It feels like we live our lives bouncing between these two poles: stress and rest, one necessitating the other until the pendulum swinging bores you into oblivion. Many of us live our lives just at the edge of plunging headlong into fatigue and overexhaustion, until we are forced to rest, whether by nervous breakdown or overdone emotional release.

I believe there may be a better way to live. Those who have endured trauma have a lot to teach us about how to handle stress. When trauma presents itself, there is no amount of rest or self-care that can erase the wounds that attach themselves to you. You cannot relax enough to make the horror abate. You carry it and it continues to plague your thinking and behaving. The trauma is always with you.

Trauma survivors must learn to surrender, and the traumatic response (dissociation) is its own sort of surrender. It is giving your body up to the pain. I am not saying we should purposefully put ourselves in harm’s way or give up fighting to avoid pain that is avoidable, but a certain amount of pain and stress is inherent in this life, and there are times we cannot escape it. We must learn to live in surrender and not just self-care. Some wounds are so deep, self-care is just a band-aid for a wound that needs surgery. And we must learn to carry each other and in that way help lead one another to healing.