Mindfulness and
the Gift of Trauma
Siddhartha looked into the flowing river. Never had a river attracted him as much as this one. Never had the voice and appearance of the flowing water seemed so beautiful. It seemed that the river had something special to tell him, Something which he did not know.
—Siddhartha
There is something in the river, something that draws us, that teaches and enlightens; that allows us to remember how transient all of life really is. A rippling reflection of ourselves and the world around us stares up at us from the water’s flowing surface. For an instant, that transient image might be illumined by a shaft of sunlight or parting clouds, allowing us to glimpse what is normally not visible; to become aware of what was probably always there, but we were somehow not able to see. Something below the surface of our being that we “do not know” becomes known to us. A deeper layer of self becomes visible. And then it passes, dissolves, and becomes part of the rolling waters once again. And we have to keep traveling the river to expose its further secrets. We have to wait for more images to reveal themselves, to learn what we are meant to learn. We have to embark upon our own inner journey.
The gift of trauma is that it deepens us layer by layer. It pushes us to our psychological, emotional, and spiritual limits and teaches us to hold more emotion than we are used to holding, to see more than we are used to seeing, to contain, observe, and look for meaning.
All people get hurt; pain is part of being alive and in a body. In the same way that we will have body bruises and broken bones, we will have emotional wounds and broken hearts. But we have a choice as to what we do with what happens to us. The art of life, as the saying goes, “is to play the hand we’re dealt” as well as we can.
Our thinking mind is one of human beings’ most dazzling gifts. With it, we can make sense of our own experience. It is through our thinking mind that we can imagine something as abstract as a sense of self and reflect on ourselves in relationship to our world. This is how man made fire, airplanes, music, art, the computer, and how we structure something as conceptual as a consciousness of past and future.
But even with all of this evolutionary distinction, our intellect is still only an instrument in our living hands, because our direct experience of life happens in the present moment, not in our heads.
Relationship of the Thinking Mind to the Body/Mind
If we watch our own hand pick up a spoon and bring it to our mouth, we see what a seamless and amazing machine the body/mind is as it executes this incredibly complicated task. Our senses guide us as the spoon moves and finds its placement through space. If we think at all, it may be just to watch the picture of our arm as it passes before our eyes, or to wonder about how our food will taste.
But usually, we are nowhere near this experience. Usually we are a million miles away as we mindlessly bring the spoon up to our mouth again and again and eat without tasting. We are somewhere else. Our intellect is not doing this lovely job of being still and observing, maybe having a thought or two about what is going on in the here and now to enhance our feeling of being present. Rather our intellect is leaping around, taking us far away from the moment, probably somewhere in the future or in the past. Most of us spend the bulk of our time just like this. Somewhere else.
Returning to the Present. Trauma essentially takes us out of our present moment. When something is happening that is overwhelming us, the moment gets too painful to stay in. So we become defensive; we find some way to remove ourselves from the present. We build large, defensive structures, essentially designed to ward off what is happening that we can’t handle. Though emotionally fleeing from the moment can provide a temporary safe haven, it can have long-term effects that undermine our ability to be present to our own inner and outer worlds.
Healing trauma is a process of returning to the here and now, of unpacking our defenses so that we can feel what went unfelt, understand the significance of what we’re feeling in terms of our self structure, and reintegrate what have been heretofore disintegrated, unprocessed pieces of experience. We need to own all of who we are so that we can feel whole. Resolving the frozenness of trauma allows us to feel more alive in the present.
Pain Templates
We template our early experiences, and those templates become a baseline from which we operate. What we do when our templates from the past get triggered defines a critical moment. Do we use what is getting triggered as fodder for personal growth, or do we just pass on pain? Do we project our pain outward, disowning it in ourselves, thus throwing an old template onto a new experience? Or do we recognize that a pain template from the past is getting triggered in the present and is being layered upon and mixed in with the situation we’re in right now—that we’re about to re-create an old pattern in a new circumstance?
