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chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.
If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.
health and illness are not random states in a particular body or body part. They are, in fact, an expression of an entire life lived, one that cannot, in turn, be understood in isolation: it is influenced by—or better yet, it arises from—a web of circumstances, relationships, events, and experiences.
Most of me is in the grips of the distant past, near the beginnings of my life. This kind of physio-emotional time warp, preventing me from inhabiting the present moment, is one of the imprints of trauma, an underlying theme for many people in this culture. In fact, it is so deeply “underlying” that many of us don’t know it’s there. The meaning of the word “trauma,” in its Greek origin, is “wound.” Whether we realize it or not, it
is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.
In the present century, the leading trauma psychologist and healer Peter Levine has written that certain shocks to the organism “can alter a person’s biological, psychological, and social equilibrium to such a degree that the memory of one particular event comes to taint, and dominate, all other experiences, spoiling an appreciation of the present moment.”2 Levine calls this “the tyranny of the
past.”
“Conscious, explicit memory is only the proverbial tip of a very deep and mighty iceberg. It barely hints at the submerged strata of primal implicit experience that moves us in ways the conscious mind can only begin to imagine.”5
In times past, it would have taken me days or longer to “knock it off”: to drop my resentment, and for my core to unfreeze, my face to relax, my voice to soften, and my head to turn willingly and with love toward my life partner.
Trauma pervades our culture, from personal functioning through social relationships, parenting, education, popular culture, economics, and politics. In fact, someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society. We are closer to the truth when we ask: Where do we each fit on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been? And what possibilities would open up were we to become more familiar, even intimate, with them? A more basic question comes first: What is
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We are closer to the truth when we ask: Where do we each fit on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been? And what possibilities would open up were we to become more familiar, even intimate, with them?
As I use the word, “trauma” is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events ...
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Likewise, trauma is a psychic injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment. It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls: the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies.
It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls: the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies.
Raw wound or scar, unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological. It constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people. Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment’s riches, limiting who we can be. By impelling us to suppress hurt and unwanted parts of the psyche, it fragments the self. Until seen and acknowledged, it is also a barrier to growth.
“Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering.”
Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune of the sort mentioned above and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied.
“The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child,” writes the psychiatrist Mark Epstein.
What the two types share is succinctly summarized by Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
They both represent a fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world. That fracturing is the essence of trauma. As Peter Levine writes, trauma “is about a loss of connection—to ourselves, our families, and the world around us. This loss is hard to recognize, because it happens slowly, over time. We adapt to these subtle changes; sometimes without noticing them.”
It is sobering to realize that who we take ourselves to be and the ways we habitually act, including many of our seeming “strengths”—the least and the most functional aspects of our “normal” selves—are often, in part, the wages of traumatic loss.
We each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of
others.
An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists.
“It’s a landscape of dread and betrayal and sorrow and cruelty.
For many years the most difficult question that could be put to me was “What are you feeling?”
In the absence of relief, a young person’s natural response—their only response, really—is to repress and disconnect from the feeling-states associated with suffering. One no longer knows one’s body.
Her account of a sudden at-home-ness in her physical self is emblematic of how healing works: when trauma’s shackles begin to loosen, we gladly reunite with the severed parts of ourselves.
A traumatized nervous system, on the other hand, never gets to unfreeze. “We have feelings because they tell us what supports our survival and what detracts from our survival,” the late neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp once said. Emotions, he stressed, emerge not from the thinking brain but from ancient brain structures associated with survival.
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight,” wrote the psychologist Rollo May.12 Trauma robs us of that freedom.
self-assaulting shame so easily moonlights as personal responsibility.
shame so easily moonlights as personal responsibility.
“Contained in the experience of shame,” writes the psychologist Gershen Kaufman, “is a piercing awareness of ourselves as fundamentally deficient in some vital way as a human being.”13 People bearing trauma’s scars almost uniformly develop a shame-based view of themselves at the core, a negative self-perception most of them are all too conscious of. Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion
for oneself. The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.
conviction of one’s inadequacy has fueled a great many glittering careers and instigated many instances of illness, often both in the same individual.
“Everything has mind in the lead, has mind in the
forefront, is made by the mind.” Thus opens the Dhammapada, the Buddha’s timeless collection of sayings.15 Put another way, the world we believe in becomes the world we live in.
Our beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building. Here’s what the Buddha left out, if I may be so bold: before the mind can create the world, the world creates our minds. Trauma, especially severe trauma, imposes a worldview tinged with pain, fear, and suspicion: a lens that both distorts and determines our view of how things are.
“What’s this all about?” I shouted to my companion over the cacophony, shaking my head in exasperation. “Trauma,” he replied as he shrugged his shoulders. Ruppert meant, simply, that people were desperately seeking an escape from themselves.
If trauma entails a disconnection from the self, then it makes sense to say that we are being collectively flooded with influences that both exploit and reinforce trauma. Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.
Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because t...
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What is lost is well described by the Polish-born writerfn4 Eva Hoffman as “nothing more or less than the experience of experience itself. And what is that? Perhaps something like the capacity to enter into the textures or sensations of the moment; to relax enough so as to give oneself over to the rhythms of an episode or a personal encounter, to follow the thread of feeling or thought without knowing where it leads, or to pause long enough for reflection or contemplation.”16 Ultimately, what we are distracted from is living.
We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.
The act of blaming herself, its gravitational center planted permanently in the past, would only divert her from showing up for her loved one in the here and now.
If, on the other hand, trauma is what took place inside us as a result of what happened, in the sense of wounding or disconnection, then healing and reconnection become tangible possibilities. Trying to keep awareness of trauma at bay hobbles our capacity to know ourselves.
once you become aware that you have choices, you can exercise those choices.”
Unless we can measure something, science won’t concede it exists, which is why science refuses to deal with such “nonthings” as the emotions, the mind, the soul, or the spirit.
By “psychosomatic,” Pert did not imply the modern, often derisive dismissal of disease as a neurotic figment. Instead she meant the word’s strict scientific connotation: having to do with the oneness of the human psyche (mind and spirit) and the soma (the body), a oneness she did much to measure and record in the laboratory. Her discoveries, as she justly claimed, would help fuel “a synthesis of behavior, psychology, and biology.”1
what they think and how they feel have everything to do with each other. It is run-of-the-mill, for instance, to speculate about which life stresses have contributed to one’s ulcer, what mental strain is behind a headache, or what unprocessed fears lead one to experience panic attacks. The same principle applies when we look not just at individual symptoms but at most types of diseases.
It’s not only events as such but also our emotional responses and how we process them that affect our physiology.)
