We can and should acknowledge the pervasive nature of trauma in our lives, but how? Change one simple question: What is wrong with you? to What has happened to you?

Why in the most traumatizing of times are we seeing the degradation of this crucial awareness? Attacks on DEIAJ are a red flag that we are becoming a less humane society--like a bird on a wire without wings. How can we be a humane society if we do not intentionally reduce the likelihood of harm? Not only is in-process healing thwarted by our hostile and unaware actions, but new injury is occurring which will magnify traumatic effects worldwide. There is a direct connection between increased atrocities and inhumanity of war, to our individual and collective regression.

Just as witnessing acts of kindness has a positive effect on our emotions, physiology, neuropsychology, wellness, witnessing harm re-traumatizes human beings. Isn’t it time we acknowledge the pervasiveness of trauma, and that we are regressing in our humanity?

For over 30+ years, I worked clinically to educate and heal widely varying degrees of human pain, trauma, and suffering. There is no good reason not to employ trauma-informed care in all organizations and throughout society. Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) is an organizational process that requires all individuals, practices, and protocols, and environments to engage in universal precaution for trauma. Using a trauma-informed approach means fully integrating awareness of the individual, historical, racial, and systemic trauma into all aspects of functioning to provide environments for everyone in the organization that intentionally reduce the likelihood of further harm and allow opportunity for healing and growth.*(Buffalo Center for Social Research).

Drs. Maxine Harris and Roger Fallot propose five guiding trauma-informed value and principles: safety (physical and emotional), trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. True universal precaution necessitates consideration of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility and justice (DEIAJ) when applying these five values. This is an invaluable and humanizing call to intentional change via awareness. Despite inroads made through intentional, therapeutic, humane addressing of existential trauma, we are now backsliding.

In The Science of Change, Richard Boyatzis presents us with a well-researched model of intentional change proven to work at every level from individual through organizational and global. An ideal vision drives intentional change, much like imagining and working toward a future self. We must embody a vision and connect it to an ideal. Our learning agenda emerges from our comparing the real with the ideal. I can see no reason why trauma-informed practice and care should not be the ideal toward which our society strives.

When we acknowledge the pervasive injury of our acts, ignorance, and division as a species, we meet the real. This is required to imagine and intentionally create an ideal world where we can heal. I have devoted my entire life to this work. And only greater division has been the result. I believe we are poised to either reach a tipping point and choose to be more humane, deepen our self-awareness, compassion, and collective intention or plunder ourselves. Awareness and imagination are the wings that can carry us to a safer, more trustworthy, collaborative and empowered choice!

Hi, I am Liz! Ahyin Quantum Being has culminated from decades of hands-on work, exhaustive study, and my own deep embodied healing work. Only through awareness, coupled with imagination, and trauma-informed practices can we turn our ignorance into a unifying vision and willingness into humane co-existence, co-creation, co-regulation for ourselves and each other. Let’s join together in positively influencing the cosmology we embody.