Trauma: Get Over It

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Ritual, Aristiz?bal suggests, is one way of understanding trauma as a path to healing and renewal. 'Most of us have lost our connection to our roots, but the ancestral wisdom is in our bones,' he says. In fact, considering that the experience of trauma itself contains the possibility of renewal, it's worth noting that many traditional adolescent rites of passage include some form of physical wounding.

'No one says, 'Tra-la-la, we'll carry you around in a throne and make you king of the May Day,'' says clinical psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff, who made a study of the ceremonies while he was at the University of Toronto. 'No: They cut you, perforate you, circumcise you, bury you.' In many of these traditions, the initiation is looked upon as a ceremonial death and rebirth. 'It's got to be a sacrifice, a giving up a part of the self. It's a mimicking of the pain of becoming,' he says.

There are other paths, of course. Matthew Sanford, although he is paralyzed, practices and teaches yoga, and he says this work has helped him heal. 'With yoga, I'm not processing psychologically or emotionally what happened to me, but I literally let the echoes of the traumas come out of my body, and let go of them.'

The connections among emotion, body, and mind implicit in both ritual and yoga are key components of healing. 'People have been using talk therapy to reach the trauma, and it is possible to do that,' says Gina Ross, 'but it's much harder. The reptilian part of our brain does not respond very well to talk.'

Ultimately, the most terrifying result of our failure to embrace trauma in spite of our fears is what Aristiz?bal calls the American 'cult of death.' He has witnessed the disconnected and unnatural ways that people die -- alone in the hospital, filled with tubes, a doctor checking vital signs, their families gathered in the waiting room. 'Then you have two days to grieve. You read the five stages of grief, so you understand it rationally, and then you go back to work,' Aristiz?bal says. 'The absence of ritual around death has led this society to see death as a failure of medicine, not a part of life,' Aristiz?bal says. Ignoring the trauma, we fail to grasp its meaning.

'It's not only economics and capitalism that continue creating war, but also the fact that our psyche is so wounded and we're not recognizing it,' Aristiz?bal continues. Americans would do well to promote national healing processes that face trauma head-on, like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as well as rituals like those in Sierra Leone, where child soldiers have received new names, along with forgiveness. Instead, he says, 'We were told, 'Go to Disney World and we'll take care of the rest,' while the ashes of 9/11 were still falling on us.'

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