The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (7 page)

“When a person says to a friend, ‘I’ll see you later,’ or a parent says to a child at bedtime, ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ these are statements, like delusions, whose validity is not open to discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naïve realism and optimism that allows one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable. It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the-world.”
⁵
Traumatized people are left with an experience of “singularity” that creates a divide between their experience and the consensual reality of others. Part of what makes it traumatic is the lack of communication that is possible about it. “The worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others,” Robert Stolorow writes. Trauma creates a “deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form.”
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I have seen this over and over again in patients of mine who have undergone direct trauma, those who have been in war zones, lost family members to accidents or disease, or become terminally ill. They are suddenly dropped into an alternate reality that feels as “singular” as Kisagotami’s did when she lost her infant son. After 9/11, for example, a middle-aged patient with a terminal illness, whom I had been seeing for about a year while he underwent various experimental treatments, felt suddenly vindicated. “Now everyone’s feeling what I’ve been feeling,” he said, smiling numbly. He lived in my neighborhood, several blocks from the World Trade Center, and he was absolutely fearless, in stark contrast to the rest of us, during the weeks and months after the tragedy.

In trauma, 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. “The traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness,”
⁷
says Stolorow. Trauma exposes “the unbearable embeddedness of being,”
⁸
in the sense that it shows us our powerlessness, our helplessness, and our inability to exist independently and
absolutely
in the way we might wish. Trauma is disillusioning, but not in the gentle way of the mother who has already given her child the illusion of omnipotence. It reveals truth, but in a manner so abrupt and disturbing that the mind jumps away. The old absolutisms no longer reassure, and the newly revealed reality feels crushing.

The Buddha managed to make trauma tolerable. He found a way of easing people into the burning nature of everything without driving them into the arms of negativity or nihilism or self-doubt or self-hate. He often used death, the very trauma that the absolutisms of daily life are designed to hold at bay, to nudge people out of their egocentric complacency.

Yet the Buddha was not into scaring people for its own sake. He suggested that most of the time, no matter how much we think about death, we can’t really understand it. The
absolutizing
tendency runs so deep that, unless death hits us over the head, we do not really appreciate its reality, even though we may mouth the words. His aim was to cut through the absolutisms of daily life, not to traumatize but to show people what he, the Buddha, had already learned. Even when he was ostensibly secure in his world of lily pools and sunshades and minstrels with no men among them and meals of rice and meat, he was delicate. Only when he was able to hold the realities of old age, illness, and death could he become strong. The effort required to ward off the possibility of trauma—the rush to normal that the absolutisms of daily life encourages—is itself traumatic.

The Buddha also used trauma to detraumatize people. Sometimes he deliberately evoked it, and sometimes he just used what people brought him. But whichever scenario he worked with, his message never varied. Facing the traumas we are made of, and the new ones that continually shape us, makes more sense than trying to avoid them, if the mind is in a balanced enough place to hold the truth. Trauma is unavoidable, despite our strong wishes to the contrary. Facing this truth, this disillusioning attack on our omnipotence, with an attitude of honesty and caring strips it of much of its threat. When we are constantly telling ourselves that things shouldn’t be this way, we reinforce the very dread we are trying to get away from. But feeling our way into the ruptures of our lives lets us become more real. We begin to appreciate the fragile web in which we are all enmeshed, and we may even reach out to offer a helping hand to those who are struggling more than we are.

I had a joint session recently with a patient and her twelve-year-old daughter that made me think about this. My patient had a fight with her daughter that morning and they were both too upset to let her go to school as she was supposed to, so my patient brought her to the session. I had met her daughter once before, when she was about two years old and her babysitter was sick. My patient had brought her to a session that time, too. I remembered how verbal she was, even at that age, and how attentive her mom was to her throughout the hour in my office. Yet, ever since she was about three months old, the daughter had been inexplicably anxious. She had been dealing with it well for the past few years, but her anxiety had been cresting again lately. When her mom was out walking the dog, for instance, if she was not home at the exact moment she had said she would be home, her daughter would become completely hysterical. While she was fine at school, or on overnights with friends, at home she could be hypervigilant to the point of making her well-intentioned mother claustrophobic. The absolutisms of daily life were not working for the young girl—if her mother was late it was as if her world had crumpled completely.

