The Myth of the Traumatic "Event"

Tweet

By Georgi Y. Johnson

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”

Albert Einstein

Seven-year-old Khalil is sent to fetch his father back from the field because it’s time to eat. He doesn’t really want to go, because he fears his father’s punishment for having broken his bike. But he goes anyway because his mother needs him to. He searches for his father in the usual places in the field but can’t find him. There is some sense of relief, because Khalil is still anticipating punishment, and his father had been quite the enemy of late. Khalil is thinking of returning home, as his father is not there, but when he circles around the copse of trees and notices what looks like an uncommon pile of mud some hundred meters away in the meadow. He goes to check it out, and as he approaches, there is a creepy recognition in his gut that the fabric flapping in the wind over the mud-pile is his father’s familiar coat.

He begins to run, knowing, feeling, dreading, that this form is his father’s body. He is desperate to get there, to see if he’s OK, and to help him. As he draws closer, he registers a strange stillness to the body. There is a weird kind of watchful absence. But still, his own body is running reflexively to help. He calls out many times to his Dad. He arrives at what he realized is his father’s prostrate body, and he pulls it over to see his father’s face. This reveals the dead face, contorted in pain. Not at peace – but with eyes open, horror struck, with a dull, blank stare from the space where his soul used to shine.

Decades later, at the apex of his life, Khalil has set up a meeting of Nondual Therapy. This trauma has formed him, but it so old it feels like second nature. It's a monochrome, linear story. He has told the story so many times to different therapists that he is almost angry to come back to it. Why does it come back now, when he is wanting to talk about the awakening of consciousness? "It just is what it is," he says, his eyes gazing forward as if into an unshakeable void where his father's corpse remains motionless, caught in time, forever.

Physical events are like physical symptoms. They bring the undercurrents of disharmony to the surface for healing. Because the "thing" that happened can't be separated from the one it is happening to, the event or the happening are always an accumulation of deeper underlying, conditions. Just as the nature of the soil determines the fate of the seed, the deeper undercurrents of the psyche determine the experience - and the very nature - of any event.

Events do not create the disharmony. The disharmony and imbalance comes with the rupture - between different dimensions of experience. What has been felt, sensed and seen seems indigestible. It seems impossible to integrate parts of what the living matter of experience with the rest of life. What has been felt is nailed down as fact - immutable - and in the case of trauma immutably damaged and unfit for consumption.

A key one in this area of experience in the early life of Khalil is in the moment of seeing the dead face of his father. It is dead, with the deadness of the dead. "Dead" is not an experience but a fact. Dead is dead and can never be undone. It's a fixed thing, unnegotiable, like a great wall that demands an end to all experience. Experience dies in the belief that "Dead" is Dead. 

Dead is not dead for the seven-year-old Khalil. Dead is not the end of experience, because the young boy is there, as the consciousness within the experience, very much alive. "Dead" is an explosion of experience, that is still alive and reverberating decades later. "Dead" is the physical event that awakens a shock of existential consciousness and it is the consciousness within this rude awakening - the living power of perception and being alive - which is truly un-negatable.

When trauma therapists only treat only the symptoms, (such as addressing the event itself) the underlying rivers of feeling are forsaken. When we seek the removal of symptoms – for example, repressing, ignoring, rewiring, or introducing imagined resources to change the experience by offering an overlay of another experience – then we force the authenticity of the core suffering back into the somatic unconscious. We preclude the external release, and in this, the chance of repetition and deeper psychological dysfunction increases. This potent, direct configuration of forbidden sentient energy will seek release in other contexts, through other events, according to other parameters. As Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

The physical event is a doorway to the experience of the authentic self, it is never an endpoint. If the healing journey begins and ends with the "thing that happened" then any touch point with the physical event becomes a U-turn out of the self and back into the world, away from the inner center and back to the psychic fragmentation of outer reflections. The art of healing trauma is to leverage the event to unlock the deeper sentient story and to restore the integrity and autonomy of the individual’s psychospiritual journey.

Khalil releases the body. It is as if time collapses. He turns his own small body away and curls his knees to his chest. Reality is suspended. He is frozen. No-one knows for how long. Khalil doesn’t remember anything for a quite a time after that.

If we live in a world of “things” or objects, then this trauma is the “thing” which is the event: “Seven-year-old Khalil went to the field and found his father dead from a heart attack.” Khalil’s father is the object. Khalil is the subject. And the event is the thing we now call the "trauma". We assume an objective, impersonal position – like a football commentator – to report the event. This is the truth. The reality. In a nutshell. This creates a belief that when we want to heal this trauma, we must seek to heal this horrible event. Healing then involves an interference with a lot of what was directly experienced by Khalil. His experience is undermined in relation to the physical event. It is precisely this invalidation of direct experience (in the name of healing) that creates and perpetuates the psychology of trauma.

In these misguided maneuvers to dampen the edge of suffering we hear platitudes, such as: “Your father was quite old, he had a good life,” or “There’s nothing you could have done, it was his time.”

But the trauma is not ultimately about the father that died, but about Khalil’s experience of shock and loss in the here and now. The trauma is about Khalil, not the father, not the death, not even the event. The suffering has nothing to do with the father. Even when it appears to be about the father, it is Khalil’s suffering of the suffering of the father that we are working with. Khalil’s direct experience is primary to the trauma. The event is a signature.

When we identify trauma as a “bad” event, the happening becomes isolated, unwanted, and stigmatized within the flow of daily life. It is the “bad” thing that happened to the “good” person. But in the field of experience, there is no good and bad, there is vibration and frequency of feeling. The judgement of good and bad generates and sustains trauma. It isolates areas of suffering and the ones that suffer. It is profoundly lacking in compassion.

When no-one wants the bad, what's left of good is very little. "Good" becomes a pleasing and placated veneer shielding a shattered inner world. Over time, the rejection of the "bad" thing builds a field. It's bad to be bad. A deep energy of gloom or doom (which is what feeling bad is made of) shrouds the traumatic event. Depression, stress disorders, and physical illness ensue. It's very bad when we're not allowed to feel bad. Sometimes the mask cracks. The potency of the soul breaks through potentially as destructive behavior decades later that is utterly wicked but feels very much alive.

This was what has happening outwardly, when I first met Khalil. It is paramount for me to recognize the healing power in the destructive impulse and to ride this opportunity rather than to suppress it.

Resilience involves coming to peace with the amber of trauma and integrating it to some degree within the whole. The surface layer of events has nothing to do with this. To believe the event is the cause of our existential exposure to the here and now, is akin to believing that the eggshell creates the yoke, or that the way the onion sheds its peel decides the flavor of the onion.

With the restoration of conscious aliveness in the here and now it becomes possible to replay events in such a way that it becomes clear that the suffering of pain and loss belongs in the dimension of impermanence, while the sentient aliveness of True Nature is sourced in a deeper dimension, at the source of consciousness itself. With this work, little by little, Khalil is regaining the permission to feel what he feels, to grieve where he grieves, and to be a sensually alive wherever he is sensually alive. The heart is coming on line again as destructive rage now is revealed as having a creative aspect - a deeper drive that has everything to do with the ferocious sense of truth within awakened consciousness and the primacy of love.

The formative traumatic event of the death of Khalil’s father serves as an anchor of physical actuality and self-realization in the unfolding of a much deeper process – a process of wisdom and understanding that unfolds through a life-time. This is a living happening in the here and now, where there is the sacred rite of passage between the essence of Khalil and the essence of the whole.