The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (5 page)

In spelling out the connection between acknowledging trauma and experiencing its release, the Buddha was describing something that today’s psychotherapists have also found. I had a serendipitous discussion with a friend of mine recently that encapsulates the connection. My wife and I were having brunch with another couple and talking about what we were all working on. I was trying to describe this particular Buddhist concept, the one I am writing about here: that the blissful nature of reality is part and parcel of the fact that everything is burning. I used the shorthand phrase, common in Buddhist circles but unfamiliar to my friends, “nirvana is samsara, samsara is nirvana” to describe it. “
” is the Sanskrit word for the cycle of rebirth. It means “keeping going”
⁸
and connotes the everyday world of conventional suffering driven by egocentric preoccupation. The idea is that nirvana is not a separate place that we can get to when we eliminate what we don’t like about ourselves but is already here, hidden behind our likes and dislikes, in the everyday.

My friend, unfamiliar with my Buddhist lingo, thought I said, “Nirvana is some sorrow, some sorrow is nirvana.” She had a flash of insight and thought she understood what I meant. She had recently started group therapy and discovered that, in her tendency to try to make everything okay for everyone, she was avoiding her own anger. Acknowledging her anger in therapy had opened up a feeling of sadness, a willingness to own the feelings of disappointment or betrayal she sometimes felt, and felt ashamed of. Like my patient who had cried and cried in her car when feeling the fleeting nature of her life but had been moved by the love her sorrow contained, my friend at brunch understood that acknowledging her sorrow opened her in a deeper way than was possible by always trying to be “nice.” There was a freedom in “some sorrow” that gave her a brief hint of nirvana.

Trauma experts report something similar. “It cannot be overemphasized that injurious childhood experiences in and of themselves need not be traumatic (or at least not lastingly so) or pathogenic provided that they occur within a responsive milieu.
Pain is not pathology.
It is the absence of adequate attunement and responsiveness to the child’s painful emotional reactions that renders them unendurable and thus a source of traumatic states and psychopathology.”
⁹
The Buddha was after something similar in his Fire Sermon. The burning, fleeting nature of reality is not pathological, he was saying: It just is. If you create an atmosphere of attunement and responsiveness within yourself, one that mimics the mental and emotional state of an attentive parent, this pain and sorrow becomes not only endurable but self-liberating. It releases, and in the process, we can also be released.

This phenomenon plays out in the realm of the everyday as well. No matter how hard we try to make a world that is rational, predictable, and under our control, things still go wrong. Traumas, big and small, are constantly interfering with our lives. If they are not befalling us, they are happening to our neighbors, and we have a choice in how we react. We can pretend they are not happening or we can meet them with attunement and responsiveness. A friend of mine was flying to Europe recently from New York. He got to Kennedy airport two hours ahead of his flight’s scheduled departure and waited for a good forty-five minutes in a huge line to check in. The clerk took one look at his ticket and told him, unceremoniously, that his flight was leaving from Newark, not from JFK. He had just enough time to race there by taxi to make his flight. Otherwise he would have to buy a new ticket.

Berating himself and fueled with adrenaline, he ran to the front of the long taxi queue and pleaded his case with the woman at the head of the line. “Could I please step in front of you?” he asked her, his voice cracking. “I went to the wrong airport and I might be able to make it to Newark in time for my flight if I leave right now.” His trauma was in vivid display but the woman responded coldly. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting here?” she scolded. “You may not cut in front of me. You should wait your turn.” The taxi dispatcher overheard my friend’s plea, however, and called out to him. Pointing to a cab that someone was just getting into, he waved my friend over. “Hurry up,” he said. “That person is going to Newark Airport, too. Get in.” My friend made it there just in time, his trauma ameliorated by the kindness of a stranger.

This kind of trauma is happening all of the time, all around us. When the Buddha taught the Fire Sermon he was pointing this out. When we resist the underlying traumatic nature of things, we cut ourselves off from ourselves and from others. We become like the woman at the head of the line, jealously guarding our positions and impervious to the struggles of others. But when we accept the presence of some sorrow, we can embody the bliss of the taxi dispatcher, spontaneously responding to those truly in need.

One of the most famous stories in the Buddhist literature also speaks to the ubiquity of trauma and weaves in the lesson of the Fire Sermon while playing on the notion of the Buddha as a physician. The tale is of a mother, Kisagotami, whose infant son had suddenly died of illness. Kisagotami’s predicament was all too vivid. Her son had died but she refused to put down his body. Bereft and on the edge of madness, she wandered through her village clutching the dead child to her breast, a stunning manifestation of grief and trauma. She begged every person she met to find her a doctor, someone to bring her baby back to life. The villagers were frightened of her and turned away. She became more and more desperate, more and more agitated, more and more distressed. Finally, one man took pity on her and told her that he had heard of someone with medicine for this kind of thing. She went to the Buddha, told her story, and listened to his response.

