Trauma & My Story (Part 1)

There are many ways to be traumatized. Usually, we only think about shock trauma when talking about trauma – accidents, physical abuse or severe diseases. There are many other events that are more subtle and may be ongoing over many years that are just as traumatic. Maybe even more so as they are often overlooked and not validated.

One of the most well-known researchers and author on trauma is Peter Levine Phd.(2005), he emphasizes how ultimately:

(…) trauma is about loss of connection - to ourselves, to our bodies, to our families, to others, and to the world around us. This loss of connection is often hard to recognize because it doesn’t happen all at once. It can happen slowly, over time, and we adapt to these subtle changes sometimes without even noticing them. These are the hidden effects of trauma, the ones most of us keep to ourselves. We may simply sense that we do not feel quite right, without ever becoming fully aware of what is taking place; that is, the gradual undermining of our self-esteem, self-confidence, feelings of well-being, and connection to life. Our choices become limited as we avoid certain feelings, people, situations, and places. The result of this gradual constriction of freedom is the loss of vitality and potential for the fulfillment of our dreams. (p. 9)

This is something that I can confirm from my experience how the influence of social conditioning is often so subtle and ongoing that I for a long time did not even realize what was going on.

I think there always needs to be some kind of awakening, of getting aware of this something that is going on under the surface of human experience for us to even see the possibility of change. I will refer to this later in the chapter “Desire for change”. Chellis Glendinning (1995) also elaborates on how trauma permeates every aspect of us as individuals and our social environment. As I said before, I am as convinced as she is that there are so many traumatized people in our western cultures:

Every trauma that occurs is an individual trauma perpetrated by individuals and experienced by individuals. Every trauma is a social trauma with roots in social institutions and implications for society at large, and every trauma is a historic trauma, fostered by the past and reverberating into the future. Our society is made up of vast numbers of traumatized individuals, and our culture has come into being through a universally traumatizing process. The outcome - today’s technological civilization with its massive psychopathologies and unending ecological disasters - is a collective reflection of the traumatized personality. (p. 126)

It is important to note, that trauma is highly individualistic, “that people can be traumatized by any event they perceive (consciously or unconsciously) to be life-threatening.

This perception is based on a person’s age, life experience, and even their constitutional temperament.” (Levine 2005: p. 11) It is really about how people perceive a specific situation, so the same event can be traumatizing for some people and not for others. It is basically about your perception of life: “(…) when it comes to trauma, the critical factor is the perception of threat and the incapacity to deal with it.” (Levine 2005: p. 11)

For me, the growing awareness at first did not come from suffering or pain, but an insight into something larger, a feeling of “there has got to be more”.

Writing my first master’s thesis in English Literature in 2002/2003 I had an epiphany. It was as if time stood still, and I was asking myself: How in all the world did I end up here? Right the next moment my thought was: There must be better ways to find out what you want to do with your life. So, after I had finished my studies, I started researching and reading about the wide field of personal growth. It was only after many years, in 2016 that two people made the connection between what I had been writing about in my thesis and my tentative insight into a different way of being in the world.

The topic of my first master’s thesis was how values are transmitted through children’s fantasy literature: as in the worldwide phenomenon Harry Potter.

There seemed to be universal human values that the books spoke to, as they were so successful in so many countries. In the introduction to my thesis, I had looked at The Hobbit more closely. With that, I was deeply embedded in thinking about values, about the interplay between good forces and bad forces and how often that distinction is not so obvious. The Hobbit can also be seen as being about the hero’s journey. So that was the backdrop against which my own search started. I then dove deep into the field of coaching and it took me almost twenty years to deeply understand what works and what does not work while still being aware that I will never have all the answers. Over the years I have looked at many coaching approaches, healing modalities, energy work and alternative models of education.

Also important were my two minor subjects: Intercultural Communication and Sociology.

So basically, you could say that in English Literature I was looking at all kinds of stories and through those stories at human desires and behavior. With Sociology, I thought a lot about sociological correlations and also human behavior. What Intercultural Communication did for me was open me up to all kinds of different world views. At some point it was totally clear to me that for whatever I thought was right - there was for sure someone, if not thousands of people, in the world who thought that the exact opposite was true. From that point onwards, I started to question everything.

“I did not want to help children and youth cope with a broken system but instead, I wanted to help build a new model for learning and living.”

Over the following years, I did several training programs, started to read about alternative education and did training in therapy for learning disabilities. With that I realized at some point that I did not want to help children and youth cope with a broken system but instead, I wanted to help build a new model for learning and living. I don’t even like to use the word learning disabilities, as that is putting the blame on the individual, where what it basically is, is a disability of society to compassionately support each of its members towards the best possible personal unfoldment.