“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”

-Bessel van der Kolk

I think the world mostly sees trauma as the bad thing that happens to you in the moment – the headlining event of pain.

But to me, life is more a tumbling sequence of smaller moments, the real damage being what follows when no one sticks around to see what the main event did to you.

Or turned you into.

In light of that, I'd like to recommend The Body Keeps the Score where van der Kolk vividly dissects how pain lives in and pummels the body until someone finally bears witness to what happened.

His work has reconfigured my understanding of healing, which really does start, I think, with being believed. By others if you’re lucky, or by yourself at the very least if you’re not.

TL;DR: It's incredible how much you lose waiting to be believed.