Five lessons I’ve learned on trauma

35 years ago, in a country 10,000 miles from home, I was caught up in a trauma that wasn't my own. At that time, I lived and worked among Chinese students of English, whose hopes and dreams – and, for some, lives – were violently quelled on 4 June by tanks that that drove into Tiananmen Square. I learned a lot about trauma back then. I learned what it feels like to live four years of intensity in a couple of months. I learned the power of raw emotion. I learned what it is like to live where anything can and might happen at any moment. I learned what a privilege it is to sit alongside someone else in extremis and be a witness to the unbearable.

I often think about my students from that time, about their nobility of spirit and generosity despite all that was going on. Though fleeing from attack back to the countryside, they still found time to ask about us, we who were peripheral Westerners in that situation. The experience, in many ways, has informed the unfolding of my life since, and it led me to train as a counsellor and psychotherapist.

Trauma is often referred to as a bad thing we don't like, a mysterious 'something' that sweeps us off our feet, or an entity that remains hidden within us until it pops up and throws us off course completely. Yet through sitting for many hours alongside others over 30 years in the consulting room, I have known so many who find meaning, hope and direction in their lives. I want to notice it, to speak about and celebrate the change that is possible, post-trauma. I want to make what is hidden visible. Sitting alongside trauma is a humbling place to be – there is much to be gleaned from studying trauma and getting to know its ways. I want to share with you what I have learned.

Trauma represents the best and worst of us

Trauma – being overwhelmed – is part of the warp and weft life. Perhaps we all recognise events or situations that have changed us from the inside. The worst of trauma is not difficult to see: when we dominate, denigrate others, turn away our gaze, become inured to others' suffering, dismiss, ignore, when folk are dispossessed, judged or treated harshly and heartlessly for reason of prejudice, or lack of proper care and attention. The worst of trauma – war, disaster, hardship, deprivation, when things pile up and life throws us curveballs – is everywhere.

But so is the best. Evidence to show us that having gone through hardship and troubles, we might be inspired to observe how we work out what is most important. Maybe post-trauma we can have more heart for the sufferings of others, work towards making a difference, reach out connect, work for community and cohesiveness.

Trauma affects the whole of us

Everything that happens to us is connected to everything else – body and mind. We are embodied. Trauma happens first to the body – and it reacts. A working definition of trauma is an overwhelming experience that undermines our ability to cope.

Trauma is a response of the nervous system. A woosh of fear and shock comes up from the base of our spine, flooding the limbic region of our brain and disabling the pre-frontal cortex 'higher' functioning. This impacts our ability to think, link, be strategic, logical, remember. We've heard the phrases 'brain fog', 'seeing the world through plate glass', or 'averting our gaze from bad or wrong things'. These ways of being can be protective trauma responses.

Only 20-30 years ago, in my profession, we used to think if we told our trauma stories that would be enough to heal from overwhelm. Of course there is a place for telling stories, and finding words for our inner experience is important, even if it comes out piecemeal. But we miss a trick if we don't include the body. Trauma is a body blow. Our language is peppered with 'stiff upper lips', 'broken hearts'. We relive the battlegrounds of our past trauma in our posture, our hunched shoulders, a grumbling gut or a clenched jaw.

Our bodies can carry the weight of our experience – a good starting place might be to pay attention to our faithful bodies that have helped us survive. They can be our guides to tell us what has happened to us. Often, if we respect the body and pay attention to its messages, it will tell us what we feel and what we need.

Trauma is a wound that is hidden inside

Trauma comes from the Greek word for wound, to pierce. If we have a physical wound we see it, we tend to it, we bandage it, we see it is healing when a scab forms. Inner trauma wounds are so often invisible. What we see are trauma responses, protective of those wounds, trying to prevent more wounds more pain happening to us. The study of trauma responses is the subject of my book, as well as what to do if we or someone we love has a response, is dominated by one, caught up or trapped, not knowing how to do anything different.

Of course, some trauma responses are blatant – and very off-putting! A fight response is pretty tough if a cornered person lashes out; or a flight response might mean a person caught up in a behaviour they appear to have no control over, evading, ducking diving, forever changing their environment, their partner, always on a roll.

Other trauma responses might be subtle, requiring some seeking out. We might meet someone who finds social contact difficult if not impossible. They avoid eye contact. Their trust in life itself seems broken, they would rather pull away rather than risk further hurt. Or we might meet someone who exudes a subtle but elusive aura of need about them, latching on to a crumb of attention. Simmering under the surface is a deep cry, perhaps from having been displaced, ignored or rejected long ago.

People who are traumatised sometimes have parts of themselves that operate as if from compartments inside. We all have parts of ourselves, we move from one to another fluidly without thought, but in trauma there is a turbo-chargedelement. The parts are not experienced in a fluid or cohesive way, and some parts can be hidden away so much they seem erased, until they pop up out of control to dominate the show. How can they be like this? Because a facet of trauma can be that if dominated by one part, we may have no awareness of another.

We don't remember for good reasons

To survive, we do not associate with the terrible thing… our minds create a gulf between us and the experience. The technical word is dissociation. As war correspondent Lyndsey Hilsum says, it's not what we remember but what we forget in trauma. It is sometimes necessary for us to forget terrible experience and put parts of ourselves in compartments for safe keeping.

If trauma is this unresolved experience frozen in time, it makes sense that we might bump into the occasional reminder. This is triggering, when we are reminded in thought, memory, sensation, a slither of pain/overwhelming experience comes back. I sometimes think of the power of trauma being like the centre of a volcano, full of power and charge. It may be dormant, but it can become active. Sometimes the best we can do is to gently come away from the active zone and let ourselves know we are safe. Doing this sometimes needs to be actively repeated work, to remind ourselves that was then, and this is now.

Information and understanding goes a long way

Trauma cuts us off – breaks the threads of connection to ourselves. We struggle with having too many feelings or too few, or trusting others. There are many in our world who are locked in their own halls of misery, unable to connect with good things, reactive and volatile, difficult to manage and easily judged. Unrepresented and overlooked, they are often on the edge of society. They may have psychiatric diagnoses, complex lives with intersecting problems. They may be vulnerable, fragmented, labelled, dismissed, falling through the cracks of the help that is offered.

I have worked with many distressed and often disturbed folk with complex needs, with personality disorders, who have trauma and unmet needs at the heart of them. They may deeply blame themselves or even hate themselves for their own difficulties. The trauma is at the heart but not always recognised. My work is often inspired by these words carved into a giant scallop sculpture, from the opera Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten: I hear the voices that will not be drowned. But it takes time and attention to hear the sound of the sea in a seashell.

If nobody takes the trouble to be with us – to unravel and unpack these facets of trauma and make sense of them – we pull might away from the world and struggle on alone. Our minds can become mysteries to ourselves. Loneliness and lack of connection perpetuates trauma. It is a double whammy. Being dominated by trauma responses can destroy quality of life.

A bit of information makes all the difference, and can help us break free from our shackles. It is a bit like having a tangled ball of wool that you painstakingly take time to unravel, and separate out the strands. 'It's not just me! This is trauma! At some point trauma happens to all of us and these are some of the ways it shows up…'

Then, the glory is what happens next. Post Traumatic Growth – what hope, beauty and goodness springs out of chaos, disintegration, and darkness. Every day, we see people facing what has broken them and working towards that, with determination. Rather like a Japanese Kintsugi vase, what is broken can also be made strong, shining and precious. Wonderful things can and do emerge.