7
No discussion of trouble in the emotional realm should ever occur without a concurrent discussion of the impact of unhealed trauma, because unhealed trauma takes a massive toll on our culture. If you are not a trauma survivor, then one of your parents, siblings, mates, children, teachers, friends, or peers is. You probably learned from them, as we all do, to distract yourself, deny your feelings, and avoid your pain; therefore, we must address trauma before we can successfully enter the emotional realm. Understanding trauma is especially important if you want to understand rapids-level emotions such as panic, rage, despair, and the suicidal urge. These intense emotions tend to arise after dissociative trauma, and if you don’t understand their purpose in the healing of trauma, they might destabilize you unnecessarily.
The definition of trauma is individual; you know it when you see it or when you’ve experienced it. Trauma can occur when you’ve been assaulted or attacked, but it can also occur during surgery or dental procedures, in response to the death of a loved one, or even from witnessing someone else’s trauma (especially if you have very active mirror neurons). You can also be traumatized emotionally when important people yell at or insult you, or when you’re embarrassed in front of others. However, not everyone responds to trauma in the same way you and I might, and some traumas heal on their own. The way to tell if you’ve got unhealed trauma is to check in and see if you can deal with and approach all of your emotions without dissociating, distracting yourself, or avoiding them. For most unhealed trauma survivors, emotions are very difficult things indeed.
When I began my healing work in childhood, I saw that physical trauma caused dissociation in the animals who were brought to me. When I worked with humans in my teens, I observed that sexual trauma (especially in childhood) dissociated people in essentially the same way. In many cases of trauma, a person’s sense of psychological boundaries is weakened, and his or her ability to connect to the world and other people is often disrupted. Traditional therapy is often useful in addressing the mental and emotional components of trauma, but it can be less successful in addressing the boundary damage and the tendency toward dissociation.
Throughout my life, I have met survivors of physical assault or emotional abuse (and surgeries and ill health) whose sense of boundaries is in very much the same shape as that of the sexual assault survivors I worked with. I learned through them that the damage that results from any kind of trauma—molestation, beatings, emotional cruelty, painful surgeries or hospitalizations, or even frightening dental work—is remarkably similar and remarkably common. I was surprised to learn that the skills I taught to trauma survivors—grounding, focusing, welcoming their multiple intelligences, healing their boundaries, and channeling their emotions—were applicable to almost everyone. Many of us, it seemed, were dealing with some form of dissociative trauma, boundary loss, lack of grounding and focus, or disconnection from our lives. Many of us, even those who couldn’t be placed in any accepted trauma category, were having unhappy out-of-body experiences and great difficulty with emotions. I had to expand my understanding of trauma to include the vast population of dissociated, emotionally disconnected, and mentally overwrought people I began to see.
My definition of dissociative trauma grew to include any sort of stimulus that could send a person’s attention hurtling away from his or her situation. I began to see dissociation as a widespread survival skill, not just for the situations we all agree upon as traumatic, but for a vast number of agitating or overwhelming everyday situations. I also saw that trauma survivors tended to affect the people around them; they tended to create an atmosphere that provoked dissociation and avoidance behaviors in their circle of friends and family. Some trauma survivors did this by unconsciously visiting traumas (emotional or physical) on the people around them, but some did it merely by being emotionally unavailable in their relationships (which sent the people around them into discomfort and avoidance behaviors). I saw that dissociated and distracted people tended not to support integration and awareness in the people around them; they often created a ripple effect of distraction and unconsciousness in their environments.
An example of this ripple effect can be seen in early scholastic environments, where children who are learning to shut down their empathy (which requires powerful avoidance behaviors) are driven to create an emotionally dangerous environment of ridicule and threats. In this environment, it is nearly impossible to remain whole; the healthier children usually lose their emotional footing and their ability to stay integrated, while the offending children become emotionally deadened. The entire environment can become toxic—dangerous to the emotions and the psyche as a whole. In response, many children disconnect from their emotions in order to survive.
