, loss of sleep or appetite and flashbacks of the event— symptoms, which if they persist, we recognize as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. But what happens when trauma gets repeated? What happens when it’s not one frightening event, but a frightening event that happens every day for years? A one time trauma overwhelms the system—and you are caught off guard. But imagine how exhausting it would be to get caught off guard every night for most of a childhood or a lifetime of racial discrimination? Our brains and bodies are designed for efficiency and survival which means finding the least demanding and most protective ways to cope. When trauma is repeated, we don’t wait to get caught off guard—instead we unconsciously, yet wisely, build a system of defenses against being overwhelmed and getting caught off guard again, because building defenses to withstand repeated trauma conserves our energy for survival. Instead of getting flooded with emotion, with terror, fear and all the responses to trauma --we go numb, we feel nothing and we do whatever we have to in order to maintain our distance from ourselves or others. Our lives become about self-protection.
Treating trauma as if it were a single event to move on from, and not a repeated trauma is getting in the way of healing ourselves and our nation. Repeated trauma consists of three separate aspects and each require different interventions for healing. All three must be worked through in order to heal.
The first aspect of repeated trauma is what did happen. These are the traumatic events. What did happen is actually the form of trauma that most people recognize and our media culture idolizes: we love a good trauma story. And we falsely believe that once the story is told, we have healed and we can ‘move on.’ Being able to share your trauma story is necessary, and it is a crucial part of healing to have your story validated and witnessed. But the story in and of itself is not sufficient to heal.
The second aspect of repeated trauma is what aided survival-- that is —the protections we used to survive the trauma. With repeated trauma, we don’t just experience trauma, we develop ways of surviving it and those behaviors get woven into our way of being—they become part of our personality. We may have learned to shut down or to not feel emotion. We may have learned to equate any conflict with the violence we experienced and equate assertiveness with the power that was used to hurt us. These trauma survival skills may have served us well then, but they often turn out to be everything that is wrong with, or interferes with, the behavior and conversations that are needed to heal. They interfere with getting and trusting help. And they interfere with being a source of trusting help for others. For example, as a white woman I am aware how my personal trauma history impacts my ability to hold shame, conflict and difficult conversations—how it makes me want to stay silent rather than assertively intervening in conversation or duck away from the role of the perpetrator that must be owned in antiracist work. How healing from our own trauma is required to support the healing of others. How it is required to contribute to a trauma-engaged nation.
And there is a crucial third aspect to healing trauma which is often hidden— it is what didn’t happen. Repeated trauma is about what did happen and what didn’t happen. What didn’t happen was the normal developmental growth that would have taken place while the trauma was occurring. It’s not just the remembered acts of violence but also the necessary and healthy developmental tasks that you weren’t learning at the time the trauma was happening. A country at war isn’t building roads and schools, a child who is enduring abuse at home is not learning to trust adults and ask for help, and communities combatting violence don’t have time or energy to meet and create arts or education programs.
Attending to what didn’t happen is where survival stops and growth begins again. And not growth of what once was—because our country, like a child who has grown up in an abusive home, has never known a life without trauma—but instead it is growth of something new. And we all have a part to play in its healing.
Copyright 2021 Gretchen L. Schmelzer PhD
[1] Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address