Author, speaker and neuroscience educator Sarah Peyton is a friend to ACEs Connection. When I asked her recently to speak to the importance acknowledging the grief and trauma most of us are feeling during COVID-19, as we see the number of deaths increase and as people we know fall victim to the disease, she welcomed the opportunity.

I wanted to ask Sarah to do this because recently, as I was listening to her “Your Resonant Self, Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing,”, it clicked for me what has been missing as a trauma survivor during the pandemic.

Sarah was telling the story of Nepalese boy soldiers who went off to civil war. The 2010 research showed that the boys who “came back to a welcome from their communities ended up with fewer signs of post-traumatic stress. But the boys who went off to the same war, fought shoulder to shoulder with those other boys, and came back to communities that turned their backs on them had much higher levels of post-traumatic stress.”

“This research helps us to understand that trauma is less defined by what happens to us than it is by how we are received afterward,” Sarah writes.

Acknowledgement of the trauma of having been in a war was the difference for the Nepalese boys.

The night before the inauguration, when President-elect Joe Biden with his wife, Jill, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris with her husband, Doug Emhoff, held their somber memorial for the 400,000 Americans who had died during the pandemic, it was healing because it was acknowledgement. Seeing those deaths marked by 400 luminarias, one for each 100 victims, was healing because the truth was being seen, shared.

Having our country’s leadership acknowledge the pain and the loss we’ve seen day in and day out allowed us to breathe a collective sigh of grief and relief.  Our grief is real. Most of us feel it. As Biden said, “...to heal, we must remember.”

As a trauma survivor, I was in my sixties before I began to embody the importance of grieving for myself about the trauma and the losses I’d experienced as the result of trauma. Trauma has cost me in terms of how well I did in school, in relationships, in my career, in my finances.

Sarah Peyton’s beautiful book, recommended to me by colleague Cissy White, has been a touchstone. Each time I’ve pulled it up to take another read or listen, I process a bit more.

How are you doing? Does it help you to know that some leaders are genuinely sorry for what we are all going through?

Resources:
https://www.yourresonantself.com/

https://youtu.be/07XjnoDQuQ4 - YouTube Video