Our health and wellbeing depend largely on the quality of our close relationships. Sources from indigenous wisdoms to modern neurobiology understand that human beings are innately inter-dependent. Because of this intelligent design, pain, conflict, struggle and trauma always have a relational component. Therefore, healing too is relational in nature and includes a person’s relationship with themselves, the people around them and their relationship with place and spirit.

We cannot manufacture or guarantee safety. Nor is safety a solely externalized circumstance. Safety is hugely subjective based on many, many facets of a person’s neurobiology, mindbodysoul state, current need, history, intergenerational story, and ancestral lines. Distress and trauma set in when people feel isolated in their struggle or when they feel disconnected, abandoned or shut out from themselves, others, place or spirit.

Learning to be in good connection in the context of the struggle, is the antidote to trauma. It is connection which engages our innate capacities for resilience and healing.

As human beings, mammals and herd animals, we are designed to co-regulate for the collective survival and wellbeing of our small groups. Neurobiologists say we are ‘hard wired’ to lookout for each other, to protect each other and to metabolize the effects of stress and trauma together for our continued wellbeing.

Sometimes, our capacity to offer stabilizing and healing presence may be compromised due to chronic stress, trauma or interpersonal triggers or conflicts.

Still, under any imprint of stress or trauma lies the intelligence of our biology and ancestral resilience. Engaging and practicing these intelligences uplifts our innate capacity to offer stabilization and healing in difficult times. 

Who amongst us received real relationship training? What messages did we receive in our adolescence and early adulthood about what relationships are or should be? Most people received no explicit relationship training other than implicit messages about how to get and give love, safety, care and connection. Perhaps most critically, most people have no training in emotional intelligence, relational integrity, relationship first aid, conflict resolution and how to support growth and transformation within a relationship.

Therefore, when challenge inevitably arises, people who are not trained fall into their ‘biological training’ to threat response: defensiveness, avoidance, arguing, overwhelm. Training in relationship intelligence and relationship first-aid gives us more skillful options when confronted with the inevitable challenges of loving and caring for each other. And just like any first-response training, trainees learn to stabilize themselves in times of intensity, in order to assess, discern and act on behalf of the collective wellbeing of themselves and those they support.