The Trauma of Everyday Life

me in mind of my anxious dreams on my retreat. In both situations it was as if I were being taken over by something outside my control. It was one thing to try to make sense of it coming up through my dreams and another thing to see it in such prominent and vivid display on film. I felt sorry for my wife and my daughter, both of whom seemed bewildered, and ashamed of myself. And I could see that I was, in the language of psychotherapy,
enacting
something that was completely outside my capacity for reflective self-awareness.
    Psychotherapists have long recognized that people color their experience through the prisms of their own particular minds. When this happens in therapy, it is called transference—it becomes the therapist’s job to help patients understand that the ways they are misperceiving the therapist contain clues about early traumas that are being reawakened in the therapeutic relationship. But it is not only in a therapeutic relationship that people are subject to transference; people act out unprocessed emotions all of the time: at work, with their loved ones, even when stuck in traffic or waiting on line at the store. Unresolved trauma waits at the gate of experience, looking for an opportunity to express itself. As I could see in the videotape of myself, however, there is a peculiar quality to this expression. It pours out unbeknownst to the person engaging in the behavior. It is
enacted
with remarkably little self-awareness. Even after the action is completed, one has little idea of what was being expressed. One of the fascinating things about reading the Buddhist scriptures is seeing how this tendency was described twenty-five hundred years ago. Not only did the Buddha act out his dissociated aggression in his ascetic pursuits but, once awakened, he became expert at recognizing and treating this tendency in others, in ways that anticipated the work of today’s most experienced trauma therapists. He became adept at interrupting the unconscious perpetration of trauma from one person to the next.
    It is interesting that
sati
, the word the Buddha chose for mindfulness, means “to remember.” In his choice of this word, it is as if he already understood today’s most recent thinking about how trauma encodes itself in the mind and body. While the remembering aspect of mindfulness is usually taken to mean “remembering to be aware of whatever is happening in the moment,” there is another quality to it that relates more directly to the way trauma cleaves to our experience. Re-membering also connotes bringing that which is dissociated back into the self. It can mean rejoining, or becoming cognizant, in the sense of bringing something into consciousness that has been lurking outside awareness. In the case of trauma, this second meaning of remembering is especially relevant.
    One of the distinguishing qualities of trauma is that it cannot be held in normal memory. Because the feelings associated with it are by definition unendurable, they never make it into the part of the brain that makes sense of emotional experience. Robert Stolorow describes it this way. Developmental traumas, he says, “derive their lasting significance from the establishment of invariant and relentless principles of organization that remain beyond the influence of reflective self-awareness or of subsequent experience.” 1 The neural pathways on which these emotional currents run are based in the amygdala, deep in the brain, and they operate outside the influence of conscious thought. They can hijack the mind and blank out awareness, as my reaction to the wiggle worm made clear, so that it feels as if one is suddenly in the grip of something over which one has no control. Stolorow makes an interesting point about the impact of trauma, one that the Buddha’s psychology also supports. Trauma takes us out of time. There is no past or future when one is overtaken by it; it is as if it were happening
now
. “Experiences of trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned through the portkeys supplied by life’s slings and arrows,” 2 he says. The sense of one’s own continuity, of what he calls the “stretching along between past and future,” 3 is collapsed by trauma. The traumatized individual lives outside time, in his or her own separate reality, unable to relate to the consensual reality of others. The remembering quality of