Trauma, Domestication, and Wildness
“Trauma is an interruption in emotional development; not what happens to us or things that interrupt us even though those cause interruptions. Trauma is a prolonged unresolved interruption in emotional development. Many things cause trauma. Anytime we interrupt a young animal, human or otherwise emotional experience, in order to control their behavior we are domesticating them.
Domestication is then the intentional interruption in emotional development for the purpose of controlling another’s behavior.
Think about how you were treated as a child and how often your emotional process was interrupted to guide you in someone else’s direction, cutting you off from your deepest internal guidance.
You can’t be manipulated if you’re emotionally mature. That’s why society needs you to be emotionally immature. To be wild is to be emotionally sovereign and when you’re emotionally sovereign you are informed by your own emotion about how you are relating to your perceptions and the world around you, rather than your emotional state being manipulated by any number of things.
This is a completely different paradigm of human existence if we were to actually become the mature animals we were designed to be.” -Ren Hurst
The Wisdom of Wildness: Healing the Trauma of Domestication by Ren Hurst
Watch/listen in on the following videos on Trauma, Domestication, and Wildness with Ren Hurts.
1. Do No Harm
2. Control Only What Is Yours To Control
3. Expect Nothing
4. Love Is Not a Transaction
5. Speak Only with Reverence
6. Always Create a Space of Invitation
7. Honor Every No
8. Your Boundaries are Your Responsibility
9. Everyone is Always Right
10. Be Willing to Meet Your Own Needs
11. Remember to Play
12. Drop the Story
13. Feel It All
“Domestication is when we interrupt someone’s natural emotional processes in order to control them. And how I define trauma is the interruption of those emotional processes at an early developmental stage. When you’re an emotionally congruent, authentic leader, your discernment and your intuition, and your instinct is so on point that you don’t need to reach outside of yourself for unnecessary control. And so, I’m trying to teach people how to reclaim that authentic sense of power within themselves from a creation standpoint, rather than reaching out in every direction imaginable to have some fleeting sense of safety and control in the world.” – Ren Hurst
Quotes from The Wisdom of Wildness: Healing the Trauma of Domestication by Ren Hurst
“The consciousness that resides within every living being never questions the interconnectedness of all life. It is awareness beyond mind and form, unable to be claimed, yet available to all. Such connection is ineffable. It cannot be understood by the mind, yet there is knowing. It cannot be felt in the body, but the body is its messenger. Informing through instinct, intuition, and inspiration, it is the grounded, embodied experience of being one with spirit and all that is while still operating independently as the animals we are designed to be. To be fully engaged with this connection is what it means to be wild. To allow it to guide one’s path is to be grated access to the wisdom of the soul.” -Ren Hurst
“Non-judgement comes from emotional maturity, not mindfulness.” -Ren Hurst
“Domestication is more than controlling another’s body. It involves controlling so much of another’s inner experience that it literally alters who they are by stifling emotional processes that would otherwise connect them to greater wisdom. There is no such thing as an emotionally mature domesticated animal, including human animals. The very nature of domestication involves overruling someone’s natural responses in order to control them or shape them into some lesser, or tamer version of themselves. Wild animals are not hard to tame because of their biology; they are hard to tame because they are emotionally aware and are able to respond accordingly to threat. No one who knows real freedom would be interested in stealing the freedom of another, and there is a reason that slavery is mostly nonexistent in the wilderness. The wild knows the true cost of domestication is actually incurred by those who do the domesticating. It is the trading of authentic power for a false sense of control, which is never sustainable long term.” -Ren Hurst
“The balance maintained by the wild has become critically compromised by humanity’s denial of our interconnected truth. The only force that can restore this balance lives purely only in that which remains wild. A better word for that force is love, but it has absolutely nothing to do with romance or the warm, fuzzy feelings of affection. The truest form of love is interchangeable with words like presence, wild, and even God. Love is a container for expansion that cannot be defined by any lesser part of itself but requires seeing the bigger picture.
The interconnectedness of the wild is ever present in each of us. All that keeps one from accessing it are the various layers of conditioning resulting from our own domestication. No concept in our lives seems to have become more domesticated than love. The love most of us know and crave is easy to package and sell; therefore, it isn’t hard to understand how we have lost sight of love’s true meaning. Heartbreak is one of the most painful experiences most humans will ever face, so selling the idea that it can be cured through the affection and admiration of another is a lucrative endeavor.
