Trauma Resolution

The ins and outs of living in a traumatic age . . .

I don’t care who you are, you have experienced, and carry the effects of, trauma. Trauma is ubiquitous. Being born into modern times itself is a trauma. The world has changed so much in the last 150 years, our evolutionary nature just can’t keep up. We were born to move at the pace of walking (and occasionally running) and yet we barrel through space in cars and trains and planes. Our systems hardly know what hit them. That said, even pre-modern tribal people experienced trauma. It’s inherent in human life. There are earthquakes, accidents, wild animals, furious waters and volcanos etc that cause death and destruction.

There are a few major differences between us moderns and our traditional tribal ancestors:

1. We had less trauma to begin with so we had time to restore and rebuild between traumatic events.
2. We had ceremonial practices of prevention and resilience building so we were stronger going into traumatic situations.
3. We had ceremonial practices for recovery and healing after traumatic events that went beyond our resilience threshold so we were able to continue strengthening ourselves and didn’t get trauma stuck in our bodies.
4. We didn’t inherit trauma from our ancestors to the same degree that is currently the norm.

Many ceremonial practices hinge on inflicting intentional trauma in order to create an opportunity for building resilience through navigation and integration of trauma. These kinds of ceremonies create the circumstances for insights and visions. Visions can release you from patterns of identity so that you become more and more your-self, or less your patterned self. So then you can navigate trauma outside of the ceremony in the big world and eventually guide others through ceremony/resolution.

You may have heard of the concept of the wounded healer . . .

or the idea that it is the crack where the light gets in. These both refer to the power of our wounds and broken-ness, but when you’re stuck and stranded in a society / system that has lost its way from wound to wisdom, it’s little consolation to be told the wound is going to help you.

Talk therapy can be a life-saver.

However, it is quite inefficient (it takes years of going over and over pshycho-active content to see/feel progress) and stuck in the world of intellect and emotions (understanding emotional responses is limited). Often talk therapy has one delving into very painful and/or traumatic experience without proper ability to hold and contain the depth and often ends up being re-traumatizing rather than healing.

On the other hand Coaching and pop psychology don’t go deep at all.

Most methods expect you to just just will-power your wounds away. You’re asked to pretend you have none and snap into a state of suspension. This can be really useful for moments of awareness and can help you see possibilities that you couldn’t before. However, if this is all that is offered, you can set yourself up for disappointment, and feeling like a failure, when you tire of the mental control required to maintain the suspension of your patterned way of thinking.

Myth Mending is about going from wounds to wisdom.

It provides the kind of containment and pace and efficiency that’s needed to engage and resolve trauma. It incorporates Indigenous healing wisdom, the neuro-science of trauma, depth psychology, ancestral healing and more to create a comfortable and inspiring, yet powerful and efficient modality for deep personal transformation, organizational, and community restoration.