Empathically speaking, traumatic and dissociative behaviors are almost always contagious. Our disavowed (though never absent) empathic skills always alert us to traumatic behaviors and dissociation in other people. Dissociated people often have poor boundaries, and they tend not to be aware of boundaries in others, which makes them somewhat hazardous, emotionally and socially. Traumatized and dissociated people almost shake up the air around them; we really can’t help but notice them. But since our empathic skills are hidden from us (for the most part), we cannot make heads or tails of what we perceive. Often, we simply dissociate in response to the jangling and undecipherable disruptions we sense. I observed this situation regularly when I did talks or workshops for my books, where one or two dissociated people would start a chain reaction of dissociation in the room. Of course, my audiences usually consisted of trauma survivors who already knew how to dissociate, which is why I always started my talks by running them through a quick empathic practice that reset their boundaries and helped them get grounded (we’ll learn that practice in the skills chapter). But in nearly every talk, there would be a dissociated latecomer who missed the practice. Invariably, no matter where this person sat or how silent their entrance was, waves of dissociation would fan out in response to his or her presence in the room (people would lose their concentration or focus, begin dozing or fidgeting, become emotionally wrought, or their attention would wander). Not everyone would dissociate (some people were so relieved to be integrated inside a strong boundary that they refused to budge), but often, more than half the audience would lose their grounding, their boundaries, and their focus. Emotional and psychological states can be very contagious!
Notice in your own life the people with whom you’re most comfortable and relaxed—often, those people are grounded and stable. They have what I call “good psychological hygiene.” Now think of the people who disturb and jangle you—those people are often filled with unrelieved traumas, chaotic emotions, and scattered focus. These people have poor psychological hygiene: they don’t have or respect boundaries, they don’t deal responsibly with their emotions or yours, and they avoid conflict (or create too much of it) so that their relationships suffer. Each of us usually prefers to be around calm and stable people with good psychological hygiene—who seem to be few and far between in this age of distraction. The movement of culture has been to separate spirit from body, and mind from emotion. As a result, many of us have poorly moderated quaternities or dissociated personalities; we cannot focus ourselves properly, and our hygiene is bad.
Our society (in truth, most societies, if we look at the worldwide prevalence of racism, war, genocide, and civil strife) is teeming with unhealed trauma and unrelieved dissociation. As a species, we have been socialized to dissociate and distract ourselves from life as a matter of course, and as a result, most of us aren’t fully aware of how or why we dissociate. In most of our psyches, there’s nothing awake that could call our attention back into our bodies when we realize we’re dissociated, nothing aware that could listen to and honor our emotions, and nothing whole that could harness and direct the movements of our minds. The conflicting flows in our often warring quadrants knock us around, and even if we weren’t traumatized in any of the classic ways, most of us are drawn like magnets toward the distracted and dissociated behaviors that infect our culture. Distraction, avoidance, and addiction form the major impetus in most psyches and most societies; nearly every one of us is dissociated in some way. Either our spiritual lives are separate from our everyday lives, or our emotions and our intellects operate from within opposing and bitterly warring camps. As a result, most of us exhibit the disruptions I see in trauma survivors: we have poor boundaries around our psyches and poor focus-—but we don’t have to stay that way.
I’ve observed two basic ways that people respond to their dissociating traumas: either they learn to traumatize themselves, or they learn to traumatize others. When survivors respond to unrelieved trauma by traumatizing themselves, they usually repress it and re-create its atmosphere in their inner lives. The trauma and its after-effects settle into their inner landscapes and create feelings of powerlessness, dread, and hopelessness. Physical and psychological symptoms such as behavioral or sleep disorders, hyper- or hypoactivity, depressions, learning disabilities, dissociative episodes, and chronic pain often follow unhealed traumatic incidents. In people who choose to keep their unhealed traumas clamped down inside themselves, these symptoms often lead to addictions or compulsions, codependencies, neuroses, or abusive relationships. Many trauma survivors tend to live in an endless, slow-motion replay of their original wounding (I certainly did). They live lives of desperation, lives that won’t work properly no matter what they do.
The second response is to turn around and become a traumatizer of others—to express traumatizing behaviors upon others as a way to relieve the disturbing effects of the trauma. Survivors who traumatize others experience feelings of powerlessness, dread, and hopelessness—just as the self-traumatizers do—but these survivors don’t clamp down on their pain or contain it; rather, they visit it upon others in an attempt to understand, deaden, or master it. Their response is to become abusers themselves, to don the cloak of the traumatizer in a desperate and horrifying bid to regain the power they lost in their original wounding. My molester was certainly in this second category, as all molesters are. Cruelty is a learned behavior that springs directly from unhealed trauma. When I was a child, and I would lash out at my friends and family with my hair-trigger temper, I was expressing my abusive trauma onto them and making their lives miserable. Expressing my trauma didn’t fix anything—it just created more trauma.
