“Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships,” wrote Judith Herman, in her ground-breaking book Trauma and Recovery (1997). “They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience. They violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into a state of existential crisis.”
I find this to be true in so many of the people I work with, and I have experienced these difficulties myself. Trauma affects our relationship with ourselves, our relationships with others, and our relationship with meaning, purpose and faith.
Trauma lays bare what was hidden
Trauma has a way of laying bare what was once well hidden. The people I work with are often outwardly successful in their lives. They’ve done well at work, they’ve had friends and partners, their lives have had a direction, and perhaps a faith or sense of spirituality has given them hope and guidance.
And yet the past intrudes. Perhaps the trauma of their childhood affects their adult lives. Not far beneath the surface, they doubt themselves, or hate themselves; they struggle with intimacy, or find themselves isolating, or desperately seeking company or sex; sometimes they rage at others and their fate. An undercurrent of hopelessness seeps up into their daily lives. Sometimes a new trauma – an accident or a death, a loss of health or material possessions, a life transition, COVID-19 – jolts them into the depths. The ground that once seemed so firm beneath their feet becomes unstable, swampy, threatening to suck them in.
As Judith Herman says, they are thrown into a state of existential crisis.
three-fold separation
Trauma exposes the fault lines that lie just beneath the surface for us all. According to existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, these breaches of relationship – with self, with other, and with meaningfulness in life – are actually fundamental to the human condition. Trauma exposes that fact.
Tillich puts it starkly. The human condition, he says, is one of “three-fold separation.” We are separated internally, from and against ourselves; relationally, from one another; and spiritually, from what he called the Ground of Being – life, nature, energy, God, a sense of greater belonging or purpose.
healing and growth
The people who come to counselling with me are often experiencing difficulties in one or more of these three areas, and frequently are asking fundamental questions about their lives.
Counselling or therapy offers an opportunity to heal the ruptures that Herman and Tillich identify and to address the existential questions that trauma exposes and that ultimately face us all. How we answer the questions determines how we live our lives. It is possible to both heal and grow in the face of trauma.
Contact me if you want to improve these relationships – with yourself, with others, and with your life.
