is there such a thing as 'healing' trauma?

How does therapy actually heal? Is it through doing or being? And, how is psyche like a sea sponge?

I love when the words of a wise one roll around inside, like an emotional lozenge, slowly giving up more and more nourishing nectar. Recently, Eckhart Tolle popped back into view, reminding me of a graceful, wise voice I often turned too about a million years go in my twenties. This quote in particular, kept on giving:

Love and joy are inseparable from your natural state of inner connectedness with Being.

Tolle uses a capital “B” to differentiate being and Being, I contend that, similarly to Jung delineating self and Self, Tolle is nodding toward the transpersonal or divine aspects of human nature. This got me thinking of the true(st) nature of being. It got me thinking about our cultural resistance to being in favour of it’s metaphysical opposite: doing. And then, as is far too often the case, it got me thinking about how this might be relevant to therapy.

In professional circles, “being vs. doing” opens up all sorts of controversy. Many claim that therapy isn’t really about doing at all, rather it’s about presence (clinical speak for being). There is quite a lot of truth to this, but it can go too far. If applied universally, an emphasis on presence can inadvertently be an endorsement of lazy therapy, or of therapy that isn’t prepared to burrow into the tricky and lesser-visited recesses of the psyche. And yet, if we’re focussed only on doing and never on being, then we’re committing another clinical sin: of being formulaic or cut off from deeper states of consciousness and relationship. And we certainly wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

what does ‘healing’ really mean?

So it seems we’re talking, yet again, about false binaries. Or when over-simplification of a quite nuanced topic leads to an idealogical trap. A further case in point; the addiction to action (doing) and ignorance of presence (being) has made its way into therapy via social media and commercial imperatives, as a preoccupation with “healing,” in particular, that now familiar trope "healing trauma."

The unmentioned nuance here, is that when working with trauma we rarely remove it. Indeed, the key ingredient to working with trauma, especially the developmental type, is accepting that it is there and then being deeply present to the traumatised part. This is vital when we sit with parts that result in severe psychic disruption or personality disorders. Such parts are often full of anger, shame, or have socially unacceptable impulses. We “heal” these parts, when we can stay with them, rather than trying too hard to “fix” them. Indeed trying too hard might end up being an inadvertent collusion with dissociative processes that push those parts back into the void.

True attending is far from “healing”, as we might think of say, healing a broken bone. Instead, it is a re-integration that takes time and relationship. There are many flawed attempts to bypass this process that show up in practice. That it can be “transformed” with an affirmation, or imagined away with an ego driven visualisation, or behaved away in response to a directive, external other. Instead, to heal at depth, the wound needs to be bought into the transformative light of consciousness which means, bringing that traumatised part into a true connectedness with Being with a capital B.

When we carry trauma, from dark things that happened to us, or to our family or culture of origin, those shady parts can be quite something. Such injuries, often times infused with archetypal and ancestral material, can be nothing short of devilish. In this case, the therapeutic relationship becomes pivotal. It’s the therapeutic relationship, and the attentive, even co-regulating presence of an other who in themselves, offers a deep connectedness to Being. This way of working is very different to the simplistic and often sanitised world of insta-healing. This way of working, is very difficult to achieve on a screen alone. And this way of working can be difficult to find, as practitioners with a developed quality of Being are often in high demand and limited supply.

I’ll come back to the nature of healing relationship shortly, but first, how can we square the alluring promise in Tolle’s quote - of connectedness with joy and love - with the murky realities of unbanishable trauma? Well to talk about that, lets dive into a warm, salty sea.

the sponginess of being

To explore further, let’s think about a sea sponge, living in that sea. These wonderful creatures grow in nutrient rich waters, trapping grit in complicated webs of tissue, some finely porous. If the organism’s structures were too loose or open, the gritty goodness of the sea water would pass right through.

Metaphysically, human beingness is a bit like a sea sponge. While the spark of life is in us, that light resides in the creature of our embodied sponginess. The light occupies us, but is only realised in close proximity of the tight gaps in our sponge. The more trauma and dissociation we have, the looser the gaps, and the light can’t be metabolised. The more capacity to metabolise the light, to relate and to know it, the more we can realise our true nature. In that sense, relatedness to our natural state is at its most, when we can hold and make use of the light that’s within us. Traumatised and dissociated parts (the gaps) contain unrealised aspects of our light. Though they are in us, they remain unavailable to our usual states of being.

Good therapy reduces the size of those gaps, because good therapy means we first know and eventually, learn to love our traumatised parts. The implication is if we wish away trauma, we wish away part of our light. This can happen when we are overly headstrong in our determination toward love and joy. When we strictly impose ideals of positivity and healing, which obscure rather than know our trauma, we have to ask: what aspects of our true nature are we abandoning?

being real in (cosmic) relatedness

Perhaps the most important part of Tolle’s quote is the phrase “inner connectedness”. So much is made of connection in our culture. Usually, the notion of connection is external and usually, sadly, it’s quite superficial. Contrast the connectedness of mother and baby with the connectedness of social media networks to feel into the distinction I’m making.

Inner connectedness is a different lens on relationship. What if we didn’t abandon those innocent parts, and instead cultivated a relationship with them? To a certain extent we can choose to feel into such states at any time, but what if those parts of us were so well known, and connecting with them was so habitual, that being with them was just an everyday part of our spongey existence? What psychospiritual properties might become more available, and how might our relatedness and our nature, change?

External relationships are still of great relevance, in fact they are the key to the development of such internal connectedness. Most often, it’s in close relationships where our joy and our love can exist, and also, where it can be forgotten. When we fall from our true nature, toward something reactive or narcissistic, it’s often in our closest relationships where this felt. In moments such as these we are being called to rekindle that relationship with Being, and find away back to authentic love and joy. It takes effort, but the muscle can be built.

Close relationships are also where we can learn to first find, then habitualize this inner connectedness. Good therapy encourages us to be with difficulty and tenseness, so the reactivity which takes us away from such Being can be worked through. But close relationships like therapy also provide perhaps the most powerful of all healing potentials. And to explore that, I need another metaphor.

I think about the profound healing relationships in my life (therapeutic and otherwise), as a little like the sun, moons and planets of the solar system. Two important forces exist, the gravity which pulls together, and then, the light (in all its seen and unseen wavelengths) which is transmitted between. This can feel nebulous, but think about the way significant others have been pulled toward you in life. This is the gravity, pulling toward healing. How many do we remain in orbit with? And what’s the nature of that orbit? Then, there’s the light transmission which is also, quite ineffable. The most obvious of light is joy and love, care and delight, light that is transmitted through emotions and relational contact - but what about the more subtle? These unseen wavelengths are perhaps the most spiritually significant when it comes to the healing power of relationship. We feel it in our bodies, yet also from beyond. It’s a movement that’s inward and upward, yet downward and outward. Such relationships often appear in dreams and other states of consciousness. They can nourish us, but also are prone to dynamics and abuse, so must be ethically grounded and regarded as sacred. And yet, despite and perhaps because of our desecrated world, we need such relationship now more than ever.

That’s because, when you sit with a wise one, be they teacher, spiritual director, therapist or guide, the most intimate of transmissions is underway. For in the light they offer through love, what’s being nurtured is the capacity to live from your own state or connectedness with Being.

Sun and moon.

Planet to planet.

Being to being.

That’s real, Self realisation. Imbued with a certain quality of love.

And, its a joy to behold.