My world is filled with a huge collection of the most beautiful, inspiring and talented people. People who have dedicated their lives to turning the world into a better place, and imbuing it with their own brand of magic. Most of them spend their time chucking both metaphorical and real incendiary devices into the collective consciousness like little messages of hope in bottles floating around this dark world we live in. And most have dedicated their lives to this. They all have a couple of things in common- they are all filled with the enormous love of true revolutionaries, and they are all extremely fucked up.

I say this including myself of course. And I say this not with any sense of jaded bitterness, but simply as an observation of what I've found to be true in my relationships with the people around me. In watching how good we all are at eating each other alive, I've started wondering how we can expect to be effective in "˜saving the world' or acting as instruments of change when we can't even get things straight with ourselves and the people closest to us.

My work takes me to places where there is a lot of what I would call "˜overt' trauma. Places like war torn Iraq and Palestine. Places where there is massive suffering on a large scale. Although I have not suffered directly at the same level as the people who live in these places and can't leave have, simply witnessing that kind of suffering can be traumatic in and of itself. The people closest to me started noticing it when I returned from Iraq the first time, soon after the fall of Baghdad. They said I seemed angry and distant. It started coming out in my relationship with my partner and with the little girl I am raising. She complained that we had no intimacy anymore, and that she couldn't get through to me, I seemed lost. I came back with so much anger and so few ways to express it. Over time it started to turn inward and manifest itself in my relations with the people closest to me. Eventually it came to a head and I decided that I had to do something about it.

I had long thought about going into therapy for the myriad issues that I carry around with me from the scars of my childhood. However, I spent two years in various institutions during my adolescence, and the ways that I was abused in these places left me with a deep distrust of mental health "˜professionals.' So I was left not really knowing where to turn. After I returned from Iraq the second time, I went on a 40 city speaking tour, and in the course of the tour I was introduced to a friend of a friend who I was told did an alternative form of trauma therapy called "Somatic Experiencing (SE)." I was intrigued and agreed to do an initial session with him, mainly because I knew that he came from a similar political background as me and this gave me reason to trust him more than I would a normal therapist. He started to tell me his story. He said that he also went through a period in his life where he was terribly abused. He said when he got away from his abuser he went into the world of activism, fighting the man etc., and put all of his energy into that. He was happy that he had done some good work, but his world had gotten increasingly chaotic. At a certain point he realized that his work was not coming from a place of love, but from a place of fear and rage, and that he found himself constantly re-creating situations similar to those that transpired between him and his abuser. Constantly being on the run, hiding, creating paranoia for himself, further backing himself into a corner and becoming more and more closed. At a certain point he bottomed out with this and had to find another way to live.

One of the things that really stuck with me was that he told me that activist types tend to have this thing where they hold onto their traumatic responses to the world and let these forces rule their actions. They have a really hard time healing and letting go of this way of interacting with the world because they see it as the driving motivational force behind what they do, and think that without it they would slip into inaction. Living in a violent and disturbed world dictates to us that we must hold onto this anger and pain; it's the only sane response in an insane world. But he offered me a different perspective: when we start to let go of our dysfunction, we actually start to engage in our work in a much more effective manner. We don't have to hold onto our sickness just to have the motivation to fight- in fact, the healthier we become, the more our actions become coherent and the more power they have as a result. And the better able we are to take care of each other.

This resonated with me. So I began work with him. SE isn't like traditional psychotherapy, or other forms of "˜talk therapy.' It isn't reliant on speech or the Freudian model of digging deep to find the root of what went wrong in childhood. Its theory is that trauma is stored physically within us: if we ever want to break free from the cycle of reliving the original trauma(s) and constantly recreating the patterns of abuse as we try to re-negotiate our way through them, we must release the energy that is locked within us as a result of the trauma. Trauma is a normal part of life; all creatures experience it. The difference between the rest of the animals and us is simply that we've forgotten how to release the energy that gets locked up within us when we experience something traumatic. When an animal gets into a potentially trauma inducing situation, if they are able to get away or fight their way out, once they reach a safe place they do something very physical to release the stored up energy. Running around in circles, panting heavily, or having little convulsions are some of the things animals do to release the stored up energy which if not released becomes toxic. Living in industrialized society, when do we ever have a safe place to do something like this? Virtually never, and that's what SE work can give to us - a safe place with a trained guide to start releasing bit by bit a lifetime of stored up trauma.

The nature of the world that we live in is that we experience traumatic situations constantly. Unspeakable acts are committed daily all around us, and although we may not witness them personally, we know they are happening and this affects our relationship with the world dramatically. It affects everyone's experience- and is one of the core issues that create the collective sickness that everyone seems to have to a certain degree. If we want to truly engage in making the world a better place, the first place we have to look is to ourselves - and work like SE cuts to the core of the matter. Its one of the few things that I've found in my life that makes me feel like true liberation may actually be possible. And that kind of hope for myself and for the people around me isn't easy to find. It's changed everything for me.

Further reading: Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine, Ph.D. www.TraumaHealing.com

Andrew Stern is a photographer and media activist whose work focuses on social and political issues around the world. He is currently based in New York City. www.AndrewStern.net