Healing trauma’s fracture

When trauma rips apart the fabric of your life a huge void opens up where you are removed from the upper world of normal waking life.  You feel as though a great distance separates you from these others who seems like strangers, from another land that you once felt to be home, but which trauma has revealed to you is no longer a safe resting place.

The sense of trust in a seemless continuity is torn apart and just perhaps there is a deeply spiritual aspect to this, in that in facing the void or the deep dark empty space you become aware of your mortality but also, maybe, just maybe you become aware on some level that the soul is timeless that the ego and all its habitual coverings is on some level only temporary, as these coverings hide a deep truth that those who have not gone through trauma cannot see.

Today when I was talking to the breast nurse who was dressing the wound left after a breast biopsy was performed we spoke about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  The nurse was sharing how much compassion she had for soldiers returning from war, I was contemplating with her the terrible predicament of soldiers returning from the Vietnam War who were shamed by civilians for their involvement in that war whilst carrying horrific memories and traumatic imprints which made their lives a living hell.

It seems that the experience of a death threatening illness or involvement in traumatic experiences like wars and accidents rips the fabric of our life apart and never quite puts it back together in the same way.  The torn apart fragments can decimate our relationships, the intrusive flashbacks can alter behaviour and give it a reactive violent slant which kills love, related and connectedness.  Only to the degree that empathy is shown can we begin to heal.  Only by reassembling the fractured pieces and talking about them over and over can we rebuild the bridges and connections within our minds, bodies, emotions and hearts that have been torn apart.

As we build this bridge, as we allow ourselves to inhabit our bodies again and feel the way through instead of erecting defences or running strategies we bear witness to the terrible truth.  Love allows this.   Love allows us to open up and embrace what had to be buried or hidden.  Love lets in the light to the dark places.  Hate and fear would keep us separate.  It would find a way to deny trauma that exists.  Hate would not honour us or our true journey.

How can we hate this, hard as it is?  The wounds we had to bear, the struggle we had to undergo, the torn ruptures which broke our hearts all  took us into a chrysalis from within which we must work to become butterflies.  Trauma tears apart the fabric of our lives but we can take the torn pieces and integrate them into a kalidescope of beauty,  in and through owning our wounded torn places we give birth to love, to acceptance, to wisdom, to healing.