There are birds singing long before the break of dawn. And there are cygnets on the Royal Canal. And in Poland, a strange coalition of three countries stopped the acceptance on a key scientific report on climate change. We went out for a walk this evening along the Canal and couldn’t believe how mild it was. It’s confusing, not just for us, but for mother nature and all of her children.

I started to read a book and then switched over to its audio version, having listened to a talk by its author, Bessel van der Kolk. There is also a relatively short interview with Bessel on youtube, in which he summerises his work.

Traumatised people tend to get very isolated, locked up in their own misery and then find the company of other people who have suffered just as they do and then they get an identity of “we are sufferers” and then their lives get stuck. 

The most important thing is that we discovered that trauma changes the brain. You see the world differently and you live in a different body. A great challenge of trauma treatment is how to help people to feel fully alive and to detoxify themselves from the impact of the trauma. Trauma is lived out in heartbreaking, gut-wrenching experiences.When you’re traumatised you feel these awful sensations of dread, helplessness, disgust and horror in your body. – Our research has shown that yoga is more successful than any drug when dealing with trauma.

It’s the first time that I thought about Pádraig’s accident and its impact on him and on myself in the context of a trauma. I kind of know and to an extend understand the impact it had on myself. Although my knowledge and understanding is most likely not great. But I have no idea and can only imagine the impact it must have had on Pádraig. The trauma of his accident has left him literally speechless and most likely full of dread, helplessness, disgust and horror, as Bessel says.

Who is helping him to deal with this? Who is helping him to get a handle on it, to understand it better, and to overcome it – if that was ever possible?

Never, over the past five year, have I ever heart anybody mentioning the existence of trauma in relation to him or myself (or his family and friends). Never mind the necessity of treatment, the necessity to find a strategy to deal with the trauma.

One of his closest friends, the one who arrived at the hospital first, the one they asked first for organ donations, spends a lot of his time in Nepal practising yoga.