What Happened to You

interpersonal rupture and repair is good for building resilience.

The core elements are awareness coupled with connectedness. Together, these can create a trauma-informed community.

until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. The wounds will bleed through and stain your life, through alcohol, through drugs, through sex, through overworking. You have to have the courage to pull out the wound and begin to heal yourself.

This is the lesson I hope everyone carries with them from our conversation, too. We must understand and heal the wounds of the past before we can move forward.

It is true, though, that the cost of wisdom can be very high. And for many people, the pain never goes
away. The wise learn how to carry their burden with grace, often to protect others from the emotional intensity of their pain.

Trauma and adversity, in a way, are gifts. What we do with these gifts will differ from person to person.

As you point out, if you don’t give back to yourself, you simply will not be effective as a teacher, a leader, a supervisor, a parent, a
coach, anything. Self-care is huge. Unfortunately, many people feel some guilt about taking care of themselves; they view self-care as selfish. It’s not selfish—it is essential. Remember, the major tool you have in helping others change—whether you are a parent, teacher, coach, therapist, or friend—is you. Relationships are the currency of change.

Touch is as essential for healthy physical and emotional development as calories and vitamins. If infants aren’t held or rocked—if
they don’t experience the loving warmth of a caregiver’s touch—they won’t grow. In fact, they can die.

Many people have had the experience of feeling “exhausted” after a day of travel, even if all they did was stand in a few lines and sit on a plane. This happens because your brain was continuously monitoring thousands of new stimuli. Remember: Activating your stress-response systems, even at a moderate level, for long periods of time is physically and emotionally exhausting.

Disconnection is disease. I think the Māori elders were right, and that there is some correlation between rising suicide rates and the increased fraying of our social fabric.

We are now raising our children and youth in environments that are both relationally impoverished and sensory overloading from the proliferation of screen-based technologies.

Well, the capacity to demonstrate empathy is a function of key neural networks in the brain, and these networks are organized on a use-dependent basis. In other words, just as language fluency requires exposure to lots of conversation and verbal stimulation, “empathic fluency” requires sufficient repetition with caring relational interactions. And our modern world is not providing these opportunities for our children.