The Trauma of Everyday Life

Birth, aging, sickness, death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are inescapable; being close to those who are disagreeable, being separated from those who are loved, and not getting what one wants are all unpleasant facts of life; indeed, just being a person in this world brings suffering because of how insignificant we feel and how impermanent we are. Even pleasant experiences carry a whiff of dissatisfaction because of their inability to provide ultimate comfort. No matter how fulfilling, they eventually run their course.
    But there was another quality to the
dukkha
the Buddha described, a more subtle description of the unsatisfactory nature of the human predicament. The word itself is a compound with an interesting derivation. The prefix “duh” means badness or difficulty, while the suffix “kha” can refer to the hole at the center of a wheel into which an axle fits. The word thus connotes a bad fit making for a bumpy ride. 6 For me this image of a poorly fitting axle was another way of describing the sense of not fitting in, of not quite belonging, of being slightly at odds with oneself, that had afflicted me for as long as I could remember. It was probably no accident, given the derivation of the word, that the Buddha’s teaching of the Four Noble Truths was entitled “Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dharma.” His listeners would have been aware of the connotations of the word
dukkha
and would have appreciated the imagery of the Buddha turning a wheel smoothly.
    Questioned some years after his enlightenment by a local prince about his penchant for delivering bad news, Buddha said that he could no longer abide by the traditional Sanskrit principle of saying only what was true and pleasant. He marched to a different drum, he maintained, and would speak of what was “true and beneficial even if it was disagreeable.” To illustrate his point, he pointed to a baby on the prince’s lap. What if the infant put a stick or a pebble in his mouth? Wouldn’t the prince pull it out even if doing so were likely to cause the baby some distress? Wasn’t that what a doctor sometimes had to do? Not to mention a mother? But he added one caveat. He would speak the beneficial, if disagreeable, truth only if he “knew the time to say it.” 7 As is the case with good therapists today, tact was a major concern of the Buddha. If someone was not ready to acknowledge his or her trauma, he would not force the issue. Each individual had to liberate him- or herself, after all. The best a teacher, even a Buddha, can do is to show them how.
    “This generation is entangled in a tangle,” began one of the earliest commentaries on the Buddha’s teachings, written many generations ago in Sri Lanka, somewhere around the fifth century of the common era. The “tangle” refers to the way we only want to hear what is “true and pleasant,” the way we refuse what is “disagreeable.” In the Buddha’s time as well as in our own, there was a rush toward some imagined version of normal, an intolerance of the precarious foundation upon which we are perched. It was true thousands of years ago and it remains true to this day. The novelist William Styron once expressed this perfectly. Overheard when he was a young man in Paris drunkenly falling into his oysters and pleading to his friends for relief, Styron gave voice to what for most people remains an unacknowledged whisper in the back of their minds. “Ah ain’ got no mo ree-sistunce to change than a
snow
-flake,” Styron moaned. “Ah’m goin’ home to the James Rivuh and grow
pee
-nuts.” 8 Styron’s willingness to acknowledge his trauma is unusual—most of us refuse to admit it, even to ourselves, but live in a state of entanglement with it nonetheless.
    A patient of mine recently gave voice to a similar sentiment in the midst of her therapy with me. She was sober, and she had a different image for her suffering, but she was pleading in much the same way as William Styron: “I feel like a person alone in a sailboat in the middle of the ocean clinging for dear life to the mast,” Monica confided as she began to well up, the silence of her therapy session cushioning her tears. “It’s too much; I can’t hang on any longer; I don’t know what else to do.” An accomplished and beloved professor in her midfifties, Monica was astute enough to be able to give language to her trauma, one that many people feel but shy away from. She, too, was like a fish out