Finding your Community: Healing & Belonging

Key to healing from trauma: Find your people, your community - your tribe, mi gente.

Div Manickam - Unsplash

My eyes opened wide as I read these words from Oprah and Dr. Perry’s book: What happened to You.

.. a key to healing from trauma is finding your people, your community. This can help build resilience, post traumatic healing and ultimately post traumatic wisdom.

Belonging

Everyone needs people who can listen, be present, and make them feel heard and seen. When we have friends, family and other folks in our life, we have a natural healing environment. We heal best in community.

When we find our tribe, we heal beyond measure. We start to connect the dots and start to feel alive again. Like we matter in this world. And truth be told, we all matter - all humans matter. We just need to start to love ourselves and stop seeking approval.

When we live on others terms, we forget and lose our own identity.

Having come home, it was a struggle at first to switch identities from the fearless Div in US to the timid and shy Div in India, who barely speaks. I decided to be myself and knowing that will not be what my parents expect of me, I am learning to be ok. I hope they see that I am happy as I am. That I don’t need to check the boxes that society has defined for me. That I am creating my own world and that I matter.

Healing

As long as we don’t speak of the elephant in the room, things are good as I don’t have the answers to their questions. These words below from the book comforted me and made me realize that I can take all the time in the world to find the words to heal me in my own way.

• Controlling when, how much and which aspect of a traumatic event we share allows us to create our own therapeutic pattern of recovery.

  
... they were waiting for her. in her own time. in her own way.


• Because if we try to control when and how much a traumatized person talks, it can be re-traumatizing rather than healing.

Post-traumatic Wisdom

In the book, a powerful advice: Instead of saying, “Hey, tell me what you are thinking about”, we need to let folks control when and how much they’re going to talk about what’s upsetting them. When we give a person that control and help them feel safe, in their own time they will be more capable of talking.

Walking is regulating for me especially in nature. After months here, I finally started to experience nature - in a park and a waterfall. The sensory elements of nature teach us about the regulating rhythms of life.

When we are upset, words are not effective. Our emotions run through and get the best of us. I experienced this with my 5-year old niece and wondered how I could help calm her and assure her its ok to feel the way she is feeling.

Tone and voice has more impact than words. It’s best to be simply present. We all want to feel heard and be seen. Recently, a conversation at home led my emotions: frustration and anger to peak up. I realized the tone triggered my past fears and I shut down. I couldn’t help folks see or feel what I was feeling.

Always choose Belonging

Even if its your best intent, sometimes words fail us as humans. That’s why it’s key to give everyone the space and time they need to figure it out in their own way.

I am grateful to all the communities that helped me find myself, to be a voice for the unspoken and truly belong - Gracias mi gente.

Be fully present. Listen with true intent.

Our actions mean more than words.