Trauma Often Breaks The System We Need Most For Healing

​One of the cruelest aspects of trauma is it damages the system we most need for healing. Much more than trauma impacts the internal systems of an individual, it damages the systems an individual uses to attach to others. It hinders their capacity to have meaningful relationships. And by meaningful, I mean healing-centered relationships.

Before I go any further, let me say, when I'm talking about trauma, I'm talking about anything that happens to someone that becomes too overwhelming for them to handle on their own. Because whatever that is, if it causes one to live in a prolonged state of feeling overwhelmed, that's when the whatever that is becomes destructive to self and potentially others.

And coming from someone who works in the world of trauma, as someone who lives through his own, I assure you many people are carrying around more than one 'whatever that is.'

We often make the mistake of deciding that what someone else has experienced wasn't traumatic. But our personal definitions of traumatic do nothing to temper what feels overwhelming to the person whose experience we are judging.

In fact, it often makes it a bigger burden to carry.

What often makes an experience go from plain hard to downright traumatic is when an individual doesn't have someone in their life buffering them from the effects of the experience itself, and absorbing some of the harsh impacts of that experience in the aftermath.

So an individual carries that experience forward in isolation.

It's important to know, today you will see plenty of people, young and old and of all colors surrounded by people, maybe they will be smiling and laughing and skipping about, yet - they are living in isolation.

They may have a few thousand Facebook followers, yet - they are living in isolation.

When you are using all of your energy to hold something in, to hide something that is longing to get out, you have no energy left to attach to the people who might possibly receive what you are holding.

It takes far less energy to smile and laugh and skip about than it does to hand over a burden to a healer. The smile is often the greatest tool we have to protect us from anyone ever being curious about wounds beneath the smiles.

It's not like we don't want to hand our burdens over; inside we all long to be healed. But the attachment system we use to connect to one another in healing has long been broken and further disassembled by prolonged isolation. It's left us ill-equipped to both hold onto and share our burdens.

Maybe that is trauma's deepest wound.

Those who have an easy time handing their burdens over to another have no idea how impossible that feels to someone who has never experienced the handing over of a burden. So we begin to blame the burden holder for their unwillingness to heal, when in reality their system to heal has been long broken.

Or in many cases, never created at all.

Often times, trying to teach someone how to hand over a burden - how to be vulnerable - is like trying to teach someone to speak a language who has never had a voice at all.

More and more, I cross paths with the voiceless. And it breaks my heart. Mainly, because no one has to remain voiceless.

They just don't.

First, we can all begin to create safe places for one another to share our burdens. We can stop judging one another's burdens, we can stop deciding for one another whether or not one should feel overwhelmed by their experiences - both past and present - and just accept overwhelmed.

Accept it with an ear and with love.

It's also important to know, often the overwhelmed aren't coming to you. Their system that hands over burdens is broken. Vulnerability is an invitation we offer, a peace and safety we roll out like a carpet in front of another. It is not a skill we teach.

I'll say that again; vulnerability is an invitation we offer not a skill we teach.

Sometimes we simply need to offer, "you look overwhelmed, friend. I get it. I'm here if you'd like to share some of it."

I am here to absorb some of the impacts of your experience.

And for the burdened. Burdens are hard. But burdens grow like a fire on gasoline when stored in isolation. I know in many ways isolation isn't your choice, but deciding I no longer want to feel isolated is.

"No one will understand" is a lie your burden is telling you. I get it, not everyone WILL understand. Not everyone wants to. But someone does. I promise you. Begin the search for that someone.

Maybe it's a counselor. A pastor. A friend.

Not everyone understands that your system for finding a healer is broken. Not everyone feels your isolation, and many who do will blame you for it. But your life is worth the search for the one who will feel it without judgment.

So search.

Please search.

Because when people ask me today - and even when they don't ask me - I will say, our greatest collective threat IS our isolation.

It's such a lethal combination - the damage our isolation does to us as individuals and to our greater togetherness and unity - AND - layered on top of that - is the reality that we are better than ever at hiding the degree to which we experience isolation.

We need a revival. A meeting in the middle of people who are willing to ask, "are you ok" - and the people who are bravely walking toward them with a willingness to offer up "I am not ok."

Our world is not ok.

Our attachment systems are broken.

But they can be healed. They can be - if we will meet in the middle. The hurting and the healers, just meeting in the middle.