After having read the introduction to this series, I’m sure you’re craving for more. Dr. Maté begins his book with Part 1: Our Interconnected Nature. The very first idea he wants to depict is the nature of trauma. You have all probably heard this word, whether it was in the context of someone saying: “wow, that really traumatized me”, or knowing about Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder from soldiers. The thing is, trauma is a universal experience, and it is much more impactful than we think.
“All trauma is proverbial”
states psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, one of the leading trauma research authors. Children begin to speak around the age of three, which means that within the very first years of our lives, we have experienced enough trauma to impact our lifetimes.
Think about a time when you were upset as a child, let’s say around the age of 7. Someone would say something mean, you would maybe cry, fight back, or go tell a parent. But how can a one-year-old communicate such a betrayal and pain? That’s the point.
Gabor explains this very well in the following quote:
“The psychic wounds we sustain are often inflicted upon us before our brain is capable of formulating any kind of a verbal narrative. Second, even after we become language-endowed, some wounds are imprinted on regions of our nervous systems having nothing to do with language or concepts (…) They are stored in parts of us that words and thoughts cannot directly access”-we might even call this level of traumatic encoding ‘subverbal'”.
Now, I mentioned that trauma touches each and every one of us, but it’s important to know how exactly that happens. There are scientifically two types of trauma. Capital T Trauma is trauma that we can see quite well: divorce, child abuse, and violence. This is the kind of trauma that shouldn’t happen, but it unfortunately does. Then there’s small t trauma, which is “less memorable but hurtful and far more prevalent misfortunes of childhood”, and is everything that SHOULD have happened but didn’t. For example, your parents not showing up to your school play, not having an adult to truly listen to your needs, etc.
The worst thing about trauma, is that regular doctors barely pay any mind to big T trauma, let alone small t trauma. Trauma obviously impacts us a great deal, but the worst thing it does is disconnects us from our gut feelings, the ones that help us make the right decision.
To end this section, I want to leave you with some food for thought:
“If trauma entails a disconnect from the self, we are often caught engaging in pursuits of all kinds that are meaningless: multi-tasking, small talk, scrolling. All because they obliterate the present moment, which we have so much difficulty dealing with.”
And now let’s reflect on how much we are using our phones and social media, and how it’s a coping mechanism, a distraction. “Ultimately, what we are distracted from is living”.
Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling…
very much so!