Self-Sabotaging. Psychologist Peter Levine speaks about triggers in terms of energy and the ability of a threat to literally overwhelm the activating systems of the brain. When we are traumatized, for example, if the energy from the threat that is occurring is not discharged successfully at the actual moment that the threat is happening, along with its accompanying feelings and behaviors, the traumatic moment becomes imprinted in the brain. Then, each time this moment of threat is triggered by some cue in the present that is reminiscent of the original hurt, the body goes into its “defensive position.” Each time we respond to a perceived threat, first biochemically and then behaviorally with actions designed to minimize this threat, a “blueprint” of attempted survival strategies is re-created and stored in both the body and the brain and we, in a sense, retraumatize ourselves (Levine 2004).
Emotional Whiplash. Someone who is rear-ended in a car is taken by surprise. In a millisecond the body reaches out to defend itself; often throwing out an arm and the head goes suddenly forward and back in movements that are outside of its normal range of motion. In whiplash, the neck muscles can freeze in that position in a thwarted action of self-defense. The large muscles are stretched beyond capacity and weakened, and the small ones go into trauma trying to support what the large ones can no longer support. And each time there is the threat of further harm, those now-kindled and sensitive nerve endings react all over again as if the threat were as real as it was the first time. The muscles are caught in a cycle in which they retraumatize themselves. Healing whiplash requires those muscles to release that thwarted movement and complete it with awareness and/or to be “taught” how to regain their more normal patterns of movement, in order to rebuild their strength and resilience.
There is such a thing as emotional whiplash—when our emotional muscles get overstretched and our sustaining core is weakened. Then we try to use defenses like denial, minimization, repression, or intellectualization, to shore ourselves up, because our core emotional muscles are traumatized. And they get oversensitized, so that every time there is a signal that we may be hurt, we throw out a new blueprint of the old relationship dynamic and re-create and deepen that pattern—in a sense, retraumatizing ourselves.
One common way that this passing down of pain from past to present can occur in our relationships is through a dynamic that psychoanalysts call projective identification, in which we project qualities—good or bad—on another person that match up with what we already have experienced, and we behave in such a way as to elicit responses in that other person that match up with our existing templates or blueprints. In other words we draw out of them the very behavior we fear most. Our minds tend to perceive selectively; we give less attention to qualities that do not match up with our templates and more to those that do. We look for qualities of rejection or subterfuge that match up with what we may have known, and we expect or even elicit them from the people we’re relating to, convinced that what we see is all there is. Or we can assume that people will feel positively toward us. In other words, we elicit what we assume is there. In either case, we behave according to our template.
The Gift of Awareness and Self-Reflection
When we are triggered, which is inevitable, we need to learn new strategies for feeling management Expecting life to have bumps and having tools to deal with them can actually help us use moments of being triggered to grow from rather than retraumatize ourselves. When we’re triggered, simply breathing through pain, allowing our perceptions of threat to ease and doing something different from the old pattern can work wonders. A small change in our knee-jerk reaction can interrupt the template and open the door for change and growth. We can quiet our minds and our reactions so that we can observe and understand where something that is happening on the outside might be sending us on the inside. When we do this, we can use moments of being triggered as moments of healing; because what triggers us most is often what has hurt us most; it sends a signal up from where our deep, unconscious pain lies. If there was not unresolved pain there, we would not feel so vulnerable; our reactions would be less intense.
Life is a constant process of injury and repair. Recovery allows us to rework moments from the past that have us stuck in our present so we can release ourselves from an endless and self-perpetuating cycle of stubbornly reenacting and re-creating old templates of experience—so we can become more relaxed, porous, and open to new experience.
The Gift of Presence in the Present
Self-awareness and self-reflection are what allow us to live life consciously, to see ourselves in action, witness the workings of our own inner being, and observe and understand others. In order to calmly self-reflect, we need to be able to be in a state of mind that is not distracted. Following the breath as it moves in and out of us is an age-old method of connecting our mind and body, calming down our nervous system, and reducing racing thoughts.
