How Can We Define Trauma?
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
Trauma can be divided into four basic categories. These are: physical trauma, or bodily injury; emotional trauma, or psychic injury; psychological trauma, or mental injury; and spiritual trauma, or injury to the spirit. However, since this course has been written from a metaphysical and not a medical point of view, we will mostly be dealing with the psychological aspects of any given traumatic experience and its aftermath. Once we understand trauma from a mental point of view, we’ll be better able to find the hidden lessons and higher meanings that lie within all types of experiences that might be considered “traumatic.” Keep in mind that, in accord with the idea of personal sovereignty, we have some control over our own experience. Though we cannot always decide whether or not we will experience some kind of injury, we can choose how to think about what has happened to us. Our minds, through their inherent power to create meaning and purpose, can provide the alchemical means by which any injury can be transformed into a tool for obtaining complete awareness and higher consciousness.
Everyone in our world experiences some form of psychological trauma, even if only of a secondary nature. For example, seeing a dead body filmed on television can be psychologically traumatic and have detrimental effects on the mind of the viewer. Children are especially vulnerable to the effects of psychological trauma. This is why most mental injuries take place early in life, before the mind of an individual has become hardened by repeated exposure to psychologically harmful events and stimuli. MarthaStout in The Myth Of Sanity (2001) explains, “All of us are exposed to some amount of psychological trauma at some point in our lives, and yet most of us are unaware of the misty spaces in our brains left there by traumatic experience, since for the most part we experience them only indirectly.” In other words, most of the traumatic experiences to which we are exposed actually happen to other people. We read about these tragedies in the newspaper or see them on television.
Civilization with its modern conveniences shelters us from the harsh conditions of life that prevail in the majority of earthly human situations even today. Privileged members of the industrialized middle class would probably feel psychologically traumatized by the simple conditions of everyday life that less “fortunate” people (i.e., the majority of humans on this planet) must accept. Martha Stout continues in this vein in The Myth Of Sanity (2001): “Seldom do we ponder the traumatic events in our own lives, let alone the frightening hardships and life-or-death struggles that were the daily lot of people as close to us, in terms of time, as our great-grandmothers, or even our grandmothers.” The harsh conditions that prevailed in the lives of our own ancestors in previous generations still prevail in most parts of the world for most people. She also tells us, “If we travel a little way from the developed world, we find that more than one fifth of the global population still lives in extreme poverty, and life expectancy in some of the least developed countries is forty three years. At least one billion people now living on our planet suffer from chronic hunger, and a human child dies from malnutrition every four seconds. The World Health Organization reports that half of humanity still lacks regular access to the treatment of common diseases, and to the most basic medicines.“ The physical hardships that we face in our own daily lives seem insignificant when meditated upon in the light of the much harsher conditions to which others are subjected.
When we realize that everyone has hardships and troubles to face in life that equal or exceed those that we must endure, our own bad experiences might seem less terrible to us. Traumatic experiences, especially psychological ones, can be mitigated by the use of mental perspective. For this reason, two people can experience the same potentially traumatizing event and only one of them might actually be mentally harmed as a result of the experience. As Martha Stout tells us in The Myth Of Sanity (2001), “The severity of a trauma is measured by how damaging it was, of course, but also...by the subjective meaning the victim attaches to it.” In other words, our ability to create meaning gives us some degree of control over our internal experience. We can choose to attach meanings to events that will allow us to grow and adjust to the nature of the world, and this will give us more mental strength and stability. Conversely, we can choose to believe that our bad experiences mean that we ourselves are bad people, for example. This thought will make us mentally weak, and unwilling to face the challenges of life. She explains further by saying, “By definition, a traumatic event, whether it be objectively tragic or not, opens in the mind a corridor to the apprehension of our essential helplessness and the possibility of death. A traumatic stressor is overwhelming not because it is colossal—for it may not be so for observers—but because it has a certain meaning for the individual.”
By deciding what our experiences mean to us, we can take control of our own lives at the most basic level. However, the conscious creation of meaning requires a great deal of will power, awareness, and effort. Children, and other sheltered or dependent individuals, often lack the mental strength necessary to create an independent self-image and world view. For this reason, psychology holds that formative experiences take place primarily in childhood. The meanings that we attach to things become fixed at a certain point in our development. To change such “association locks,” to use a term coined by science fiction writer William Burroughs, we must first identify them. We must get to know ourselves as human beings who share a common state of existence, and we must recognize the actual nature of the human condition.
As we mentioned before, children are more vulnerable to psychological trauma. This is because their inexperienced minds often cannot make sense of traumatic events in a positive way. Martha Stout tells us in The Myth Of Sanity (2001), “Because of their lack of experience in our world, children are traumatized far more frequently than we are. Circumstances that provoke mild anxiety in adults may easily generate life-or-death terror in children, because the very young have not yet created for themselves a framework for interacting with the world at large. This temporary deficit is one of the most poignant and dangerous connotations of the expression ‘childhood innocence.’”
As adults we learn how terrible the world can be, either through our own experience or by becoming aware of worldly events. To protect our minds from the potentially lethal psychological damage that the intimate awareness of ubiquitous tragedy could inflict, we learn as adults how to create a world-view that allows us to carry on and maintain some degree of hope for ourselves and the world. In The Myth Of Sanity (2001) Martha Stout says: “We are a thoroughly shell-shocked species. Though we have not all suffered abuse as children, we have all endured experiences that we perceived as terrifying, and that utterly exhausted our tender attempts to comprehend and cope. From a troubled world that often seems to menace, many of us have absorbed repeated, toxic doses of secondary trauma as well: from people we care about, and even from an impersonal media.” Keep in mind that those who control the media may portray events or choose facts so as to make things seem more terrible and hopeless than they would otherwise appear. Such terror tactics may have a calculated effect on human consciousness: they tend to produce the condition of listless apathy that often results from battlefield experience. Hence the metaphorical term, “shell-shock.”
Shell-shocked as we are, we learn early on to cope with the horrors of day to day events in the media and elsewhere by a mechanism known to psychology as dissociation. When we dissociate, we distance ourselves from traumatic stimuli by cutting off our awareness, by going away. This loss of awareness helps us stave off secondary trauma so well that it becomes habitual. Understanding this process goes a long way toward making sense of the apathetic nature of collective thinking on chronically tragic subjects like corruption in politics or the deterioration of the environment. Those who have been directly traumatized learn to dissociate in an even more radical manner, as we shall see later. Note once again, however, that not everyone who goes through or hears about a stressful event sustains psychological damage.
Also, we must take into account the limits of the current psychiatric paradigm, and the largely mythical nature of psychological “conditions” such as “PTSD,” “ADD,” and other facile but inherently misleading acronyms. As we will see later, “mental illness” as such doesn’t really exist. In an insane world, no one is entirely sane. Martha Stout in The Myth Of Sanity (2001) supports this hypothesis by noting that “...as a result of our histories, and of our inborn disposition to become dissociative when our minds need protection, moderately dissociated awareness is the normal mental status of all adult human beings.” Though not everyone ends up as a mental patient, let’s face the truth of the cliché: “We are all a little crazy.” If we weren’t, we couldn’t possibly cope with the human condition and continue to live our lives in the way that this mad world requires us to. As 20th century novelist Henry Miller once put it (as quoted from Madness, Heresy, And The Rumor Of Angels (1993)), “If we were truly awake we would be stunned by the horror of our everyday life. No one in his right senses could possibly do the crazy things which are now demanded of us every moment of the day.” As a corollary to this postulate, we might say that we have to lose our minds before we can come to our senses. The mind plays tricks on the eye, as anyone who has witnessed a magic show can testify.
We can get to know ourselves more deeply by examining the nature of this dissociative reflex that all of us share as mentally vulnerable humans in a world gone mad. We can also have more understanding for others who can’t immediately “get over it” when their experiences don’t seem so awful to us. In fact we might realize that we are not really aware of the extent of our own dissociation from ourselves and the world we inhabit. After all, dissociation occurs without conscious intervention, automatically.
Only an act of will can make us fully conscious in the present moment, and short-circuit the automatic dissociation reflex. Martha Stout in The Myth Of Sanity (2001) brings up an important question on this point: “How do childhood and adolescent terrors that should have been over years ago manage to live on and make us crazy and alienated from ourselves in the present? The answer, paradoxically, lies in a perfectly normal function of the mind known as dissociation, which is the universal human reaction to extreme fear or pain...” We can deal more easily with pain, this passage implies, by ceasing to be aware of it. The passage continues by telling us the purpose of this block in our awareness, and the trouble that such blocks eventually cause: “Dissociation during trauma is extremely adaptive; it is a survival function. The problem comes later, for long after the ordeal is over, the tendency to be disconnected from ourselves may remain. Our old terrors train us to be dissociative, to feel safe by taking little psychological vacations from reality when it is too frightening or painful. But later, these mental vacations may come upon us even when we do not need them, or want them, or recognize them.”
This lack of recognition can often be remedied by feedback from others, as when a friend tells us that we haven’t been listening. It can also be self-regulated, for example, by taking note of the times when our eyes scan the words on a page without our mind being aware of what those words mean. Though we might not like to admit it to ourselves or others, all of us must constantly battle against the tendency to let go the thread of consciousness and slip into the relative bliss of an “automatic pilot” state of being where life goes on without engaging our higher faculties in any meaningful way. No one wants to suffer, and mentally “checking out” offers an escape into an internal sanctuary where nothing that happens in the big bad outside world can touch us.
If we never experience the world for the flawed place that it is, however, we will never know the joy of being fully present in the moment. This pure appreciation of existence and life as it must be lived can be likened to the Buddhist idea of enlightenment. The realization of our sorrowful state of suffering on earth must be fully felt and acknowledged before we can become free of that suffering in our own minds. Buddhist thinker Mark Epstein, in his book Thoughts Without A Thinker (1995), writes, “While ‘suffering’ is the conventional translation for the Buddha’s word dukkha, it does not really do the word justice. A more specific translation would be something on the order of ‘pervasive unsatisfactoriness.’ Not to obtain what one desires causes dissatisfaction, and being separated from what one cherishes causes dissatisfaction. As many a psychotherapist can testify, and as the Buddha so clearly recognized, our own selves can feel somehow unsatisfactory to us. We are all touched by a gnawing sense of imperfection, insubstantiality, or unrest, and we all long for a magical resolution of that dis-ease.”
This course seeks to offer pointers for just such a “magical” cure for the so-called mental “diseases” that often seem to result from “traumatic” experiences. The cure has a simple, yet nevertheless magically potent, name: healing. Each of us must use our own magic to cure ourselves. No doctor can truly cure us. We can only recover by willing our own recoveries and going through the healing process. We must charm our own minds into believing that we can recover by healing ourselves, no matter how terrible the past has been for us.