“Trauma is not what happens to us,” doctor and addiction expert Gabor Maté writes, “but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”9 Our past experiences of our stress being ignored, shamed, or silenced can build us into people who expect to be alone with our pain. Like rooms without windows, we carry that dark anticipation within our bodies in our sensations and the meaning we reflexively ascribe to them through emotion. Your past shapes your present and projects your future. But your present experience can change the way you sense the past and hold hope for the future.
