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Our capacity to recover our resilience after traumatic events is a normal feature of being human.

However, the "trauma-healing industrial complex" teaches us that trauma can haunt us forever.

There is a heathier way to think about and work with people who have survived traumatic experiences.

This post is Part 1 of a series.

Back in 2012, I read a statistic that floored me. In a book by psychiatrist and researcher Bruce Perry on neglected and abused children, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry mentioned in passing that two thirds of all trauma survivors recover their resilience after traumatic experiences, regardless of the type of intervention (or lack of intervention).I didn't know what to think. I had learned something very different, and you may have learned it too, which was that traumatic experiences — especially in childhood — could be so damaging that they essentially became life sentences for most trauma survivors.

The trauma healing industry emerges

At that time, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) quiz was becoming popular, and it had us add up the painful events we had experienced in childhood to receive our score. That score suggested strongly that we could predict our likelihood of developing specific conditions, diseases, or syndromes as a direct result of our combined traumatic experiences.

The trauma-healing industry was also heating up at that time, and we were told that moving our eyes while recalling traumatic incidents could heal us (EMDR), or that shaking and shivering could dislodge traumatic residues that had supposedly become stuck in our bodies (Somatic Experiencing).

The Polyvagal Theory told us that traumatic experiences damaged our brains, our vagus nerves, and our nervous systems, while many people were taught how to allegedly move from sympathetic to parasympathetic states through breathing practices or intentional relaxation methods.

By 2014, we would be told that our body kept score of everything that happened to us, almost as if we were blank........

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