Episode 15: Are You Done with Trauma as Culture?

Unresolved trauma in our bodies and nervous systems go on to become systemic, creating our culture. 

This is an invitation to look at how this plays out through inter-generational and dominant culture core wounds and trauma patterns that live in us – and why it doesn’t have to be this way, which becomes the doorway into practical pathways towards liberation.

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Transcript

Hello there, and welcome to root and rise a space where we explore the slower, deeper and faster rhythms that govern life and touch into the parts of us that require care, connection and tending. I'm Rohini Walker, and today's episode opens with a question, are you done with trauma as culture? And I'm going to take a wild guess that the answer is a full bodied Yes, Can we pause and acknowledge that, that we're done with this dominant culture that's built on trauma, that we're ready to break up with it, To finally leave this abusive relationship and notice is there a part of you that's still insisting that this is just the way it is? Notice what that feels like in the body, the belief that this is just the way it is, what happens to your breath, to your posture, to your capacity for life, what emotions and their corresponding cascade of chemicals flood the system? Because emotions produce chemicals and the emotions we feel over and over again become our dominant biochemistry, which becomes our biology and physiology, and now invite in the consideration that it doesn't have to be this way, that we all deserve way way better. 

What does that feel like in the body and the nervous system? To me, it feels like an openness, an opening, a curiosity, like a sense of emboldened hope, which is energizing, which wants to move me into generative action, my life force feels purposeful and alive. 

What does it doesn't have to be this way feel like for you, if it feels enlivening for you, see, if you can stay rooted in that as we drop into this episode, which is intended to sow the seeds of subverting the traumatic and traumatizing dominant culture. So let's begin with a quick working definition of trauma. 

For me, the one that's been the most clarifying and transformative is the one put forward in somatic experiencing, which looks at trauma as the body's reaction to an incident, rather than at the incident itself. It looks at what's going on in the body and the nervous system. When we're in a trauma response, our bodies become flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and stress hormones, which mobilize us into fight, flight or freeze. 

A trauma response is reflexive. We don't have to think about it or analyze it. Our sympathetic nervous system is automatically mobilized into fight or flight, or our parasympathetic nervous system moves us into freeze. And it's also worth noting here that the reflexive reaction of fawning or appeasing, which is an expression of freeze, is also trauma induced in response to relational threat. So the rush of these chemicals through our systems is experienced as an intense energetic charge through our systems, and this includes numbness, which is the presence of too much charge and overwhelm. 

These trauma responses and the reflexive mobilization caused by stress hormones have served an evolutionary purpose when our lives have been in actual danger, running from a predator, being robbed at gunpoint or being physically attacked and abused as a child or as an adult, there's clear and present danger, and the threat responses move us into getting away from that danger to safety. We are here. We have survived because of our trauma responses. 

But trauma responses start causing disease and imbalance in our systems, individually and collectively, when they become chronic, when they become culturally normalized in our bodies and our lives and in society. When being in an ongoing trauma response, in the absence of clear and present threat or danger becomes systemic, we become traumatized when the impact of a trauma response the energetic charge and the surge of stress hormones are not discharged from our bodies and nervous systems after the event, but remain frozen or inflamed in place, eventually becoming an identity layer from which we operate In the world, especially if we experience an event that evokes a similar uncomfortable feeling tone but is not actually threatening, we lose our capacity for embodied discernment, and we fall into a reflexive trauma response, and this then becomes the narrow frame through which we meet the world. So say a threatening incident happened, our trauma response mobilized us to safety, but because the energetic and chemical charges weren't able to fully discharge after the event, the body has not fully realized that it's safe, or has not realized that it's safe at all. The trauma response is still looping in our system, waiting for completion, waiting for that loop to be closed and completed. 

