The Truth Hurts: Healing Childhood, Adult and Collective Trauma
"When we heal, it doesn't erase what happened, but it means that what happened doesn't drive us anymore." – Max Lowen
World Council for Health Steering Committee member, Dr Tess Lawrie, and Mind Health Committee member, Kim Knight, hosted an enlightening Better Way Today session on 8 April 2024, with guest Max Lowen.
Max speaks from first-hand experience about “recovering from trauma and stepping into your power”, having survived and healed from the trauma of satanic ritual abuse, torture, and trafficking in childhood. She now helps others recover from the consequences of childhood neglect and abuse. On her show, Unbroken, Max interviews survivors, truth warriors, healers, and teachers. Check out her website for more.
According to Max, trauma is the real pandemic afflicting our world. We are discovering that people in some of the highest positions of power and authority have been deliberately traumatising humanity, as this makes it easier to control our minds and manipulate us to fulfill their agenda. We are all affected, which makes this presentation essential viewing. Find out more about what trauma is, how it affects us, and why it is so necessary to face and heal from our own traumatic experiences. This session is not just informative – it’s also truly inspiring.
Here are some take-aways …
What is trauma?
Max defines trauma as “shock or severed distress from experiencing a disastrous event,” noting that “traumatic reactions occur when people feel powerless, and when nothing they can do matters.” Trauma can be ‘simple’ – a once-off incident, which is easier to heal – or complex and repetitive, such as growing up in an abusive family and being unable to escape ongoing trauma. We respond to trauma in different ways: sometimes by repressing or denying what has happened; at other times we may re-enact the trauma (as children do during play) or act out inappropriately.
Max explained that trauma is the root cause of the high levels of addiction in society, as addiction is a way to numb our pain. To effectively treat addiction, it is necessary to first treat the trauma. And we need to take responsibility to heal from trauma and break what can become a cycle of trauma that is passed on from one generation to the next.
Healing from trauma
When we heal, it doesn't erase what happened, but it means that
what happened doesn't drive us anymore. – Max Lowen
Observing babies and toddlers reminds us of our true nature as human beings. While life will inevitably expose us to traumatic situations, the traumatised self is not who we are, nor who we came here to be. Many of us who have suffered trauma long to create a better world. But the truth is that this healing starts within each of us.
Trauma shows up in many ways, such as numbness, feelings of guilt, fear or anger, flashbacks, nightmares, and avoidant or violent behaviour. These and other symptoms are rife in society, reflecting the traumatised state of the world and our great need for healing.
Treating trauma involves:
Establishing safety: removing the person from the traumatic situation.
Remembrance and mourning: reconstructing the events that happened and expressing the associated emotions so that they can be released.
Reconnection: healing what was fragmented by reconnecting with the self and others.
Many therapeutic approaches are helpful in resolving trauma, including counselling, journalling, inner child work, and body-oriented (somatic) modalities. It is also essential to attend to our basic needs for friendship, regular exercise, good nutrition, restful sleep, and connection to the divine.
Tending the nervous system
Most of us have heard that when we experience a sudden threat, the nervous system triggers a ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ survival response – which also results in an inability to think rationally. Max added a fourth option: ‘fawn’ – in other words, a need to please others and avoid conflict, hoping that this will result in us being accepted, loved, and protected. These childhood survival responses can become habitual, subconscious ways of reacting to difficult situations that last into adulthood. In healing trauma, it is vital to select therapeutic approaches that help to reset the nervous system.
Rise above fear
We are constantly besieged by fearful messages. To stop fear destroying us, we must learn to face reality without fear. One step is to become aware of the situations that trigger us, as these help us recognise where we were wounded in the past and give us the opportunity to heal. Doing this, we find that those situations lose their power.
As the brain does not distinguish between an external reality and our thoughts, we also need to avoid negative thoughts that cause a physiological response and can re-traumatise us. We can learn to reframe our experiences, for instance, shifting our language from ‘problem’ to ‘challenge’, and recognising that every situation in life is there to support me and my growth.
Be inspired
Max just brims with inspiring ideas of how to practically step out of fear and into sovereignty. She encourages us to become aware of the dialectical tricks of the fear-mongers, to let go of drama, and to choose our thoughts, words and emotions wisely, so that we may live in high-frequency emotional states which the ‘controllers’ cannot access. As she says:
Everything is energy. And so, if I am energy, my energy is mixing with everyone around me.
Everything in life is interdependent. So everything we think, everything we do, everything we say out loud, ripples across everywhere and affects everything.
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I practice Transcendental Meditation - TM twenty minutes, twice a day for more then forty years.
https://www.tm.org/en-us/
https://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/
So agree! healing trauma is the critical lynch pin in healing the world, most traumatized people cannot take on board one more change, new practice or challenging thought - just getting through a day with the impact on their bodies and minds of the trauma is enough... And as we live in culture that is prepared to destroy and enslave in order to perpetuate itself trauma engulfs us even if we have not been directly abused. We cannot heal the earth until our individual and collective traumas are healed.
I have been practicing IFS (Internal Family Systems) - an extraordinary practice that is incredibly simple and amazingly healing (I have tried many other options). Check out the book 'No Bad Part's by Dick Schwartz. He has also done many interviews on YouTube and in many he demonstrates how IFS works. Bessel van der Kolk devoted a whole chapter to IFS in his seminal book 'The Body Keeps the Score'. It has the capacity to brings people back to their essence quite quickly.