Open talk about Trauma

“…trauma is an open door. We all have to make amends to all the people we let in.”

Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monsters

This quote from my recently finished foray into No God, No Monsters really made me pause. There is a lot to unpack in this short bit and that lot got me thinking deeply.

The American Psychological Association defines trauma as “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster.” The examples in this definition all portray singular, one-off events. I believe societally this definition has been expanded lately to include prolonged events instead of being limited to a specific moment. Like when someone lives in a high-violence area, they have smaller moments of trauma that add up to a whole traumatic experience.

Trauma has become a word that people use regularly with many different expectations. It has become a buzzword. So to find it in a fantasy fiction novel, and in such a deep thought, stopped me in my tracks.

I want to take this one piece at a time.

“trauma is an open door.”

How does a traumatic moment create an open door? In my mind, it opens a new way into you. It creates a new lens through which you view the world. Not removing all the old lenses, just adding a new one the person now has to see everything through, stacked up on top of the rest. Like when someone who has been mugged from behind becomes super aware of any person, thing, or movement behind them. They don’t change the majority of the way they interact with the world, just add hyperawareness as protection.

But doors go both ways. And they are used by more than one person. So how does trauma open a person up to others differently? I think that depends on the person and the trauma. But everything I am and how I view the world, informs what I react to, how strongly I react, and how much that reaction affects those around me.

Take someone who has been physically abused, they may have healed to the point where meeting new people is possible. Maybe even shaking a stranger’s hand no longer causes stress. However, when they meet a new person who hugs strangers they would react much more strongly and negatively than a person who hasn’t. Much to the surprise and upset to the hugger. The hugger sees the hug as a welcoming, a breaking of barriers between strangers to make them closer than just a handshake. Yet, in this interaction, it is not. It builds a wall between them and not on purpose by either person. It just springs into being. Causing pain in both people.

Trauma creates a door to the person that isn’t hospitable or welcoming but is the only option. That person who hugs enters an engagement with the abuse survivor without realizing that the door with which they use to connect is the same door the other person experiences fear, mental pain, or other negative emotions through.

The person with the trauma lens has no conscious control of this reaction. They can, with time and a lot of work, gain conscious control. They can adapt around the trauma response, but every person triggers the response before they learn and adapt.

Another reason it’s a door is that it’s now a permanent part of the person and now provides the sole access of the person to the world and the world to the person. The trauma survivor can never access the world without it or other engage with them without passing through it. And this becomes less true with healing.

“We all have to make amends to all the people we let in.”

What does it mean to “make amends”? The dictionary defines it as “compensate or make up for a wrongdoing.” This definition definitely goes further than your basic apology.

How do we make up for a wrong? I know that hubby and I teach our child that an apology is a necessary starting point, but that it is empty words if you don’t adjust the behavior that created the wrong in the first place.

Taking us back to the trauma survivor, this means healing themselves. They will continue to wrong others through their trigger(s) if they don’t, right? And that is a monumental task.

Just like you can remove a door from a building and replace it with a wall, you can heal the opening the trauma created. However, just like that spot in the wall where there was a door, the person who has healed from trauma still has a new part that is not homogeneous to the rest. It is spot weaker than the rest simply because it can never be absorbed fully back into the whole. If healed well, no one from the outside will ever know it existed, but the trauma survivor still has the door marked permanently on the building plans.

So what does this quote mean to those of us who have one of these trauma lenses? I believe it puts the onus on us to find a way to heal so that we don’t continue to spread the trauma we experienced to others. So that we can truly end the cycle the trauma started and rejoin the world without causing more pain.