The Trauma of Everyday Life

handle anything. The frame of his ego required that he be solid as a rock. Unable to be so, he drank. Dissociating from the troubling feelings, he remained haunted by them. Stuck in his implicit memory, they never could be acknowledged. He needed to talk with another person so that he could make some sense of things. Only then could he let down his guard and feel like a person again. As Dr. Carr put it, “In the absence of a sustaining relational home where feelings can be verbalized, understood, and held, emotional pain can become a source of unbearable shame and self-loathing.” 6
    Carr’s finding that the trauma lay not in the violence his patient witnessed but in the “feelings about the violence
he
inflicted” is instructive. Unbearable feelings become tolerable when the capacity for mindful knowing is strengthened. We don’t have to be war veterans to experience unbearable anguish, although this does not diminish the horror of what war veterans have gone through. But as the Buddha made clear, we all have to deal with something. Trauma is a fact of everyday life. Just staying with the issue of anger: We all have shame and anguish about the violence
we
have inflicted. Wishing that it were not so does not make it go away.
    But we do wish. A patient came in to my office recently and asked me for a favor. He wanted to know if I could give his wife a mantra to help her manage her pain and stress. She was used to working very hard but was getting older and was being nudged, ever so surely, out of her privileged position at work. She didn’t know what to do with herself and was becoming increasingly anxious. She knew that her husband was getting something out of working with me and hoped I could work some magic for her. I wished I had a mantra for her. But I recognized this as another example of someone resisting the trauma of everyday life. If only there was a formula that could make it disappear! I told my patient that one of the traditional functions of mantra in the East was to open a space of longing. Imploring God, through the repetition of his name, to help us accept the traumas that have befallen us and take responsibility for those we have caused, is very different from asking Him to restore us to perfect harmony. My patient’s wife did not believe in God, but he thought she would grasp the point. Trying to blot out trauma leaves us vulnerable to enacting its residue. He thought she might be able to devise her own mantra, one that made room for imperfection and disappointment but also connected her to the tenderness he knew she harbored.
    The Buddha’s most fundamental discovery was that the human mind is, in itself, the relational home that is needed to process trauma. While we all tend to think of ourselves as isolated individuals adrift in a hostile universe, the Buddha ultimately saw this way of thinking as delusional. It may feel as if you are all alone, he taught, but that is not the whole picture. We are relational creatures, our minds reflecting the organizational patterns of our earliest interactions. If you go into aloneness without the customary fear, you may be surprised at the sense of unknown boundless presence you will find. The implicit relational knowing of the mother is hardwired into each of our minds. Obscured by our habits of thought, by our egocentric self-preoccupations, and by the primitive agonies that hold us in their grip, this illimitable awareness is already there for the asking. It is a renewable resource, ever present, accessible to those willing to go through the traumas of everyday life to find it. Good therapists make this palpable in the interpersonal environment. They replicate the holding environment of Winnicott’s mother-infant dynamic and create a context in which difficult feelings can be known as they never could before. But the Buddha’s insight took this one important step further.
    The Buddha’s story illustrates that a relational home can ultimately be found within. This does not mean there is no place for psychotherapy, no role for therapists like Winnicott or Carr, only that the function of such interventions will ultimately be to point the way toward this truth. In losing his mother at such an early age, the Buddha affirmed the underlying and inescapable anguish at the heart of existence. While it is compelling to read his journey toward enlightenment as a process of coming to terms with this trauma, I believe it is much more. Not only did he find a