The Trauma of Everyday Life

certainly fits a bereft child as much as it does a sickly old man. And Gotama’s puzzlement at the sight has all of the hallmarks of a contemporary therapy patient struggling to make sense of a split-off aspect of his own self. Teetering precariously at the edge of his seat, such a patient, estranged from his emotional self, is likely to feel a bit confused when his true feelings start to dawn.
    “Tell me,” said Gotama while staring at this vision of himself, “who is this man?” That is the question that came to preoccupy him over the next six years. Having woken up to the reality of death, sorrow, and loss; having seen his delicate nature; having a beginning inkling of the dissociated remnant of primitive agony lurking within, Gotama was poised to confront the harsh truths of existence, truths that, for him, included the inexplicable absence at the heart of his early life.
    We now use words like “estrangement” and “dissociation” to describe the coping mechanisms people use to deal with trauma. But in the Buddha’s time such concepts could only be inferred. And although it has not often been recognized or acknowledged, the psychological teachings of the Buddha
do
suggest this phenomenon. For in order to become a Buddha, Gotama had to remember what he had never entirely understood and reexperience what he had only temporarily known. His task was different from. Her losses occurred when she was an adult, and she could summon both her love and her grief when it became safe enough to do so. His loss occurred in an infantile and preverbal state. He had no way to remember his mother and no way to process his loss. And yet, before he could complete his journey, the trauma that configured his self had to be brought into awareness, experienced as if for the first time, and transfigured. The split that the young Gotama endured needed to be healed. The Buddha had to invent a therapy for himself and apply it. As one of today’s leading experts on developmental trauma, Philip Bromberg, has put it, “No matter how great the pain of being trapped within one’s internal object world, and no matter how desperate the wish to break free, it is humanly impossible to become fully alive in the present without facing and owning all of the hated, disavowed parts of the self that have shaped and been shaped by one’s earliest object attachments.” 7
    For some reason, therapists writing about early intimate relationships between infants and caregivers like to speak of “objects” instead of “people.” The idea, I believe, is that babies are incapable of relating to whole persons, that they relate, instead, to objects (like the breast) or functions (like feeding, holding, or soothing). They become attached to these objects or functions or traumatized by the lack of them. If they are hungry, for instance, they do not yet know they are hungry; they are moved by a physiological and biological urge to cry out. It is up to the parents, the “objects” of the baby’s subjective experience, to respond to the baby’s cry. When a therapist writes about being “trapped in one’s internal object world,” he is writing about being trapped by primitive agonies, about the constraints dissociated traumas put on the mind. While the Buddha’s story is traditionally related in metaphorical, not psychological, language, a careful examination of it reveals a similar psychological process underlying it. Just as described above, the Buddha could become “fully alive in the present” only by engaging with the “hated, disavowed parts of the self” that were configured by his earliest relationships. He found a method of dealing with dissociation before there was even a concept of it. In so doing, he not only awoke to his own Buddha nature but also came to understand it as a reflection of his lost mother.
    Therapists today have a language for trauma’s impact on the mind. They recognize that the mind’s primary defense against agony is dissociation and that the primary motivation for dissociation is stability. Especially in situations in which unbearable emotions are stirred up, the self’s only choice is to wall itself off from whatever is threatening it, to remove itself from what it cannot regulate. My friend whose parents were both alcoholics with violent tempers became a person who was always most eager to please. Her parents used to have terrible arguments, smashing furniture while she cowered with her siblings under the