How to deal with trauma? In other words, how to deal with undealt-with events from the past that we can’t remember?
Of course, we can’t remember most of our life – we can’t even remember most of today! What we experience moment by moment goes in one ear and out the other basically because we haven’t trained our mind to recall things. The interesting point is, from the Buddha’s perspective, every millisecond of whatever we experience, none of it goes astray – it’s all stored in our memory. Nothing goes astray.
Some of the things that we forget are the traumas: we push them away. We’ve suppressed the memory of the event, but we carry with us the fears and anger and the rest. We know very well if we’re a little girl, four years old, let’s say, and your mother hits you or your father shouts at you, then something is going to be happening in that little child’s mind.
Some little girls who are very direct and no-nonsense might not be afraid of Daddy, so they won’t suppress it; she might even deal with it because she’s got a very intelligent mind even at the age of four – so that person won’t have trauma!
Another little girl might be a good little girl and will feel guilty as well as angry and will suppress it – and then an hour later she will be smiling as if nothing had happened.
We all have trauma because we’ve all got fears, we’ve all got attachment, we all have things happen that attachment doesn’t want, which brings aversion, then we add guilt to it, then we have shame – we have all this junk.
This is how we spend our lives. We’ve all got traumas, and then one day it all comes to the surface – it’s not possible just to make it go away.
And some people have much worse things happen than other people: some people live their lives being abused and tortured and harmed and raped. A woman I know, since a tiny child her father would rape her; then he’d bring in the neighbors and they would rape her; and he’d even have the German Shepherd dog raping her. She lived her childhood like this.
Because she doesn’t have anger, she suffocated it all. Then she developed many different personalities, living in la-la land in her desperate attempts to avoid dealing with these awful things.
That’s our mind: our mind is not capable sometimes of dealing with what we see and what happens, so we either go crazy, or we deny, or we have rage and anger or, if our minds are developed – and some people’s minds are developed – they handle it. That’s what’s so fascinating: there are so many examples of this.
It’s possible that a person can have a mind that isn’t very attached, that doesn’t have much anger; they have a lot of suffering, but they’re able to handle it, they’re able to navigate it, work with it, and therefore go beyond it. That’s what we all have to learn to do. We are all capable of that. That’s what practice is!
But we need the courage to remember this because we’re so terrified, you know? We blame and get angry or we have guilt and depression – or we have denial. They’re our three ways we manage, and we’re not managing: all three are misconceptions.
So, what to do? Essentially, what we mean by trauma is an undealt-with negative event. We’ve suppressed it and then something will happen later that will trigger the memory, and we just can’t cope.
But we can learn to deal with it. Not so much the way we do in our culture, which is we remember what the person did, and then we stay focused on that, full of anger or resentment. And the worst thing is we think we can never heal it, never get over it.
If we’re brave enough, we can learn to look it in the eye, see it for what it was, and then work on our minds and deal with the fear, the anger. Why? Because it’s the fear and the anger that cause the suffering, not the event itself.
We don’t realize that by working on our mind we can change our response to that trauma: literally, it stops being a trauma when you bring it up, you confront it, you remember it, you see it, you let go of it – and then it’s gone. It’s a great theory, yes – but we can do it.
And of course it’s hard work – it’s enormously hard!
We don’t have to force ourselves to go back and dredge up the past. Our practice every day is what helps in this process. Every day we learn to see our mind – not the external, not just the person, not just the event. As we keep dealing with the mind, moment by moment – our attachment, our aversion, our fears, our jealousy – working on the mind, that is what heals us.
Then we can work on the past. It happens naturally, it comes automatically. The past will reveal itself to us, and we will be able to handle it because we’re working on our mind now. It’s very powerful. It’s a very different approach, you know, a very different approach.
And this is the point: even if we do remember the traumas, as long as we keep having attachment and aversion and anger and blame, or guilt, or shame, we will never heal, ever, ever, ever.
Healing comes from changing our mind.