As I recount the 88th Texas State Legislative session, all I can think of is the loss so many Texans faced. As a queer person, I feel pain and loss for my younger queer and trans siblings, as they grow up in a state that has made it clear that they do not fit within texas values. As a trauma therapist, I recognize the traumatic and ambiguous loss that the LGBTQ+ community is experiencing as a whole is deep and scholarly unexplored. Loss and grief scales far beyond the loss of a loved one, or the loss of one’s job. For marginalized communities and identities, grief and loss is constant and cyclical, yet we don't see it being explored in an academic settings.

Black lesbian feminist, poet, writer, and activist Audre Lorde stated, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” while she was struggling with cancer in the 1980’s. As a trauma therapist who has borne witness to ongoing oppression on both the personal and global level, this notion of care and self-care have been on my mind lately. What does self-care mean today? Is self-care still an act of political warfare, allowing us to enact change in the world as Audre Lorde meant it to be? Or has it transformed into a western, individualistic concept that has left us feeling isolated and dissociated from our own humanity in the face of painful human experiences? 

"I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself." – Maya Angelou

Trauma, whether a singular distressing event or a cluster of experiences, can have an impact on nearly every aspect of a person’s life. Trauma inhibits us from being fully in the present moment – often interrupting our relationships, work, and identity development. One of the key characteristics of trauma is that it doesn’t have a beginning and an end in our memory. Energy conservation during traumatic experiences prevents our brains from processing the narrative of the events in ways that we can catalog and store as we do other, everyday encounters. The short-term effect of this is survival. The long-term effects can look like chronic stress, hypervigilance, and emotional dysregulation. This leaves most trauma survivors expressing feelings of exhaustion or hopelessness.

When we experience a traumatic event, or events, it is not our conscious mind that determines whether the event was traumatic, but the nervous system. Trauma is a physiological experience rather than a cognitive one. In Texas, we are experiencing another winter storm. While this type of storm isn’t a big deal in states that expect winter weather events, in Texas we don’t have an infrastructure to support our people during this type of weather. Here are some important pieces to processing stress or trauma to aid in completing the survival response and orienting back to safety.

It’s the season for giving and a season where a lot of our mental health struggles can be stirred. Instead of buying the latest toy or gadget for your loved ones, perhaps gift them something that will benefit their mental health. Maybe you’re also looking for some sweet self care items for yourself—the Moving Parts team has you covered with our mental health gift guide!

With the popularization of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score,” this trope has become common when we speak about trauma. What we mean when we say ‘the body keeps the score,’ is trauma is held in the body. It is the body that determines whether something registers as trauma, it is the body that responds to trauma in an attempt to protect us from threat, it is the body that responds to outside stimulus in an attempt to prevent future trauma from occurring. It is the body that must heal from trauma as much as (if not more than) the mind.

Many trauma survivors (myself included), live with a too-good-to-be-true mentality. If we prepare for the worst, we are prepared when the worst inevitably happens. It is not unexpected or unknown. When we can predict what will happen, it can offer us safety and calm. When events feel unpredictable and unexpected, we can feel out of control and are confused by how to respond. The brain finds safety in predictability. We build our behavior and responses around what we expect to happen.

Child therapist Jamie Delgado explains what trauma means to her.

Friday, I welcomed a new cohort in the morning, and said goodbye to our prior cohort in the afternoon. It was in this meeting of a hello and goodbye that I found the group’s purpose. Of course, I’d known the purpose to some extent when I started. What began as a group for therapists to enhance their knowledge of working with trauma and examine what comes up in them in response to their people, became a place for therapists to move more deeply toward their own parts and each other’s. To build connection in a time that was so tinged with isolation. It became a place to grow, as moved toward vulnerable places, held by the group.

According to Steven Porges it takes 10 sessions to build safety in the therapy room.