Layers of Trauma

Like an archeological dig...emotions trapped...

“Trauma often stores itself in layers, not unlike the sediment found in an archeological dig. With attuned treatment and a safe environment, the psychic reveals itself one level at a time. It is common for more personal and current injuries to show up first, then the older, more ancestral strata to come into view. Most important is the through line, a common vein of meaning that runs through all the layers, a resonant theme that vibrates with emotion when tapped. This is the mother lode, and if one can find it, healing may be on the horizon.”

~Rabbi Thirzah Firestone, PhD

I sit with this quote and I appreciate it because it’s so nuanced and meaty and true to trauma.

It is especially relevant to me/for me because I recognize how much I am addressing layers of emotional inheritance and ancestral trauma as well.

I find the findings of epigenetic research fascinating, in that descendents—whether mice or people (survivors of Holocaust, slavery, Native American genocide) there are differences in DNA and stress hormone responses. We clearly carry the imprint of our ancestors’ emotional wounds in very real, very visceral and physiological ways. By that I mean not relegated to simply the mental/psychological realm.

Because western medicine and big Pharma likes to get us to believe that you can parse out parts of our bodies, organs, rather than treat the unified whole.

This is certainly for very self-serving reasons to sell drugs, but I also think it’s because we’re so basic in our knowledge of integrative and holistic medicine, and find it hard to qualify, that we instead pretend it doesn’t exist. So, instead, we push anxiety or depression to conditions or illnesses of the mind, despite ignoring large bodies of research and findings to suggest otherwise. That there are many, many body reasons why these symptoms may present.

However, anxiety and depression can be the direct result of trauma, either based on one’s own experiences or—

And here’s the real mind-boggling, mindfuckery, or things that affected your parents or grandparents, ancestors, that haven’t been addressed or dealt with.

Reminds me of that saying that intergenerational trauma will continue through the lines until someone addresses it and feels it and endeavors to do the work to heal.

But even then, I don’t see it as that simple for everyone and all types of trauma. Think about the intergenerational trauma facing descendents of Native Americans and First Nations and other indigenous groups, in constant battles for survivance, while their ways of life continue to be decimated and erased and ignored, daily. This on top of the intergenerational trauma and those emotional wounds they must carry.

Or, take descendents of enslaved Africans, for African Americans, they bear the wounds of their ancestors and yet also the experiences of lived, embodied racism and seeing people of color shot down by police for routine traffic stops or choked to death for a call about a bill that was potentially counterfeit. And no justice or punitive measures often take place. And moreover, no large systemic change to institutional racism is addressed.

Trauma in these levels, interconnected as they are, can be heavy and multi-layers. It is not always enough to address one layer, the personal. We start there. But then there’s the ancestral. Then there’s living in a world where you are subject to constant abuse, enduring Complex-PTSD, it can be hard to ways to address all the trauma in our broken world.

I still can’t help but marvel at—

The more I read and learn about trauma, and I read and learn a lot about it, the more I come to believe that there are many underlying traumas that present as mental illnesses and/or have manifested in mental illness symptoms like depression and anxiety, etc.

I love Firestone’s quote above, and she does do important research and interviews and therapy with survivors of Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sometimes, such as the case of the Holocaust, the genocide and war has ended. But that is not always the case for all races and ethnic groups in all places throughout the world.

Trauma(s) are complex. They are individual and collective. To the personal and with the family. To the race and to the bodies. To the genders and the margins of the queer and all other marginalized groups. To those with war wounds.

Just the other day I watched a movie where they explained what we now know as PTSD as “war neuroses.” Certainly, it makes sense.

And yet, we now know that such neuroses that accompany post-traumatic stress disorder and changes to the brain need not involve war.

Certainly, that happens often, when soldiers have scarring experiences after combat.

And yet, not always. Other examples of ethnic cleansing, of other genocides, of violence, of bearing witness to the ugliness of humanity and how we treat each other, even participating in a place of war or conflict, as a civilian—

I marvel at all the different ways in which our collective humanities experiences trauma, single events, ongoing experiences, and all the ways that we are aware of what has happened to us, to traumatize us, and yet also, all the ways that we do not.

Finally, in a video I watched recently with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, he said that stress is certainly a normal part of most people’s lives and the human experience. However, trauma must be understood as squarely situated, located or trapped, within the individual person’s body, because when the stress/the event has finished, the person is unaware that the threat has ceased to be.

That is why the effects on the mind and body are so grave.

That is also why you get stuck, trapped. Frozen in time, reliving the situation or incident again and again and again.

Those descriptions certainly are true for my experience and a common tale amongst those who have survived trauma and/or identify as having PTSD.