It's All About TheTrauma
The Hermes’ Web Website is all about trauma and the degree to which the ills of the world can be traced back to it. And, most importantly, how to work with trauma to make the world a better place on both an individual and collective level! Because unrecognized and untreated trauma has the potential to undermine everything that matters!!
When trauma or abuse happens to any of us, we are shattered into pieces by the impact: the victim, the perpetrator, the survivor, and the avenger. Once the shock wears off, we tend to identify with one of these roles and carry it with us as we move into life and make our impact on the world, for better or worse. That split-off piece tends to become our primary identity.
Unfortunately, there is little recognition in the world at large regarding trauma and its effects on everyday life or how widespread and endemic it is. It’s popular right now to treat trauma in the context of individual therapy, much of which is done on-line these days, depleting the ranks of clinicians that work in treatment programs or undergo more challenging training that could instruct clinicians how to facilitate core-level change. Unfortunately, we see the mounting issues in the world at large and the long-term consequences of trauma being played out, large and small: climate change, political divisiveness, America inching towards civil war, the swing towards autocracy and dictatorships worldwide, and the pollution of water, air and food with plastics and chemicals. All these problems occur because of intentional human decisions, likely influenced by the unrecognized significant trauma in the background.
With a majority of trauma survivors, the experience has been shoved down below the barrier where it festers and gestates. It also contaminates our core/spiritual center and can eventually surge upwards, skewing values and behaviors in a negative direction.
Given how thoroughly trauma is entwined with our fate, we are in danger of destroying ourselves. A majority of the population appears to be in denial and perhaps even punishing those who call attention to trauma, past or present, while ignoring the grave threats that its consequences present!
This website pulls together 5 crucial elements in the battle to take on trauma, heal it to the extent one can, and manage the damage so it doesn’t add to the world’s issues.
Here is a brief introduction to those 5 elements:
1. WHY WE CAN NOT LEARN—THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAW!
Western consciousness is based on identifying with an ego structure that is by definition barricaded against the personality or psyche as a whole. Any attempt to educate a person whose consciousness is structured this way will fail because only the ego gets the information and the rest of the psyche remains unaffected, or increasingly disaffected. When we attempt to teach values or morals, those values and morals do not reach down into the core of a being, they remain on the surface—easily disrupted, eroded, possessed, or compromised. We need educations methods that are designed to educate or reach the whole personality, not just the ego. After all, you really can’t program a human being and expect core-level change, no matter what fancy name you put on that procedure or what studies back it up.
Responsivity is emblematic of the work of Milton Erickson whose style of “hypnosis” was really a method of doing an end run around the barricaded ego and corresponding directly with the core. Responsivity’s goal is the same: engage the core, let the tail wag the dog - nicely!
2. THE HOLOCAUST SELF
These are the 9 traits that can result from abuse and trauma, overt or covert, intentional or secondary. There traits represent damage to the human soul and spirituality. Each of these traits has significant negative effects and in combination they can be deadly. I found these traits to be one of the things men in prison identified with most strongly, as it matched their experience of themselves throughout their lifetime and contributed heavily to the crimes that resulted in their imprisonment.
3. THE MISSING PIECES
This is a map of the possible damage that happens when we are shattered through trauma – a map of the crucial elements and their descriptions. We need to know what we’re missing, where the gaps are, and what is necessary to bring those pieces back and reunite them with the whole to whatever extent possible. Certain toys and films relate to each of the pieces (detailed in the Web Sight Program), helping clients to grasp their breadth and depth and find their re-acquisition relatable.
4. THE WEB SIGHT PROGRAM
This program is the implementation of the process of restoring the missing pieces and is akin to the process of making Kintsugi pottery—detailing how to take what is broken (traumatized), and through a somewhat dangerous metamorphosis return it to a state of greater beauty, worth and integrity. The outcome is likely to be grace as grace tends to emerge when we can embrace brokenness rather than rely on denial, suppression and facadomy.
5. THE WEB, THE TOYS, THE STORIES
Responsivity is the language of change and its articulation. This web site, through its fealty to the principle of responsivity, hopes to offer the toys and tools necessary to help individuals and groups find their way through the shadows and darkness of the human enterprise in order to restore functional internal and external democracy based on informed choice, develop emotional intelligence, and establish increasing community, conscience and compassion (the 3 Cs-sees).
Once the trauma problem is recognized and begins to be addressed, Hermes’ Web helps provide the resources and wherewithal to navigate those difficult waters while engaging the client in the process.
“So long as the war between layers of the psyche has not been resolved and cannot be admitted in consciousness, the intelligence of the conscious mind and that of the unconscious will tend to cancel each other out: what is left is behavior that appears unintelligent.”
Andrew Schmookler, SOWINGS AND REAPINGS
The toys will be broken down into categories and explanations given for each toy, addressing their importance and background stories. Back-up materials and videos for working with them will be made available to those who purchase the toys and tools.
As you explore Hermes’ Web, the toys, and the web site and its many paths into the human core, we hope that trauma may begin to resolve to some extent and that one’s life will become richer, both to self and others.
