Garden of Souls: Cultivating Love and Respect in a Time of Trauma

By Diana Gurley Ph.D.

This book is about trauma, but it is not about therapy or individual correction and transformation. Instead, it is about the ways our small tribes of families, friends and colleagues can create wholesome environments and groups that understand the nature of trauma, and thoughtfully counteract the conditions that make harrowing experiences possible.

After a discussion of the nature of traumatic events and the variety of human responses to it, the book explores how traumatic experience relies on chaos and the destruction of norms, and suggests ways we can build meaningful structure and rhythms. It proposes that a world of isolation can lose its effect when people make connections with others based on what is good and lovely and shared. It considers ways to practice discernment and critical thinking as a counterbalance to confusion and lies. Helplessness is a signature factor in traumatic experience, but is loses its power when a community identifies personal and social resources, and makes sure people have access to what they need. Grief, uncovered, can be shared. Life-affirming strength can be differentiated from domination and selfishness. Traumatic events that are layered by repetition of racism and ostracism can be seen and understood, and advocates can step forward.

Release is possible, but only when we, as communities, create safe and wholesome places where each of us can be respected and valued. This book suggests many ways to understand these ideas, to practice them, and to question our assumptions about what is broken. It calls for us to stand for humanity, beginning with those we know.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665546706

Diana Gurley Ph.D.

Diana Gurley holds a PhD in medical sociology, with further training and experience in epidemiology and psychiatry. For over thirty years she has worked extensively on the ground in communities challenged by violence, poverty and isolation, focusing on trauma and its consequences, seeking to understand the ways small bands of people help the recovery process or exacerbate it. She has found that there are key components to healthy communities that can encourage growth and transformation, and that can counteract traumatic events. She brings to the study of trauma personal stories of adults who were severely abused as children, of men and women in prisons and jails, of couples in fertility treatment, of the homeless, from people living in Central Harlem and on Native American reservations and in Appalachia, through hospitals and substance treatment, and from families with few resources seeking to care for the very old and the very young. The themes of help and harm cross all of these social boundaries. She has noticed that the most damaging of traumatic events often arise from social circumstances, but that in our culture, most of the treatment for traumatic harm is individualized. She proposes that there are ways our families, neighborhoods, faith groups, school and work environments and helping facilities can help to restore well-being after harm.

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ISBN: 978-1-6655-4669-0 (sc)

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Published by AuthorHouse 11/03/2022

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The New Community is a non-profit organization that provides classes in prisons and with

prison reentry populations, training peers in social support to address trauma.

Unitas Group is the community consulting and training branch of the non-profit.

Proceeds from the sale of this book support The New Community.

For more information, visit our website at www.TheNewCommunity.org.

To learn about training opportunities for organizations,

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Who Are We?

How To Use This Book

WHAT IS TRAUMA?

SAFETY

CHAOS, CLEARNESS, AND THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

STRUCTURE

DISCERNMENT

ISOLATION

SELF, OTHER, BOUNDARIES

HELPLESSNESS

POWER

EXPANSION

GRIEF

BREAKING

RELEASE

SHARED TRAUMA

BALANCE

LOCUSTS

Appendix 1: Notes on Facilitation

Appendix 2: Social Support and Obstruction Scales

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

James Wright, A Blessing

GARDEN OF SOULS

Cultivating Love and Respect

in a Time of Trauma

Diana Gurley, Ph.D.

Welcome to the New Community, where we teach social interventions that address trauma.

If you are reading this, you are likely to be someone who first recognizes a person in trouble. You may be a teacher, or work in an emergency room or an employee assistance program. You may be part of a group people come to for solace – perhaps a church or recovery group. You may have noticed that someone you know has gone missing or is turning down opportunities to be together, isolating and hiding away. A family member may be in trouble. You may have had your own traumatic experience and are looking for ways to build friendships to help stabilize your life, or to make use of your experience as a peer who supports others. You are probably looking for ways to help.

This is not therapy. It is not Western medicine. We are not here to prescribe or to treat. These things can be very good, and we encourage all people to seek out and use every available resource in order to be healthy and whole. This is something different.

We usually think about treatment for trauma in terms of talk therapy or medication. But people live in communities, in families, in workplaces, with friends, at the grocery or hardware store. What happens when we are in those places? Are they sanctuaries for healing?

Imagine a pond filled with fish, and the fish are sick because the water is polluted. We could pull each fish out of the pond to treat it and make it well. Then what should we do? Toss it back into the water? This text is about how we can clean our ponds, making wholesome environments where fish can thrive.

We come into the world with a capacity to heal. When you cut your finger, a scab forms over the wound to protect it, and new skin begins to grow. When you have an infection, healer cells race to fight invading bacteria to guard the integrity of the body. We have the capacity to do that when our souls are injured. There are ways we take care of ourselves without fully understanding how healing operates, but we do know instinctively that we are able to become stronger, more peaceful, more compassionate. This is something we can do for ourselves.

We just don’t do it alone.

