Link – Why We Don’t Listen to Trauma Survivors (the “Contagion” principle)

This article is referring to events and people I do not know much about, beyond some public information I’ve seen about the yoga communities, but this line did catch my attention:

“Sometimes we can’t acknowledge the trauma of others,” she said, “until we acknowledge the ways in which we ourselves have been traumatized.”

Matt talks about the trauma of listening to someone tell their story, and the thing that reminded me of is that when we choose to disclose to another person, to share our story of abuse, we can hope they will react well, support us, etc. But we have to be ready for anything. We don’t know what kind of trauma or issues of their own they will be bringing into the conversation. It’s not our place to judge them for it either.

Sometimes, our stories may just be too much at that time for someone. We need to be OK with that. We need to have the strength to allow the other person to deal with the secondary trauma in their own way and at their own pace.

If you can’t do that, maybe this isn’t the person you want to tell your story to just yet. That’s OK too. It’s not easy to tell, and it’s not easy to listen to. We’ll all be better if we can talk about it, and react to it, honestly though.

http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/why-we-dont-listen-to-trauma-survivors-the-contagion-principle/