I Want to Break Free! Moving Beyond the Metaphor of "Trauma Healing"
Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.
— George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
A number of years ago I was at a teacher trainers summit for a school of yoga of which I was a member. I listened to various people wax on about various issues, people I’d known for years from the scene. At one point someone got angry about something. A voice in my head said, ”Oh that's because you are always angry”. Then I looked at someone else: “Yeah, and you are filled with unacknowledged rage which is why you are always snapping at your students”.
I’m not particularly proud of this moment of high judginess, but I was perplexed. These were people, like myself, who had spent 10-20+ years involved in a rigorous spiritual practice that had an explicit trauma healing component. What had happened?
Next thing I know, this spotlight was aimed at myself: “Well what about you then?”
Suddenly, it struck me — the cold, hard truth. I realised that I, too, still had the same basic insecurities driving my nervous system that had led me to dive deep into this spiritual path nearly 20 years ago, some 5000 hours ago, of asanas, of meditations, of spiritual austerities, some of which were explicitly said to eliminate core trauma. The truth was, though there had been improvements on many levels — and many other sublime experiences — somehow the splinter at the root of the injury had not yet been found and removed.
I thus broke with the introversion of that community and began a deep exploration into many other modalities of healing, including psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, Shadow Work, Parts Work (IFS), psychodrama, conscious sexuality...
This experience along with my own work in a mentorship programme I call Soul Re-Wilding, got me thinking about this thing we call ”trauma”. Just what is it exactly? Why is it so common to meet people who have been working to heal their trauma for years and yet still suffer from it, still act it out unconsciously, still struggle to be as they wish to be in their lives? Why are we taking so long to heal from these early wounds?
I contend to you this: The way we think about trauma is wrong. As a result, we are working with this medium of our psyche as if it were something else. We are using good tools but often not in the right way — like trying to use a paint brush to sculpt clay.
In fact, even the words “trauma” and “healing” might be misleading us. I propose that "trauma" as we use it here, is not a factual reality, not a "real" thing, but rather, is a metaphor — and there are better metaphors to use. It's time we take a careful look at our use of the notion of trauma...
Understanding Trauma 2.0
“Trauma” today most commonly refers to events, usually from one’s early childhood, which had a negative psychological impact. The aim of “healing trauma” has swallowed up much of the personal development genre, and a good part of spirituality and shamanism, and has even becoming the dominant motivator for psychedelic research and explorations. There are many modalities of trauma healing and many bright doctors, scientists, luminaries and gurus on the case.
Clearly whatever this “trauma” thing is, we really want to get rid of it!
But the term wasn’t always used thus. Originally trauma is a word meaning injury, particularly physical injury. Prior to the current era you would most likely encounter the word in the medical domain: “Severe blunt trauma to the head” — this meant you got a hard thunk to the noggin'!
So “trauma” as a psychological concept is really a metaphor. And with this metaphor comes a whole set of notions to which we implicitly align when we use the term in this way. Some of these expectations turn out not to be so accurate.
Metaphors Are Bundles of Ideas
A metaphor is like a Christmas hamper. It is a whole set of things bundled into a convenient and picturesque package. Some of those things you actively want — they are why you bought the hamper. Other parts you just get stuck with...
We use metaphors like maps. Sometimes in the realm of abstract ideas we encounter an unfamiliar domain — one that we can not study with our normal five senses. We thus seek a metaphor from another domain — one that is familiar to our senses — and we use it like a map to understand and to navigate the new, unfamiliar space.
So “trauma” as a metaphor is borrowed from physical injury in order to try to understand the enigmatic and non-physical realm of the psyche. But this metaphor, as metaphors do, comes with a set of implicit notions. One of them is “healing”. Consider this...
What is healing? Well, if you break your arm, then it needs setting and then time to heal. A healed arm is one where the break is no longer present — the arm is back to its original, pristine version of itself — though it might be a bit weaker from now on.
In that paragraph you can see all the assumptions implicit in this metaphor:
The injury is discrete and localised (a broken arm doesn't imply a broken hand)
There is an original pristine state to return to
Healing is facilitated first by a medical professional
But the healing itself is done through the body’s natural repair system
And though healed there may be a persistent weakness in that part forever more
How well do all of these assumptions fit when we talk of psychological trauma?
Is there such thing as a “pristine” state of the psyche?
Is there an immune system that will repair rifts in the psyche if they are “set” properly?
What exactly does it mean to “set” the bones of the fractured psyche?
And how would we even know when it is fully healed and able to bear weight again?
