Trauma is what happens when an experience is more than we can cope with at the time. Therapeutic Shamanism understands much of what we call trauma as soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer: a part of us leaves and stays stuck where the harm happened, whilst another part holds the fort and carries on. It also sees our culture as carrying trauma, and holds that much depends on how we come through it.
What is trauma? #
An experience that overwhelms us. Arielle Schwartz, in her guide to post-traumatic growth, puts it simply: “the very definition of trauma assumes that the person experiencing it did not have the resources to handle the situation at the time that it occurred.”1 Peter Levine, who developed the body-based trauma therapy Somatic Experiencing, adds that what harms us is not only the event. “Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the ‘triggering’ event itself”, he writes; they come from what was left unresolved in us afterwards.2 And Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes how the experience splits off: “Dissociation is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented”.3
Shamanism has its own, much older, way of describing the same thing.
How does shamanism understand trauma? #
As one of the oldest causes of soul loss. “In hunter-gatherer tribes, the principal causes of soul loss usually would have been things like bereavement (or other causes of broken heartedness), illness, or shock and trauma.”4 When something is too much to bear, part of us leaves. Soul loss is what happens when a part of our psyche leaves us and does not fully come back, and it can happen through shock, trauma, bereavement, illness, fear, abuse or neglect.
From a shamanic point of view, much of what we call trauma is soul loss. When we go through something we simply cannot cope with, a part of us leaves, and very often it stays stuck back in the time and place where the trauma happened. That is a pretty good description of a flashback. The lost part is frozen in that moment, bound to it, unable to move freely.
Paul Francis’s father fought in the Second World War and never spoke of it. In shamanic terms, a large part of him never really did come back from the war, as part of him was stuck there still, in those terrible events.5
Trauma therapists have noticed the same. Peter Levine writes that after colonisation, indigenous peoples of South America and Mesoamerica used the Spanish word susto for trauma, a word meaning “fright paralysis” and also “soul loss”. “Anyone who has suffered a trauma knows, first, paralyzing fright, followed by the bereft feeling of losing your way in the world, of being severed from your very soul.”6 See What is soul loss?
What happens to the part of us that stays? #
It holds the fort. “In the event of trauma, the part of the soul that stays is known as the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer. It is the part that stays and soldiers on, ‘holding the fort’, so to speak.” Shamanic work has often focused on the lost part “but tends to ignore the plight of the fort-holder”, the part that kept going “in a difficult environment, doing the best they could.”7 Healing trauma in Therapeutic Shamanism means caring for both. See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
Does everyone have trauma? #
Yes, and there is no shame in it. We all have trauma. There is no such thing as someone without trauma, as trauma is part and parcel of the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer, and there is nothing wrong with that. What matters is what we do with it: how we process it, and the stories we take from it.
Why do some people come through the same event less harmed? #
Partly because of what they bring to it, and partly because of how they meet it. Levine lists many things that make a difference, from the event itself to a person’s age, support and inner resources.8 Our foundations matter too. A series of events left Paul with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, despite all the inner work he had done. His therapist explained it with an image: he had built a good, safe house, but “It was built on a fault line”, the damage of an unhealthy childhood.9
And how we respond matters. Whether hard times change us for the better “seems to largely come down to how they respond to the event”, and “whether they choose to let the event make them, or break them.”10
Is our whole culture traumatised? #
In some ways, yes. The last 6,000 years have been a traumatic human history, and our modern culture is collectively living with post-traumatic stress. Van der Kolk makes a similar point from the clinic: trauma leaves traces “on our histories and cultures” as well as in families, “with dark secrets being imperceptibly passed down through generations.”11 See What is the Fall? and What are ancestral burdens and how are they passed down?
Hunter-gatherer life was not free of hardship, but the start of life was very different. In those cultures “childhood neglect was rare to the point of being virtually non-existent”, with children raised by “keeping children close, and quickly responding to their emotional needs and well-being”.12 Even so, “It is important, too, to not romanticise hunter-gatherer life.”13 Danger, illness and loss were real.
Can trauma change us for the better? #
Sometimes, though it is not a path anyone needs to choose. Paul’s own crisis was a real make or break time, although in reality more a question of being utterly broken and then having to try and completely remake himself.14 But suffering is not required: his own path was a traumatic one, but having experienced it, there is absolutely nothing he can recommend about doing it that way.15 There are gentler paths to the Soul.
Trauma therapy says much the same. Levine writes that “The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.”16 And Schwartz warns that looking for meaning is not the same as saying that all things happen for a reason, “which is a misused phrase that can be both confusing and hurtful.”17 See What can trauma therapy offer shamanic work? and What can shamanism offer trauma therapy?