This is when we become traumatized, and that, in turn, becomes a layer of identity, of how we define ourselves. This becomes our internalized culture, which is normalized and reinforced over time within the collective nervous system, and becomes the culture that is externalized into the world, and a culture built on stuck trauma is where war consciousness finds fertile breeding ground, back to our individual nervous systems. When we're looping on stuck trauma, we have less capacity for life, as I mentioned, and we're not in current time, because physiologically and therefore subconsciously, we're still looping on the stuck energetic charge of a past traumatic episode, and our subconscious creates our reality and creates our culture, we haven't fully processed and integrated the experience, and so on a biochemical, subconscious level, our bodies have not realized that we have survived that Experience, calcified trauma forms the structure of identities and beliefs and behaviors and is unconsciously handed down from parent to child, including in utero. This is when trauma becomes ancestral and intergenerational, creating the cultural context of family life.

It's often experienced in our nervous systems as a haunting or like a stinging feeling of something that's always been there and we don't consciously know why or where it came from, and we've become identified with it. In my own experience, I discovered that so much of the stock trauma in my system from childhood abuse had its roots in a generational lineage of abuse and violence, which in turn had roots in the larger cultural context of patriarchy. And as we know all too well, patriarchy and empire are inherently traumatic, getting to that somatic understanding of what inherited intergenerational trauma felt like in my system, and gradually dis identifying with it and witnessing it instead letting the old stories stuck in my system be known and felt and released, became the pathway into ancestral trauma healing all done through my own nervous system and body where it was all being held, waiting for resolution and of course, let's not forget that the dominant social, political and economic systems that we live in and are currently in the process of evolving out of also come from millennia old traumas of oppression, enslavement, exploitation and genocide, one of the deepest wounds inflicted by the materialist systems of this culture is the enforced belief that we're separate from nature, and this belief requires us to shut down our innate capacities for more than verbal, sensing, feeling and communing with the more than human, conscious, animate world, and essentially having to gaslight ourselves into denying the holistic interdependence of all life. Meanwhile, our bodies become traumatized from having to normalize this deeply unnatural way of things. 

All of this creates the dominant culture that we're marinated in, a culture built on generation upon generation of humans interpreting the world through the distortions of the trauma stuck in the nervous systems, and from this, we unconsciously create our own beliefs and meanings about ourselves, about the world and each other, which then unfold into our individual and collective experiences. And ultimately, traumatized bodies are easier to control and manipulate. They're easier to hook into addictions and life force draining habits and let's drop back into it doesn't have to be this way, liberated bodies that are grounded in their own nature, rooted agency, is where the evolutionary revolution is going to take place. 

When you look at animals in the wild, they instinctively know how to literally shake off the energetic charge after an event that caused a trauma response here in the desert, I watched the bunnies of the land after they've escaped from our dog, Bodhi. And once the bunny has safely got away, she shakes her body to release the excess energetic in chemical charge and calmly goes on with her foraging. 

Meanwhile, our culture has colonized us into deeply distrusting the wild wisdom of our bodies, which innately know how to release trauma from the earliest of ages we are trained to sit, still, Be quiet, be good, not fidget and most certainly not shake or express any stuck charge or distressing emotion that needs to move through us. And our parents were taught the same, and the ones who came before them were taught the same and the ones before them and so on. Trauma is not for repressing and becoming unconsciously identified with and creating our culture from trauma that has become calcified in our systems needs to be tended to, related to, and given the space to naturally resolve. It's a doorway through which we can gain access to more of our body, our being, and the wholeness of who we are as we do this, we also come to know ourselves as inextricably part of the weaving of nature. Over time, as we tend and resolve and integrate, we start to reclaim our Earth, bodies from the grips of colonial domination and control, which are the traumatic hallmarks of our culture. A foundational tenet in somatic experiencing and trauma healing is the truth that safety is not the absence of threat, it's the presence of connection, and this starts with ourselves, with our capacity for self connection and self tending, so that we are creating safety from the inside out, rooted in our bodies. So we're creating the capacity to meet life from an embodied, rooted place of reclaimed self agency and self trust. 

And I'm starting a free, monthly online space to do just this. It's called coming home to the body, and the first one is on May 12, at 3pm Pacific for 90 minutes. The link to register is in the show notes, and that is all from me for today. Thank you for listening and tuning in, for your attention, your presence, and for being willing to take part in this conversation of dismantling the trauma that lives in our bodies that then gets out pictured into the world as our culture and until next time, Remember that it doesn't have to be this way.