Trauma, Resilience and World Reconstruction

When the stresses of life are ordinary and manageable, most of us feel we have it together. We have a cohesive sense of ourselves and the world. Things are in place, and we understand how they connect. But under the strain of trauma, this cohesiveness may be replaced by a feeling of fragmentation and anxiety, nothing safely fits right. The world is disrupted, suddenly dangerous and unfamiliar, and a dissociation, a spaciness sets in replacing the usual order and sequence. We startle and don't exactly know where we are or what is happening. For a time, we look to ourselves and others as out of character.

Trauma disrupts, cuts, and entangles the through-lines that organize the drama of our lives. The patterns we were following, the improvisations we could enter are torn. Flexibility ends and for a time we are stuck. We need these through-lines to be reknit, restored, maybe rerouted. Our sensible and navigable world requires reconstruction.


When the trauma has been imposed by malevolence, the desire for justice, revenge and retribution appears and is confounded by the helplessness left in the injury's wake. 

How do we get it back together? What are the parameters that define resilience and reconstruction after catastrophe and trauma?   What is involved in the different ways we respond?  Sleep helps,  finding time to retreat and regather is a good idea, love and work help restore meaning. Seeking community is vital. 


For some, a return to the normal is rapid, hours or a day does the trick. But for others, especially if a previous vulnerability, a vital unresolved injury is touched, it may take longer, at times, much longer.  Our sleeping dogs we thought put down wake up and howl.


The problem with reconstruction, of being made whole, naturally involves the extent that our relationships, social practices and memories are entwined with the damage and the loss.  How significant is the damage to the person's basic values, knowledge, and skills? The basic questions of significance and extent are fundamental. How extensive and how important is the damage to the person's status, eligibility, world-view and self-concept?   

In one way or another, everything in a person's life is connected to everything else. These connections create a dynamic. Some aspects of our lives, some of our attributes, are in active conflict, others may be complementary or relatively independent, but a change in one aspect creates a change throughout a person's life, in some cases to the extent that our actions no longer appear to be our own. 


After significant damage and loss we often ask, out loud or through action, what can I still do and what must I do now? When we grieve we ask, what can I do with this terrible gap in my world? What is left to value? Who can I still depend on? Who can rely on me?
  

Adversity elicits resilience to the extent a person's remaining attributes are sufficient. We would like to believe that adversity makes us stronger but we know all too well it often makes us mean, depressed and anxious. Resilience involves the remaining values, knowledge and competence a person and community can bring to bear on the reconstruction.We assess what remains intact, what wasn't damaged. Is there enough we still value to have faith in the potential to regrow without undo distortion? Will there be anything left to notice besides the scars?


I have been sitting with a lot of people grieving or in mourning. In some cases, the distinction between mourning as a temporary state or as a more ingrained status is blurred given the time and work required for a person to reconstruct their world. It will complicate matters if they find they need to create a significantly different place for themselves given the vulnerability that came with their previous status. This may take considerable time to accomplish, the amount of time it takes to grow and mature. 


Loss and destruction can be part of a personal drama that unfolds both in reconstruction and as the beginning of something new, an undesired opportunity as well as a dilemma. But it will take as long as it takes.


That said, reconstruction is reengagement.