What Happened to You

interpersonal rupture and repair is good for building resilience.

The concept of resilience is used in our field. But if you look carefully at our biology after a traumatic experience—all the way down to the way genes are expressed—trauma will change everyone in some way.

In the wake of trauma, the hardest thing to understand is that nothing and no one can take away the pain. And yet that’s exactly what we desperately want to do—because we are social creatures, subject to emotional contagion, and when we’re around people who are hurting, we hurt, too. We don’t want to hurt. It is hard to sit in the midst of ruined lives and not feel the misery. It helps us regulate to try to undo or negate—to look away from—others’ pain.

So we make our arbitrary assumptions about people’s innate resilience. We make our sweeping declarations that allow us to marginalize
traumatized children. We take our focus off the tragedy, move on with our lives, telling ourselves that “they” will be okay. But as we continue to see in our discussions, the impact of trauma doesn’t simply fade away.