Only after looking at what was lost among those trees could I begin to conceptualize how much good has been removed from the human experience due to trauma.
I bought my home in 2006 and can assure you that the two Pine trees were planted and transplanted at the same time; they were nurtured (or not) by me in the same amounts. Both trees grew at the same pace for about nine years. Over a year ago there was a huge snow storm that toppled the Pine tree on the left. I tied it back up hoping it wouldn't die. Sure enough, the Pine tree was resilient and survived. In fact, if you were to look at it today you would not know that it once fell over and looks like a model Pine tree.
People often see survivors of trauma after they have begun the healing process—just like my Pine tree—they look like nothing ever happened to them, and because of that, as a society we fail to see how much energy and resources it takes to heal from trauma; that the investment in healing is valuable and necessary, and the immense cost to the individual and to society of that trauma. So we take the easiest path-we divest from healing systems, we don't bother investing in cultural changes that reduce trauma and blame victims of trauma for their own trauma, hoping they would just heal themselves and move on without disrupting our lives and inconveniencing us.
...but I look at those trees. I know that had I originally invested $20.00 in supports, the Pine tree would not have fallen, I know that I shouldn't have assumed that it would do just fine with the same amount of resources as the un-fallen tree and I know for a fact that had it not experienced that trauma it would have been over one foot taller than it currently is. By not taking trauma seriously, I am deprived of about one or more extra foot of air cleaning power and on the aesthetic level, two matching trees.
Trauma takes away possibilities from us. A victim of trauma heals like most organic things, and because of that we often fail to see what we miss out on because of energy that had to be redirected towards healing. If I didn't have the tree to the right to compare it to, like everyone else, I would have assumed that the tree recovered just fine through sheer resilience. It is resilience that allowed the tree to heal, but it is the absence of trauma that would have allowed it to grow taller than it currently is. The tree isn't "damaged," like most humans, it has limited resources and those resources were used to repair the damage caused by the storm rather than into growing taller. I guess we never miss what was never there, but can you just imagine how much better our world would be if we were to eliminate trauma?
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