I use the word “trauma” quite often here, but what does that word really mean? I work from many different traditions with my clients as well as in my own personal work, but I find The Runes to be a very clear, concise way to understand how our minds work. The Rune pictured here, Thurisaz, is shown upright as well as reversed. The Thurisaz Rune represents primal energy—a club smashing through an obstacle, or a wall of thorns protecting oneself from danger. It represents the Archetypal power of the Frost Giants, as it is all directed energy with no conscious thought.
We can see that this interpretation very easily correlates to a traumatic event. The individual consciousness cannot, in the moment, interpret this violent intrusion into one’s sovereignty committed by another. Any meaning we make of this event comes much later. But the reversed position of Thurisaz represents the inverse of this force—primal brutality turned inward. This is the present-moment manifestation of past trauma. We attack ourselves in an attempt to reconcile our past experiences.
But this is not how it has to be. The past can never be changed, but how we relate to that primal energy living inside of us is malleable. Working with the past can be useful to some people, but my primary focus in my clinical work revolves around this question: “What are you experiencing right now?” Whatever relics of the past that are still moving in us can be held with self-compassion, but only once we have learned to feel these relics without judgement or interpretation. It sounds simple, but it rarely plays out this simply. It can take months, years even, to learn how to experience the feelings we have when they are connected to our past.
And that’s where I come in. I’m ready to sit with you through this process. It might be painful, but changing our behavior is the only way to change our outcomes in life. Let’s get started.
