It is well documented by conservative science how a human being deals with trauma.
Trauma first overwhelms and then destroys the body’s nervous system.
It affects cognitive ability –
the ability to translate experience into meaning –
it steals the ability to imagine a different way of being in the world.*
Trauma affects memory creating blanks – holes in the fabric that cannot be recovered except perhaps through dreams visions, sensing, intuiting, having experiences with Nature that the rational mind does its best to resist.
Trauma is stored in our bodies.
Our bodies are the Record Keepers.
Trauma is passed down from one generation to another.
It is believed that humans pass down intergenerational trauma for at least three generations. In a real way our experiences may not even belong to us.
Perhaps most important is that trauma records what we feel or felt, not necessarily what happened.
I would add that trauma also affects what we sense, intuit, think.
I am a woman whose life has been punctuated by so much trauma, known and unknown that I am amazed that I have managed to stay alive.
Someone who has succeeded escaping serious trauma or is still in denial of its existence and impact on psyche, soul and body will often end up becoming yet one more abuser.
Recently I had an experience that almost killed me.
It has been almost two months and it is writer in me that is compelled to document this experience in a myriad of ways – to write myself through what happened in order to release the demonic forces that almost destroyed me.
Every time I enter this bottomless pit of confusion and re-surface new insights emerge.
I can feel the dark power of the swamp – the quagmire – shaking ground that I am so courageously traversing.
The compassion I feel for myself increases tenfold each time I am willing to face what comes next.
My intention is twofold:
Continue the task.
Allow the story to unfold.
Learning to love and cherish my self/Self is a lifetime goal that I will (most probably) not reach.
Critical to my well – being is my commitment to try.
11/7/23
Note: I have become headachy, frightened, and anxious just penning these words.
The peaceful looking waters hide what lies below the threshold of what we think we know….
FIRST SNOW
Silence
at dawn
Slate gray
First snow
on the way.
Hairy chirps
hammers insects
from
a tangled tree
outside my window
cherished
by me
since she
was a
seed…
Scalloped
shelf fungi
reveal
diseased entry
from her wound.
White Pine
Blister Rust
not only
kills Conifers
but strikes
Wild Apples
too.
Will this one
turn dusky orange?
I witnessed
the hole
beneath her
left unattended
for a year
sensed
her vulnerability.
She would not survive
brutal pruning
or shattering o limbs.
Oh, how I
resisted awareness…
of what my body knew…
death would claim
her golden fruit
Acceptance
turned the key.
This November
chickadees feast
on skeletal branches
Downy
drills holes
in cracked gray skin
I am saying goodbye…
First snow
in November
asks only
that I
stay Present
for the Dying
to feel Peace.
This stark
white world,
landscape of
deep sleep
months of
winter ahead
comforting
low
light.
A brush
with death
so unexpected
a long dark tunnel
a threshold crossing
Fire turned Ash
erasing the past
A Web of
pulsing Roots
sparks of Light
weave silvery
silken tapestries
between
woman and tree
hidden
from all but the initiated
deep
Underground.
It has been my habit to resist the coming of winter although I do embrace the dark, the slowing down, the stillness, the falling leaves, the first dusting of snow. It is strange to feel an absence of the usual regret because I will not be as free to come and go during the coming snowy months.
I feel synchronized with this Turning on a level I never experienced before. I lean into the coming of a powdery white world or one of slippery ice with acceptance of what will be when most of nature sleeps under a warm blanket. Wild storms may come and go as I gain more strength, sink into deep sleep with my beloved dogs, brave harsh winds and hope the plow comes to clear the pathway, peer out frozen windows, listen and watch for birds. Visit with caring friends. I will dream new dreams and write more stories as the months pass appreciating the gift of Now.
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Feminism and Religion 
Hope you are healing well enough? Referring to your recent accident.
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“I will dream new dreams and write more stories as the months pass appreciating the gift of Now.” I especially love this sentence in this beautiful evocation of the courage of stepping into trauma, facing it head on, and the gifts that brings. You put into words what I, too, have experienced in my own way. May the coming months bring continued insights and healing.
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Just now I am struggling with NOW – ugh !
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Thanks Sarah, you are so right. My background is in gestalt psychotherapy, what you are describing is trauma very much related to what I have termed patriarchal social/cultural conditioning and indeed it is generational, we are only now really taking the lid off of “mental illness” that is directly rooted in patriarchal conditioning such as narcissism-root cause, denial of self, our true nature that we walked away from in childhood to fit a patriarchal script. Hysteria, denying girls and woman wanting, to be-do-have, neurosis, OCD, ADD ADHD, Etc. all related.
