Trees don't rush to heal from trauma
Trees don't rush to heal from trauma
and why we shouldn't either (especially around the holidays)
I’ve always been enamored by trees. Their sturdiness and majesty. The way clapping leaves sound like ocean waves.
Trees have witnessed some of the most profound moments of my life:
My first beer at eleven under the shade of a wrinkly oak. Waves of tears as a teen near rows of sapling pine. Mysterious muses and backrests as I worked on unfinished stories and screenplays, their branches my only readers. They’ve stood by as my silent smoking buddies and held me up when I needed a place to pee outside. In early recovery, they waved to me as I ascended sand dunes and pranced through quaking aspen and sugar maple groves with my best friend and puppy, Mo.
Trees may have a place in your life, your past, too.
Beronda Montgomery, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Michigan State University wrote an article called: Trees don’t rush to heal from trauma and neither should we. In it she states:[1]
Wounds – whether deliberately induced through pruning or fortuitously caused by natural disaster – become highly visible as the trees stand exposed in fall and winter. Trees notice when there is damage or loss, and embark upon a process of recuperation and healing. They don’t just ignore trauma or ageing in order to get back to business as usual. Indeed, failure to respond – and respond actively and dynamically – could result in long-term poor health, even death. So, when a wound occurs, trees initiate a protective response that often takes place in two distinct stages – an initial, rapid chemical phase, followed by a slower, long-term physical adaptation. […]
Covering a wound prematurely simply to keep the damage out of sight, without attention to openly dealing with it through cleansing and therapeutic care, can lead to a festering of issues rather than a healthy progression towards healing, reformulation, growth and thriving.[2]
Trees tell us something about healing and the need to respond to trauma. They also show how different approaches are needed. A response in the short term and a strategy for the long game.
Are you interested in learning more about healing from trauma, including inter-generational trauma?
There are tools and practical ways to disrupt cycles of inter-generational trauma. There are things that have helped my own journey (and help on the daily) and rhythms that I cannot wait to share with you in my new book!
If you’d like to be a part of my early readers, send me a message on Instagram or comment below. I’d love to have you and will be sharing all sorts of freebies and fun things with the group in 2024.
Just as there is a season for everything (turn, turn, turn), there is also a choice nestled within what Montgomery calls a “delicate balancing act in the struggle to recover from trauma.” There is a time to apply the salve and a time to plant a new seed. Grow a new branch.
There is also a time to receive: to allow love back into our lives, or perhaps into our lives for the first time.
Sometimes it takes a while to be able to feel and know we are lovable. It can take work. Like I share with folks who are celebrating a recovery milestone: Recovery and healing is not easy, but it is always worth it. And so are you.
You are worth every second of the work.
You deserve to be free of anything that has been preventing you from knowing your true worth and knowing the One who loves you. You deserve to experience a grace that glistens. You deserve to “know a new freedom and a new happiness,” as my recovery friends say.[3]
Our lives may have started on the wrong side of things, in places of despair and captivity, but now (praise God!) we can commit to a new path. Trauma doesn’t have to have the last word. Grace does.
Will you join me on a movement towards healing in 2024?
Hope to see you in the new year or this THURSDAY DECEMBER 21st. Register now to attend the free, live event with the Center of Addiction and Faith.
[1] “Trees Don’t Rush to Heal from Trauma and Neither Should We | Psyche Ideas.” n.d. Psyche. Accessed November 3, 2023. https://psyche.co/ideas/trees-dont-rush-to-heal-from-trauma-and-neither-should-we.
[2] Retrieved from: https://psyche.co/ideas/trees-dont-rush-to-heal-from-trauma-and-neither-should-we.
[3] Read the July 1985 Grapevine Magazine article A New Freedom and a New Happiness. (n.d.). Www.aagrapevine.org. Retrieved December 8, 2023, from https://www.aagrapevine.org/magazine/1985/jul/new-freedom-and-new-happiness
This was beautiful, Caroline. I have become quite fascinated with trees in my recovery journey. They truly have so much to show and teach us. Just like us, they all have their own story to tell. I especially love how they shed their bark. To me, it’s a reminder that as we expand and grow, it’s ok to drop those parts of ourselves that once felt necessary. We can shed old ways that we clung to and expand into new growth.
I'd be interesting in learning more about your book (but don't use Instagram at all - so if that's where the conversations happen, I'm not able to participate).
Also, from the moment I read this email title, I thought of a really moving presentation I first saw at the end of this past October about how trees deal with loss. The speaker is both a forester and pastor. He does have it available in book form or as a Youtube video presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQrJubJk48M (How Trees Deal With Loss by Jason Kissel).