Notice, though, that these two responses—repression and expression—are the same ones most of us choose in regard to our emotions. There is a repressive response where the trauma is compressed into the inner self and an expressive response where the trauma is inflicted upon others. And just as it is with the emotions, neither response resolves the trauma or heals us. Repressing the trauma shoves memories, feelings, insights, and terrors into the unconscious, and without full consciousness, that material can only fester. Expressing the trauma, on the other hand, shoves the disturbing material onto the souls of others. Expression does not heal or address the pain in any way. It only ensures a brutal world and a destroyed ego structure for the traumatizer. Additionally, these repressive and expressive behaviors translate themselves directly into the emotional skills of trauma survivors.
If people choose to repress their traumatic material, they tend to repress their emotions as well. Repressers create an abusive internal environment by forcing memories, realizations, and emotions into their unconscious and subconscious realms. A represser’s trauma stays alive and fully activated because it is never addressed with consciousness or clarity; therefore, the traumatic suffering continues unabated. Remember that “suffering ceases to be suffering as soon as we’ve formed a clear and precise picture of it.” When we refuse to look at our suffering, it cannot cease, because no clear picture of it can be formed. A represser’s central self is inhabited not by an awakened village of resources, but by dishonored emotions, unheard thoughts, ignored pains and sensations, and unrelieved torment. In such a psyche, dissociation, distractions, addictions, and avoidance behaviors are necessary.
When people choose to express their traumatic material and visit it upon others, they tend to be emotional exploders. Expressers create an abusive external environment by hurling their emotions, memories, and behaviors onto the people in their lives; they hurt everyone around them and consequently destroy their own ego structure. Again, no useful consciousness or integration is possible because their internal world is filled with trauma and ego devastation, while their external world is filled with violence and turmoil. Expressers gain no power, no peace, and no consciousness; rather, they keep their trauma alive in devastating ways so that suffering is ensured for all. In such a psyche, dissociation, distraction, addictions, and avoidance behaviors are also necessary.
Though society’s criminal is certainly the expresser of trauma, repressers also tend to drag turmoil in their wake. Repressers don’t do quite as much visible damage to the people around them as expressers do, but because their inner lives are so tumultuous, they don’t relate coherently with others. Repressers are so busy keeping their trauma contained that they aren’t full partners in any relationship. Because repressers avoid, distract, and dissociate as a matter of course, they destabilize their own lives and the lives of the people around them. Repressers don’t support consciousness inside themselves; consequently, their lives and relationships tend not to support full consciousness either.
Whichever choice we make, whether we repress our traumas or express them onto others, we’ll be almost completely tied up in the task. As a result, we’ll have very little focus available for the task of living whole and conscious lives. Both choices—expression and repression—create very poor boundaries and very poor psychological hygiene.
The devastation of trauma is all around us, and we don’t know how to help people who are essentially not among the living. In response, we don’t think clearly about trauma. We offer hundreds of therapies, systems, medications, and distractions to erase the traumas—just as we do with the emotions—but we never stop to consider another choice. We don’t ask the voice of fire to tell us why trauma is so prevalent or how we can bring ourselves back into our bodies after traumas occur. We don’t listen to the call of water when it asks us to dive under the surface and feel the powerful emotions trauma brings forward. We run from the sensations in our bodies that ask us to viscerally feel the trauma again because we don’t understand that certain aspects of traumatic flashbacks can heal us (but only if we approach them in the correct way). Then we hide in our logical intellects and create more systems and therapies to stop trauma, to erase trauma, and to end trauma, as if trauma were unnatural (it’s not).
We don’t even consider that there might be a third response, just as there is with the emotions. This third response to trauma is to channel it from within an awakened psyche, to enter it consciously, to dive into the emotions, the thoughts, the visions, and the sensations—and to turn the trauma on its ear. This response is the one I’ve been striving toward and working with for the last forty years. It’s much better than responses one and two, I can tell you.
