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composite picture of reality in a desperate one attempt to inform us of where we are, what is going on

and what we must respond to. From this fragmented hodge-­‐podge, we make our decisions and plans.

To this scramble we add trauma and unmetabolized grief. Perhaps this scramble is trauma and

unmetabolized grief.

Proper grieving is one of the key indigenous technologies that open the doors between the worlds. The

willingness to grieve engenders an emptying that creates space to listen and to hear. Grief, the

dictionary tells us, is: “Deep sorrow, misery, sadness, anguish, pain, distress, heartache, heartbreak,

agony, torment, affliction, suffering, woe, desolation, dejection, and despair.” It’s odd that we have so

many words for something we tend to so little. Strange, too, that the word loss is not included, for grief

is fundamentally about the loss of someone or something we love. Untended grief is cumulative,

immobilizing. Traumatic. And what, exactly, is trauma? The dictionary says it’s, “A deeply distressing or

disturbing experience.” I would add: ... that permanently alters our lives for the worse, such that the

world we once knew, and ourselves within it, become unrecognizable. It is this rupture of meaning that

makes trauma so potent.

If not addressed, trauma hitchhikes from generation to generation, our constant companion, co-­‐author

of our lives. It will have its say, invited or not, whether or not we choose to hear its message. As a case

in point Liberia was founded in the 1820s by freed slaves sent to colonize the land from which their

forebears had been torn. The civil war there, similar to wars elsewhere, may have been the inevitable

implosion of multi-­‐generational trauma stemming from slavery, abduction, displacement, repression,

colonization and exploitation.

Trauma is stored in our bodies and in specific parts of our brains.10 In response to trauma, our bodies

try to protect us. We become numb in that part of our brain that allows us to feel, to think clearly, to

put things in perspective, to make life-­‐enhancing choices. Everything bends to the will of trauma. It is

as unmistakable and as uncompromising as, say, a pedophile, a torturer, or a terrorist with a bomb.

Chances are, the people driven to these extremes are, themselves, victims of severe trauma and so the

cycle continues and escalates.

10 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Viking, 2014