Healing is about coming back to our choice and to aliveness 

We know we are healing when we feel like we can take new actions, make different choices, and feel connected to our aliveness, even under the same old pressures or inside of the same contexts.

We hold trauma and oppression as intimately linked. We can define trauma as any event or ongoing set of conditions that is too big for the nervous system to integrate. Traumatic events and conditions undermine our capacity for safety, dignity, and belonging 

Healing from the impacts of trauma and oppression involves:

• Building embodied resources/resilience 
• Integration 
• Building new skills/competencies 
• Meaning Making/new narratives   

Embodied Resource/Resilience

Trauma and oppression leave us without access to safety, dignity, and belonging. This can leave us feeling unmoored, unsafe, without connection to pleasure and possibility. Building embodied resilience or somatic resources supports our nervous systems to know it’s safe enough to feel, that there is something other than the pain to come back to in the present moment. We know that there are common factors that support our resource, our aliveness, and our resilience. 

These common factors are: 

• Being connected to something bigger than ourselves like spirit or nature
• Connection to at least one other person 
• Feeling like we’re making a contribution

To build a somatic resource you can ask yourself the question: When have I felt most alive? What was I doing? Who was I with? Go to that memory and notice what you feel in your body. Play with turning the sensation up or down. 

Integration

Trauma lives in and organizes our bodies and our nervous systems. It has a way of getting stuck and keeping us from living the lives we want. To integrate trauma means that there is a place for that stuckness to go. It gets to move. The impulse that it is holding gets satisfied. The integration of our trauma happens from the body up. Talking will never move us beyond the stuckness that trauma and oppression create. 

Integration happens when an old need gets met and satisfied. If you feel constantly stuck in a state of appeasing others, for example you might ask yourself: what does that take care of for me and where do I feel that impulse in my body? You then might offer that place some acknowledgement for what it’s taken care of without trying to change it. That could look like telling it “good job for taking care of me” or placing a hand over that space and offering it some knowing that it is seen. 

Building new skills/competencies

Trauma and oppression take away our capacity to take action in the world. We are left without the ability to shape the world back while it is doing so much shaping of us. Healing trauma involves the development of these capacities that have been taken from us or that we never got to have in the first place. Some examples are boundaries, being able to ask for what we need, mutual connection, being able to move through conflict choicefully, to dream and to vision. 

What skills and competencies do you need to fulfill on what you care about? What kinds of actions do you need to take that aren’t currently possible for you? Make a list? How might you practice these a little bit every day to build muscle memory towards them?

Meaning Making/new narratives

We often come to healing work with a fixed narrative of who we are and what is happening in our world. This narrative is naturally interrupted as we heal and the wounded parts of ourselves are attended to and cared for. In the process of our healing, we make new meaning and find new narratives for who we are and how we want to be in the world. For example:  where we once believed we were too much, on the other side of healing we now have great respect for that part of ourselves and instead know our wholeness in a deeply embodied way. 

You might ask yourself: What do I long for? What contribution am I here to make? What really matters to me? Who and how are my longings asking me to be in the world?