The Trauma of Everyday Life

individual anguish along, and each such person, in harnessing his capacity for remembering, let that anguish crawl upward.
    I thought of this dream during a workshop I was teaching a little while ago. A handsome young man was sitting all the way in the rear of the room, twenty or thirty rows back. He was one of only a few African Americans in the workshop, a man of about thirty, confident in his bearings. He wore a knit cap on his head and commanded the attention of all as he spoke. “I’ve been struggling with something all day,” he began. “When I meditate now, I am filled with a feeling of loss. It has to do with my father, who left when I was young. There’s a lot of anger, and I can feel myself wondering if it was my fault, even though I know that’s ridiculous. But when I stay with it more, I just feel it turning into a kind of deadness: a lethargy, as if nothing matters. I feel myself sinking into the feeling and it feels dangerous, as if life has been stripped of meaning. What would you suggest?”
    I was struck by his sincerity and his courage in speaking of something so personal in front of such a large group. I could feel him missing the father he hardly knew and turning that pain against himself, as if he were broken or cursed. I thought of the Buddha’s loss of his mother and of the process of recovery that his dreams signified. And I remembered how the Buddha, like this man, first sank into nothingness and then willed himself toward deadness. His third dream, in which there is some kind of creative emergence from the grubby ground, gave me the inspiration to respond.
    “These feelings of rage and distress and despair that you talk about,” I said, circling something I knew I would have trouble articulating. “They only exist because of your original love for your father. They are like signposts back to that love. His leaving took that love with him, or appeared to, but you will see, if you stay with your meditation, that all of that love is still there in you. From the infant’s perspective, it’s directed at only one or two people, but even if they failed you, that capacity for love is still there in you. It’s too bad for your father that he didn’t get to know it—but there are plenty of people now who will be grateful for it. There’s a whole roomful right here.”
    There was a danger of glibness in my response, but I think the gentleman in the workshop felt the intention of my words. While they were framed around notions of love, they were also drawn from our discussions of Buddhist and Western psychology. As long as he was locked into the self-image of being a fatherless child, cut off from the one whom he needed, this man was caught in his presumed identity. He was aware of his trauma, but he was using it to distance himself from life. He had a story about himself but no access to who he might have been before his trauma derailed him. I was trying to use his feelings of deprivation as a means of bringing him back in touch with a more fundamental truth about himself, to guide him back toward—or at least help him to visualize—the intrinsic relational foundation of his being. By not fighting with his internal wounds, by not insisting on making them go away, by not recruiting everyone in his intimate life to save him from his feelings of abandonment, by simply resting with them the way we do in meditation, he could learn, as the Buddha did, that he already was the love he thought he lacked.
    The fourth dream, of the four birds coming together as one, speaks of the sense of internal cohesion that comes when the self is no longer held hostage by the traumas of childhood or the conflicts of adult life: When the self, in all of its multiplicity, is known as one. The four birds of different colors, reflective in the traditional accounts of the four castes in Indian society, are also suggestive of dissociation and estrangement. However it may be conceived, the traumatized self is fragmented, divided into parts, unable to hold the entire range of its history. Experience is constricted because the full range cannot be tolerated. The ground for holding it is not strong enough.
    One association comes to mind in reference to this fourth dream of the Buddha. It has to do with a patient of mine who suffered a terrible loss of multiple members of her family in a tragic accident. Several years afterward, she began to write of the life she had lived. She wrote a series of remarkable pieces, each