When I realized that traumatic and dissociative behaviors were nearly universal (and that expression and repression were at the center of the trouble), I brought more vision and emotion into my thought process. I moved away from the accepted definition of trauma as a singular event and into an overview of trauma as it moves through cultures and throughout time. I had already seen firsthand that the lingering symptoms of trauma could indeed be healed when dissociation was understood as a rupture between body and spirit. If trauma survivors can meet their traumatic memories and incidents from within the center of the village inside them (and agree to neither express nor repress their traumas), they can bring all parts of themselves to bear on the issues that led to their dissociation; they can channel the flows of information in all parts of themselves and come back to center. However, if trauma healing is attempted without that full-bodied understanding of which parts dissociate and where they go, healing is unlikely at best.
As my studies deepened, I was astonished to learn that dissociation itself was not the real problem at all; it’s simply an innate survival skill we all use as a matter of course. We all distract ourselves, avoid issues, and dissociate every day—it’s absolutely normal. The real problem arises when we can’t reassociate or regain our equilibrium after a shocking or agitating incident occurs. Strangely, I also discovered that trauma is not the real problem either, because trauma is a fact of life. Trees fall, dentistry happens, stressors occur, cars veer, people yell and hit, and molesters prowl; danger is everywhere. The issue is neither in the danger nor in the dissociation, but in the fact that we don’t have the resilience to bring ourselves back to center once the danger has passed. That resilience springs naturally from a fully resourced psyche, but without that stable and agile foundation, resilience is unlikely. When we don’t have access to our whole selves, we can’t tolerate flow, which means we can’t channel our thoughts, emotions, sensations, visions, or traumatic memories. If we can’t move our traumas along naturally, we’ll have to keep them alive in endangering ways that force us to distract and dissociate. The trauma then expands as our dissociative and avoidance behaviors begin to travel and infect the people around us and eventually our culture as a whole.
There is a chicken-and-egg situation here: Did we become unable to resolve trauma because we don’t have a fully resourced village inside us? Or did we lose access to the village inside us because we don’t understand how to reintegrate ourselves after trauma? In either case, our centuries-long inability to resolve trauma in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our societies has increased the population of unhealed trauma survivors in each generation. In response to this nearly universal trouble in the psyche, humans have for many centuries nurtured religious doctrines, spiritual teachings, scholastic systems, medical and psychological modalities, and socialization structures that, in essence, support and encourage dissociation, distraction, imbalance, and emotional illiteracy. The separation between body and spirit, the overemphasis on small parts of the intellect and the dishonoring of the emotions, these behaviors and mindsets aren’t restricted to one culture or one set of doctrines. Severe intrapersonal resourcelessness and the inability to restore focus and health after traumatic incidents exist throughout most world cultures. I wanted to know why.
I wanted to know how individual pain and trauma grew into a worldwide inability to deal with emotions or think coherently. I wanted to know what evolutionary purpose was being served: Why would the majority of a population choose to hold on to trauma or visit it upon others (in word or deed) when it was so clearly devastating? Why did dissociative behaviors run through audiences and crowds like wildfire? And why were both Eastern and Western spirituality so intricately tied to transcendence and dissociation from the body, the intellect, and the emotions? This last question led me to study spiritual traditions that were not transcendental; it led me more firmly into Taoism and indigenous belief systems that honored the grounded earth and water elements.
I studied tribal wisdom, mythology, Jungian interpretations of myths and dreams, shadow work, trauma-healing practices, and anything else I could find. These all led me back to the assertion made by mythologist Michael Meade about childhood sexual trauma: that it is an initiation done at the wrong time, by the wrong person, in the wrong way, with the wrong intent, on the wrong person—but it is an initiation nevertheless. Just like a tribal initiation, childhood sexual trauma creates a separation from the regular world and a wounding that changes the initiate forever. As I found so poignantly during my book tours, however, all forms of trauma create essentially the same troubles in the psyche that molest survivors endure; therefore, all trauma can be seen as initiatory. My goal then was to understand not trauma, but initiation.
