The
questions are: what traumatic events have happened? How are your body and mind
repairing the injuries sustained from those events? What have you done in your daily life to help
yourself recover? What justice do you
require from society to support your personal healing?
We
create our own reality, and often there is more than one to choose from.
It took
many years for me to go from the simple question “How healthy do you feel?” to
“What can we do together to make you healthy again?
Healing
begins with a choice.
Sometimes
self-healing is buried so deep within a person’s hopelessness and despair that
it is impossible for the trauma sufferer to feel its existence.
While
every human being lives and operates in a social world that can be hurtful,
cruel, and violent, this same world can bring about salvation, joy, and
nurturance.
Eliminating
suffering is not enough in any trauma case.
The goal must also be to re-establish a life of pleasure and joy, an
extremely difficult prospect.
Our
fear of the violated remains strong. Overcoming this fear and moving forward
depends upon the universal human capacity for empathy. This ability for interconnectedness allows us
to assist others as they move into new and hopefully better worlds. Empathy allows us to see that some
traumatized people need to talk, others to deny, and still others to be
relieved by medication.
The
concept of self-healing demands a shift away from emphasizing illness and
damage to appreciating natural healing processes.
