This book explores the universal and sometimes contradictory dimensions of traumatic experience. Because its effects ripple into life on many levels, trauma, and our responses to it, can linger within friendships, families, and cultures. This occurs with our conscious awareness as well as on unconscious levels, yet it is interwoven into the many ways that we interact. Considered from this interpersonal and thus interconnected perspective, trauma belongs to each of us relationally, and as members of humanity. Acknowledging trauma as having multidimensional realities that extend far beyond the times and places of specific events recognizes that generations of families, as well as entire cultures, can carry emotional memories, even without literal ones. These indirect experiences, as well as those that occur in our lives more directly, create layers of trauma that infuse the ways in which we relate to each other.
