Despite what the personal transformation crowd may purport, humans are defined by a physical body, a highly reactive limbic system, an attention seeking nervous system and a brain that doesn’t know truth from perception.
We are limited by pain, illness, fatigue, distress, age and circumstance.
And I don’t mean limited in that we are held back, that we are negatively impacted or disabled by them. I mean limited in that they are actual, literal realities and therefore aiming to live as expansively as our imagination wants us to is not conducive to being a human.
Our humanness is our physicality, which has limits, and our humanness is our mind and emotion which is expansive beyond comprehension.
An unlikely couple. A pairing that will always keep us in the push and pull of not enough or too much, magical or practical. The gap between the two leading us to wonder ‘is this enough? Am I fulfilled? Shouldn’t there be more to life than this?’
The condition of human. It keeps us in check.
It’s an experience with possibilities and impossibilities and that’s just the truth of it.
So when it comes to the ideal of ‘trauma informed’ we can probably conclude that our best efforts at such an approach will be wrought with missteps, mistakes, getting it wrong, doing it wrong, trail and error and back and forth, as much as getting it right.
One of the tenets of the trauma informed framework is that we resist re-traumatisation. ‘Resist’ is the R of the 4 R’s of trauma informed that has always intrigued (and delighted) me the most.
Resist re-traumatisation. A big ask for a human. Noble though. Ideal.
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