catacosmosis 's Key Ideas from What Happened to You?
by Oprah Winfrey, Bruce D. Perry

The pillars of traditional healing were

1) connection to clan and the natural world;

2) regulating rhythm through dance, drumming, and song;

3) a set of beliefs, values, and stories that brought meaning to even senseless, random trauma;

4) on occasion, natural hallucinogens or other plant-derived substances used to facilitate healing with the guidance of a healer or elder.

It is not surprising that today’s best practices in trauma treatment are basically versions of these four things.

This is true. Your past is not an excuse. But it is an explanation—offering insight into the questions so many of us ask ourselves:

Why do I behave the way I behave? Why do I feel the way I do?

Trauma leaves your shipwrecked. You are left to rebuild your inner world. Part of the rebuilding, the healing process, is revisiting the shattered hull of your old worldview; you sift through the wreckage looking for what remains, seeking your broken pieces…as you revisit the ship-wreck, piece by piece, you find a fragment and move it to your new, safer place in the now-altered landscape. You build a new worldview. That takes time. And many visits to the wreckage.

In the wake of trauma, the hardest thing to understand is that nothing and no one can take away the pain. And yet that’s exactly what we desperately want to do-because we are social creatures, subject to emotional contagion, and when we’re around people who are hurting, we hurt too. We don’t want to hurt. It is hard to sit in the midst of ruined lives and not feel the misery. It helps us regulate to try to undo or negate-to look away from others’ pain. So we make our arbitrary assumptions about people’s innate resilience.