Tim Miller, writing on Jewish mythology, tells the story of a tree in Paradise from which bloom all the souls of earth. As the souls grow ripe, they descend into the Treasury of Souls, where they wait to be born. The Tree in Paradise is a Tree of Souls. He mentions another tradition: that as souls come into fullness, birds resting in the trees sing with joy when souls fly out into the world.

Once, in a dark time, I questioned my value on the earth. A dear friend said to me, Just keep breathing and you will feed the plants. Whether we are aware of it or not, each time we take a breath, we take in the freshness of the trees around us. We breathe together, restoring one another, willing one another to life.

After a long, gray day, someone in the Pacific Northwest might say there is only the rainy season, but I do not believe that. One year I determined to walk a single long path in a large arboretum in Seattle, tracing the same path at three-week intervals so I could see changes over time. I came to know each plant along the way in its lifespan, cheered by the bright greens of early spring and the promise of blossoms, observing the fullness of color in the flowers, watching the autumn leaves change and drift to the earth, smelling the fertility brought on by the small deaths of leaves in a living forest. It was a sacred journey and I remember it often, because the promise of new life has burrowed its way into the dark soil of my being and rendered me fertile, too.

As above, so below. For the Tree of Souls in Paradise, there are many trees of souls on earth. They are trees of friendship, companionship, families, workplaces. We, with our sometimes burdened and difficult lives, live among the gracious branches of those trees. As our lives mature and grow old, we release ourselves and float away to nourish the soil. We are a necessary part of the cycle of life.

I believe we do not live for ourselves alone, but for others with whom we share air and rain and sun, and for those who will come after us. In the trees, these new souls are already budding. We can make a way for them to come into fullness. In our lives and in our little deaths, we make new life possible. Let us draw food from the deepest roots of our humanity. Let us send out sweet fragrance to anyone who passes. Let us bear fruit for the hungry. Let us shade the weary and waft cool breezes for traveling souls. We are alive.

Let the birds sing with joy for our being.

Reference: Miller, Tim (2017). The Great Myths #7,

https://wordandsilence.com/2017/12/04/the-great-myths-7-the-tree-of-souls-jewish/

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was developed through many deep conversations with people whose stories are told here. Their willingness to share their experiences and what they learned was extraordinary. I thank them not only for their stories, but for the grace of their companionship. They have been a blessing to me, and I hope they will be a blessing to many others in the wider world.

I also want to thank my teachers who, over the years, have instructed me in mountains of theory and research into social behavior and the workings of the human mind. This book is an application of that learning. I hope it will enrich the knowledge base for others.

As the stories coalesced and were merged with theory and research, I asked some wise friends to review and critique the material. Their responses lifted the writing and made it better, and their encouragement was a grace beyond measure. The Rev. Phil Campbell read all of this with characteristic thoughtfulness and an ability to faithfully communicate to families and communities. The Rev. Dave Clements is an enthusiast and always hopeful, but he knows what is needed to bring resources to those who must counsel others in difficult times. Dr. Keith Gurley, my meticulous and beloved brother, drew attention to the cry of teachers and school administrators seeking to know what to do with the trauma that is in front of them. Donna Harati brought a heart filled with life and light, and an understanding drawn from years of laboring in the fields. Deborah Hefling is loving and well-trained in dynamic psychotherapies, but most importantly is a master gardener who seeks to restore natural order in wild places. Carol Laursen brought her voice and her meditative mind to hear what was being said, and contributed peace and clarity to the process. The Rev. Sala Nolan pushed and pulled and demanded honesty at every turn, knowing as she does the work that we are asked to do; she brought vision for new possibilities made possible through love and determination. Mamie Rockafellar reviewed the material with thoughtful support and friendship, tending to the details as she has in life for the past many decades. My heartfelt thanks to all of them.

WHO ARE WE?

I am a medical sociologist and epidemiologist. I completed a Ph.D. in departments of behavioral medicine and sociology in Kentucky, and then completed three additional years of training at Columbia University in psychiatry and epidemiology. I have focused on trauma for over thirty years. As a researcher and teacher, I pay less attention to individual behavior and more attention to a larger unit of analysis – our patterns as collections of people. What I noticed early on is that most traumatic experience that produces lingering pain is induced by other people. Understanding that, I thought that if traumatic suffering is socially induced, there ought to be some social remedies for it. Over the years I have worked on Native American reservations, on cancer in Central Harlem and suicide attempts in Washington Heights, with low-income single mothers in Appalachia, with the severely mentally ill, in hospitals, in residential treatment settings, and in jails and prisons. In all these settings I have found common themes in the ways we hurt each other, and the ways communities and families can make the hurt worse or better.

In our country, most care after traumatic experience seems to focus on individual therapy and pharmaceutical interventions. But traumatized people don’t live all of their time in therapy. They (we) live in communities and are constantly interacting with others. They (we) are the community. In all my efforts I look to ways we can educate one another about the nature and consequences of trauma, so we can create environments