Mythologist Michael Meade has explained the three stages of tribal initiation:
Tribal initiations are performed as a way to guide tribe members through life’s transitions. Rituals and ceremonies guide tribe members from conception through birth, from birth into childhood, from adolescence into adulthood, from marriage and mating into elderhood, and from elderhood into death and ancestral status. Many tribal societies create a container and a foundation from which all growth and transition can be understood and overseen. Stories and legends, dance and music, art and culture, and deep connectedness create tribal identity, while initiation marks important passages in individual and tribal life. Tellingly, most quaternal or five-element cosmologies spring from indigenous cultures.
In nonindigenous cultures, that wholeness is not in evidence. Much has been said about the freedom and individuality nontribal societies enjoy, but just as much has been said about the price paid for that freedom. Our individualistic Western culture has grown in ways tradition-bound tribal societies cannot, but we’ve also decayed in ways tribal societies have not. Our disconnection from Mother Earth and the quaternity is an unhappy result of splitting away from tribalism, yet our growing ability to tolerate diverse cultures and create complex communication systems that connect all people is a happy result. Neither way of life is ideal; both have their healing and destructive aspects. The healthiest society is probably somewhere between the two opposites in that sacred middle realm, but we’re not yet in that sacred place. The opposing social structures have made contact, but it is not yet fully conscious contact. Much of the movement toward spirituality in nonindigenous cultures is a movement toward ancestral wisdom—toward ritual, ceremony, initiation, and connection to the deeper currents of life. Conversely, many tribespeople feel stifled and trapped in the amber of their ancient tribal customs.
We nonindigenous peoples live in a quandary: we value our freedom from tradition and tribalism, while at the same time we’re drawn inexorably toward them. This should not be surprising since we all come from tribal societies in the first place. Each one of us can hearken back to African or Middle Eastern tribes, to Celtic or Viking tribes, to Asian or East Indian tribes, to Native American tribes, or to the island tribes of the South Pacific. Our tribal selves still live inside us, and our ancestral DNA has hundreds of thousands of years of indigenous memory that competes with a mere handful of hundreds of years of modern life. Our ancestors still speak to us from within the voice of fire. Our bodies still resonate to season, place, and rhythm. Our multiple intelligences still know how to translate symbols and impulses from deep within the subconscious. Our emotions still remember their sacred function as carriers of deep wisdom, just as our psyches still require ceremony, ritual, and initiation in order to live and grow properly. We moderns have moved out of our tribes for the most part, but tribal wisdom has not moved out of our psyches.
Traumatic injury in childhood has been equated with a kind of unconscious initiation ceremony—not because it is a spiritual or ceremonial experience, but because the movements within it mimic the movements of the first two stages of real initiation. Understanding the stages of initiation (and the ways in which traumatic incidents mimic initiation) will give us a greater understanding of what trauma does to the psyche, to our culture, and sociologically speaking, to us as a species.
In tribal initiation, stage one is an organized, expected removal from the parents and the everyday patterns of the tribe. Tribal children are brought up to expect initiation; they and their families prepare for it and are fully aware of its presence in their lives. In trauma, however, there is no preparation. Traumatic stage one is a disorganized removal from the known world—a sudden, shocking, and wholly unexpected end to normalcy. The stranger approaches, the loved one betrays you, the doctor comes near, or the play becomes ugly—and it begins.
Tribal stage two is an organized ordeal, such as a walkabout, a ritual scarring,[5] or a solitary journey. Though there is pain and fear involved, there is also a container created by the tribe and the overseeing adults. The walkabouts and journeys occur on tribal lands where trackers abound; the scarring and ornamentations are usually performed by adults who have a certain expertise at what they do; and the ordeal has a definite end-point, which the initiates are aware of on some level. In trauma, there is no organization to the ordeal and no promise of an end. Traumatic stage two is the out-of-control moment of the assault—the beating, the yelling, the unwelcome touch that separates spirit from body, or the beginning of the operation. The traumatic brush with death has no container, no safety hatch, no ancestral guidance, and no clear endpoint. In regard to surgeries performed on children, some would say that surgical procedures are performed by expert adults, and that they have a clear end-point; however, since they often involve restraints, anesthetics, and the specter of death or disability that cannot be discussed openly—especially by children—they often create lasting traumas.
