“All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.” - Resmaa Menakem

Trauma is a memory living on in our bodies here and now, not digested or integrated. These memories can be that of war, car accidents, natural disasters, rape, or other terrible situations, and yet trauma can also be as simple as not being attuned to by the people in our life who are meant to love us—what we call developmental trauma.

Imagine a little girl, excited and enthralled about a drawing she made at school, she rushes home after to show her mother with excitement, to find her mother busy cooking dinner. As she holds up the drawing to her mother’s face, “Mommy, look, look, look what I drew today in school!” Her mother responds shortly, “Stop it!” and brushes the girls drawing away and continues on with her tasks. Moments like this, repeatedly occurring in parent-child relationships over time, cause what is now called developmental trauma. Then there is the other kind of childhood trauma that is more overtly abusive, such as physical or sexual violations, calling children stupid, and so on.

Trauma-informed care is being attuned to these varying kinds of trauma, and the somatic, relational holding patterns humans get into when these types of experiences are not digested or integrated. Trauma is not healed alone. We need the support and love of other conscious attentive beings to allow our bodies to unwind and relax once again. I am here to walk this path together with you, to digest the once indigestible, to feel what was once too painful to feel, in the safety and trust found in our relationship over time.

Here’s how some experts define trauma:

“Any experience of fear and/or pain that doesn’t have the support it needs to be digested and integrated into the flow of our developing brains.”

- Bonnie Bodenach, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Trauma is specifically an event that overwhelms the central nervous system, altering the way we process and recall memories. Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then. It’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.”

- Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Failures of love in early childhood. The common tendency is to associate trauma exclusively with war, veterans, holocaust survivors, torture victims and others, generally adults who have been through horrific experiences. Of course, these are all occasions of unspeakable trauma. But in my experience the shock of discovering that those who were supposed to love us failed is likewise traumatic, and can have lifelong consequences.”

- Bruce Sanguin, Dismantled: How Love and Psychedelics Broke a Clergyman Apart and Put Him Back Together