A process of re-membering…
Sometimes having everything taken away gives us the opportunity to learn who we are at our core. This was my experience after brain injury. What survives? What aspects persevere? Who am I beyond the doing? Beyond the responsibilities? Beyond ability? Who are you when all your identities are removed? And can they really be removed? The questions formed an eddy that threatened to pull me under. Many went unanswered for years. Even now as I add new identities I hold them differently. This is how I know that I have changed.
But six months after being rear-ended and sustaining a traumatic brain injury I had a true stripping of identities with the onset of severe PTSD. I was no longer the doing me and barely the being me. I tried to stay positive and stubbornly refused to give up doing, but eventually my nervous system said no and my body slipped into terror. Sensory processing was so jumbled, so distorted all normal functioning was nearly impossible. I had synesthesia and a backlog of impressions. There was no felt reference for up or down. I can say that after years of persistent effort I survived.
Slowly I got to know myself in a new way. My brain learned and is still learning to process sensory. I continued to be a biologist in my curiosity, in the way I tracked my physiology and neurological processing. I continued to practice yoga with new aims and remembered key inquiries into the patterns of the mind. I worked hard at getting through each day and night. Somatic Experiencing® taught me to find moments of resource within the trauma. You might even say I learned to surf or dance on the insanely huge waves of survival energy trapped within my body. I learned to mobilize and metabolize small bits of charge until my window of tolerance widened enough to tolerate more engagement in life beyond just surviving.
I am fortunate to be in the process of regaining many of the ways I used to participate in the world. I still think and move as a biologist, surfer, dancer, yoga practitioner, hard worker, educator, coach, and mentor. In many ways I am the same person, and in other ways I am profoundly different. I have learned how to slow down. I have patience. I can truly embody presence. My knowing of deep human suffering is perhaps the biggest gift as it gives me a felt sense of connection to the rest of the world. It adds a dimension of wholeness to be able to fathom each other’s joy and pain. I am reminded of wrinkles creasing a face, of fissures across a landscape, of the way land settles after earthquakes. There is a depth beyond the surface that enriches our experience of each other.
In many ways trauma opens us to the magnitude of what it is to be human. It gives us appreciation for life and the possibility of living again. And it show us how fundamental human connection is to healing.
