Trauma...understood as a shattering, malign experience that burns its mark into the self...is a potent thing. When we've experienced traumatic harm, our entire nervous system says: you survived this thing. You're not going to go anywhere near anything like it ever ever ever again. This makes sense as an instinct, but can make some of the rest of life much more difficult.
Like, you can't be around water. Or cars. Or dogs. Or men. Or people that remind you of a certain person. Or people at all.
Trauma, by its nature, forcibly defines our engagement with the world. Understanding this is an important part of reclaiming ourselves and our agency. The challenge, of course, is that trauma-responses are themselves dysfunctional. Trauma is a thing to acknowledge, but is the very last thing you want to center as a healthy integrating aspect of your psyche. If trauma is the focus of a therapeutic approach, then in less-competent hands, all efforts can become to find the trauma...up to and including defining any suboptimal event or difficult relationship as "traumatic." When the hammer is "trauma work," every nail starts looking traumatic.
This perhaps the greatest challenge of trauma-centered therapeutic approaches, because the task .of healing is to heal...and the trauma that warps our choices and stunts our lives is fundamentally and essentially dysfunction. I mean, literally. It's function shaped by shatteringly negative experience. That's what the word "dysfunction" means.
To which I found myself contemplating what it would look like for a therapeutic approach to emphasize the shatteringly positive. Yes, "shatteringly positive."
Because there are such experiences. There are moments in life when we are suddenly and irrevocably changed for the better, times that function in the inverse way to trauma. Instead of having horror, fear, or anxiety seared into us, we are suddenly and unexpectedly made more whole, given courage, and given hope.
What do such experiences look like?
They are, first, epiphanic. Having an epiphany means being caught up in the realization of something, as your consciousness suddenly grasps a vital and necessary truth that you've not had before. Epiphanies are life transforming, shattering the present reality and the norms that have come before and replacing them with something new.
They are, second, ecstatic. Ecstasy means, literally, standing outside of oneself, and describes a state of awareness in which you are at a remove from your normal consciousness. They can be stirred by psychotropics or trance-inducing actions (think dance/song/prayer), but can also arise in moments of unusual experiential intensity.
Third, they are sublime. English is a weird language, in which "sublime" means "rising above a threshold" and "subliminal" means "existing below a threshold." Why don't they refer to the same thing? It's just the way English is. Our language struggles in such places, but the unifying feature of these concepts is the encounter with and pressing through of a boundary. A moment of breathtaking awe can be sublime, but...I would contend...so can the breaking through of a disintegrative part of yourself. Those in recovery describe that moment of "hitting bottom" as being the place where real change begins, and it's a threshold encounter, in its own way sublime.
Finally, they are eucatastrophic. Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien, who saw it as the core defining feature of "faery" stories, by which he meant any supernaturally grounded narrative. It's the good-shattering of a broken order by the indwelling of the transcendent holy, in which change is effectuated by something both good and greater than the existing and dominant power.
All of these point to an experience that is analogous to trauma, but that is radically and fundamentally positive. And all are also essentially religious experiences.
"Come to Jesus moments," if you will.
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