“Yes,” he said, “I have medicine for this. But first bring me some mustard seed from a house where no one has died.”

Kisagotami went back to the village and knocked on door after door. “The living are few but the dead are many,” she was told. She could not find a house that had not known death, and she returned to the Buddha without any mustard seed to seek further advice, having put her baby down in the forest before returning. It is notable both what the Buddha said and what he did not say. He did not tell Kisagotami that this was her karma and that she must accept it. He did not tell her that she must have done something terrible in a past life to deserve such a fate. In a famous sutra, preserved in the collection called
, he explicitly rejected such a naive view of karma. In that sutra, when asked directly whether all of the painful things that happen to a person are a result of karma, he answered in the negative. “That would be overshooting,” he said. “Only one in eight such things are due to karma.”

“You know the feeling of too much bile?” he asked his interlocutor. That feeling is due to a physical imbalance, not to a negative intention or an unwholesome thought or an unethical action. There are other such imbalances that cause disease and these, too, are outside our control. Similarly, he went on, there are unfortunate things that can occur because of the weather. Floods, earthquakes, droughts, and so on happen according to their own laws—it is not right to suggest that victims of them are in any way responsible or that they somehow created their fate. Other adversities are similarly random. Even acts of violence are not the result of karma, he continued. We often fall prey to them inadvertently, not because of anything we have said or done but simply because we are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
¹⁰

The Buddha said a simple thing to Kisagotami when she returned to him. “You thought that you alone had lost a son. The law of death is that among all living creatures there is no permanence.”
¹¹
He was not lecturing Kisagotami at this point. She was already transformed. Her engagement with the people of the village had developed her empathy. Instead of relating to them solely from a place of her own suffering, she had been inquiring after their own experiences of life and death. In seeing that she was not the only one to undergo such pain, she became more able to see the impermanent nature of everything. The Buddha was acknowledging the reality she had already glimpsed. He did not try to tell her the “truth” before she was ready.

Later, after having taken the robes of a
bhikkuni
, or female mendicant, Kisagotami was outside on a hillside at nightfall gazing at the village below. She saw the lights in the village dwellings flickering on and off and had a sudden realization, one that consolidated everything that had come before. “My state is like those lamps,” she thought, and the Buddha shot her a vision of himself at that moment to affirm her insight.

“All living beings resemble the flame of these lamps,” he told her, “one moment lighted, the next extinguished—those only who have arrived at Nirvana are at rest.”
¹²
Just as he did in the Fire Sermon, the Buddha articulated his central message. The parallel between the Buddha’s approach and that of today’s trauma therapists is clear. Even in this most undeniably painful circumstance, when dealing with the loss of a child,
pain is not pathology
. By creating an inner environment of attunement and responsiveness, even this most unendurable and crushing reality became not only bearable but illuminating.

I was reminded of these connections recently by another patient, Alexa, an inspiring thirty-five-year-old writer who told me how upset she had been with herself for uncharacteristically losing her temper with her three-year-old son one busy weekday morning. Her story was not atypical for parents of toddlers: Her beloved child was beginning to wear her out. She was trying to get him dressed and fed and out of the house, and he was frustrating her at every turn, not wanting to put on his shoes, taking off pieces of clothing when she turned her back, asking her to play a favorite game with him, and altogether refusing to cooperate with her pleas. Having made it through his terrible twos, she was not yet prepared for how trying his threes could be. Exasperated, Alexa had unloaded on him.

“You think the world revolves around you, and it doesn’t,” she cried impatiently.

There was a brief pause in which he gazed at her wide-eyed.

“It moves, Momma?” he replied.

His earnest cry cut short her irritation, of course, and rekindled her delight in him. She still remembers the guilt she felt, though. Why would she want to say such a thing? How could she shatter his safe world view in an instant out of anger? His words functioned a little bit like a Zen master’s response, his innocent question stopping her in her tracks. “How does he even know that revolve means move?” she remembers asking herself.

Alexa had successfully created a world for her son of which he
was
the center—her exasperated comment only affirmed how productive she had been at fostering this illusion. Her son had what therapists call a healthy attachment to his mother; he was able to take her support entirely for granted; she had given him the attunement and responsiveness necessary to ward off most developmental trauma. She had wanted him to feel like he was the center of the world, and she had succeeded, and she was right to have done so. As today’s therapists conceive of it, her first major task as a mother was mostly done. The second task, of gradually easing her child into “disillusionment,” of failing him just enough that he could begin to know her as a separate person and relate to her empathically, could only be undertaken if and when the first mission was accomplished successfully.