The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (25 page)

Batchelor’s description of the Buddha’s opening brings to mind a reaction to my cell-phone meditation that I heard about secondhand. One of my friends told me that after hearing me lead the meditation she went home and told her husband about it. Her spouse, a highly accomplished but troubled man who had struggled deeply with addiction for much of his adult life, burst into tears when she described it to him. She was surprised by his uncharacteristic response—it was not his habit to burst into tears. He was withdrawn from her and had become increasingly isolated and unemotional. When she asked him why he was crying, he said that the idea of letting life in, listening to it and accepting it was so much the opposite of how he was living that he was overwhelmed. The amount of pain he imagined in the room both moved and unnerved him.

His response, while extreme, highlights the radical nature of the Buddha’s approach. As he said immediately after his awakening, it really does go against the stream. In our efforts to manage our own traumas, in our attempts to suppress them or make them go away, we close ourselves off like my friend’s husband had. We shy away from our own pain and we certainly shy away from the pain of others. We feel filled up already and afraid of being further contaminated. And we are so busy managing our own stress that we forget the humanity—the compassion—that brought my friend’s husband to tears.

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T
he paradoxical nature of the Buddhist stance is evident in the traditional descriptions of his awakening. On the one hand, dissolving the stubborn solidity of self and other opens up a flow—and a compassionate awareness—that can outlast destruction, much as the mother’s survival of her infant’s rage does. On the other hand, the surrender of the self into implicit relational knowing also reveals the impermanence that will eventually consume one. It was this paradox that the Buddha’s final insights resolved. In the realizations that dawned, he came to fully appreciate the inexhaustible body of bliss that had so frightened his mother at the time of his birth.

In the third watch of the night, the Buddha understood what he later articulated as the Four Noble Truths: suffering, its cause, the bliss of its cessation, and the path to its relief. He stared straight into the fire, saw that everything was burning, and, in the process, felt the flames of craving blowing out. In no longer resisting the imperfections of life, he saw it transform. Nirvana dawned just as the morning star first appeared. “Done is what had to be done,” the Buddha declared. And then he uttered his famous statement about the eradication of ignorance, “Oh, housebuilder! You have now been seen. You shall build the house no longer.” Later on, when describing his new understanding, the Buddha phrased it something like like this: “What other people call happiness, I call suffering. What other people call suffering, I call happiness.” With the fire of craving blown out, the Buddha realized what has come to be called the wisdom that goes beyond wisdom. In keeping with the metaphor of intrinsic relational knowing essential to the psychology of the Buddha, the Tibetan name for his metawisdom (
) translates as “the Great Embrace.” The knowledge that goes beyond knowledge is relational. In the third watch of the night, the Buddha saw clearly that we all have within us the means of dealing with trauma. As one important sutra has put it, “If we are not hampered by our confused subjectivity, this our worldly life is an activity of Nirvana itself.”
²²

Fifteen hundred years after the life of the Buddha, his teachings moved to Tibet. One of the Indian Buddhists who brought those teachings there was a Bengali monk named Atisha, born in 980 CE, who was one of the most accomplished masters of his time. Once asked by his Tibetan followers to summarize the Buddha’s realizations, Atisha gave a famous response. It is denser and more comprehensive than what I was able to say to my father, but at its heart was the same implicit relational knowing that became the Buddha’s diamond throne. Its combination of wisdom and kindness defines the Middle Path.

“The highest skill lies in the realization of selflessness,” said Atisha. “The highest nobility lies in taming your own mind. The highest excellence lies in having the attitude that seeks to help others. The highest precept is continual mindfulness. The highest remedy lies in understanding the intrinsic transcendence of everything. The highest activity lies in not conforming with worldly concerns. The highest mystic realization lies in lessening and transmuting the passions. The highest charity lies in nonattachment. The highest morality lies in having a peaceful mind. The highest tolerance lies in humility. The highest effort lies in abandoning attachment to works. The highest meditation lies in the mind without claims. The highest wisdom lies in not grasping anything as being what it appears to be.”

Still looking for something more, his followers had one additional question. “And what is the ultimate goal of the teaching?” they asked.

“The ultimate goal of the teaching is that emptiness whose essence is compassion,”
²³
he responded. Even though we can’t find what is knowing, he might have said, knowing is there.

In bringing implicit relational knowing out of his unconscious, the Buddha healed the rupture of the beginning of his life. Having solved his own problem, he did not disappear. His own trauma alerted him to the traumas of others. For the rest of his life, until his own death from food poisoning forty-five years later, he shared his understanding freely. Aligned with that emptiness whose essence is compassion, he showed others how to be mindful of their own minds. Resting in awareness, seeing the world as a mirror, he helped people know trauma, not only as trauma but as a bearable, if inevitable, consequence of an unstable world. Experienced as a reflection of mind, even trauma could be enlightening.

