Transcription
Perhaps one of the oldest truisms is the notion that life is suffering; that a painful existence is not an exception, but rather the rule. Growing up is then coming to terms with this painful fact: loved ones die, breakups callous our hearts, the things we thought we had were never there to begin with. Nothing lasts. This is the realistic view, the first Noble Truth we find in Buddhism. Everything is burning, as the Buddha proclaimed.
A man who, for 29 years, lived in a protective bubble that shielded him from the painful reality that constitutes our condition, one day, however, journeyed out and discovered the four Messengers: a corpse, a sickly person, an aging person, and a lonely hermit, which character spoke to a terrible fact of life: death, illness, aging, and loneliness. He understood that there was no escape from these things. According to many retellings, this is where his journey began, as he ventured out over a six-year period to find enlightenment.
What the Buddha discovered was something terrifying and profound: trauma is a fundamental aspect of being. At first, the use of the word trauma seems too severe here; not everyone experiences trauma, right? Such a word is usually reserved for the most extreme and unfortunate of cases. However, as Governor Mate explains, there are capital T traumas and small t traumas. The former—senseless and unexpected acts of extreme misfortune or cruelty on an innocent person—such as severe child abuse, natural disasters, or illness, usually bring forth the images we often associate with trauma.
However, the latter, the less pronounced yet still pernicious small t traumas, such as the loss of a parent, memories of bullying, painful breakups, or simply moving to a new country, nonetheless expose us to the fact that everything is burning. And although most of us will not feel comfortable identifying as someone who is traumatized, it is still difficult to imagine a human life that has been untouched by death, illness, aging, or loneliness. Even the Buddha, who lived a lavish and comfortable life for 29 years, was exposed to developmental trauma from a young age. Although rarely highlighted in scholarship, the Buddha's mother died when he was an infant. It is unlikely that a child as sensitive as he appeared to be could have been left exempt from the effects of such a loss.
It is broadly accepted that early and recurring experiences of helplessness and loss in childhood can lead to the unconscious conviction that unmet developmental yearnings and reactive painful feeling states are manifestations of a loathsome defect or of an inherent inner badness. So, what exactly characterizes trauma? Namely, it is intolerable. The brain struggles to make sense of it, and so for the most part, it is pushed deep down.
Why is it so intolerable? The words of the psychiatrist Mark Epstein beautifully capture the answer: the reassuring absolutisms—albeit mythical ones—of daily life—that children do not die, that worlds do not move, and that parents always survive—are replaced by other more pernicious convictions: the enduring, crushing meanings of one's aloneness, one's badness, one's taintedness, or the world's meaninglessness that precipitate out of unbearable affect.
Trauma forces one into an experience of the impersonal, random, and contingent nature of reality, but it forces one violently and against one's will. Namely, trauma reveals our powerlessness. We have little control in the final analysis. Because this fact is so painful, we often turn to some form of dissociation. We limit who we are, we numb our feelings and our responsiveness to the world. "The mind flees its own subjectivity in order to evacuate its pain," writes the psychologist Harvey Schwartz. There is, of course, great harm that comes from dissociation. As we harden ourselves to life, we limit our availability to others, to love, and to ourselves. Future personality development is paused, and the self is depleted of fluidity and humanity.
In a sense, trauma freezes us in time, leaving us unable to move forward and incapable of thinking of a time before it all went so terribly wrong. As Epstein writes, trauma takes us out of time; there is no past or future when one is overtaken by it. It is as if it were happening now. In the end, trauma brings forth fear at the expense of love. We close ourselves off to what makes life worth living. "For it is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found," writes Winokur.
Dissociation hurts us, but some would argue that this dissociative state is actually reminiscent of the Buddha's Enlightenment. Didn't he learn to overcome his emotions, to escape his subjectivity? In some sense, isn't he escaping himself? Mark Epstein's reading of Buddhism posits that the Buddha did not overcome his emotions, but rather came to terms with them. He did not turn to self-indulgence, in which he denied suffering through numbing oneself with escapism and fleeting pleasures, nor did he turn to self-judgment, in which he punished himself and entirely identified with his trauma through rumination.
Instead, the Buddha chose a middle path. He simply sat with the pain without judgment or denial. How did he accomplish this? Exactly. In short, the Buddha built himself a relational home through mindfulness and curiosity. Namely, he discovered that the mind has the capacity to create an atmosphere of attunement and responsiveness that closely mimics the care of an attentive parent. He became the parent to himself that he had lost as an infant and learned to accept rather than deny his pain.
This space he cultivated within himself became a relational home. This was primarily achieved through his use of bare attention. By simply paying attention without reacting or judging, but simply through relating, he was able to cultivate a holding environment in which the intolerable aspects of life could be experienced fully. This is a paradoxical strategy: by trying not to change anything at all, change occurs.
One may liken this to the difference between self-improvement and self-love. You don't need to change yourself necessarily; in some instances, striving to do so merely becomes a form of self-punishment. Instead, you simply need to learn to be kind to yourself, like a caring parent would be kind to their child. You don't need to change in order to belong; you just need to understand that you already do belong.
Bare attention is only half the battle. As one monk quips, "Those who think Buddhism is just about stillness end up sitting very silently up to their necks in their own." There is an active and investigative component to the Buddha's journey that involves curiosity. We need to sit with our fears with an open and curious mind. It encourages one to examine the strangeness of one's own internal landscape from a neutral perspective.
No longer being exclusively identified with the ego's need for structure and stability, no longer being driven by the face one puts on for the world or for oneself creates the possibility of releasing oneself from old habits that have become ingrained in the personality. To be curious is to get over yourself; it involves humility. Most of us dwell in a cage of self-absolutization, this idea that we are really real.
Yes, we are real. The Buddha does not refute the existence of the continuous subjective flow of experiences and memories we identify as ourselves, but we sometimes think that we are more real than we really are. We identify with rigid mental habits and theories of ourselves, such as schemas, that actually inhibit us from becoming all that we could really be.
To be curious is to admit that we know little about who we actually are. As one engages with past trauma, with the painful realistic view that life is suffering, a flood of negative emotions are likely to arise. This is an indication of one's internal landscape finally opening up. This is also arguably the most difficult part, but it is worth it in the end.
By not fighting with his internal wounds, by not insisting on making them go away, by not recruiting everyone in his intimate life to save him from his feelings of abandonment, by simply resting with them the way we do in meditation, he could learn, as the Buddha did, that he already was the love he thought he lacked.
It is initially difficult to accept this idea that suffering is inherent in life, and yes, Epstein's use of the word trauma when describing extremely trivial annoyances does leave me skeptical of the use of the term trauma when describing a majority of life's misfortunes. However, I do think the point still stands: pain, loss, change—all are a basic fact of life.
But the seemingly intolerable aspects may not only become tolerable but could even become illuminating when we build a relational home that can hold them. We cannot change whether we will suffer or not, but we can decide on how we relate to this suffering. The first step is acknowledging that suffering has occurred. Here, in a state of curiosity and relaxation, you may experience the same insight as the Buddha: your pain, your hurt is not personal; rather, it is an underlying reflection of universal reality.
We are all bonded by the suffering inherent in being. All suffering, despite varying in magnitude and form, is one trauma. If it doesn't destroy us, it wakes us up, both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it make us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.
Unless you are very, very lucky, suffering will come. This doesn't mean you have to seek it out. Still, when it comes knocking at your door, remember that the only way out of our suffering is by going through it.
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Thank you.
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