Why We Need Human Connection to Heal Trauma
Wired for connection
From the time you grow in your mother’s womb, you develop a physical synchrony with other human beings; your mother’s rhythmical heartbeat becoming the first rhythm you are in sync with. You are wired for connection.
One of the lasting effects of trauma is disruption, because trauma breaks this synchrony down. The reason is that trauma almost always involves the breaking of trust in yourself, your instincts, your abilities, or trust in others. This disrupts the connection to others, making you feel out of sync with them. Depending on what happened to you, being with another in stillness without fear, like in a close embrace, may be challenging, especially when something happened to you that involved another and your inability to escape. The world may also become divided between those that know what happened and those who don’t know or don’t understand and those who don’t know might not feel trustworthy. This loss of trust makes it incredibly difficult to allow intimate relationships and let anyone in[i]. But healing requires human connection. Healing requires reconnecting to ourselves and reconnecting to another.
You need to be able to feel safe – seen, heard and loved - with others to have meaningful connections and a satisfying life. One part of this healing journey will always be the inner love you commit to, your personal responsibility for how you experience the world. Trauma can blur the lines between you and others, because it often involves the violation of boundaries. So, getting to know yourself and being able to experience yourself is important to experience others with their own emotions and thoughts and stories separate from you[ii].
The other part of this equation is recovery in relationships and community; Connections that provide emotional and physical safety and give you a space to make new experiences[iii]. It is important to restore relationships – the one with yourself, and the ones with your community - to restore your well-being and heal from trauma.
How to reconnect with yourself and others
To become synced with yourself and others, it’s necessary to integrate your physical senses (listening, smelling, touching, hearing, seeing) and resonate with others through sounds and movements. This creates connection.
Some examples of powerful acts of reconnection
going to bed and waking up together
sharing hugs
dancing together
singing together
drumming together
martial arts
All of the above activities have a healing power, because they rely on interpersonal rhythms, physical awareness, and vocal and facial communication. Practicing any of these activities in groups can also help shift from the fight, flight or freeze response into a reorganization of your perception and managing your life and relationships in the present.
You can also connect with practices that your ancestors used to do in order to create that collective healing effect and capacity for genuine belonging.
The Butterfly Effect
Social support is powerful in protecting you from the imprints of trauma and becoming overwhelmed. When you live life consciously, you are grounded in your own emotional inner experience and capable of standing up for yourself. At the same time, you have the ability to be in emotional contact with others and respect others, accepting that they are on their own journey with their own experience. The ability to differentiate that way makes you respond from a space of open acceptance of your own emotions without molding yourself to others needs or rebel against them.
Behaviors and coping mechanisms are learned, always with the goal of keeping you safe. This is true for yourself and for others. What you reject in others is often the first clue to what you deeply reject within yourself, what needs healing. You need to accept others regardless of individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of and in them, just as you acknowledge it in yourself. On this path, you cannot rescue anyone; all you can do is offer them to be by their side on their own journey and hold space for them.
The beauty is that conscious practice can shift any behavior and you are able to take responsibility for yourself, your behavior, your emotions and your life. By choosing to heal yourself, you begin to heal yourself and your community. Everything that you do has an effect. Once your body is settled, you help others settle, too. By braving the wilderness of trauma healing, you help others heal, too. By showing up as the full expression of yourself, you give others permission to do the same. And then, the essence of harm reduction, healing and nurturing yourself and others is a space free of judgment, a space of acceptance of who you and who they are.