How to understand trauma? You could say it’s when something terrible happened when you were little, let’s say, and you didn’t deal with it then because – and this is part of the suffering – we don’t know how to deal with difficulties, you know?
So what did we do with it? We got all neurotic and twisted inside and then built up all these habits of anger or resentment and hurt and jealousy to protect ourselves because we don’t have techniques, we don’t have methods. As little children we don’t know how to deal with traumatic experiences like our mother abusing us, or our father being unkind, or the next-door neighbor doing something terrible.
We’ve got to analyze; when we talk about trauma, we’ve really got to use the Buddhist analysis to understand why that is and, as simple as it sounds – as simplistic as it sounds – it comes down to the Buddhist explanation of suffering and the causes of suffering.
If we’ve read any Buddhism, we might have heard the Four Noble Truths, and it’s about suffering. It sounds pretty simple: one, first you have to identify the problem: there is suffering; two, there are causes; three, you can get rid of suffering and its causes – it’s such a shocking statement you almost can’t believe it; and four, how to do it.
So, number one: there is suffering, and there are different levels of suffering. The first level of suffering is when the bad things happen. And trauma is certainly an example of that, isn’t it?
Let’s look now at the second noble truth: the causes – and this is almost too simple for us, this almost seems like it’s not possible, “Don’t be ridiculous, only two causes?” Here, though, Buddha’s talking about oneself, the experiencer of the suffering, not the other person.
The first one is called “karma.” Whether you’re looking for the cause of happiness or the cause of suffering, the cause of a trauma or the cause of a joyful experience – whatever words you like – then we’re looking at this concept of karma, Buddha’s explanation of why the universe exists, why things happen.
But let’s look at the second cause, the main one: the delusions, the neuroses in our mind – all we ever talk about is the mind. Buddha’s analysis is we have virtues, and these are the cause of our happiness; and then there are these states of mind that are really kind of awful, painful, disturbing, neurotic, delusional, dreadful to have: attachment, anger, jealousy, low self-esteem, pride, resentment, you name it – and these are why we suffer.
According to Buddha’s analysis, we come into this life programmed with very strong attachment, strong emotional hunger to get only the nice things. That’s attachment’s job: it wants only the nice things.
So when an awful thing happens – say, someone punches you in the nose or abuses you, unexpectedly, and then intense aversion arises, automatically. When you’re little you’re so naïve, so ill-equipped mentally, so depending on your personality, you either punch back, which is anger, or you have incredible fear, and you push it away, bury it. That’s the commonest thing we do: we bury, we deny, we don’t know how to handle it. We don’t know how to respond, you know?
We don’t know how to respond, so we suffocate it – we’ve buried our memories! We bury most things, so they’ve got to come out at some point – they’ve got to come out. From the Buddhist perspective, everything we ever experience is stored in the mind. The memories, the fear, the anger, the hurt are all in the mind, but we’ve buried them. So no wonder we’re neurotic as we get older.
Our main job then is to become familiar with our mind. We talk like this in therapy in the West as well, but the Buddha’s view is, sure, we remember the event, but we learn to become deeply familiar with our mind itself: we see our tendencies, we see our habits, we see the fears, the hurt, the anger, the depression – all of it. And slowly slowly we learn to deconstruct them, dissipate them, change them.
This is the essence of Buddha’s approach: we can change our mind. Then by healing our mind – by healing our mind – we heal the trauma.
When anger is internalized, then it becomes depression. If it’s volatile, you know, you lash out. In both cases, they’re aversion – and aversion is the response when attachment doesn’t get what it wants, and attachment is the main voice of the primordial mistaken sense of a separate, concrete “me.”
This analysis sounds almost simplistic, but the more we understand it, the more powerful it is. Then, of course, if we study the Buddhist model of the mind and go into more detail about the other parts of our mind – the names of the different states of mind and the way they all function to produce this person that we are – it’s very fascinating – the more we can start to, really and truly, become our own therapist, really and truly see our tendencies, see why we suffer, why we’re so hurt in some situations, what the jealousy is all about, the resentment, and the rest of the states of mind that cause us so much pain.
It doesn’t mean only remembering the events and focusing on them – no! It means looking into the mental states – the delusions, the fears, the anxiety, the anger – themselves, and learning to change them. That’s the Buddha’s unique approach, you know?