I think this last one hits right to the point: You might attend years of sessions of some trauma healing modality but never really know whether you are healed. A therapist might have an extraordinary, peak session with a client, but can they tell them with certainty that they are healed at the end? Or maybe they manage to heal one client but not the next. If so, what went wrong with the later?
Maybe this lack of clarity around effectiveness and consistency has less to do with their skills and more to do with a poor choice of metaphors.
In a bit we'll explore other metaphors for trauma and how they might improve our understanding and treatment effectiveness. But first, let us look at another one of these questionable assumptions implicit in the "healing" metaphor: the notion of the pristine, i.e. the healed state.
So Fresh and So Clean
This idea of the “pristine” state has some curious antecedents, both from colonialist thought (that’s for another time), and with spiritual dualism. Dualism is the idea that the spiritual reality is pure while the earthly realm is degenerate. In Anglo-European culture, it began (sort of) with the ancient Greeks and was furthered by Christianity's notions of Heaven, Hell, and earthly sin. Nowadays some talk as if they’ve transcended this dualism (”non-dual awareness”) but its legacy is baked into so much of our thinking and often shows itself in our metaphor selection.
A few decades back, when trauma was included in the realm of East-meets-West spiritual traditions, it was more of a chapter rather than the whole book. To heal trauma meditations, and ablutions of various forms were prescribed.
"Trauma? It is just a case of identifying with your false ego. There is no trauma in enlightenment! So just channel the pain into your spiritual austerities. More prostrations, more hours in asana, more meditations!"
These communities often spoke condescendingly of traditional therapies.
Other various communities / cults over the years have furthered this idea. Scientology was obsessed with getting to a fully “clear” state and many carrots were dangled about psychic powers and omniscience to be won by those who could achieve this state. However, public demonstrations resulted in humiliation for founder L Ron Hubbard and his top candidates. Another case of bad metaphor.
Here again we have this idea that there is a singular, original, untainted, and ultimately powerful state. Here we are ”enlightenment”, ”transcended”, “actualised”, ”redeemed”, "free from original sin". It is all the same thing...
It is important to understand that even if you think you are above all of this, we live in the cultural legacy of these beliefs. "Healed" and "clear" are very close to one another.
I personally feel this notion of a single pristine version of the psyche is the biggest block to the aims we seek.
Look at it another way: Is there such thing as a perfect tree? Are some rivers better than others? Clearly not. Yet, you might say, for certain goals, like whitewater rapids canoing, some rivers are better, or at least preferred.
Here we see another metaphor at play, one borrowing from nature. And you might see how this metaphor gives more scope for possibilities than the trauma/healed version while still allowing a preference for certain outcomes.
Other Metaphors of Trauma
So perhaps our struggles with healing trauma have more to do with the metaphor than the practices or flaws in ourselves. Perhaps our map has simply exceeded its usefulness.
There is a Golden Rule of Metaphors:
Never use a metaphor beyond its usefulness.
How do you know when you've exceeded its usefulness? When it ceases to be useful! This is a bit of a paradox...
So if “trauma as injury” has reached its tether, what other metaphors might we conjure up? It turns out there are already quite a few out there. Let’s have a look at them along with their implications of how one would go about treating their version of trauma.
Trauma as Injury
Obviously covered above but to quickly summarise and consider the treatment implications of this metaphor:
Trauma is an unnatural state due to previous injury
We give treatments to ”heal” it. These treatments are externally. We apply psychological, and biochemical techniques to heal the injury.
Healing means to return it’s “original” state, i.e. the one we’d be in had the trauma not occurred.
Trauma as Co-Personality
This is an exciting new domain whose modalities are bridging the world of peer-reviewed-double-blind science and the more numinous and spiritual understandings.
The metaphor here is that traumatic events cause a fracturing of the core persona. We still have the Core Self — the wise mature adult, unaffected by the event — but we also have these other parts co-existing with the Core Self.
These other parts were splintered off from the Core Self, or rather you could say, spawned into existence by the trauma event. They operate semi-independently in response to that trauma for whom it is ever present and imminent. When some event occurs in our day-to-day living that superficially represents the circumstances of the core trauma event, they dominate the psyche, eclipsing the mature and unaffected Core Self.
Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind refers to them as Loyal Soldiers, citing the Japanese pilots downed in the deep Pacific. When rescued 20 years later, they were ready to get back into the fight, but….the war had ended! Their intentions were noble, doing their best to preserve their country, but the task had long since become obsolete.
Your inner psyche has these Loyal Soldiers too — they rallied to fight the war ravaging your psyche when the core trauma events occurred.
What kind of treatment works with this metaphor?
