The First Step to Inner Healing: Healing Community Trauma

The first step in healing psychological and emotional pain may simply be the willingness to heal. This sounds like a no-brainer. When we get a cut or break a bone, our physical bodies automatically enact healing processes without the need for our willful consent, and we only help it along in the process by resting, taking medication, and making sure not to further injure ourselves. The multiplicity of our minds, though, can make straightforward inner healing more complicated.

But why would we not want to heal? Two reasons come to my mind.

Perhaps we believe we deserve to be in the pained state we’re in. That we’re somehow rotten, or evil at our core, and that the pain we’re experiencing is a proper inner state for us. Sometimes we might feel that we have a duty to keep ourselves in this undesirable state. In a recent Foundation for Self Leadership video, Toward Deeper Healing, a panel of therapists discussed veterans who were unwilling to let go of grieving for the memory of soldiers under their command who had not made it home. They owed it to their fallen men to remember them, and this is how they honored their memory.

Another reason we keep ourselves from healing could have to do with the nature of how we often deal with traumatic events. To cope with an overwhelmingly painful experience, we often close a part of ourselves off in order to protect the rest of our mind, as well as those around us. Understandably, it’s very hard to heal this part of ourselves when we’re actively suppressing or hiding it, for fear of what it might release if it were to breach the surface of our psyche.

I think that everyone’s pain is their own, and the way in which we each process our pain will have to be in our own unique way. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. But there are processes and activities that provide the bedrock for healing to take place, that have been practiced by people before us and all around us. For one person it may be meditation, singing at church, and sweating things out by running a marathon. For someone else it might be intensive talk therapy, starting a home garden, and stargazing. Even though we might not know the right path for ourselves just yet, it starts with the desire to heal, and where there is a desire, hope may follow. From there we can keep trying things out to see what begins to take hold and nourish us.

This article was inspired by Healing Community Trauma, the first episode of the Facing the Moment podcast series, which is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Youtube. In this episode, Aizaiah G. Yong, PhD, and Toufic Hakim, PhD, discuss Aizaiah’s personal journey through physical trauma, and the ways that we can access healing through connection, both in our individual lives and in our communities.