There’s a lot of talk about “integrating” or “healing”
traumatic experience which I believe has led to a lot of confusion.
It's important to re-envision words like “integration” and
“healing," as they have lost their relevance, aliveness, and magic.
Additionally, for many they have become further tools of shame, blame, and
self-attack, re-enactments of an early environment lacking in empathic
attunement. We must breathe life back into these ideas in an imaginative,
grounded, and creative way.
Often what is meant by “integrating” or “healing” trauma
(loosely defined here as experience characterized by unbearable or overwhelming
affect) is that one day we will “get over it,” “transcend” it, meditate or
"manifest" it away, or otherwise purge it from our
psychic-emotional-somatic being.
In my clinical experience (in sitting in the fire with many
courageous men and women with the most heartbreaking histories), this view of
trauma is in large part inaccurate, aggressive, misguided, and at times even
dangerous and violent. There are some things that happen to us that we will
never “get over” nor would this even be an appropriate goal or lens to use in
approaching the sacredness of the human temple.
Let us set aside any spirituality or “healing” which is
(unconsciously or subtly) rooted in self-abandonment, self-attack, and
self-hatred and replace it with slowness, empathy, and a grounded, relentless
compassion. We must re-enchant this entire area of inquiry with love.
But if what we mean by “integration” is discovering a place
inside us where we can hold and contain our experience, make sense of what
happened in new ways, and discover deeper meaning, then these concepts can come
alive again. Slowly, over time, guided by new levels of kindness, clear-seeing,
and multileveled awareness, we can begin to bear that which has been
unbearable, providing sanctuary and safe passage for the pieces of the broken
world to re-organize.
As we train ourselves to re-inhabit our bodies even in the
face of profoundly disturbing cognitions, feelings, and sensations, we can
begin to weave a more "integrated" narrative of our lives,
re-authoring the sacred story of who we are, our purpose here, and what is most
important to us. We can gather the pieces into a coherent whole and begin to
trust in the validity of our experience again.
The goal then is not some fixed state where we have
successfully purged an aspect of our self-experience from what we are, as if it
were some wretched foreign substance, but rather to find a larger home for it
within us. Slowly, we can allow what has become frozen and solidified to thaw
and become flexible. Ultimately, it is love that will soften the wounds of the
body and the heart, for they will never unwind in an environment of
self-aggression. It's just not safe or majestic enough there.
Over time, beyond merely holding and containing the sacred
wound, we are invited to practice intimacy with it, to come even closer than we
imagined possible to the lost children of the psyche and soma … discovering
that they have not come to harm, but only to return home, to resume their
instinctive place in the inner family.
