Part V: Context and Community

This is the fifth and final part of our short series about trauma-informed self care.

And today I am going to talk about context and community-- first their relationship to trauma, and then how cultivating connection, reconnection, and community is a vital strategy for staying in the work. In the last episode I talked about how the precursor to developing post-traumatic symptoms is frequently the presence of fear plus helplessness. Here I want to highlight another aspect-- trauma as an experience of alienation and disconnection, especially when we're talking about human -caused harm or disaster. It is often an experience of rupture, separation, and disillusionment.