Trauma is not the focus and it’s not at the core

There’s a lot of talk lately about the importance of having trauma-centered or trauma focused care. These therapies are based on the idea that the traumas we experience (especially as children) create lasting impressions on us and impact the way we interact with ourselves and the world. Coupled with this concept comes the idea of using therapy to address our “core wounds”.

While I agree wholeheartedly with much of this, I come at it from a different perspective that changes the whole dynamic. I don’t believe that trauma is the “center”. I don’t believe it should be the focus and I don’t believe we have wounds at our core. Though I do believe we must be trauma informed if we are going to be good caregivers.

My experience is that at our core or center is spirit. The disagreement about the nature and even the existence of spirit forms much of the conflict between Western materialist approaches to healing and shamanic/spiritual approaches.

Spirit is not something that can be measured in a lab or tested in a double blind placebo controlled study. For the Western materialists that means it’s not real. For them, truth is something that can be measured objectively and the presence and power of spirit is a purely subjective experience.

In the shamanic and spiritual worlds, the idea that everything is related to spirit means that everything is conscious to some degree and everything is in communication with everything else. There is an integrated whole-ness or holism at play. Disease or disharmony is viewed as an imbalance with spirit or the illusion of separateness— in some way the patient has blocked themselves from spirit and the disease or disharmony is expressing that disharmony to draw our attention to it so that it can be embodied and integrated.

Our society has mostly forgotten how to somatically process trauma, and due to that forgetting we have no other choice but to try to dissociate from it. We can only try to escape it, and then pass that repressed trauma onto our children. The scientists have already “discovered” this ancient truth— they call it epigenetics. The dissociation then creates another layer of sickness as we wall off the traumatized parts of us. We then unconsciously play out these repressed traumas in the wider world.

What the spirit-centered model posits is that there is a wholeness at our core, that as we integrate the wounded parts we re-establish the communication between the lost parts of ourselves. Interestingly, when we re-integrate those parts we can also enter into a deeper level of communion with the plant, animal and spirit worlds.

At the core of Kundalini Mediumship and Spirit House is that all of us can experience the ecstatic union with spirit that comes when we integrate the wounded parts of ourselves. This is at the heart of the spirit centered model of healing.

Interestingly, the imprints of this ecstatic union do show up on randomized clinical trials. That’s what’s so amazing about spirit! Anecdotal evidence from psilocybin trials shows people having a sense of euphoria, connection and compassion months or years after their dose. The scientists don’t call it spirit, they call it rewiring brain chemistry or releasing endorphins.

As long as the scientists just view the process internally, they will miss a deeper part of this process. I once knew a psychiatrist who described his work as holistic. What I came to understand was that he viewed his patients as a whole and treated them as a whole being, but separate from him. He was missing out on the deeper threads of spirit and trauma that connected him, his patients, and the world.

I’ll talk about my own experience of those deeper threads in another blog post!