Purple - the colour of trauma

Trauma occurs when we least expect it to arrive. It comes into our lives with sudden shock and is accompanied by other complex things like pain, grief, anger, hurt, sickness, injury, depression, anxiety and more.

If we experience physical trauma in our lives, we may bear the marks of purple bruises and purple scars. Physical reminders of what we’ve been through. Invariably, the physical trauma becomes our emotional trauma too, as we cope with loss, change, regret, and other difficult and challenging feelings.

If we experience emotional trauma in our lives, we can attempt to keep it out of the sight of others. Yet eventually emotional trauma manifests itself in physical ways often outside of our control. Outbursts of tears and anger, sleeplessness causing purple rings to appear under our eyes, loss of appetite and we can even change the way we walk and talk and interact.

Trauma robs us of the way things used to be. It opens us up to having to navigate new pathways, neither of our choosing or our making.

Purple is the colour of trauma. We read of trauma throughout the ministry of Jesus. We hear the trauma in the stories of those who suffered terribly and reached out to Jesus for healing. We hear the trauma in the events leading up to the crucifixion. How were the lives of those present changed forever from the trauma of being spectators or even contributors to the terrible events of Jesus’ last hours? When Jesus’ went to pray in the purple evening light in the garden of Gethsemene, just before his arrest, the loneliness and terror of the trauma yet to be faced must have sat so heavily with him.