Tribal stage three is the celebration, during which the entire tribe recognizes the new person and welcomes him or her as an initiated and valued member of the tribe. The initiate does not return home as the same person; expectations change, responsibilities shift, and a new life begins. Sadly, in trauma there is no stage three; there is no welcoming back for trauma survivors. Traumatic initiations are usually performed in secret or are an established part of the shadow life of the family or the neighborhood. There is no one to tell the trauma victim that he or she has survived a deathlike ordeal and has come out the other side as a new being. There is no conscious acknowledgment of the sudden end of childhood or normalcy, and there is certainly no celebration.
In traumatic initiations, stages one and two occur without sense or reason. The regular world stops, the horror begins, and there is no protective ceremony, no overseer of the process, and certainly no welcoming back. Therefore, there is no way for trauma survivors to take their place as conscious and initiated members of society. When stage three does not occur, initiates (tribal or traumatic) are left in limbo. This is why the third stage of any initiatory process is crucial. Without it, the initiation and the initiate are unfinished, and the tribe is incomplete.
Tribal knowledge says that if stage three is not completed (for whatever reason), the initiate must cycle through the first two stages of initiation once again. Initiation is a three-stage process that does not conclude until all three stages have been completed. I have found that the psyche concurs with tribal wisdom on this point. The rule in the human psyche seems to be that stages one and two of trauma will be repeated until stage three occurs. Suffering ceases to be suffering only after we have formed a clear and precise picture of it, and that clarity only occurs in stage three. We cannot form a clear picture of traumatic suffering from the sudden separation of stage one or from the unfinished ordeal of stage two. There must be an end to trauma and an understanding of trauma before we can truly exit our traumatic initiations.
In initiatory tribal cultures, an unfinished initiate will be cycled through the initiation ritual once again, and he or she will be welcomed properly at the successful conclusion of the completed ritual. In noninitiatory cultures where unfinished trauma reigns, the psyche will revisit stages one and two in whatever way it can—by repressing the trauma and re-creating it in the inner world, or by expressing the trauma and re-creating it for others. The trauma will be kept alive because the initiation ritual will still be in progress. When there is no welcoming and no validation of the life-altering ordeal that has been survived, there will be no possibility of exiting the traumatic initiation. The psyche will intentionally cycle through stages one and two until resolution is achieved. In nonindigenous cultures such as ours, we call this cycling post-traumatic stress disorder when it is repressive, and abusiveness or criminality when it is expressive.
When we can understand the essence of initiation, however, we can see that both responses to traumatic initiations—both the repressive self-abuse and the expressive abuse of others—are unconscious repetitions of stages one and two. When we cycle unrelieved trauma through our inner or outer world, we’re still very much in the process of initiation. We continue to separate ourselves (or others) from the known world, and we continue to enter or create ordeals in the desperate hope that stage three—the welcoming back—will occur. We may drop into unmanageable depressions, addictions, or neuroses. We may ingeniously seek out jobs and relationships that remind us of the atmosphere of our original traumas, or we may traumatize others. For many of us, these behaviors will lead to therapy or recovery, which can provide a kind of stage three.
In therapy or recovery groups, we can be welcomed into a world where our suffering is understood. We can help ourselves and other survivors make sense of turmoil, and we can speak freely and openly about our traumas, thereby ending the cycling. Though healing often occurs in these situations, many people remain attached to their therapists or their recovery or healing groups for years or even decades, simply because it’s the only place they’re seen in any stage-three sort of way. To stand up and say, “Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m an alcoholic,” and to have the whole room be proud of your honesty, to have the whole room respond with, “Hi, Bob,” is a stage-three experience. We may laugh at twelve-step groups and self-healing junkies, but these therapies provide many of us with our only experience of being welcomed by a tribe that sees our initiation for what it was.
