Key’s Reviews > What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing > Status Update

“How ironic that the cultures our modern world has marginalized are the very cultures with the wisdom to heal our modern woes.”; and how ironic that some definitions of success can also reduce social connectedness—living isolated, fancier gadgets, ingroup vs outgroup dynamics, self-absorbed, prioritizing extrinsic goals such as materials and status rather than intrinsic such as community and meaning in life.

Connectedness and community is key to building resilience to buffer against life’s challenges—people aren’t born resilient, but need a safe and loving environment to return to as they practice facing moderate, achievable challenges and talk about their distress at their own pace, with someone who can reflexively listen and absorb high emotions, and exude a call they can catch.

“We feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty”

The topic of transgenerational transmission has always fascinated me! Resilience can be influenced genetically and then passed down? Amazing, and devastating when you realize why—the traumas that the OG had to survive to reproduce, giving the future generations a blueprint on how to survive that trauma, assuming they will go through the same.
Also, it takes 10-20 interactions to develop familiarity with a person.

Experiences in the 1st 2 months of life has a disproportionately important impact on long-term health/development—not surprising but wild. Now, the only tolerable dose of therapeutic interaction for intense trauma being only seconds long—mind-blowing. Heavy sigh. Good news: the history of relational health is more predictive of mental health than history of adversity!

“ Our brain is organized to act and feel before we think“. The idea of us encoding early memories before we could even encode the actual memories themselves, is fascinating to me. And heartbreaking. Phew.