The trauma experts don’t have the last word on everything. In fact, I find gaping holes in their teachings. They are not the experts on everything that they purport themselves to be.
I think it’s in good part a racket, honestly. And they seem to capitalize on their popularity. And they have the money to promote themselves endlessly.
Sure they have lots to offer, but they also leave out crucial dynamics, where I have found the bulk of healing to lie—in the excruciating messiness of the heart and body. Since it’s messy, it’s tough to describe and it’s not terribly popular. Most people, they believe, want easy fixes. Publishers certainly prefer it, for sales. Easy fixes sell better than a complicated, partially defined odyssey.
They may also promise miracle cures that are exaggerated. But deep healing is not that, but they don’t tell you that part. They may not know. And they may only be able to hold space for, or promote, what they know.
I wonder sometimes what depth of healing they have engaged themselves. In The Body Keeps the Score, as one example, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk shares about meeting a somatic healer whom he worked with. What was “revolutionary” to him was elementary and basic to me. I was kinda shocked actually that this was the supposed somatic expert everyone considers to be a god.
Most of Bessel’s work is cognitive and scientific, which is great, but what I discovered in my own work is that you don’t need the science to do the healing. I dived into the science largely after my dark night of the soul work in therapy. I’m a science geek, but a passionate healer first.
So the science was just more of like “oh, that’s so cool, that matches up with my experience.” But the rub is that a lot of the experts don’t teach you how to do the emotional work.
Shockingly, and you can verify this for yourself, Bessel does not mention the importance of grief for recovering from developmental trauma. In my own work and work with clients, I have found it to be central—where the rubber meets the road.
They may share with you how to shake, how to stretch, how to witness your pain, or engage self-care—but they don’t teach you how to identify, profoundly embody, and work through difficult emotions. Nor how to use the mind for critical thinking as an ally in this somatic unfolding.
For these reasons, there is hard-won wisdom that is invaluable to others, which you gain from actually going through a deep healing process yourself. You learn things that books and science can’t teach. I found it to be utterly creative at every step, which is a far cry from any prescription and standardized method. And I used creative means to heal, especially poetry and journaling.
So, what can I offer? I’m finishing a book that teaches the process I engaged for healing from developmental trauma, which focuses on the emotional work. I also heavily focus on the necessary creative ways to fully discover and embody what I call the “backlogged emotions” that keep us stuck. Until that is finished and released, I
Crucially, most people have no idea they are carrying this burden. I didn’t . . . until I entered the chronically numb, tight, and painful places in my body.