For others who are not as lucky, stage three occurs in prison, where they’re welcomed by a tragic group of fellow initiates. Prison life can be incredibly tribal (and incredibly unconscious), and initiations occur there as a matter of course. Tribes are based on skin color, gang affiliations, and criminal background, and in these tribes people experience a kind of brutal welcome. The trauma does not usually end; rather, tribe members are often organized and taught to be more skilled at traumatizing themselves and others. The true essence of stage three—the welcome into a new life after stages one and two have been concluded—doesn’t often happen in prison tribes. The rough prison welcome doesn’t put an end to trauma, but any welcome is better than no welcome at all. This is why it’s so amazingly difficult to break away from criminality and prison tribal life; something in the psyche is fed when initiations and welcomings (however crude) occur. The tribal parts of our brains respond to tribal rituals, even if we have no conscious understanding that the rituals are occurring. Prison tribes (and the tribal street gangs that so often lead to prison) provide a powerful and seductive facsimile of welcome for the most damaged and resourceless members of our society. As a result, the criminal underclass becomes a powerful tribe of its own, one that supports and exploits trauma survivors at the very same time.
In both instances, in therapy groups and in prisons, trauma survivors are moved to a kind of stage three. However, neither welcoming process seems to allow trauma survivors to take their place as respected elders in our larger culture. In prison tribes, the trauma stays alive and spreads like wildfire through the prison and eventually back into the culture. No true healing occurs because the trauma is still being repressed and internalized, or expressed and lived out. Prison tribe members often become stronger and more skilled, but unless something unusual (like the William James Association Prison Arts Project) intervenes, convicts don’t generally take their place as functional elders in prison or in society as a whole; they usually only function within a very small area of influence. In therapeutic tribes, on the other hand, a certain level of healing occurs (in that traumas are no longer being avoided or expressed chaotically), but in many cases, these tribe members do not enter fully into awakened elderhood either.
When the welcoming tribe is composed of similarly traumatized people, initiates often get the wrong message about belonging and identity, and many healing and recovery tribes don’t foster a deep connection to our larger society or culture as a whole. Instead, the identification tends to limit itself to the trauma at hand. One becomes a survivor of a specific set of circumstances instead of becoming a fully initiated adult. One becomes a member of the alcohol tribe, the sexual assault tribe, the abused child tribe, or the prison tribe—but rarely a fully welcomed and valued citizen of the world. A form of stage-three welcoming does occur in these therapeutic tribes, but it is not true stage three, because it does not reliably provide our larger culture with true adults, sacred elders, or soul warriors. This kind of welcoming, then, is still attached to and embroiled in the first two stages of traumatic initiation. Much acknowledgment and healing does occur in these therapeutic tribes, but the deep and transformative movement into the completeness of stage three often does not.
In my empathic healing practice, I saw people who had been through many kinds of therapies, including these unintentionally tribal modalities. In most cases, I saw people after they had moved into “survivor” status—they were no longer victims, they had fully identified their wounds, they understood them intellectually, and they could monitor themselves for signs of traumatic reenactments or post-traumatic behaviors. Yet still they felt unfinished, as if something had been forgotten. They were right—many things had been forgotten, such as their visionary fire elements, which could tell them where trauma came from (and where it’s going), or their earthy bodies, which in many cases still held on to traumatic events, no matter how much intellectual understanding had been achieved. There was also their oceanic emotions, which constantly attempted to lead them (or force them) into a deeper understanding of their trauma. These survivors were often quite confused; their therapeutic tribes had pronounced them cured, yet their physical symptoms, their emotional upheavals, and their spiritual or visionary emptiness continued unabated. Clearly, something was unfinished.
Moving into survivor status is important, but it does not fully satisfy the psyche’s definition of stage three. Something deeper must occur, and that requires our entire village of elements and intelligences working together so that we can restore ourselves to resilience and equilibrium.
When your fully resourced psyche can be brought to bear on your trauma (however and whenever it occurred), the sacred wound at the center of your trauma can be revealed. The first task in restoring your wholeness is to reintegrate yourself (we’ll learn how throughout the rest of this book). This reintegration is a form of self-welcoming that paves the way for the blessed movement into stage three. When the village inside you is reestablished, your traumatic memories can be addressed in deep and ceremonial ways, because your far-ranging eagle nature will be able to provide an overview of the situation. When your full awareness is embodied once again, true healing can occur because your suffering will cease when your consciousness is brought to bear upon it. When your vision and your multiple intelligences can track the trauma’s origins, you can take your honorable place in the currents of time and culture—not just in the culture of your specific trauma, but in the whole of human history. When your psyche is reintegrated and all of your resources return to your psyche, trauma ceases to be trauma; instead, it becomes a portal through which you pass on your way to wholeness.
