Healing Historical Trauma Through Traditional Culture

Dina Gilio-Whitaker ‘s review of Leslie Korn’s new book Rhythms of Recovery: Trauma, Nature, and the Body brings up an issue often ignored by health professionals – the role historical and cultural trauma can have on the emotional and physical well being of the individual.

Medicine, like politics, is often a matter of perspective; for many cultures illness is caused by being out of balance emotionally, spiritually, mentally or physically. Trauma, too, can cause imbalances that lead to physical illness by disrupting the body’s natural rhythms that maintain wellness. So argues Leslie E. Korn, author of a new book entitled “Rhythms of Recovery: Trauma, Nature, and the Body,” published and released this year by Routledge.

And, unfortunately, all too often the healthcare industry is of little help. “In my experience I observed that the physical and mental health professions are very compartmentalized in our approach to treatment. The physical health people treat the body and the mental health people treat the mind but nobody [other than those we call ‘healers’] really helps the client integrate and understand how the symptoms, the discomforts or distress that they’re experiencing are a whole [system],” Dr. Korn explains.

 In addition to integrating mental and general healthcare modalities, what distinguishes this book is its recognition of the role of culture and historical trauma. For American Indians the history of genocide and colonization has resulted in what psychologists call postcolonial stress disorder, which occurs not only on an individual but community level and often goes unacknowledged.

Becoming Minimalist

Joshua Becker’s story begins on a fine spring day:

Our story begins on a beautiful three-day weekend at our home in suburban Vermont. The sun was shining, the flowers were blooming, the grass was beginning to green, and the trees were budding. I was cleaning my garage, my wife was cleaning the bathrooms, and my 5-year old son was in the backyard asking us to come play with him. At that very moment, I struck up an entirely coincidental, life-changing conversation with my neighbor who commented, “Maybe you don’t need to own all this stuff.” The juxtaposition was striking. My possessions piled up in the driveway… my son in the backyard… my day slipping away… I immediately recognized something needed to change. My belongings were not adding value to my life. Instead, they were subtracting from it.

Spirituality Enhances Health

In a study, posted on the Elevated Existence blog, research shows spirituality enhances a person’s health – particularly their mental health:

“In many ways, the results of our study support the idea that spirituality functions as a personality trait,” said Dan Cohen, assistant teaching professor of religious studies at MU and one of the co-authors of the study. “With increased spirituality people reduce their sense of self and feel a greater sense of oneness and connectedness with the rest of the universe. What was interesting was that frequency of participation in religious activities or the perceived degree of congregational support was not found to be significant in the relationships between personality, spirituality, religion and health.”

The Poetry Quilt

Meyrem Hussain brings us a poignant article about  “hundreds of scraps of materials and thousands of painstaking stitches… brought together in a six-month labour of love.”

Women attending the Stuart Low Trust have just completed their ‘poetry quilt’ – a riot of colour with the compositions of 15 budding poets.

The poems include a tale of a woman being saved from a train-track suicide, an ode to the sounds of the sea, and a manifesto claiming that a perfect world is vastly inferior to one that is ‘flawed, with hips swaying with personality.’

The quilt was made as part of a project that aimed to tackle loneliness and isolation among people with mental health problems by getting them to take part in creative activities.

In total around 40 people, mainly women, did the sewing and wrote the poems.

Steph Horak, who co-ordinated the project for the trust, said: ‘The idea is to give people something to do on winter mornings when it is hardest to get out of the house.’