Thich Nhat Hanh, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness, says:
Simply breathe in mindfully and bring your mind home to your body, and when your breath is home in the body you are in the here and now, in the present. Follow your breath with awareness from beginning to end . . . By doing this we cultivate concentration . . . and through concentration, we cultivate insight . . . and insight is a miracle, we just breathe in, and we touch the miracle of being alive. Breathing in we become aware of our body . . . we may notice tension and pain we have allowed to accumulate. We have not treated our body tenderly; we can always allow tension to be released by breathing in mindfully, by breathing out mindfully.
Nhat Hanh tells us that through these simple practices we can learn how to recognize a feeling of joy and generate a feeling of happiness within ourselves: “In order to generate joy, you come home to your body and you come home to the here and now and you recognize that there are so many conditions of happiness that are only available in the here and now.”
Only You Really Know
Only we know where it hurts and how much. No therapist, however talented, can know exactly where or how much we’re feeling pain; we barely know it ourselves. No system can rescue us if we don’t allow ourselves to be helped. No diagnostician can help us if we don’t talk about what is going on inside of us. We know the intricacies of our inner world, where we love and care the most, where our pain is sharp, dull, or like emotional pinpricks. Where we have no feeling at all.
In the same way that we need to take charge of our physical health, we need to stay on top of our mental health. We need to develop a language and a context for healing. Part of healing is finding good help, and the other parts are developing a self-help Rolodex and building skills of emotional processing. We need to know where to go to get help when we need it and how to manage and process our feelings and thoughts as they are occurring. Once we learn to read our own symptoms and triggers and understand the basics of transference, projection, and reenactment dynamics, we’re in a position to be our own first line of defense. And we have a better sense of when to seek help and what kind of help to seek. Our personal prescription may be just a day off or a spa day; it might be time with a friend, a hobby, a family member, or nature; or we might need to seek out a 12-step program, a therapist, or treatment. The more we learn, the more our adult self is in a position to make good decisions and choices.
Strengthening the Compassionate Inner Adult
There is a stage in recovery where we really just want to let our child speak with absolutely no thought of what another person might feel like at hearing it. One might say that this is, in a way, a correction for all of the times we fell silent or felt erased. Part of finding that frozen self is giving our inner child full rein to feel and speak. That’s the part of recovery from ACoA issues that is serious family-of-origin work. When we first unthaw our frozen inner child, adolescent, or young adult, the floodgates open, and all the withheld emotion comes pouring forward. And that is right for that time. But eventually, as with any child, inner or outer, we need to grow up, we need to learn the skills of effective communication, and we need to realize that no matter how strongly we feel, other’s feelings need to be taken into account as well. ACoAs and codependents have often put the feelings of others before their own, at great personal expense. In recovery, the child within finds a voice, and so does the inner adolescent, young adult, and so on—the silenced selves come forward.
But ACoAs also need to find their inner adult. Too often we talk to the world from our wounded inner child and then we’re disappointed when no one hears us clearly. If we cannot hold our own inner child because we find our anxiety and pain overwhelming, why do we think someone else should be able to? We blurt out our unedited pain and anger, then we feel hurt, misunderstood, and disappointed all over again when the other person does not want to hear it.
The first person who needs to hold and listen to our inner child is us. Our inner child needs to open up to our inner adult, and our adult self needs to hold our hurting self as we would hold a crying child—with caring and compassion. We need to simply breathe with, love, and hold the child within us; we need to care. Then our adult self needs to translate what our child is trying to say into adult language that can be effectively communicated to someone else.
When we allow our inner child to blurt out each and every reaction before the adult in us makes any attempt to understand, hold, and translate feelings into words so they can be lifted into conscious and intelligent thought, we sabotage ourselves and our relationships. We don’t communicate in a way that others can understand, and we don’t take that other person into consideration. What we do when we are triggered will have much to do with whether or not we re-create past pain in the present.
The Dark Kaleidoscope of Trauma
Along with the capacity to imagine a future and make plans for it, to invent and imagine, our thinking mind can create endless, dark scenarios that make us want to retreat from life. Years of repressing and denying our pain and giving into the will of others can make us feel we should ignore nothing, that we have to dissect every random thought or feeling that we have and stand up for ourselves so strongly that we become stubborn and inflexible.