I wanted to help them and did not immediately know how. But I had the feeling that the daughter did not really understand what was happening inside of her. She was seeing a cognitive-behavioral therapist, who was helping her a lot, and she had all kinds of coping strategies laid out to help manage her anxiety. There was nothing in that vein that I could offer her—she already knew much more than I did about those kinds of treatment strategies. But I knew from my own experience how excruciating it could be to wait for someone I loved. Everyone was telling her that she was overdoing it, but, as the Buddha said when he enumerated his First Noble Truth, to be separated from the loved is suffering.

“You must really miss your mom,” I said. “Those are intense feelings to have.” To my surprise, the ice broke. Having framed her problem as an anxiety disorder, she had not really talked much about her feelings of longing. Her basic stance was that there was something the matter with her and she had better learn to shape up. She was very sophisticated psychologically though and she liked what I said to her. “What an interesting way to put it!” she exclaimed cheerfully, her eyes brightening. It is too early to tell if this one conversation will have any lasting effect, but we had a scintillating time talking about how she could make art during those times she was most missing her mom. She was already winning poetry prizes at school. It was possible, I thought, that she could learn to bear the trauma of separation with more clarity than she had been doing, and, therefore, with less distress.

There is a famous story in the Buddhist scriptures that it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of my patient and her daughter but that is nevertheless related. While the scenario in my office involved the imagined threat of death erupting in the first moments of an unexplained absence, the Buddhist tale describes a sequence of actual deaths that befell one young mother in a series of tragic accidents. Together, they show the range of trauma that lurks as a real possibility for all of us: whether imagined or real. In both situations, the absolutisms of daily life were upended and intolerable emotions took center stage. And in both situations a similar therapeutic intervention was needed to deal with the “singularity” of the event. Both my patient’s daughter and the heroine of the Buddhist fable felt split off from the consensual reality of other people. They were both anguished and alone and in need of a greater understanding.

The Buddhist story is of a young woman of the Buddha’s time named
⁹
(pa-
ta
-char-a) whose losses approach the limits of the imagination. The beautiful daughter of a wealthy
- merchant,
*
was confined to the top floor of her seven-story home when she was sixteen to prevent her from getting involved with men. Despite this measure (or perhaps because of it), she fell in love with one of her family’s servants. When her parents decided to marry her off to a man of their choosing, she disguised herself as a servant girl and ran away with her lover to a faraway village, where her young husband farmed a small piece of land for them. Soon pregnant,
begged her spouse to take her back to her parents’ home to give birth, explaining to him that her mother, seeing her with child, would forgive her and accept their union. When her husband refused, afraid that he would be arrested or killed, she set out by herself. He followed, they argued, she delivered her baby boy before she could reach her ancestral home, and, seeing no point in returning to her parents once she had given birth, she returned to her adopted village with her husband.

Some time later, the sequence repeated itself. Pregnant for a second time,
set out for her parents’ home carrying her young son. Her husband followed, caught up to her about halfway there, and tried to convince her, to no avail, to return home with him. An unexpected storm arose suddenly, lashing them with rain and frightening them with thunder and lightning, and
went into early labor. She asked her husband to find a place where she could give birth, and he went off to look for wood with which to build her a shelter. Chopping down some saplings, he was bitten by a poisonous snake hiding in an anthill and died.
gave birth alone in the midst of the storm and set out in the morning with her two children to look for her husband, discovering his corpse as she turned a bend in the road. Blaming herself for his death, she proceeded on toward
-, and her parents’ house.