The Cat is Out of the Bag on Trauma (and Now It’s Our Responsibility)

I’m confident that our time in the history books will include a note that we are in a revolution of healing. Anytime a word becomes so commonplace that it becomes “overused” I find that there is almost always deep truths present. So, maybe people over-reference “healing” in LA, but it’s a sign of something very real, if you ask me.

Therapy, for example, has grown through the grassroots and is headed to ubiquitousness and for good reason. Previous generations can’t say the same and we paid for it with cycles of endless unspoken perpetuation of pain, trauma, and abuse. We’re sorting that out now – thank goodness. 

This blog article isn’t meant to be a rant of trauma as much as it is an acknowledgement of our reality as it stands. Thankfully now we have the language to describe our reality, as well. 

What we now know is that:

1. Trauma lives in our body by way of the central nervous system. 
2. The central nervous system has perfectly working autonomic processes. 
3. If 1 and 2 are true, our state will be informed by our self-protecting CNS and we have the ability to regulate our state with conscious effort. 

This is wonderful news.

Furthermore, since we’re all living this shift from unconscious suffering at the hands of trauma to our central nervous system towards a conscious experience of it, there’s remarkable responsibility falling on our shoulders. 

Our highest, most important responsibility may, in fact, be to learn ourselves well enough to self-regulate.

This would mark the end of countless avenues of suffering and perpetual injury to others. 

Let’s heed this time as a call to action to go inward. Afterall, someone likely carved “know thy self” at the entrance of Apollo’s temple at Delphi in ancient Greece for good reason.