The Trauma of Everyday Life

awful and occasions when it is actually horrific, trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people. It is the bedrock of our biology. Churning, chaotic, and unpredictable, our lives are stretched across a tenuous canvas. Much of our energy goes into resisting this fragility, yet it is there nonetheless. The Buddha found it useful to put people in touch with their vulnerability, yet he had one important qualification to his dictum to always speak the constructive but distasteful truth. Only if he knew the time to say it would he confront people with their traumas. Only if the relationship could sustain it would he gentle them into themselves. In specifying this, the Buddha was making an important point, one not lost on today’s psychotherapists. Trauma becomes sufferable, even illuminating, when there is a relational home 1 to hold it in. Without this, it is simply too much to bear.
    The Buddha did not come to this understanding out of nowhere. His own personal journey involved coming to terms with the loss of a mother he, for all intents and purposes, never knew. As therapists who specialize in “developmental” or “relational” trauma have come to realize, the first few years of life are critical for one’s self-esteem and self-confidence. The healthy attachment of a baby to a “good-enough” parent facilitates a comfort with emotional experience that makes the challenges of adult life and adult intimacy less intimidating. When there is serious malattunement in early life, however, there is often a traumatic residue that manifests in surprising and disturbing ways. The Buddha, like many of us, acted out this residue. Abandoning his wife and child, debasing himself in the forest striving to liberate himself from his mind and body, his spiritual journey can be read, from one perspective at least, as an expression of primitive agony.
    Primitive agonies exist in many of us. Originating in painful experiences that occurred before we had the cognitive capacities to know what was happening, they tend to blindside us, traumatizing us again and again as we find ourselves enacting a pain we do not understand. The Buddha’s story is a perfect motif for this. At the heart of his life was a trauma he would not have been able to remember: the loss of the mother who so delighted in him for the first week of his life. This loss lay hidden in his implicit memory, coloring his experience in ways he could feel but never know, encouraging a feeling of self-hatred and discontent. As one of today’s leading neuroscientists, Joseph LeDoux, has put it after studying the impact of stress on the brain, emotional memory may be forever. 2 The Buddha, his emotional memory imprinted with profound loss, had to work with one of the most fundamental traumas of everyday life: the death of a loved one. And he had to do it by himself, without the interpersonal support he always gave to others.
    The Buddha made it clear that the way out of suffering is by going through it. He taught the Four Noble Truths and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness as the means of doing just this. Beginning with the breath, expanding to the body, feelings, states of mind, and awareness itself, the progression of mindfulness teaches that trauma can be used to open the mind. When we are no longer dissociating critical aspects of our experience, setting ourselves up in opposition to elements we are trying to avoid, we can finally relax. The Buddha had a taste of this when he remembered his childhood joy under the rose-apple tree. Settling into himself without falling prey to his usual set of self-judgments, he had his first sense of the collaborative communication his mind was capable of. He became a vessel for feelings, reproducing the delight his mother had felt herself unable to contain, while also touching the fear that came to consume both mother and child. In the reconfiguration of his method that followed, the Buddha found that feelings did not have to frighten him. Even the unpleasant ones of primitive agony could be attended to with sufficient practice. Trauma could be known, not only as a personal tragedy but as an impersonal reflection of an underlying and universal reality. Suffering is part and parcel of human existence. It is in all of us, in one form or another. The choice we have is how to relate to it. We can try to avoid it or we can use it as grist for the mill.
    Western therapists have long recognized how urgently the self wishes to keep