But that’s not normal. Though long-term relationships need constant work, care, and maintenance, they need not be in the emergency room all the time, and we needn’t be there either. Remember, the same medicine we need in a crisis or to cure infection can become poison in healthy conditions or in too high a dose. The body may need heroics to deal with a disease or set a bone, but then it needs time to heal and rehab. And eventually, it will just need healthy care and maintenance.
So it is with the mind. Resolving old feelings may require us to delve and dissect, but living day to day may call for additional skill sets. We need to learn when to pay attention and when to let go, when to act and when to just breathe. Sometimes all we need to do is tolerate our painful feelings and comfort ourselves so we don’t behave in such a way as to make everything worse than it is.
Sometimes talking is enough. The spoken word is an action. It is the end result of a complex process of feeling, owning, and translating emotions and thoughts into language. And it’s the beginning of communication through words. It is first intrapersonal and then interpersonal.
Therapy and pop psychology might erroneously give the impression that there is an ultimate goal, a place to arrive where we will finally be whole, intact, and cured; that there is some sort of “there” to get to, that there is such a thing as being healed once and for all. But the self is a flexible and fluid construction in a perpetual cycle of renewal and repair. We are constantly dealing with and healing from the slings and arrows of life. What we want to achieve is the ability to operate within a healthy range, where the self can be repeatedly injured and heal from injury, just like the body. This is why we build physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual resilience, so we can stay fit for life.
But we are always a self in motion, a self in an evolving sense of relationship. A self constantly experimenting with and developing a new relationship with its own core values and the values of the world it experiences. Our self is always evolving in relationship to others and in how we interact, listen, share, and co-create a relational space. A healthy sense of self can adapt, ever modifying itself, establishing and reestablishing its own equilibrium within the inevitable and perpetual fluctuations of life.
Hurt Isn’t Broken: Reframing
To watch someone you love lose themselves a little more each day and become someone you hardly recognize is an unforgettable experience. To witness as they become someone who they hate themselves for being but cannot stop being and you hate what they have become but still love them is life altering. Living with the disease of addiction changes everyone. It affects us in both good and not so good ways. And then we have a choice. Do we pass on the pain we experienced to future generations, or do we do the best we can to break the chain of pain in our generation? Do we become bitter about life and relationships, or do we find a way to hold this experience and allow it to make us deeper and wiser?
One of our great capacities as evolving humans is turning weaknesses into strengths. If, for example, you learned as an ACoA that you could not depend on anyone, you also learned that you don’t wait around and hope that others will hand you a life—you go out and create one for yourself. Or if you had to assume managerial roles in your family that deprived you of some of your youth, the upside is that you developed management skills at a time in your life when you simply had to use what was at hand and get things to work—before adult fears set in and told you that what you were doing was something you shouldn’t even think of trying. If there was little food in the house to cook dinner with, you learned to be creative and ingenious with what you had. If age-appropriate toys were lacking, you made up your own games. ACoAs learn to be creative and to take risks because we have to, and that creativity and risk- taking can and often does serve us well as adults.
Another lesson: you can lose the people you love. The upside is that we don’t take love for granted, and we know that good relationships can be ruined if we don’t take care of them. We learned that the people we loved, both good and kind, could fall apart. And so can we. So we turn that one around and get good at self-care, and we become willing to honestly confront issues that may undermine personal and interpersonal health and happiness, because we know that in the long run it will be better. And we learn to appreciate life and people while we have them; we know that nothing, good or bad, lasts forever.
It’s important to look around us: people go through horrible things, much worse things than we can imagine or have probably gone through ourselves. If we’re going to “compare and despair,” we should also compare and be grateful, because we have recovery when so many others don’t. There is something soothing, purifying, and humbling in processing pain that allows us to emerge more free and whole and alive. Something that puts us in touch with a side of life that we normally skate over; something that grows soul and expands our capacity to be spiritually alive and present to the mystery and moment of life.