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YES YES YES! Such a relief to receive validation – trauma is routinely ignored – this patriarchal script is so deadly that NONE of us are immune. Let me tell you a story – after my fall and abuse from a female neighbor I sent her a piece I wrote on trauma without personalizing it with these words “this involves YOU” – immediately I got a response that let me know my target had hit the mark…. after retreating into the false friendship we didn’t have – the woman is a liar – (first to herself of course) she wanted to know what the words I wrote meant – I wrote “TRAUMA OFTEN INVOLVES BETRAYAL “could I speak to this issue” she asked innocently. Naturally I never responded. Point made – she got it!
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I am not one for psychological labels, I need to shake my head when I see what is going on culturally, everyone is a psychopath, narcissist, compassion please, if they only knew that patriarchal social/cultural conditioning is behind it! As I said, I go to the root, what is here, what created this, here is where the healing begins. To conform to patriarchy, women had to give up their needs, be taken care of by men, dominator men-patriarchy being a dominator culture, men over women, nature and so on. Giving up our needs, creates/created a bifercation or put another way a mind body split also known today as being dis-embodiement, hence a disconnection from feelings, as our feeling and our needs are hard wired together sort of speak in that we can not possibly know what we need if we do not know what we are feeling and it all began with being denied needing. Awareness is everything, awareness equals consciousness, we can not begin to heal that which we are unaware of right and so we go to the root, what happened here. Awareness is the beginning, ah I was denied needing, which created my disembodiement and so the work is to come back into your body and re-connect with your feeling and needs, yes it takes work and, so does everything great, right! Patriarchal social cultural conditioning creates trauma, does a number on the central nervous system because it creates/created the 24/7 fight or flight loop/pattern. Transendental meditation heals the central nervous system, brings it back on board. Awareness allows us to realize what created the 24/7 fight or flight loop in the first place, patriarchy social/cultural conditioning of course, being here and now will help with that. Please pardon any spelling mistakes.
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I found this article and poem particularly helpful, Sarah, given the traumatic year I have been experiencing since my book was published. First with an ankle fracture that happened on the grass in the graveyard of a small chapel next to an ancient well that had been recently bulldozed. Then with my husband’s stroke a month after my healing. I am facing the trauma daily, gaining insight and uncovering what needs to be released. First there was shock then grief which incorporated feelings stored in the body melting into the present situation daily, every time there is a trigger I can only describe it as being like a bereavement. My husband will not, it seems make a full recovery, and I too am stepping into this ‘GIFT OF NOW’ with all its implications. Even so, I am surprised to experience a growing strength and bouts of creativity contained within it all. Retreating into the dark of winter has been helpful but the light is returning and with it may come new insight. The triggers are beginning to weaken a little and Life will go on though it will be different now.
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I think trauma constellates both grief and also opens us to new ways of being in the world… BEING IN THE NOW seems particularly critical when I find myself sliding…We are such fragile beings really and we have been socialized into this “buck up” -” no feelings please” heroic culture that denies our actual realities daily…..I think it’s important to understand what we are feeling after being triggered… sometimes this takes a while – at least for me.
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Here is something else grief is something that is poo-pooed within patriarchy, so is death, people are terrified of dying and here it is we can not fully live until we overcome our fear of dying and we can not let go of what needs to be let go of without grieving our losses fully. Our feelings matter.
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Brilliant Sarah, this is so true!
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I agree about being socialized into this no-feelings heroic culture as you so aptly put it, Sara. The soul doesn’t heal without experiencing the emotions accompanying trauma, and it may then appear as a physical illness. Having the strength to cope does not mean we avoid emotion, the two things can be experienced simultaneously. The hero, I feel would be more authentic for allowing the feelings. Doing everything I need to do in my situation and flowing with the emotions is how I can handle it. I have seen your courage in previous writings and now you are working with the emotions and it doesn’t matter how long it takes since pace is individual.
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Brilliant piece Iona, you are so bang on.
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Ah but because I live in my body I am always aware of my feelings even if I don’t know what they are or mean in any given moment… some days I confess, I wish I didn’t. Not really but the idea is tempting – relief from grief – especially regarding Earth
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