What those that would sell such false ideas didn’t count on though, was the truth. Wild hearts cannot be broken. When there is nothing to run away from, it’s harder to sell false ideas of well-being, and wild beings are harder to control than those who have been taught to believe they are less than the whole.” -Ren Hurst
“At the root of all planetary crises on Earth is an emotional health crisis. We don’t have a healthy relationship to or understanding of emotion, and the vast majority of human adults have not reached emotional maturity. Depression, anxiety, addiction, personality disorders—all these are emotional regulation problems, not just mental illness.
The cause is our own domestication, and the problem is perpetuated by our domestication of others. When we undomesticate our lives, we create the space to revere and fully experience life rather than exploit it. Within that space, we have the opportunity to heal and restore connection to that which allows emotion to inform the body as designed.” -Ren Hurst
We are not as broken as we think. We’ve simply forgotten how to be animals. The bodies we inhabit are divine links to a more interconnected existence that is free of the psychological burden of suffering. When the mind is given more attention than the body, a false story is created around who and what we are. Controlling external factors for a contrived sense of safety or seeking emotional highs is not the answer. We must learn how to feel and process all of it, the way nature intended, if we are to elevate human consciousness out of a paradigm of fear that is threatening our very existence. You are more powerful than you remember. Put your primary focus on restoring access to that which has been buried by your conditioning. Heal what’s going on in you and the dependents in your care before worrying about rescuing anyone else or saving the world. When you do, you’ll find your way back to the only thing that ever could: undomesticating your own life.” -Ren Hurst
“The way I define trauma first is a prolonged and unresolved interruption in emotional development so this is something that happens early on. This is not an event though events cause interruptions but lots of things cause interruption in emotional development that people are often unaware of. In order to domesticate someone we’re interrupting their emotional experience in order to control it, in order to control behavior. Very few people want to be accountable for that or admit that that’s what’s happening. But when I interrupt your emotional development on severing your ability to have personal sovereignty and autonomy and authentic power, and the more that remains unresolved the easier you are to control as an animal, human, or otherwise. Most people don’t ever come out of that because our entire society thrives on domestication both through our own and through the perpetuation of it onto others and most people are entirely unaware that they are domesticated especially in the way that I’m defining it. So domestication is the intentional interruption of emotional development in order to control behavior so any animal training (or human training) such as parenting that we know, the current paradigm is domesticating in order to make those in your care easier to control, usually to benefit from them in some way. And then our entire capitalist society is based upon that if I can control your emotions, I can sell you my product, I can control your behavior, I can get you to act accordingly. There’s nothing more dangerous to a domesticated society than a wild human animal that can think and feel for themselves and be guided by something bigger than the ego and so that is how I am working with these words of trauma and domestication.
A synonym that we use for domestication is to tame, but the other one that I seem to recall hearing on more than a few instances is “to break” and it seems like that at the core of this domestication is a breaking of the human spirit, the breaking of all animal spirit and it’s the severance of the self from the soul.
You have some guiding force of deep connection, beyond morals, beyond concepts of right and wrong. I mean the thing is you don’t need to be told what’s right and what’s wrong when you’re a deeply connected soul integrated being and domestication severs that process and we come in and out of it throughout our lives moment to moment but it’s not sustainable or consistently accessible because of the nature of trauma and we have to often externally resource to regulate our emotions long enough to have some glimpse of that connection, whereas this work restores it wholly so that you’re not dependent upon external regulation or forms of unearned privilege. It’s very complex very few people want to look at it honestly because it brings up shame and there is no shame in the wilderness because shame is a story of not being good enough. One of the biggest heretical hurdles and obstacles in teaching this work or guiding my clients is the line to be able to do this work effectively is accountability and accountability cannot include shame. So many of us suffer from deep feelings of shame, not being good enough and being disconnected and I think that’s one of the things that is so powerful in your work is this idea that this domestication is what separates us from everything you know. It separates us from ourselves. It separates us from other humans. It separates us from the non-human animal world and nature in itself and I think that we’re seeing the results of this separation, the results of this trauma play out all around us.” – Ren Hurst