In the evidence-based Internal Family Systems (IFS), by Richard Schwartz, you are first encouraged to become curious and get to know them. Why are they here? What are they protecting / fighting against?
Second, acknowledge, appreciate and honour them. The Japanese apparently gave their soldiers a parade and national recognition for their loyalty.
Third, reintegrate them into your “inner village” by giving them a new, updated task to be attentive towards.
In practice this involves dropping into light altered states of consciousness and being guided to converse with these parts and also speak on their behalf. We’re trying to stay clean with the ”science-based,” woo-phobic, folk so we won’t call this "channeling" ;)
Trauma as Underdeveloped Psyche
Here we come back to this notion that some spiritual traditions claim which is that we experience trauma because we are attached to our limited ego mind. In other words, if we had sufficient spiritual maturity or psycho-emotional development we would not be so attached to this ”story of self” which is necessary for trauma to have an effect.
Therefore they recommend practices to weaken our ego-attachments: austerities, meditations, karma yoga / selfless service, devotion to a deity or guru figure.
The last century has shown much sex-money-power abuse stemming from this notion. But I feel there is something here. If not the whole puzzle, it is still a useful piece.
Trauma as an Ecological Symptom
In another of Plotkin's books, Soul Craft, he introduces an ecological model for trauma. He claims humans are not meant to live in isolated boxes removed from nature. He uses the analogy that if a plant were looking weak and ill, you wouldn’t try to fix the plant but your would water and fertilise the soil.
Humans thrive in the context of healthy community. When we live within healthy community, many of our psychological challenges simply disappear.
So the treatment implied by this metaphor is to get involved in community, do some charity, start a local meet-up, join a houseshare or eco-community, or basically anything that diffuses the excess preoccupation with your own story.
Trauma as Foreign Entity
In cultures throughout the word, people still believe many diseases — especially those of what we’d call a psychological nature — are the result of foreign, autonomous, parasitic entities having hijacked the victim’s core psyche. That’s a fancy way of saying some traumas are caused by spirit possession!
Before you call in the Woo Police, allow me to cite some modern peer-reviewed luminaries on the subject. First up we have Jung, from his Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:
The figure works, because secretly it participates in the observers psyche….It is split off from his consciousness and, consequently behaves like an autonomous personality.
– Jung, p270The inevitable concomitant being….the gradual…assimilation of a primitive daemonic figure who was originally autonomous and even capable of causing possession.”
– Jung, p266
Richard Schwartz Ph.D., the founder of IFS mentioned above, has some surprising support for this notion. He was trained as a classical psychiatrist and “accidentally” discovered the various co-personalities discussed above in his clinical work with patients. This gave rise to his IFS methodology.
He also discovered something else, something less “you” and more “other”. From his interview in the Expanded States of Consciousness Summit 2024:
You mentioned these entities.…I first began running into them with clients. This was without psychedelics. Initially I thought they were Protectors and so I would interview them — sometimes for hours as I really had the belief that there were really no bad parts — and ask over and over, “What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t try to kill a person, or if you didn’t try to hurt other people or get them to hurt other people,” and so on. They would say ”I’m not afraid of anything. It’s just what I do. This is why I’m here. I’m supposed to do this.” And at some point I started asking them, “Are you a part or something else?” And they would say “No I’m not a part”….So I came to call them ultimately “Unattached Burdens”…a free floating bundle of nastiness…floating around the system causing havoc.
– Richard Schwartz Ph.D., founder of IFS
Going back further we have a long history of religious and magical
methodologies used to heal various ailments:
In the bible, Matthew 17:14-18: Jesus heals a boy with seizures, described as being possessed by a demon.
Amulets from the Greco-Roman period often contain prayers or symbols intended to ward off evil spirits, believed to cause illness.
This site near the Dead Sea contained artifacts and texts, suggesting rituals for protection and healing, possibly linked to proto-Christian groups like the Essenes.
Were the Victorian imperialists correct? Are these cultures more primitive than ours, stuck in superstition having not gone through the Rationalist Enlightenment of Western society? Or is there some deeper understanding they possessed that we discarded in our arrogance and that is about to come back full circle?
I believe what are being asked to consider, rather than a regression to a more simplistic and naive world view, is actually the opposite: an understanding of consciousness that is more nuanced and sophisticated, where inner archetypes and external entities turn out to be variants on the same phenomena, much like the particle/wave duality of quantum physics.
Perhaps the realm of what we think of as our mind and it’s inner narratives isn’t a sealed box, but is like a lagoon that blends into the ocean — where the ecosystem is generally consistent but where sharks might occasionally invade from the ocean depths.
