Congratulations on reaching this point in the book. We’ve already travelled to some challenging places, but I’m afraid I’ve saved the most difficult section until last. However, it’s also the one with the greatest potential rewards.
For some people, a sad outcome of their journey is that although they make good progress in healing their inner world, as a direct consequence of their trauma they choose to keep themselves emotionally distanced from the outer world. Painful relationships with others are the cause of their trauma, so part of their defensive strategy is to retain the emotional walls they’ve built around themselves.
For me, the true measure of the impact of our healing isn’t only that we find some peace and joy in ourselves – it’s that despite all that we might have experienced, we’ve found that same peace and joy in our connection with other humans.
In fact, it’s more than that: We discover that the greatest joy we can experience as humans doesn’t happen in the depths of our own soul, but when our soul connects with other souls in a deep and meaningful way. When we’ve only known pain and suffering in our relationships with others it’s hard to believe that it’s through our relationships that our greatest joy can be experienced, which is why this part of our healing is so important.
It’s as if there’s a joy and beauty out there that we can’t even imagine if we’ve never touched it before. And the greater our deficit in the past, the greater the wonder and beauty that can lie in our future.
To truly reset our trauma, we need to learn to let people into our hearts and lives once more. In a sense this very act is a declaration of our own transformation and healing. And so, in this final section, we’re going to explore how trauma healing meets our relationships in the outside world.
I call this work the ABCD of trauma healing, which stands for:
We’ll start by looking at the importance of asking for help and the power of healing in community – in a sense, this is learning to say yes to others. We’ll then delve into boundaries and how to make sure you manage carefully who you invite into your inner world, which is really your capacity to say no to others.
Next, we’ll move on to the importance of committing to your healing journey and how you say yes and no to yourself. Finally, we’ll close with the importance of deciding what your trauma means, and how by using the tools you’ve learned in this book you can prevent further ECHOs in your future.