What happened to you?
It is so much easier for (traumatized patients) to talk about what has been done to them - to tell a story of victimization and revenge- than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience.
Bessell van der Kolk “The Body Keeps the Score”
There are an innumerable amount of terrible things that can happen or be done to a person and they create some of the most tragic and heartbreaking human stories we will ever experience or hear. This not exactly what I am talking about here though.
The terror that I am trying to understand and overcome is that which ravages the soul after having been the terrorizer. The experience of coming to terms with the consequences of one’s own mistakes and malevolent actions. There are similarities between these two ego shattering events. The grief of an unexpected and untimely loss of a loved one rends the soul in a similar fashion to the tidal wave of reality that comes from having one’s evil spirits come home to roost.
Either way, our tendency is usually to comprehend such near destruction as an external force that has unexpectedly and viciously victimized us. As awful as our experience has been it is even worse to imagine that somehow, somewhere along the way, we actually played a role in our own demise and we must play a role in our recovery. It’s much easier to focus on how sad and terrible our lot has been rather than search the wreckage for evidence of what actually went wrong.
This is not to moralize every bad situation. It is not to say that every plane crash, breakup, or abuse received is somehow your fault. The important psychological resource that must be mined is the “what is this like” phenomenon of the trauma. We are often too afraid to sit in our trauma because it might further reveal ugliness that we would prefer to conceal. It’s easier to view it all as a cosmic or earthly force that just wanted you to suffer, rather than actually examining the suffering itself.
If your mistakes have caused you extreme shame and torturous consequences there is not doubt that there is evidence that someone along the way treated you unfairly or with a punishment that did not fit the crime. Try to resist focusing on this minor aspect of your trauma. You might be also tempted to wallow in your shame and guilt, this is closer to what is needed but it still misses the point. It’s like being stuck on a downward elevator with many more floors to descend.
We seek pleasure and we avoid pain but some pain is instructive and if we don’t learn from it, it will multiply. C.S. Lewis wrote that “good and evil increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.” The parts of us that act out destructively will continue to do so, with interest, until they are rooted out and this process starts by understanding our suffering.
If there is one thing we can learn from Christian tradition is that the greater, and deeper the suffering is, the more universally it applies. We must comprehend our hell, not deny it, so that we can tap into the underground river of dark but exquisitely human pain. Like life giving water in a well or the oil that drives our world found miles beneath our surface, the specific experience of our suffering, when plunged deep enough through our core will meet up with the same suffering that all mankind can and eventually will have and know. The redemption of deep, mutual empathy.
Why suffer so much only to miss out on the union of universal human grief?
What happened to you?
Not who did what to you or said what to you, but what happened to you?
Did you suffocate from your shame? Did it feel like you wanted to dig a hole in the ground and hide yourself forever? Did you fantasize about cutting off your own hands so as to somehow avoid culpability and then felt the paralysis from realizing that this wouldn’t work? Did you cry aloud in prayer and have the only word that could escape through your agony be a desperate supplication for “peace”?
Did that happen to you?
In your body did you feel the push of intense and urgent panic and the pull of complete exhaustion at the same time? Did you feel your ego die as you had to tell the person you loved most that you had (as you thought at the time) ruined yours and their lives for good? Did you feel unworthy of any beauty and innocence that could have possibly soothed you?
Find a way to put into words what has happened to you.
It will gut you as you remember but you will find in the imperfect words of others, a camaraderie of the wounded guilty.
There is a path to redemption.
But it’s underground.
