Trauma

Here's the truth about trauma, which most folks will never be able to boil down to and understand, let alone confess: we don't want the truth about trauma. 

The truth about trauma is that the truth about trauma is very rarely, if ever, as healing as we want it to be. We're far more comfortable with the beast that we know than the box we're about to open. 

I think that's why so many - especially so many healthcare professionals - are so vehemently against calling Dr. Fauci up and asking questions about the pandemic response. 

Because they lived the pandemic response and they're still trying to figure out how to live with the pandemic response and if you change the narrative now, if you throw in a new truth, if you introduce a new dynamic, then everything changes. 

Covid was hard. It was heart-breaking. It was gut-wrenching. It was life-changing. There's not a whole lot in this world that's worse than the feelings of isolation and inadequacy and fear that defined the Covid experience for so many of us. That's even more complicated for those of us who never got our life back...or never got our loved one back. 

In the last five years, we've learned to live with it. Kind of. We've built a new normal. Ish. We've developed strategies and stories that we tell ourselves and little victories that we cling to and some kind of shadow of hope. It's human nature. It's what we do with trauma. 

But if we go back now and find out that, say, there was a treatment we didn't know about that would have worked...or that all of the isolation wasn't necessary...or that the vaccines will have long-term effects that weren't disclosed...or that something we believed was just flat wrong...now, we have to figure out how to live with that story. 

We have to figure out how to live with the betrayal of being lied to, the anger of being misled, the grief of missing moments and opportunities and seasons that we'll never get back. The truth about trauma, however healing we think it might be, only breaks us in new ways. 

And most of us just aren't prepared to deal with that. 

So we don't want the truth. We don't want someone to tell us that there was a better way. We did what we did, and we did it because we were told to do it, and we've figured out how to live with ourselves (kind of), and at the very least, we have compartmentalized all of that, and how dare anyone try to break it back open and tell us it didn't have to be like that. 

We were there. It really felt like it had to be like that. It really felt like we had no other options. Don't tell us someone lied to us and that we really had other options. We are living in stories today that can't hold that possibility, let alone (if it should prove to be that way) that truth. 

That's just human nature. It's how we're built to respond, to bounce back, to move forward. That's not a judgment...it's just a statement. This is just how we are, how God made us. 

It's something very exceptional to find someone who can deal with trauma and truth at their deepest complexities. It is rare, indeed. 

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be asking. 

Because truth is truth, whether we are capable of incorporating it into our trauma right now or not. And as history continues to unfold and new stories get written, the best thing we can do with our trauma...is work to make sure that no one else has to live it like we did. We can only do that if we truly understand what happened...and why...and how...and how to not do that to anyone else.

(And that's science, too.)