Trauma Response

A lover recently called my work "a trauma response."

Fair. Honestly, fair.

I share what has resurrected me time and time again from total obliteration. My practices, my ways of thinking, my belief systems, the experiences I seize upon, the way I steward my attention to thrive beyond what anyone might rightfully call trauma.

It's all happening in fractals, like river eddies. Working in juvie for 3 years, I could make a strong case for receiving a form of C-PTSD there, and yet, it was integral to my recovery from my childhood abuse trauma and the trauma of my mother’s sudden death. That experience of real threat and danger, of necessary hypervigilance, is the bedrock of my commitment to a peaceful and easy life, and the way I identified the ingredients from the contaminants. Processing the fear patterns that job instilled in me took years, sorting signal from noise, and now I have essential knowledge of certain signals. I deeply understand the somatics of my body, and how much more there is to learn.

In some ways it feels like my path out of trauma was lesser and lesser traumas until I learned to get out. Except "out" isn't real. I got out of the idea of trauma as a crime, a burden, a prison, a penance, any distinction at all. I got out of the idea of myself as a victim, by getting INTO the understanding of myself as the victim, the rescuer, AND, most painfully, most sacredly, the perpetrator.

Paradoxically, I hold trauma harmless. Trauma is so innocent, that's the real grief of it. What comfort, the idea of an evil causer, a perpetrator driven by something other than what is inside of me, who might be swept off the face of the earth, whose just and righteous punishment might erase all my pain.

Being healed of this does not mean I no longer spin through the fractals of the facts of trauma, it means that I know them as the events of life herself. I know there is no cure, so I don't disturb my own peace with resistance. I know that there is no prevention, so I get to be in now, unbothered by planning for the future.

I swim deeper when I don't have a concern for my own survival. Knowing I cannot die, I drown peacefully, enjoying the sensation of lungs full of water, for a change. I rest while I am dead, resurrect with delight in this brand new world.

This is HER. This is the feminine which terrifies you. She has not defied death, she is one with death. She has not mastered life, she is life living itself while it knows that.

Oh, like we wish there was a cause of pain, we wish there was a cause of bliss. This feminine you could hurt could also be predictably pleased by you, doing the perfect mating dance, constructing the perfect nest. Oh, to believe I could do life right!

But it is brutal, so brutal, perhaps traumatizingly brutal, that there is nothing you can do about the fact that you can do anything. Nothing you do can be right, nothing you do can be wrong. You will feel how it feels to do what you do.

She has chosen you, and in her you will face yourself.

Life has chosen you, and no, you will not get out alive. You will not be safe, but you might experience safety. You will have trauma, and you will have agency, and you will have moments when you believe trauma saying you have no agency.

The sad truth is that there is no crime. There is no fairness. There is no rightness but reality, no morality, no ethics. There are practices which maintain systems to integrity, and practices which degrade systems to collapse. As humans, our perspective gives us preference.

There is a larger entropy acting on all the systems, such that none, eventually, survive. There are practices which maintain and improve system components, and practices which destroy system components more quickly than use or entropy. There are physical and metaphysical specifications which apply to all things, like gravity.

There is life, having chosen you, having her way with you in any and every way you allow, every way you show up for, every way you can't get away from. Life will seize you and pin you down and tell you you'll never get up again and you will believe life about that until you start hearing her offering you more. She will tell you anything and everything. Believing her about how you are damaged and flawed makes you disbelieve her about everything else, distrust her, when she is the one who tells you EVERYTHING, when you are the one to latch on selectively to what's most compelling to you.

A client last year said to me, "This isn't trauma, this is just my life."

Amen.

Trauma ends when you accept that it is LIFE, when you honor that trauma does not end and choose your favorite place from which to meet it.

Accounting for the way life has offered you the idea you are broken and flawed, listen out—is she offering any evidence that you are whole and grown and honed to a unique specification?

Accounting for the damage within you, can you see what's too broken to go on and recycle it? Can you see what's easy to repair? Can you see what's merely dirty, neglected, taken for granted for the way that it has never given out, never given any sign of giving out?

The thing that my trauma destroyed was my willingness to participate in certain practices, to go certain places with experiences I recognize early and easily, now. I recycled the broken parts of me, the parts of the parts willing to participate in that, into strong convictions of choosing other things. Trauma did not destroy me, it refined me, it showed me where refinement was available. My pain advised me where to look, and I listened, and I obey pain to this day, I know her language intimately.

The world is offering you everything, including the idea that there is nothing you can do about it.

It's all true! There's nothing you can do about it. It's all true! You are infinitely powerful.