![]() We race at a hundred miles an hour or are stuck still on the spot. It makes us hypervigilant, jumpy and irritable. It upscales our emotions, our suffering, our sensitivity to the world. It is so difficult to heal, because trauma is plus-sized, affecting everything on a big scale. So when I pose the question Can we heal? there is nothing glib about my response. I carry with me on a daily basis a deep empathy for the suffering I see all around me. I have met and engaged with people who face not just childhood trauma but now breast cancer too people who regularly are raped by their partners people whose children are in care people who still are being abused by criminal gangs masquerading as their family. And I have met many, many severely distressed people whose daily lives are filled with the agony of both remembered and unremembered trauma, who try so hard to heal and yet who are constantly being pushed down both by their symptoms and the oppressive circumstances of post traumatic life around them. Many times I strayed right up to the edge of the chasm and even though I chose not to throw myself in, it’s still a wonder that I didn’t stumble in. It took a decade for me fully to regain a sense of equilibrium, to be able to get up on a morning without feeling that I couldn’t face what lay ahead. And if recovery is impossible, then why are we even trying? When despair grips us so tightly, when everything is so painful inside that suicide feels the only reasonable course of action, then knowing whether or not healing is possible is fundamentally a matter of life or death.Īnd recovery from trauma is hard. I lived for many years overwhelmed by trauma, the symptoms of unhealed suffering. I could well understood the agony in her eyes. ‘Can we heal?’ she asked, quivering with the significance of what she was saying, as if her very life depended on it. I caught her eye and smiled and, brimming with emotion, she came towards me. ![]() A lady with dark hair walked away, then came back, and now was suspended in mid-motion, as if stuck in approach-avoid. It was just as we were packing away on a training day.
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