Can Our World Experience Post-Traumatic Growth?

These days, it’s so important to give and receive gentleness from one another.

Gentleness is a consistent human need, but right now, we may need it in a particularly deep and present way. Our world seems to be reeling from waves of trauma. When we hold awareness of traumatic pain, whether we’ve experienced it directly or felt it via the news cycle, our bodies, minds, and spirits can be deeply affected.

Waves of trauma in our world are not new, of course, but right now, we are especially aware of injustices and forms of insecurity – white supremacy, economic inequality, numerous natural disasters, deportations and family separations, and violence on a massive scale. To be aware of these things is not merely to know about them but to be affected by them.

We need action – decisive, creative, and disruptive action to adequately address and rectify all of these.

And alongside that action, we also need gentleness.

Our bodies need it, our minds need it, our emotions need it, our sense of spiritual longing needs it.

And perhaps, our sense of time needs it too. Here is a paradoxical thing I have learned over the years about trauma:

Trauma often distorts time. This is especially true in a post-traumatic experience. A small detail in the present moment can suddenly pull us back into the past, making it feel as though a past upheaval is happening right now. Likewise, a small detail in the present moment can suddenly ignite anxiety, causing a tailspin of fear in which we imagine a future where the upheaval might repeat itself. In these ways, trauma can bookend the present moment with a past and future that feel quite painful and insecure.

But with gentleness,

Trauma also opens up time. This is a pretty miraculous thing. There is also concept called post-traumatic growth. (Watch this video). Some people who experience the upheaval of trauma are able to remake their lives and live them more deeply, often with a greater sense of love and spiritual meaning than they might have had before. This is in no way to suggest that the trauma is somehow a good thing or a blessing in disguise. Certainly not. But post-traumatic growith can happen alongside the traumatic distortion. When it comes to a sense of time, there can actually be a bit of reversal of what I’ve articulated above. Good memories and meaningful relationships can be internalized in such a way that they are felt as deeply present. Beloved people and life-giving moments from past and hopes for the future can feel more accessible in the present moment among people who have experienced post-traumatic growth.

So what helps people experience this kind of growth? Two things are very important:

1) being surrounded by a community of care with relationships that add gentleness and sustaining presence

and

2) becoming enabled to make meaning of the traumatic experience, while learning to create a new narrative with that meaning.

So these days, in this time we’re living, I wonder,

Can our world collectively experience post-traumatic growth? Can this be a collective awakening toward deeper love and greater meaning?

Those questions are not easily answered, so they linger.

But I know this: Gentleness will be important.

– Renee Roederer

Hope to Sin Only in the Service of Waking Up 

by Alice Walker

Hope never to believe it is your duty or right to harm another simply because you mistakenly believe they are not you.

Hope to understand suffering as the hard assignment even in school you wished to avoid. But could not.

Hope to be imperfect in all the ways that keep you growing.

Hope never to see another not even a blade of grass that is beyond your joy.

Hope not to be a snob the very day Love shows up in love’s work clothes.

Hope to see your own skin in the wood grains of your house.

Hope to talk to trees & at last tell them everything you’ve always thought.

Hope at the end to enter the Unknown knowing yourself. Forgetting yourself also.

Hope to be consumed to disappear into your own Love.

Hope to know where you are –Paradise–if nobody else does.

Hope that every failure is an arrow pointing toward enlightenment.

Hope to sin only in the service of waking up.

This is the fourth piece in a series on feminist spirituality. Feel free to check out the others as well:

The Moon is My Petronus
The Rise of the Matriarchy
She
Life Finds a Way