One of the gifts of trauma for many ACoAs like me is that it brings 12-step programs into our lives. I will always have these words from the Alanon greeting burned into my heart: “You may not love all of us, but you will come to love us in a very special way, the same way that we already love you. Talk with each other, reason things out but let there be no gossip . . . let the understanding and peace of the program grow in you a day at a time.” These words held me when I needed holding. There was more spiritual sunlight and emotional and psychological fresh air in those dusty back rooms and basements than I can explain. Initially, I was simply glad to share what I really felt and not clear the room out. To say what was in my heart and have nothing around me explode. In fact, nothing happened at all. People said things like, “Thanks for sharing” or “me, too.” It changed my life.
“You will not regret nor wish to close the door on the past.” Another promise of the program that came true. Alanon gave me a wonderful sense of being connected to a reliable, easily accessible community, one that was based on “principles not personalities.” Now when I look back, I find love, strength, beauty, and pictures in my mind of people doing their best. I feel I had a great beginning, that I was just where I was meant to be.
In early recovery we need to create a strong enough support system to help to hold our outpouring of pain, which can include 12-step programs, group therapy, and one-to-one therapy. We need a strong enough container of care to hold us during the mysterious and deepening experience of getting to know ourselves on the inside.
Then comes the long-term maintenance, the self-care, and self-repair. Our relationships are a sustaining part of our lives that need constant maintenance, and families are always going through new stages of life that come with their own challenges.
Coming Home: The Gift of Integration
We cannot heal what we don’t feel. When in the course of resolving trauma we “reenter” our bodies and actually feel the emotions that we split off in a moment of fear, imagery follows. Colors, shapes, and moments of forgotten time come into view as pieces of the puzzle of us; fall together, sometimes gently and sometimes not so gently. And we have a curious sense of déjà vu, of having lived them before; as if someone we have known well and forgotten is being remembered.
That someone is ourselves. We’re integrating what was fragmented, mending what was torn, and increasing our capacity to feel whole, alive, and present.
Our physician lies within. Good therapy helps us to get in touch with, educate, and strengthen our own internal healer. It allows us to learn to depend in healthy ways so that we become capable of close relationships. It strengthens our autonomy. Recovery is a journey of personal and interpersonal expansion that we are in charge of, one that can and often does include a spiritual awakening. In developing the awareness to mine our own depths and bring our shadow selves into the light of awareness, we actually deepen our capacity for being in the moment.
People in my groups who have been in long-term recovery report something curious: though they continue to have problems in life, they no longer experience those problems as traumatic in the way that they did before they had awareness and tools and strategies for coping. They do not expect life to be problem-free, and they have equipped themselves for processing the pain they are in while they are actually in it. They aren’t freezing up and storing it in the body or splitting it off and throwing it out of consciousness. They are living in the present. They stop asking “When will I finally get there?” because they realize that there is no “there.” That life is simply appreciating the moment, the now, that the whole idea is to strengthen their inner being enough so they can enjoy the ride, so they can live this thing called life.
Invariably, when groups do psychodrama, pain comes up and out as they boldly “take the stage” or inhabit their own personal role. What they did not get to say as a helpless child is said, what they did not get to do is done, and what they did not feel is felt. The silent scream is no longer silent. And then the joy of self-discovery somehow takes over and they are in touch with their inner being. They see the whole situation in a new and more personally meaningful light, they decathect from a moment in time that had them ensnared in its unconscious grip. And they smile, they laugh, and their body and face move more freely. They have expanded their range of emotional motion.
As Sandy put it one evening when he was going through the closure of his good-byes and moving on from group: “I saw you do your psychodrama tonight. I saw you struggle to let yourself feel, to let yourself say what you wanted to say. I saw you start to feel. It was like a door inside you opened up. I remembered that moment when I started group and had that feeling. When it came to me . . . when that door . . . I mean, I had been waiting so long for something to happen . . . when that door inside me opened and I finally realized . . . I saw . . . that the person who was holding it closed all along, was me.”