For Those Who Walk With Others on the Path to Healing

For over a decade, I’ve worked in various capacities as a mental health professional but for longer than that I’ve been with people as they experienced trauma—first as a firefighter, then as an Emergency Medical Technician, then as a Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Counselor, then as a crisis counselor who works with first responders. But perhaps most importantly, I am a trauma survivor myself. I wrote about my observations from inside the trauma community in my new book After Trauma:

“Since stepping into the counseling community myself I’ve noticed a tendency to over-pathologize trauma. There is an inclination to draw lines between an experience and its anticipated trigger, to expect that people who have felt trauma will hold it or identify with it in the same way, to forget that there is a person in addition to their symptoms. The way shame blocks one’s ability to comfort the younger versions of ourselves that were hurt is discounted and dismissed. I’ve seen non-trauma-informed therapists make it too intellectual. They list positive coping skills, offer the definition of resilience, and send people on their way. But trauma is felt. It is lived in all our relationships, especially the relationship we have with ourselves.

"Trauma is stored in little pockets of our brain, written into our cells, carried in our blood. We can only shed it the same way we got it: through experience. We must look at overcoming trauma through a holistic lens, by supporting people through new positive experiences that help rewrite the parts of their brain that learned fear, through movement to release the stored stress our bodies hold, through acknowledging losses, and by supporting the meaning-making process. And we must walk with survivors on their path to assure them above all else that they are worthy of help holding the weight and that someday it will not feel so heavy.”

To clinicians, chaplains, counselors, behavioral health specialists, and all those who walk with others on their path to healing: I encourage you to continuously work to see your clients as whole people aside from their trauma, symptoms, and coping skills. See who they can be when their overcoming is secure and speak to them from that perspective. When we are in the trauma and its aftermath it can feel like our most significant identifier and sometimes, the most interesting thing about us. There is a difference between finding coherence in our life story and integrating all experiences into who we are as a person vs. only seeing ourselves from the perspective of the trauma. Help us to form our identity around the overcoming vs. the trauma itself.