Joy Can Overcome Trauma for Ourselves and Our Country

Psychologists and counselors for decades have discussed and written about trauma and recovering from it in our lives. The carried trauma in our lives while it is unhealed negatively affects all our important interactions and doesn’t allow us to move forward and build our individual worlds of health and happiness.

Laid out in so many books and seminars is one sure path to heal this trauma and move us out of fear and the fight or flight mode we have fallen into a consistent basis. And that path to healing the darkness of trauma and bringing us into the light of peace and helping us create the future of our imagination is to experience moments of joy in our life. Yes, the experiences of joy themselves help heal our trauma and open up new pathways we could not see before.

And these moments of joy to break through the trauma are very simple ones: holding the hand of a small child and laughing with them on a walk, experiencing the simple beauty of nature in the rhythms of the wind through the trees or the waves clapping up on a rocky shore, and it is spontaneous belly laughs that we allow ourselves to experience. A moment of joy can be found in a warm cup of coffee or tea gently cupped in our hands as we watch the sun come up or it is discovered in watching a loved one succeed at something they have been working on for days, or months or years.

There are just so many moments of simple joys that we experience that individually and together have the power to move us from the dark of trauma and fear to the light of peace, meaning, and love. And so too our country.

America has gone through a traumatic experience the last ten years of so. With the rise of hate and cruelty and the lack of treating each other with dignity, it is put many of us in a trauma where we believe the only answer is fight or flight. To adopt the tactics of the dark side of politics and use meanness and division to “win” against hate or to decide to flee the politics of our country and completely disengage.

We did not see a way out of the trauma that seems to cover our country like a shade drawn across the window of our world. And then something happened. The universe seemed to conspire to give us a way to heal our country’s trauma by creating a path for candidates to emerge who are steeped in a campaign of joy. And then we realize how hungry we were for those times of fun and moments of joy, and how that joy takes us out of fear and opens a new way ahead for our country to take.

Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz are giving us an opportunity to heal our collective trauma simply by providing the country with a campaign of joy. And that joy moves us out of fear or flight and helps us rebuild connections with our fellow Americans just as we would in our own recovery from trauma in our individual lives. When we move from the darkness to the light, we create new links with one another and begin to relearn that what binds us together is more powerful than what tears us apart.

I don’t have a crystal ball to tell you what the future will be in the coming days or months or years, but I do know that in this moment the spontaneous joy that erupting from the Harris/Walz campaign is healing for our country. And will help us treat one another in a more loving and compassionate way. And that is a gift I am so grateful has emerged in this moment. Onward into healing, laughter, loving, and a restored belief in the promise of America.