TH: “Trauma is what happens in us when we are going through a strongly overwhelming experience, or series of experiences. There is an intelligent response, that evolution developed, which means, if trauma is a moment when the “computer” get overloaded. There are two movements, One is extremely high stress, and the other is a shutting down or a numbing. So then we have two. The nature of trauma always creates two, and inbetween is a fragmentation. So I have very high intensity of stress because of the experience, and because it is so overwhelming, in a “part of the city” the light goes off. Imagine you have a city at night and you shut down a quarter of the city’s lights. (Similarly with trauma) one part of my nervous system goes dark.  Which means I pull out my sensitivity and shut my sensitivity down. And this is very important because once I understand that the trauma response in itself is very intelligent, it’s better than without it. An untaken care of trauma response, that hasn’t been restored or integrated, creates symptoms. Why? Because in follow up situations or situations  that just remind me of my overwhelm,  I become extremely reactive or I don’t feel anything. I’m indifferent, dissociated and numb.

“So I have these two forces in me, very reactive or very scared, fearful,  overreactive, or I’m numb, I’m indifferent, I’m distant, and a part of myself I cant feel any more. Perhaps I can feel a certain part of my body. I can feel a certain fragment of my emotional experience and I can feel you and a certain part of you, but because trauma hurts our relational capacity,  the relational movement, “I feel you feeling me”, has been reduced or fragmented and shut down. And one consequence is that subjectively, I feel more separate. I feel more alone. I feel more distant. Separation is a trauma phenomenon. But disembodiment is also. So when I ask you at the beginning to make a screenshot of your body, and when you drop deeper into your body, you can connect to your body where you feel yourself. You can also connect kind of to your body when you feel yourself just a little. But in certain areas of your body are where you are numb, you cannot connect to your body, and maybe you don’t even know that you can’t feel yourself. 

“The reason why we bring this into the climate conversation is because evolution and development are capacities of movement. Relating to each other are capacities of movement. When I feel you and I listen to you I create more synchronisation so that  my nervous system and yours together create a more coherant relational space. These are capacities of movement. But trauma is a reduced movement. Trauma is reducing the movement of life, because it’s a freezing. And we all know this wen we say, “part of my life is more difficult.” Or “I had a difficult situation.” Or “I had a difficult interaction with somebody.” That’s where we feel the reduced movement. And that’s why, even if we are very intelligent, we cannot solve certain situations or parts of our life, not because we cannot but because of the triggers that come up. And the other point is, trauma didn’t start with us. And that’s where collective trauma comes into being. Trauma was here thousands and thousands of years. All of us have been born into a pre-traumatized world… and so detaching trauma from a merely personal experience, trauma is what happened to me when I was 3 or 7 or I had a car accident, then something happened and I can connect by biography to the trauma, so a lot of the trauma work we see is centred around that, but what I have seen these last 20 years in all those bigger facilitation processes that we did around large scale wounds, is we can attach trauma to a bigger around large scale wounds.

“I grew up as a boy in post war Vienna and no-one told me that the atmosphere I felt, certain kinds of interactions between people, how people behaved, certain thinking, that all of that is due to frozen aspects of life. So I grew up thinking this is how life is, until I learned, no Thomas this is not how life is. There is one part, how life is, that’s true, but then there is another part, and that’s how life is when it’s hurt… If we normalise trauma we normalise repetitive processes that are actually living in the past. And the we complain about them because we say, say you see, this happens over and over again. … Trauma is bound to repeat itself because its partly runs … until we become aware of it.