A Relational Home

C
lear-eyed, compassionate, and awake, the Buddha was a realist. With no dust obscuring his vision, he was able to sum up the entire human predicament in a single word. “
Dukkha
!” he exclaimed in his First Noble Truth as he held to his vow to speak the beneficial truth even if it was disagreeable. Suffering! Its reality permeates our lives, shadowing the good times and insinuating itself into everything. Trauma is a basic fact of life, according to the Buddha. It is not just an occasional thing that happens only to some people; it is there all the time. Things are always slipping away. Although there are occasions when it is more pronounced and awful and occasions when it is actually horrific, trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people. It is the bedrock of our biology. Churning, chaotic, and unpredictable, our lives are stretched across a tenuous canvas. Much of our energy goes into resisting this fragility, yet it is there nonetheless. The Buddha found it useful to put people in touch with their vulnerability, yet he had one important qualification to his dictum to always speak the constructive but distasteful truth. Only if he knew the time to say it would he confront people with their traumas. Only if the relationship could sustain it would he gentle them into themselves. In specifying this, the Buddha was making an important point, one not lost on today’s psychotherapists. Trauma becomes sufferable, even illuminating, when there is a relational home
¹
to hold it in. Without this, it is simply too much to bear.

The Buddha did not come to this understanding out of nowhere. His own personal journey involved coming to terms with the loss of a mother he, for all intents and purposes, never knew. As therapists who specialize in “developmental” or “relational” trauma have come to realize, the first few years of life are critical for one’s self-esteem and self-confidence. The healthy attachment of a baby to a “good-enough” parent facilitates a comfort with emotional experience that makes the challenges of adult life and adult intimacy less intimidating. When there is serious malattunement in early life, however, there is often a traumatic residue that manifests in surprising and disturbing ways. The Buddha, like many of us, acted out this residue. Abandoning his wife and child, debasing himself in the forest striving to liberate himself from his mind and body, his spiritual journey can be read, from one perspective at least, as an expression of primitive agony.

Primitive agonies exist in many of us. Originating in painful experiences that occurred before we had the cognitive capacities to know what was happening, they tend to blindside us, traumatizing us again and again as we find ourselves enacting a pain we do not understand. The Buddha’s story is a perfect motif for this. At the heart of his life was a trauma he would not have been able to remember: the loss of the mother who so delighted in him for the first week of his life. This loss lay hidden in his implicit memory, coloring his experience in ways he could feel but never know, encouraging a feeling of self-hatred and discontent. As one of today’s leading neuroscientists, Joseph LeDoux, has put it after studying the impact of stress on the brain, emotional memory may be forever.
²
The Buddha, his emotional memory imprinted with profound loss, had to work with one of the most fundamental traumas of everyday life: the death of a loved one. And he had to do it by himself, without the interpersonal support he always gave to others.

The Buddha made it clear that the way out of suffering is by going through it. He taught the Four Noble Truths and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness as the means of doing just this. Beginning with the breath, expanding to the body, feelings, states of mind, and awareness itself, the progression of mindfulness teaches that trauma can be used to open the mind. When we are no longer dissociating critical aspects of our experience, setting ourselves up in opposition to elements we are trying to avoid, we can finally relax. The Buddha had a taste of this when he remembered his childhood joy under the rose-apple tree. Settling into himself without falling prey to his usual set of self-judgments, he had his first sense of the collaborative communication his mind was capable of. He became a vessel for feelings, reproducing the delight his mother had felt herself unable to contain, while also touching the fear that came to consume both mother and child. In the reconfiguration of his method that followed, the Buddha found that feelings did not have to frighten him. Even the unpleasant ones of primitive agony could be attended to with sufficient practice. Trauma could be known, not only as a personal tragedy but as an impersonal reflection of an underlying and universal reality. Suffering is part and parcel of human existence. It is in all of us, in one form or another. The choice we have is how to relate to it. We can try to avoid it or we can use it as grist for the mill.

Western therapists have long recognized how urgently the self wishes to keep trauma from disturbing the peace. As Winnicott’s biographer, Adam Phillips, has written, “The ego in the Freudian story—ourselves as we prefer to be seen—is like a picture with a frame around it, and the function of the frame is to keep the picture intact.”
³
That which is unacceptable to the self—the traumatic residue, for instance—is denied or extruded. Anything that might cause too much anxiety is taken out of the picture. In the Western view, the best one can hope for is an oscillation between honest self-examination and dissociation. “Only the dialectic, the see-saw, between recognition and misrecognition makes things bearable; were we to straightforwardly recognize the essential aspects of ourselves, it is suggested, we would not be able to bear the anxiety.”
⁴

The Buddha saw another possibility. Slowly but surely, he found, it is possible to expand the frame. Beginning with the breath and gradually learning to include the entire panoply of human experience, it is possible to develop mindfulness to degrees not envisioned by most Western therapists. The key, taught the Buddha, lies in not taking trauma personally. When it is seen as a natural reflection of the chaotic universe of which we are a part, it loses its edge and can become a deeper object of mindfulness. In the famous stories of Kisagotami and
, victims of what we would call unspeakable traumas, this was the Buddha’s first intervention. “You thought that you alone had lost a son. The law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence,” he told Kisagotami. “It is not only today that you have met with calamity and disaster,” he cautioned
, “but throughout this beginningless round of existence, weeping over the loss of sons and others dear to you, you have shed more tears than the waters of the four oceans.” You think the suffering is
your
suffering, taught the Buddha, but all suffering is one. This does not mean that it stops being painful, but, like the splinter in his foot, it becomes an inevitable consequence of a human embodiment.

