Esther Perel once said, ‘Trauma doesn’t want to be touched.’ I found that to be true in the work I do with trauma and my own recovery from it. Trauma truly doesn’t like being touched or even being seen. Trauma recoils at the kindest of caresses as if it were infused with malice.
A tangential anecdote that sets the scene.
I love using metaphors and parables to explain concepts in therapy and I have an anecdote I sometimes share about baffling reactions. It was a magical time called the 80’s (bear with me), I was in primary school, and my parents did not believe in the sunscreen. One summer I spend a whole day in a particularly vicious sunlight and got profoundly sunburnt. The following day my parents put an oversized tee shirt on me and sent me to the summer school. I liked summer school and at times I would even forget the pain, the extent of the sunburn, and the tautness of skin around my torso that accompanied my every breath. Until that is, a friend of mine spotted me, and approached me from behind to say hello. She raised her little starfish palm and planted it firmly in a friendly pat on my back. Before she could greet me, I yelped in agony, much to my friend’s shock. “What did you do THAT for?!?!”
The invisible wound.
This baffling behaviour of mine lies in close parallel to the reactive response of a traumatised individual to even a minor trespass. It’s worth interjecting that traumatised people can and do experience abuse but this is about the light touch that can hurt those walking wounded. These hurt people hold impressive jobs, attract academic accolades, drive to work, have responsibilities, dress smartly, speak eloquently, and yet. Yet, underneath those oversized tee shirts lies the raw and unseen injury that affects our emotional regulation in the face of relational depth and intimacy. When well intentioned gestures by our loved ones are met with explosive anger, it might be the case of an emotional wound that did not tolerate being touched and the anger could well be a protective reaction, a fulminant visceral response that leaves us racking (and sometimes wrecking) our brains, “Why did I snap like that?”
Enter therapy.
When I was training as a counsellor our college training director used to say, “Where there is heat, there is history.” Counselling and psychotherapy follow these heat patches and help the client make sense of the anguish they may carry from the past and into present. Sometimes people find out that their circumstances and resources available have increased considerably since the injury occurred and once they identified the cause of pain, they can better mitigate the emotional discomfort arising from an old wound, marking a point of becoming an active agent of their own healing process.