Trauma

DEMAND ACCOUNTABILITY. Accountability is the mechanism that ensures our commitment to the previous goals. It’s also our way to state clear expectations of others, especially those in positions of power—political and otherwise. The more we hold ourselves and others accountable to compassion in thought and deed, nonviolence, and the knowledge that comes from education, the more effective we’ll be in our efforts against trauma. It’s also how we can work together to build a world that reflects upon us better as a species.

LEARN AND EDUCATE. We must commit ourselves to lifelong learning and also to teaching others, especially the children entrusted to our care. Ideally, this book has been educational, but it certainly isn’t the last word on trauma. We need to constantly examine our stories and thought patterns and guide ourselves with clarity and compassion. We also need to instill in our children an education that empowers their resilience to trauma. Education also means learning to see through the contrived and self-serving agendas advanced by others (often through ever-present media), especially when they involve attempts to justify trauma-inducing practices through religious, political, social, or legal arguments.

TREAT OURSELVES AND OTHERS WITH COMPASSION. When Mahatma Gandhi advised us to become the change we want to see in the world, he wasn’t advocating for some magical caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation. Instead, Gandhi was guiding us to work hard to have more say in what goes on both inside and outside of us. On the surface, this goal might seem the same as the first, but treating ourselves and others with compassion involves more than thought—it takes action and presence in
the world. And it’s more than refraining from generating more trauma; it’s about employing our compassion in practical ways to decrease the power and impact of trauma in the world.

ACT WITHOUT HARMING OURSELVES OR OTHERS. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (considered the Western “father of medicine”) asked physicians to first commit to do no harm. Ahimsa—“nonviolence”—is a primary principle in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Not making things worse is the first step in making things better, and we must commit to the former for the latter to truly take root. Not doing so is the same as putting the cart before the proverbial horse. This goal itself requires a fundamental commitment to the first goal because compassion empowers our resolve not to be pulled around by blind, self-serving impulses without a thought about the consequences. Doing no harm isn’t an absence of activity; it actually takes conscious effort, especially when trauma has hijacked our limbic system.

CONSIDER OURSELVES AND OTHERS WITH COMPASSION. So much of our lives are lived inside of our heads, and what we think
and tell ourselves there matters immensely. This is where we can harbor angry or hopeless thoughts, which can then turn into destructive fantasies, which can eventually turn into destructive realities. Our minds are the places where we can berate ourselves repeatedly, beating ourselves down without the need for any outside persecutor to do it for us. So, the first goal begins with us transforming whatever trauma might be occurring inside of us and replacing what’s toxic with compassionate thinking. First, we need to be aware of our own thought patterns, and I’ve briefly offered some proven techniques to help with that. We can also use our own understanding and other innovations offered by science (e.g., psychotherapy and psychiatry) and religious traditions (e.g., mindfulness and prayer) to foster a mental environment marked by kindness and compassion.

AVOID EXAGGERATIONS. A flood that devastates a town is horrible and terrible. Using words like horrible and terrible to describe the results of a democratic election you don’t like or people who have different political opinions than you cheapens the descriptive power such words hold and diminishes their true meaning.
2 ABSTAIN FROM LABELING. Far too often, language is employed to generate false similarities and false differences between groups of people. This applies to the two political colors we affiliate with states, to gender and sexuality, to race, and to the nature of our origin in our given country. For example, the word immigrant is used as a charged and binary term in the United States despite the fact that most of the people in the country are here today as a result of immigration.
3 DON’T TRIVIALIZE. Qualifiers that trivialize especially matter when the topic under consideration involves personal trauma and doubly so when the topic is about a type of widespread societal trauma. For example, I’m regularly alarmed at how the term “sexual assault” is employed in health care and the media to minimize the severity of the violence endured, as if the assault were somehow excusable or less impactful because of the sexual nature of the attack. Trivializing traumatic experiences in an offhanded way might not be deliberate, but it can create more trauma nonetheless.
4 THINK ABOUT THE IMPACT. This suggestion applies to the examples above and to countless others. One example that deeply troubles me is the use of the term “burned out” to describe what happens to people in the health-care industry after they’ve reached their breaking point in a system that overworks and devalues them. Instead of decrying problems in the system, the impact of such a term places the responsibility on individual people, unfairly implying weakness and lack of self-care. When we don’t think about the language we use to describe others, we can often become accomplices to trauma, fueling shame in others as opposed to working with them to right unhealthy environments.

Instead of
logical and limbic processes integrating in a series of controlled leaps, what happens inside of us can become more like frantic lunging, as if we were fleeing madly from pain. But the pain of the past has us springing madly toward more pain in the future.

For this reason, it’s crucial that we learn how to help our brains stay calm enough to pay attention to logic, use prior knowledge, and recognize how linear time works. We must help our brains use these limbic system flags in ways that can best serve us because when the flags are more like signs twisted in the wrong direction, or bombs ready to detonate, or panic buttons that trigger more trauma responses, all the flags are going to do is propel us toward unhappy and at times dangerous outcomes.