The number of people impacted by global conflict, abuse, and violence is estimated to be in excess of one billion. There is no reason to think that this number is diminishing. There is clear evidence to support the idea that this number is, in fact, increasing.
Even if all conflict and violence stopped today, because of the legacy of generational trauma, whether by the reenactment of past pain or from epigenetic imprints, numbers would still increase. It is entirely likely that on any given day more trauma is experienced than is resolved. So, we are, in fact, moving backwards as we reach forwards in our desire to help. We have been doing so for a very long time. There is not, and will never be, a sufficient number of helping professionals to address and resolve the outcomes of trauma experienced globally.
“Self-making narratives create the maps of the totality of our physical reality and experiences – or, as philosophers sometimes say, of the lifeworlds that we inhabit. And just as narratives can create worlds, they can also destroy them.
Trauma, in its many guises, has been part of these narratives since time immemorial, often by shattering the topographies of our lifeworlds. Breaking our most fundamental, most taken-for-granted means of self-understanding, it replaces our familiar narratives with something dreadful, something uncanny, sometimes something unspeakable.
What is trauma? Rather than just fear or guilt or unwanted memories, trauma is a totalising force that unmakes our worlds, leading to a kind of world-loss. It draws sharp lines marked ‘before’ and ‘after’: the ‘before’ demarcates the prelapsarian world, the self that we knew; the ‘after’ is the devastation of a broken lifeworld that remains.”