The mountains in Joshua Tree National Park are ancient. Most mountains are ancient by human standards, but these mountains are ancient even by mountain standards.

How ancient? The hills and rocks at Joshua Tree are what remains from from a supercontinental landmass called Rodinia that stretched across the Baltic states, Europe, North America, Australia and Antarctica 2 billion years ago. An immeasurable time, before there was even evidence of life on earth.

The deserts of Joshua Tree have been formed by many forces—tectonic plates and numerous fault lines. The land itself has been mountains, ocean bottoms, lake bottoms and savannahs. Today it is desert.

We often think of trauma as a fault line—a place where there was a fracture. We imagine somehow that the healing of trauma is something that we are supposed to move past—or that the fault line disappears. But it doesn’t.

Fault lines are the edges. They are the places where growth and change causes something to emerge. Either something old, coming back up, or something new creating a new structure.

I have long appreciated the way the early psychologist Balint talked about old traumas in us as a ‘basic’ fault—a fault line in the self where something had broken or shattered in response to a trauma or extreme pressure. Balint described the basic fault as a place in the self that needs healing, and that, even when healed, would leave a scar—or some evidence of the fault line.

Balint, long before the research on attachment validated it, identified the landscape of safety and connection that allowed the basic fault to emerge. The area I came to describe as preparation. That if you give yourself enough support, or you experience enough support in a healing relationship, that growth and healing will put pressure on that fault line and you will feel the fault, the trauma, again. It will become visible enough to integrate. And most miraculously, you will not just heal-you will actually grow again. Balint called this place a new beginning. And in my work on the integration work of healing through trauma I have kept that term. In integrating trauma, you experience both mourning and new beginning.

As I describe in my book Journey Through Trauma, repeated trauma is really three forms of trauma: what did happen, the protections you used to survive, and what didn’t happen. Too often, the discussion of trauma focuses only on what happened. And healing from trauma requires a softening or relaxing of the protections you used to survive the trauma. This is the connection, the safety, the preparation that allows you to put aside your armor and feel and reveal the fault lines. And when softening happens, you can get to the third form of repeated trauma. You get to what didn’t happen. You get to experience new beginnings.

As I continue to heal and help others with healing I have come to really appreciate that healing is in the capacity to hold both the fault lines and the new beginnings. The ability to hold the ancient scars and wounds. Hold what has worn away and been revealed. And hold the new: the new peaks that have been formed by growth at the edge of our fault lines. And the new plains that have been formed by erosion and the runoff from the old peaks.

In Joshua Tree there are fields of massive boulders that look like sculptures—look like cairns made by giants. But we aren’t seeing peaks -no matter how big they are. What we are really seeing is bedrock. Bedrock beneath what were the old mountains and hills. Mountains and hills where the covering has been worn away over thousands of years so that all we see now are the bones. Wearing away so that we can see the bedrock that reaches to the core.

I have come to appreciate this wearing away. Trauma is a tectonic shift, a forced fault line, ahead of our capacity to hold it. It does break us at the time. I know that the helplessness I felt at the time of trauma felt like a breakdown. A breakdown that I sought to protect myself from for so many years so that I didn’t have to experience that feeling again. I wanted to feel in control to protect myself from that feeling of helplessness.

But I have also found that there is a piece of that helplessness—of not being entirely in control—that isn’t about trauma, but instead is about the reality of what it means to be human. We can’t know what is going to happen next. We can’t stop people we love from dying. The world is actually uncertain.

And so, I am beginning to hold my fault lines differently. I am beginning to appreciate my ancient structures—even as they be the result of massive upheaval at one time—because even as they are structures of trauma—they are also bedrock. There is something solid and true that I can rely on for my own healing, and for the healing work with others. There’s beauty at the edges. There’s beauty in the bones.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD