The Trauma of Everyday Life

imagine that nothing else made sense to her than to give the Buddha’s counsel a chance. Asrealized in her reflection upon the waters, there may be nothing else to do with the traumas that befall us than to use them for our own awakenings.

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    Dissociation

    W hen the old monk who ledto the Buddha threw his cloak around her, he was making a vivid psychotherapeutic statement. And when the Buddha, upon hearing her story of trauma, told her that he was one who could serve as her shelter and refuge, he was putting into words what the old disciple had already tangibly displayed. Both men were suggesting thatunbearable experience could be borne, if just barely. And both were addressing what is today recognized as the most common response to trauma: the tendency toward dissociation. In dissociation the personality wards off becoming fragmented. It does this by withdrawing from that which it cannot bear. The shocked self is sacrificed, sent to its room for an endless time-out. It is shunned, split off, shut away, or otherwise quieted. The unbearable nature of its ordeal is more than can be handled, more than can be processed, and certainly more than can be understood. In order to go on, the self cuts its losses and dissociates its alarm. This is a self-preserving strategy, called an “ego defense” in Western psychology, and it is one that has also been implicated in the development of posttraumatic stress. Its goal is to avoid falling apart, and it is usually marginally effective. The problem is that the dissociated aspects of the self do not go away completely. They lurk in the background, unexplored and undigested, and the ego must expend enormous energy keeping them at bay.
    When the Buddha suggested that he could serve asshelter and refuge, he was speaking from experience. He had already worked through his own developmental traumas. He knew firsthand that the defense of dissociation did not have to be the last word, that it is possible to be whole even after a series of traumas. He instructedin his method of mindfulness and, in so doing, gave her the antidote to dissociation. In teaching her how to release herself into her forbidden feelings, he also showed her how to emerge from them. Her reclamation of her dissociated parts can be seen not just in the image of the cloak around her shoulders but also in her connection with the physical landscape in which she was immersed. No longer needing to hold her losses at arm’s length, she was able to use the waters flowing around her to connect to her own inner state. After learning to be mindfully aware, she found she did not need to sacrifice her emotional body in the pursuit of stability but could open to what Kabat-Zinn 1 has called “the full catastrophe” of her life.
    Given that tales likeare so central to Buddhist culture, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the early death of the Buddha’s mother. One would think that her death would figure prominently in his story because of the way it speaks to his core teachings of impermanence, indeterminacy, and suffering, but there is very little overt mention of her passing. It took me years of immersion in Buddhist thought to even become conscious of it. She is there at the beginning of the Buddha’s life, exits discreetly, and is barely acknowledged thereafter. This rather curious neglect is a sign, I believe, of the traumatic underpinnings of the Buddha’s biography. Even in a culture steeped in the truth of impermanence, the need to dissociate from distress is very strong. People are so eager to get on with the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment that they rush right past the trauma at the heart of his early experience.
    In developing the theme of an undercurrent of trauma running through the center of the Buddha’s story, it is clear to me that not all Buddhists may agree. Many people are drawn to contemplative practices as a means of rising above, or distancing themselves from, their most difficult emotions. They see meditation as a way of becoming calm and clear, of removing themselves from the tumult and chaos of daily life. They are not interested in awakening their primitive agonies or being reminded of their buried losses. They see the Buddha as one who has conquered emotion, not as someone who has come to terms with it. Even the Buddha, right up until his final awakening, meditated to escape from himself. He subscribed to the dominant philosophical view of his time that the desires of the