Transitioning From a Trauma-Based To A Trauma-Informed Society
From the very beginning of life — even in the womb — safe, stable, attuned, connected relationships that are nurturing are critical. There are studies that are very clear that when moms are experiencing a lot of stress or there’s stress in the environment during pregnancy, it starts to impact the nervous system and the development of the child. Certainly, in the very beginning of life, that need for attunement to even map our tenth cranial nerve, which regulates so much of the body’s nervous system, starts to be impacted.
Studies show that those who look back on their lives and report having had ACEs are many, many, many-fold more likely to also report heart disease, lung disease, alcoholism, not having life satisfaction, any number of health or behavior problems, and certainly depression or anxiety. ACEs are recognized as biological causal factors for disease.
Deactivating shame and building compassion with awareness begins the healing journey. It opens the door to activate what I call the will to be well. Because a lot of the time, people with trauma are not actually seeking to be helped. There are a lot of defenses that can happen, and even more health behaviors. And a person has to want to engage in all the things we know now are so important to well-being, including meditation and movement, but also, of course, diet and exercise, even basic things that often get deactivated with trauma.
Awareness is the first step — and awareness with compassion, acceptance for where you are — then connecting with the body. There are nine levels of brain integration that need to be gone through, but meditation and mindfulness practice is the first step to opening that up.
There are also the relational practices of coming forward and engaging in sharing story, feeling safe, and trusting others. If we have trauma, in one way or another, we may never have experienced safety and connection and attunement, so we don’t even know what we’re missing. But as we start to create it with ourselves, we activate the healthy instinct to be connected with one another in a warm and open way. And we have to go through a whole process to be able to unlearn and relearn from the trauma, to allow what’s natural to come forward so that we can emerge into our creative, expressive selves.
Our lived moment-by-moment relational experiences and the experience we have with the self are what’s driving a lot of the biologic and neurologic symptoms of trauma—and at the same time, they can also drive the healing. When we come to the science of trauma and ACEs, and also of healing, what we recognize is that the way to respond to what we learn from the science, and to implement it, is through our own self-awareness and our connection with ourselves and each other, and how we support through systems and structures the sanctity of that. And we recognize what happens when we don’t do that.
There are some formal scientific terms for the ability to enter into relational experience with awareness and one of them is mentalization. It’s not a mental process because the mind is actually a distributed system throughout the whole body. The mind is not in your brain; it’s in your whole being. Mentalization is the ability to feel yourself and know you’re feeling yourself on purpose, and the ability to sense another person on purpose, and sense whether that other person senses that you’re sensing them—or to sense whether that person is able to sense that you’re sensing them.
The key thing we need to be able to do that, first and foremost, is what happens through healthy brain development, through attunement and attachment of the baby and the young child—something called interoception, which is the ability to sense ourselves, our feelings, our body, our needs, our wants, our love. That ability can be cut off pretty significantly when we are not met in a safe, stable, nurturing, relational way as babies, or when we sense stress in the environment. And a way you can activate interoception is through meditation and body awareness.
The mentalization process is the restoration of our capacity to relate to one another in that mutual, integrated way where we house one another within our beings, on purpose, and can sense and attune to when that’s happening or not, and continuously bring it back into attunement the way birds, when they fly and entrain together in the sky, are constantly sensing back into the center of their collective. It’s a biologic sense, but it’s obviously also a deep spiritual construct.
We can access presence through any experience, and by doing that and moving toward what’s happening, even if it’s horrific—especially when in connection with others—we can buffer a lot of the damage by continuously meeting and integrating it, by being present with it. If it’s too overwhelming, say, when we come from trauma and we haven’t developed a strong capacity for presence, then we can’t do that. But we can build, in a preventive way, the capacity to be present with life and experience, so that when we do meet catastrophes, we can access those skills.
Ultimately, my work is about systems change and culture change, where we know that we first have to deal with mindsets. Then we have to deal with our relationships, how people are relating to each other. Then we have to translate that into all the details of how we construct organizations and systems, and pay for things, and train people, and things like that.
Right now, we live in a society based on trauma, so we need to go from being trauma organized to being trauma informed and, eventually, healing centered. We don’t have to wait to get healed. We have to start with healing as prevention, and there are so many opportunities. I believe that it’s actually by meeting what lives in and between us, from a deeper sense of who we really are, that we can create the possibility of experiencing our oneness.