The Trauma of Everyday Life

eventually proposing another approach. While it may not have been such a revelatory proclamation to say that suffering was an inescapable fact of life, the conclusion the Buddha came to ran counter to most people’s desires.
    The most important thing we can do about suffering is to acknowledge it. Simply acknowledging it, while seeming like a minor adjustment, is actually huge. A friend of mine told me how, when his mother died when he was five years old, his father told him one morning that she was gone and would not be coming back and then never talked about her again. While extreme, this response is emblematic of our natural instincts. We would like to pretend that everything is okay, that death does not touch us, that we are not possessed by primitive agonies whose origins are murky at best, that we are somehow immune from the unbearable embeddedness of existance. But trauma is part of our definition as human beings. It is inextricably woven into the fabric of our lives. No one can escape it. Acknowledging it, as Realistic View encourages us to do, brings us closer to the incomprehensible reality of our own deaths. And as far as death is concerned, the way out is most definitely through.
    As a therapist, I have found this approach to be enormously helpful, even for people with no relationship to Buddhism and no interest in meditation. If it is a truth, I long ago decided, it must be true no matter what religion one does or does not believe in. Many people, in the aftermath of an acute trauma like the loss of a loved one, for instance, believe they should be able to “get over it” within a discrete period of time. There are five stages of grief, they remind me, quoting the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They should be able to go through them in a year or two, they believe. I am cautious in my response. The Buddha took a different approach, one that seems more realistic. There need be no end to grief, he would say. While it is never static—it is not a single (or even a five-stage) thing—there is no reason to believe it will disappear for good and no need to judge oneself if it does not. Grief turns over and over. It is vibrant, surprising and alive, just as we are.
    In a similar way, the primitive agonies of our childhoods live on into adulthood. Many of my patients, conditioned by Western psychology, feel that once they have some understanding of where their feelings come from, they should be finished with them. But we are not built that way. Primitive feelings continue to be stirred up throughout adult life. Understanding them does not turn them off. They are our history, our emotional memories; part of the people we have become. A patient of mine whose mother killed herself when my patient was four years old became unusually anxious when she was engaged to be married recently. She knew why, of course. What if her new husband were to disappear as precipitously as her mother did? But knowing why was not what the Buddha meant by Realistic View. He meant something much more direct. Realistic View means examining feelings rather than running away from them, acknowledging trauma rather than pretending all is normal. My patient’s betrothal gave her another chance to face emotions that had been too overwhelming to face at the time of her mother’s death. She was being given a window into herself, into her history and into her pain. In taking possession of those traumatic feelings, she was also being freed from the grip of them. Rather than enacting her panic and fleeing from her new husband, she could settle in to her present-day relationship with a newfound compassion for the bereft girl still soldiering on inside herself. Like a mad child long lost her old mother, my patient came to see that the maternal energy she needed was actually present within. Changing her attitude, changing the way she related to her panicky feelings, gave her access to that all-important energy and allowed her to go forward in her life.
    In the Zen tradition of China, the wisdom of the Buddha’s awakening has been preserved in a collection of one hundred koans called the Blue Cliff Record. These koans
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dating from the eleventh-century Sung Dynasty, dare students to move beyond their conventional ways of thinking and to align their minds with the perfection of wisdom implicit in their true natures. They pose paradoxical questions that are meant to confuse the