Not all traumas are inevitable consequences of human embodiments, however. Many of them involve willful choices made by conscious human beings to inflict pain on others. It is not the most helpful thing to say to a victim of torture or sexual abuse that their trauma is nothing personal. Yet the Buddha’s teachings offer something important in these cases too. A patient of mine put it very succinctly. After many years in therapy, he began to talk once again about times he was molested in his youth. He had told me the details when he first came into therapy but had not talked about it much since. “I’ve talked about the
events
,” he said, “but never about my feelings about them.” As the Buddha articulated, feelings matter. They are the bridge between the personal and whatever lies beyond. When my patient was able to talk about the profound disappointment he felt in the people he had most trusted, he was able to relate to his own experience much more compassionately. In the place of his chronic shame and self-criticism came a mourning and sadness for the boy he had once been. He began to see how one consequence of his abuse was the way he was keeping people who legitimately cared about him at bay. When feelings like my patient’s are not acknowledged, a protective cover is required. The frame of our ego boxes us in and our lives are foreshortened. We remain tied to the past, fearing something that has already happened but that we have never fully known.

Therapists of war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have found something similar. A particularly astute therapist, Dr. Russell Carr, has written about his work with these veterans in a way that parallels my patient’s insight. Inspired by Stolorow’s
Trauma and Human Existence
and using one particular soldier’s experience as a case study, Dr. Carr spelled out the path of recovery. “It is not the violence he witnessed in Afghanistan that haunts him; it is his feelings about the violence
he
inflicted. He often maintained that, given the circumstances again, he would kill the same people, but that doesn’t make it any more bearable.”
⁵
Dr. Carr’s veteran needed a relational home for his feelings of guilt and anguish. Before working with his therapist, he had no such home and no way to make sense of his feelings, let alone admit to them. His only notion was that, as a soldier, he should be able to handle anything. The frame of his ego required that he be solid as a rock. Unable to be so, he drank. Dissociating from the troubling feelings, he remained haunted by them. Stuck in his implicit memory, they never could be acknowledged. He needed to talk with another person so that he could make some sense of things. Only then could he let down his guard and feel like a person again. As Dr. Carr put it, “In the absence of a sustaining relational home where feelings can be verbalized, understood, and held, emotional pain can become a source of unbearable shame and self-loathing.”
⁶

Carr’s finding that the trauma lay not in the violence his patient witnessed but in the “feelings about the violence
he
inflicted” is instructive. Unbearable feelings become tolerable when the capacity for mindful knowing is strengthened. We don’t have to be war veterans to experience unbearable anguish, although this does not diminish the horror of what war veterans have gone through. But as the Buddha made clear, we all have to deal with something. Trauma is a fact of everyday life. Just staying with the issue of anger: We all have shame and anguish about the violence
we
have inflicted. Wishing that it were not so does not make it go away.

But we do wish. A patient came in to my office recently and asked me for a favor. He wanted to know if I could give his wife a mantra to help her manage her pain and stress. She was used to working very hard but was getting older and was being nudged, ever so surely, out of her privileged position at work. She didn’t know what to do with herself and was becoming increasingly anxious. She knew that her husband was getting something out of working with me and hoped I could work some magic for her. I wished I had a mantra for her. But I recognized this as another example of someone resisting the trauma of everyday life. If only there was a formula that could make it disappear! I told my patient that one of the traditional functions of mantra in the East was to open a space of longing. Imploring God, through the repetition of his name, to help us accept the traumas that have befallen us and take responsibility for those we have caused, is very different from asking Him to restore us to perfect harmony. My patient’s wife did not believe in God, but he thought she would grasp the point. Trying to blot out trauma leaves us vulnerable to enacting its residue. He thought she might be able to devise her own mantra, one that made room for imperfection and disappointment but also connected her to the tenderness he knew she harbored.

The Buddha’s most fundamental discovery was that the human mind is, in itself, the relational home that is needed to process trauma. While we all tend to think of ourselves as isolated individuals adrift in a hostile universe, the Buddha ultimately saw this way of thinking as delusional. It may feel as if you are all alone, he taught, but that is not the whole picture. We are relational creatures, our minds reflecting the organizational patterns of our earliest interactions. If you go into aloneness without the customary fear, you may be surprised at the sense of unknown boundless presence you will find. The implicit relational knowing of the mother is hardwired into each of our minds. Obscured by our habits of thought, by our egocentric self-preoccupations, and by the primitive agonies that hold us in their grip, this illimitable awareness is already there for the asking. It is a renewable resource, ever present, accessible to those willing to go through the traumas of everyday life to find it. Good therapists make this palpable in the interpersonal environment. They replicate the holding environment of Winnicott’s mother-infant dynamic and create a context in which difficult feelings can be known as they never could before. But the Buddha’s insight took this one important step further.