BLUE HERON

Gareth Higgins on BLUE HERON

This is an age of trauma, by which I don’t mean that there’s more suffering to go round - indeed there’s convincing evidence that the average person is experiencing less violence and oppression, and that more people care about more people than ever before. What I do mean is that a word coined in the late 17th century to refer to physical wounds, and evolving by the late 19th century to include psychological damage has become so utterly mainstreamed that it risks losing its heft.

That kind of pendulum swing is typical, and what matters most is to not lose sight of the gain achieved through a deeper understanding of how pain affects the mind as well as the body. It is now not uncommon for people to talk on headline news about emotional anguish, for people to talk to therapists about their memory-wounds, and for stories to be told about the legacy of conflict, not merely its ending. Sometimes those conversations are well-resourced by genuine knowledge about what is real, and wisdom about what to do with it - well, it might be true to say that that’s actually what conversation is for.