Robina’s Blog

12 October, 2023

We talk a lot these days about trauma and, of course, it's usually in relation to bad things having happened to us in the past.

What's the Buddhist analysis? Basically, if we're in samsara, as Buddha puts it, we're caught up in the various neurotic states of mind, the afflictions, such as attachment, anger, jealousy, and so forth. We've also got the virtuous states of mind, of course, such as love, compassion, and the rest.

It's crucial to understand these two fundamentally different categories of states of mind, which is pretty unique to the Buddhist view of how our mind works.

And what's useful about understanding this? Simply because the neurotic ones are the source of our suffering and why we make a mess of our lives. The virtuous ones are the opposite: they are the source of our happiness and why we do anything useful in our lives.

The Buddha talks about thousands of these afflictions and he summarizes all of them into the three poisons, the three toxic emotions of ignorance, attachment, and anger. 

The most primordial level of this ignorance is ego-grasping, a wrong sense of self, and its nature is fear. This fear permeates attachment, anger, and all the others. It's deeply instinctive.

According to the four noble truths, effectively, though, the main main cause of the problems is attachment. This is an absurdly simple statement and, if it's true, we need to learn to identify it and understand how it functions.

Attachment is in the bones of our being, virtually at the level of assumption. The grosser level of it is the craving for the nice things out there, but at a subtler level it's the assumption that I must only get the good things; it simply can't cope with anything that isn't pleasing. 

The millisecond it doesn't get what it wants, when the unpleasant things happen, the panic attack of aversion arises: this is bare bones state of mind that drives what we call anger. In other words, anger is the response when attachment doesn't get what it desperately wants or when it gets what it doesn't want. It's just the way we're wired – we're programed from lifetimes of practice.

We go between these two states of mind a thousand times a day, because a thousand times a day attachment won't get what it wants.

This anger manifests at many levels, all according to our personality. It could be volatile anger, all the shouting and yelling; or it could be more subtle, such as what we refer to as upset, frustrated, annoyed, these mild states of mind that we hardly pay attention to.

One of the key things to realize is that, according to this view of the mind, nothing disappears from our mind: everything we think and do and say and see and hear and touch and taste and smell and think about is stored in our memory.

And, of course, we are carrying around lifetimes of memories, not just this life – most of which, of course, we can't access. But they're there, impacting upon us every day.

One child, for example, mightn't have much fear, so when a dog barks at them it won't be a big deal: in that instance they have less attachment and therefore less aversion. 

But another child might have a lot of fear, so when the dog barks at them they freak out, panic, have lots of fear – and this is because their attachment to only pleasant experiences is pretty strong and therefore their aversion is intense. 

Of course, being a child, they're not equipped to deal with it – maybe they experience guilt or shame, so the memory gets buried. All of us must have countless experiences like this throughout our lives, and they naturally build up. They're buried, but don't go away. 

These undealt with events are what we mean by trauma. Even when it comes to really terrible experiences of suffering, it's the same process.

On the other hand, another person might be better equipped to confront the harm, the accident, the abuse at the time it happens and therefore deal with it. In these cases, there's nothing pushed away, nothing buried, so you could say there's no trauma. 

In other words, the more attachment, the more aversion, the more fear, the more trauma. It sounds simplistic, but it's reasonable if we use this analysis. 

The learning from this? We need to practice greeting problems, even the small ones: this equips us to deal with bigger problems when they come.