Or, perhaps, that some of us we want to know, or to admit.
And if you don’t know this, and you need someone to tell you that, I firmly believe it’s an immense privilege….that you don’t know that already, in your bones and mind and essence.
If you have trauma, most of live and breathe it, daily, until we work on our vitally important and life changing somatic healing.
I also find it fascinating how recent the study of trauma on the body and brain is. Relatively, speaking, that only in the 70’s was PTSD classified as a condition, through research done on Vietnam war Vets.
Much work has been done on Holocaust survivor descendents. But it’s baffling to think about all the intergenerational traumas that exist, the cycles that have perpetuated onward, because we only started talking about trauma, seriously, over the past fifty years.
This means that it was only in the decade that my older brother was born (in ‘76) did we finally understand that these effects of trauma constitute a physiological condition, and that is even before we can even touch, grapple with how to properly treat people with trauma.
The more I read about it, as of late, over and over again I read how we are starting to understand that many illnesses, not just ones that are deemed “mental” in nature, but ones we understand as purely physical may also be a result of trauma, Crohn’s, fibromyalgia, auto-immune diseases, etc.
We try to parse out the mental and physical conditions, in western medicine, and we miss oh-so much because we do so.
I used to date someone who—as supposedly ‘smart’ as he was—said something that now gives me pause:
Essentially, hat we already know a lot about trauma, already. (The implication being “enough,” apparently.)…That there isn’t much use in pursuing careers in that.
The assumption I think was that since we already know its effects, people don’t fund the support services, it is not a viable career path.
I disagree with that.
Now, perhaps, what he meant was it may not be an especially lucrative path.
Not being a psychiatrist, myself, in this area, he may be right.
But that is a very different point than the belief that we—doctors, therapist, trainers in these fields, educators, anyone working in service industries and the public sector— already got this trauma thing down…that we understand it, fully.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. We’ve barely scratched the surface.
PTSD and C-PTSD are tricky in that they are both mental and physical conditions. The causes of trauma vary, the symptoms may be incredibly different from person to person, and that is even before we can address possible treatments, with medications and therapy.
I think a lot of people don’t admit to having trauma. Or, it masquerades in others ways, as anxiety, as BPD, through depression, insomnia, etc, etc.
Lived, embodied experiences account for a lot. And because, as I discussed in a previous post this week, we don’t emote and let the feeling flow and move through us…we hold onto a lot, both in our minds and in our bodies.
Sometimes consciously. Other times—
We’ve adapted to that.
I am fascinated to learn at the ways in which only now are we starting to train educators, social workers, police officers in how to approach someone with trauma. Even in medical professions, nurses and doctors are not usually taught to ask about someone’s background/possible trauma. Again, because that is a “mental” issue and therefore, the false assumption is that it has nothing to do with the body.
Dr. Gabor Mate discusses this in his recent book, The Myth of Normal.
It is really astounding to stop and marvel of that—to think about all the medical (read as “real” or “physical” conditions labeled as definitive diagnoses, when they really could simply be a symptom of a much larger and a much more comprehensive, whole-body experience of trauma, unaddressed, undiagnosed, untreated.