How do I know if I'm Traumatized? (And what do I do about it?)
Some people may read the word ‘trauma’ and wonder: what do you mean by that? Some people may read the phrase ‘trauma survivor’ and think, “Hmm…is that me?”
Here at the Sanctuary Northwest, we operate from a broad definition of the word ‘trauma’. We certainly recognized what many in the trauma field call the big ’T’ Traumas: violent conflict, a severe medical injury, sexual or physical abuse, a natural disaster, and living under overt or covert oppressions. Folks who’ve experienced such things certainly count as trauma survivors. We are here for you!
But trauma can also happen in understated, low-grade and chronic forms that often go unnoticed.
Sometimes this is called little ’t’ trauma. This is more accurately understood not from the external circumstances but from the internal impact on a person’s nervous system. Anything that a person experiences that their nervous system can’t metabolize and move through in the course of the event can have a lingering impact on their psyche, soul and body.
Sometimes this is described as anything that is “too much, too little, too soon or too late.” Most of us, even if we’ve had a ‘good’ upbringing and were relatively safe, nurtured and cared for, have childhood experiences that overwhelmed our developing nervous systems and left residual trauma responses in our bodies and psyches.
It can be assumed, then, that trauma by this definition is a part of the human experience. There is a paradox we wrestle with here at the Sanctuary in attempting to hold that it’s impossible and fruitless to compare a person’s trauma with anyone else’s; and at the same time, there are some cases of trauma that are extreme, complex, persistent and not ‘normal’. We do our best to honor the range of these experiences.
For example: you might be relatively ‘ok’ and generally functioning in most areas of your life, but with a repeated periods of overwhelm or subtle persistent sense of disatisfaction or incompleteness that you can’t quite shake. Perhaps you feel guilty for feeling bad or sorry for yourself sometimes, or like your problems are small compared to most of the worlds. Often beneath these surface level symptoms are instances of singular or chronic traumas that haven’t had space to heal. This might have been from the physical or emotional absence of a parent during early childhood; repeated displacement and lack of belonging; subtle affects of mysogeny, homophobia, or transphobia. It might have been an experience of severe embarrassment or ‘failure’ that you didn’t have the support to contextualize. Whatever it was, we contest, continues to show up because it wants your attention. It wants you to heal.
We affirm that the all of creation is a living and interdependent organism. Within that, your problems aren’t small or insignificant. Seeking to address and heal them heals something vital to the health of the whole cosmos.
Or you might be at the other end of the spectrum: barely keeping your head above the water, barely making it from day to day.
You might know very well: “I am a trauma survivor!” but be wondering now: “What do I do???”
You may have survived chronic physical or sexual abuse, neglect, houselessness or illness. You may be a black or brown person attempting to survive in a white supremacist world that actively seeks to annihilate you. You might not have any room to do more or care more about the rest of the world. This trauma is also absolutely real. And it too shows up now asking for your attention, asking to be healed.
To reiterate: your problems aren’t small or insignificant. Seeking to address and heal them heals something vital to the health of the whole cosmos.
Zooming out from each of us as individuals, we also consider ‘trauma’ to be anything that has disconnected folks from our innate resilience and healing capacity as a collective body—which in the history of humanity, has been intimately linked with human ties to ancestral and earth based wisdom. Therefore, our current modern era is typified by the traumas of whiteness, colonialism, capitalism and ecocide, to name just a few—from which very few communities of people have been immune.
So in summary: we are all survivors of trauma, of various kinds, to varying degrees. And consequently: whoever you are, whatever you’ve been through, we are here for you.