A Culture of Trauma

We don’t just live in a culture of trauma — we perpetuate it.
Healing begins when we stop treating trauma as a private defect and start seeing it as the collective wound of a disconnected world.

The Water We Swim In

If you spend enough time in healing spaces,
you start to notice something:

Trauma isn’t the exception — it’s the ecosystem.

We live in a culture of trauma.
A culture that doesn’t just produce trauma,
but propagates it.

We make people feel like their pain is personal.
Like it’s their problem to solve.
Something private. Shameful. An inconvenience to the collective.

We say: deal with it.
And when you can’t, we diagnose you, medicate you, or monetize you.

How did we get this way?

The Luxury of Health

We turned health into a luxury good.

You can see it in our food systems and our access to care.
Gym memberships, yoga, and breathwork are marketed like accessories instead of human rights.

Why isn’t nervous-system regulation part of public health?
Why isn’t rest covered by insurance?

Because we decided that taking care of yourself is your job.

Health isn’t a shared responsibility — it’s a commodity.
You earn it if you can afford it.
You lose it if you can’t.

Our systems are built on individual accountability, not collective care.

Systems That Forgot the Soul

We are in this mess because our systems don’t see us as people.
They see us as:

patients to be managed,
consumers to be targeted,
clients to be retained,
voters to be swayed.

We forgot what it means to be human.

And humans are magical.

We are living mosaics of lineage, biology, and story —
a collage of ancestral grief and wild imagination,
of hormones and hope,
of broken hearts and breathtaking art.

We are not machines that malfunction.
We are creators that remember.

We manifest our inner worlds into song, into ceremony, into story —
and those stories change us as we tell them.

That’s the real magic of being human:
we can recreate ourselves in real time.

Trauma as Orientation

We treat trauma like a condition to be fixed.
A set of symptoms.
Something to systematize or proceduralize.

But real trauma work isn’t a protocol — it’s an orientation.

Trauma is a rift between a person and their world.
Healing is facing that rift, not covering it up.

It’s a reorientation that moves us from hiding to witnessing,
from denial to relationship,
from isolation to community.

That journey requires being seen.
Not as broken — but as becoming.

And that can’t happen alone.

Healing requires witnesses.
It requires spaces that can hold transformation.
Therapy is one, but not the only one.

We are starving for communal practices that can hold the depth of human pain and alchemize it into something sacred.

You Can’t Go Back

Our culture loves a quick fix.
We want people to “get over it,” “bounce back,” “return to normal.”

But trauma changes you.
There is no going back.

Healing isn’t restoration — it’s transformation.

You become something new.
Something truer.
Something that can hold paradox — the grief and the grace.

My Own Education in Trauma

I’ve always been oriented toward trauma.
It’s the gravity of my life.

Growing up, mental health was something to hide.
“Don’t talk about that.”
It was dirty laundry.

I internalized that secrecy as shame.
If it had to be hidden, it must be bad.
If I was connected to it, I must be bad.

So I tried to make myself clean.

I became a healer.
I thought if I helped others wash away their pain, I could wash away my own.

But eventually I broke under the weight of that façade
and realized — I was approaching healing all wrong.

The Wound and the Core

When I worked with kids in group homes,
I used to tell them:

“Trauma is like a wound.
When you ignore it, it festers.
Therapy helps clean and redress it so it can heal.”

It’s a decent metaphor.
But incomplete.

Because the truth is:
the core of who we are was never wounded.

Our essence — what some might call soul or spirit — is untouched.

The pain is real,
but it lives in the layers: the stories, the beliefs, the protections we built around that core.

Therapy isn’t about fixing — it’s about remembering.

It’s peeling back what’s been painted over
and realizing the light underneath was never broken.

Healing isn’t repair.
It’s remembrance.
It’s undoing the noise and inviting something new.
Rebirth.

Healing as Cultural Rebellion

We are a culture of trauma — but we don’t have to stay that way.

When you choose to feel instead of perform,
you disrupt the pattern.

When you rest instead of grind,
you challenge the system.

When you forgive yourself,
you become the ancestor who leaves something different behind.

Healing is not a personal luxury.
It’s a collective responsibility.

Every breath of grace, every moment of presence,
is an act of rebellion in a world addicted to dissociation.

We’re not here to escape this culture.
We’re here to remake it —
through remembering,
through community,
through sacred work.

Because we are not broken.
We simply forgot.
And remembering together is how we begin again.