Trauma Is Much Bigger Than A Word

​Our current federal administration, along with many state administrations following their lead, have banned and discouraged the use of many words.

One of them is trauma.

I met two full days with some beautiful humans in Farmville, Virginia this week. We all had a common denominator. Our lives have been greatly influenced by trauma.

Trauma is not a buzzword. Trauma is not a theory. Trauma is a biological response to our experiences in life. Trauma forever influences the way we see the world, the way we anticipate the world, the way we sleep or don’t sleep, and the way we do and don’t connect in relationship with the people around us.

I am one prone to saying, I don’t have near as much interest in knowing where you are as I am in knowing how you got there. In other words, tell me about the traumas in your life.

I am this way for two reasons.

One, I’ve come to know you have no idea who someone is if you don’t know what they have been through. I think of my own personal story, how for many years – decades, really - I presented an image of someone far more likeable than the person I was hiding from the world, than the person I was hiding from myself.

And two, as I evidenced once again this week, people are longing to talk about the hard stories they have lived through in life (hard stories – one of the creative ways people will reference trauma soon to avoid using language banned in our country). People long to talk about their hard stories because they are stories that have been lost in time.

Bessel van der Kolk, author of Body Keeps the Score, says trauma fragments the stories we tell about ourselves and our experiences. Because the brain’s narrative capacity is impaired during traumatic events, these experiences often become "lost" or inaccessible through traditional storytelling.

Van der Kolk's point is that trauma remains profoundly present until these stories—lost in silence, fragmentation, and timelessness—are reconnected and told, becoming part of a coherent personal history that one can acknowledge and ultimately own.

People long to have safe places to talk about their stories because those are the places where they find healing and repair. Because erasing the burdens of trauma isn’t as easy as erasing a word from our vocabulary.

Many therapists and counselors understand this.

Strong friendships and families and marriages are built on understanding this.

Many pastors and priests and spiritual leaders understand this, even if not nearly enough.

I am surprised, frankly, that more of our politicians don’t understand this. Afterall, it takes very little research to uncover the trauma – I mean, the hard stories – in their own childhoods. Stories very much influencing the way they respond to perceived threats in their worlds today.

Our shared traumas are very much at the root of our fears of one another, our lack of acceptance of one another, our deporting of one another, our anger and wars with one another.

Oh my, the billions upon billions of human beings that would be infinitely healthier if easing the burdens of our shared traumas was as simple as banning the word trauma.

But it is not. We will be discovering that as our words disappear, but the hurts keep growing.

Me, I will continue to show up in people’s traumas. I will write and speak into and about their trauma stories and mine. I will not be hindered from calling them what they are, because for many people, that is what allows them to feel seen and known for the very first time.

And trust me, THAT, that showing up, comes a whole lot closer to 'erasing' trauma than pretending it doesn't exist ever will.