Magic, Ritual, and Healing Trauma

One of my favorite definitions for trauma is any unhealed wound. It’s not about the event that caused the trauma, which can be anything from a plane crash to childhood neglect: the trauma is what stays inside your body after the fact. When something has happened that we can’t fully process, it sits around, piping up about just about every decision we’re trying to make. Trauma means that, though we might know that we are safe, we do not feel safe. And there’s no arguing with a feeling. 

Trauma studies have advanced a lot in recent years, and the more we learn, the more unconventional the treatments become. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and using psychedelics and drugs like MDMA are some of the wild new therapies that seem to really work. People are starting to realize that a decade in talk therapy hasn’t really gotten them anywhere. They understand themselves and their problems. They have gotten to know their patterns in life. They might even have a very clear sense of what the trauma is that is still sitting in their system. But still, nothing is changing. 

This is partly because talking is mostly an intellectual exercise, and trauma doesn’t really respond to the intellect. Researchers now understand that traumatic memory doesn’t have a narrative the way most other memories do. It is fragmented and sensual, living in smell, touch, or disconnected images. It lives in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in the oldest part of our brain that is only concerned about whether or not we are surviving. These parts of us do not understand the list of self-care practices we can try. They do not give a crap whether or not you’ve figured out how to gently phrase your boundaries to your partner. These parts don’t feel safe, and they won’t let you go anywhere until you do. 

There are, however, some really powerful ways to communicate with the trauma in our bodies. One of those is magic. 

Yes—magic. Get your cauldron out, light your candle, and find a wand with a unicorn hair in it. Trauma doesn’t respond to conventional ways of healing, so we need our unconventional grimoires. We cannot plan out and micromanage our healing, but we can cast a spell. 

I work with a lot of people who have experienced trauma, and I find myself using magic a lot more than I initially thought I would. We explore energy work, intuitive healing, and a practice of listening to the body and trying to understand what each of its parts needs in a practice I like to call tuning in. This is what worked for me, when I was healing from my experiences: therapy was wonderful and useful, of course, and I wouldn’t have gotten very far without it. But when I hit a wall, I found that it was yoga, meditation, ritual, and energy work that was able to shift things that hadn’t moved in years. 

There’s no real secret to these practices. Actually, what they are is a way of talking to the body, to the nervous system, or to the right side of the brain, which is where trauma can get stuck. It is a way of exploring traumatic memory and healing (and many other things else) through creativity, imagination, and intuition. There’s nothing magical about it. 

Or is there? 

In Resmaa Menakem’s bestselling book My Grandmother’s Hands, he explores how racialized trauma lives inside of our bodies. A big theme here is intergenerational trauma—the idea that trauma is “contagious” and often passed down through family lines. Racialized trauma is, of course, present in black and indigenous bodies in America, among others, but what we don’t often realize is that it is also present in white bodies (and police bodies). White colonizers in America were likely escaping an incredibly violent era in Europe where powerful white people punished and tortured less powerful white people. These colonizers “blew their trauma through” the black and indigenous bodies they encountered, thus perpetuating that violence across the generations. We all carry racialized violence within us, in some way or another. Our ancestors are present within us in all their malevolence and benevolence. 

At one point in the book, Menakem recommends an exercise where you sit quietly and “invite the presence of an ancestor. […] You do not get to choose who this person will be; he or she will choose you.” As you sit with this ancestor, you simply observe them, their emotional state, and your own. Eventually, you thank them and send them on their way. When the meditation is over, Menakem recommends, “if you still feel an uncomfortable presence, leave the room.” 

Now, this can be called a meditation, certainly, but it is also something of a seance. Even Menakem, who is a therapist, not a witch, realizes that you may be calling in the real energy of an ancestor, and they might want to stick around. From a magical perspective, it is incredibly dangerous to do this without first setting up a circle of protection of some kind and having a strategy for clearing this energy when you have finished. Ancestor magic is powerful. 

That might be because of ghosts. It might also be because the egg you came from was fully formed inside of your mother’s body when she was still inside of her mother’s body. We are not so separate as we seem, in our physical bodies. Our nervous systems are built while we are still inside of our mothers. Our grandmother’s trauma may very well have touched the egg that became you. 

A 2015 study found that the children of Holocaust survivors had modified genes related to cortisol, the stress hormone. In 2013, researchers associated the smell of cherry blossom with an electrical jolt for a group of mice who then procreated. A heightened anxiety response to the smell of cherry blossom was seen in those mice’s children and grandchildren, even when they were raised separately from their traumatized parents. It makes sense that we would inherit certain fears in order to support our survival. Those ghosts are trying to keep us safe. 

A few years ago, I went to the Matriarchs Uprising Indigenous dance festival, and attended a piece by Maura Garcia with the theme: “When I am dancing, my ancestors are dancing.” She talked about how all the ancestors were here in the room with us, and when we dance, laugh, and play, they join us. She invited members of the audience to share about a person they loved in their lives, to imitate their laugh or sigh, and taught us all to make those sounds together at intervals during her piece. In that room, as audience members, we were gathered to join in a ritual of healing the personal and the collective. It’s important to remember that just as trauma is passed down, so is healing.

It doesn’t matter whether you think of these practices as magical rituals or practical psychotherapeutic interventions. Maybe things are only magical until we understand how they work. But we do know that using our bodies, our breath, and our imaginations can be more effective than talking, for some people, at certain times in their healing journey. When we are healing, our ancestors are also healing. It’s okay if we need a little evidence-based magic to help us do that. 

Want to explore a different strategy for healing and making change in your life? Learn more about my one-on-one Pathfinding program.

Julie Peters is the author of Want: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault. Learn more about her here or follow her at @juliejcp

There are images of Julie on this page by Andi Mcleish.