What’s important to acknowledge is that despite 200 years of psychology, the realm of the psyche is still an uncharted wilderness. It is enigmatic and in many senses a "black box" — we can see the outer effects, but the inner workings are mysterious. The achievements of Freud and Jung were that they brought awareness to whole facets of psyche that were being ignored by the clockwork rationalism of the Industrial Age.
So what kind of treatment would we expect for a ”trauma as foreign entity” model? What is the modern version of an exorcism?
The protocols of IFS involves identifying these “unattached burdens” and then casting them away with visualisations and psychodrama that are engaging to the subject. But what is an exorcism other than a psychodrama with content that is meaningful and evocative to the one possessed?
Trauma as Innate Structural Weakness
The last metaphor explains an interesting phenomenon, what I call the Guru Corruption Effect. This where you have person of a particularly high personal development. They consequently attract many followers who seek to emulate their model. Over time their power and influence increases and eventually they are found to be abusing this power.
In this fallout, the lamenting followers ask, “How could someone so advanced in development still have these flaws?”
Well maybe they aren’t flaws, i.e. deviations from the pristine nature, but rather they are just structural weak points in their psyche, invisible until a certain threshold of temptation is exceeded.
In other words, everyone is a villian if given enough power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's not a pathology. It's just human nature.
This idea has some ancient precedent: Gnosticism was the medieval esoteric branch of Christianity that was extremely popular until the Catholic Church decided to do a purge. According to the Gnostics, the physical universe and all within it was said to be created by the Demiurge and his minions the Archons, effectively angels assigned the task specifically by God.
But the Demiurge was jealous of humans, so he instructed his Archons to implement inherent weaknesses in the human body-mind, areas where they could easily be corrupted. Jealousy, envy, gluttony could be excited in them to deny their basic nature of compassion and love and instead do harm to one another.
This is the model of “trauma as structural weakness”. In the modern world, we see it in places like the 12 Steps Programme, where addicts are told “once an addict, always an addict”. They have to accept this and the solution is then to restructure their inner and outer worlds so ensure there is no falling into temptation.
In this metaphor, there is no possibility of “healing” but instead a basic reality we must accept. From here we strengthen the support around the weekends as to not fall victim to it.
How to Happily Ever After
Baked into the notion of ”healing trauma” is that is it inherently good. Of course you want to heal your broken arm. Why would anyone not?
Yet here this metaphor obscures a deeper, more authentic reality. What is it we are actually hoping to achieve with trauma healing? Why do we think we need to heal our trauma to achieve it?
Maybe it’s to kick depression, or to stop panic attacks, or to have more confidence, to have better sex, to succeed in business, to perform on stage, to promote our creative work, to have a solid romantic relationship, or to be able to just to feel happy as we are without needing external validation.
These are the true wants. Nobody really wants to “heal trauma”. We want what we think that will bring us. What we are seeking is agency — the ability to change something in our lives. Trauma healing is really about personal empowerment.
Yet for some reason this agency is being denied to us. Some sort of self-sabotage is going on. Thus we jump on the trauma healing train in an attempt to understand and hopefully dismantle this self-sabotaging part.
But will we be successful? Having better sex might involve deep trauma processing or it might just involve learning some practical skills…or both. Depression might be fully resolved just by getting more exercise and connecting with local community. Again choosing the correct metaphor matters.
I propose a mixed metaphor model — or better yet a meta-model — where instead of having a fixed model and single preferred modality, we have a pool of possibilities, of many modalities, and also of tools that go beyond just seeking the root of the core trauma.
Personally I have found much benefit from abandoning loyalty to a single method and instead following my intuition in a client session, wherever it leads me.
And this has led to me offering clients a fuller spectrum of consciousness development experiences rather than just focussing exclusively on their core trauma. This meta-model approach has clearly demonstrated to me that is helps better identify a client's true goals and work effectively towards them. It also has shown to foster better integration of the trauma healing work into their day-to-day lives: their relationships, their work, their play, their sense of meaning and purpose.
I believe it is time we abandoned loyalty to any single method and embrace all of them as tools in our chest — and that we start asking ourselves and clients what we really want out of life rather than just to be "healed".
In the next article I'll present a meta-model for personal healing / development / empowerment. And we'll look at how different modalities fit within it and how we can ensure we are addressing the full spectrum of the human in order work.
Thanks for reading! Know someone else who would appreciate
Further Reading
Soul Craft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche &
Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, Bill Plotkin
*What is Internal Family Systems?", Schwartz, R.C.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung, C.G. (1969).