When we left our indigenous tribes, we gained much in the way of individual freedom, but we lost much of our understanding of the necessity of ceremony and initiation, and we forgot that our souls still require initiations, rituals, and ceremonial woundings so that we might grow into whole and conscious individuals. We’ve forgotten the deep rules of the psyche. We’ve forgotten our fiery myths and stories; therefore, our knowledge of sacred wounding has moved into the background and into the shadow. As a result, our movements toward initiation and ritual have moved into the shadow as well. The remembrance of the sacred aspects of the first two stages of initiation has left our conscious minds, but our profound need for the first two stages has never faded.
Initiation occurs whether we want it to or not, because it is a necessary passage in our lives. When we don’t understand this, we create unrelieved suffering around our traumas. We run from our memories, our traumas, our sensations, our bodies, our emotions, and our lives. We try to hide in intellect-only or spirituality-only systems in the desperate hope that our traumatic memories and behaviors will just go away—but they never do. They can’t. Stages one and two must repeat until stage three occurs. If we remain in a dissociated state, we’ll be unable to move to stage three; but when we can consciously bring our full selves back together, we can become adequate to the soul-making task of moving to stage three.
This movement toward integration is empowering because it addresses the central issue of trauma, which is surprisingly not the pain or the horror of the incident, but the lingering sense of powerlessness and disconnection that results from not being able to move to stage three. I have observed that when trauma is treated as an individual tragedy (rather than a multicultural phenomenon), and post-traumatic behavior is treated as a pathological (rather than a natural) response, it cannot be dealt with in a way acceptable to the psyche. Trauma survivors can do much to become less disturbed and more functional, but true healing requires a fully resourced psyche in which the body and spirit communicate freely, and the multiple intelligences and all of the emotions are welcomed and honored. When this internal balance is restored, the movement to stage three is assured.
When the psyche has been reintegrated, there is no longer a knee-jerk rush toward distraction, avoidance, addiction, or dissociation; therefore, the inner world becomes a stable place in which clear thinking can occur and the emotions can be honored and channeled. When the emotions are allowed to contribute their brilliant and unceasing energies to the psyche, they provide a flowing conveyance into and through the underworld of trauma—they provide the energy and information needed in each part of the journey. When the psyche is integrated, the body can awaken and contribute its memories, abilities, and knowledge to the process, while the emotions can help relieve and ameliorate the pains, symptoms, and behaviors the body brings to consciousness. In this healthy, fluid environment, the logical intelligences can contribute their airy brilliance to the healing process. They can study healing and psychology; they can bring meaning to spiritual visions, emotional impulses, and physical sensations; and they can put the trauma into historical and cultural perspective. Through it all, the visionary spirit can provide an overview, not just of the trauma, but of the emotions, the thoughts, and the physical sensations that contribute to the healing of trauma. From the center of these well-moderated elements and intelligences, the psyche can regain its balance and resilience.
When we can heal trauma from a fully resourced perspective, we become deeply connected to the very center of our selves, but more than that, we become reconnected to the center of our troubled society. When we’re whole, we can see that traumatic avoidance, distraction, and dissociation form the basis for most people’s lives. When we can acknowledge the trauma at the center of the human heart (rather than repress or express it), we can consciously channel our trauma and understand the dissociative foundation upon which most lives and societies are based. From that understanding, we can make conscious decisions about our position in relation to dissociation, distraction, and avoidance. We can decide what role we want to take in our tribe of dissociated and quaternally unbalanced people. We can decide to take our honored place as elders, rather than remaining unconscious automatons.
By diving into the trouble and moving to stage three, we can finally make sense of our suffering, and in so doing, we can end it—for ourselves and for others. I call the conscious movement into trauma a soul-making journey because when we can dive into our wounds with our full complement of intelligences and abilities, we’re no longer mere survivors of specific incidents; we become fully resourced soul warriors. From the sacred ground of stage three, we can keep our understanding of trauma alive, not by cycling through it with repression or expression, or by identifying ourselves as its powerless victims, but by remaining conscious of it and its aftereffects as we strive for social and political justice.
When we move consciously to stage three, we learn that we’re not broken apart by our wounds; rather, we’re broken open by them. Therefore, more energy, more information, more love, more art, and more soulfulness can flow through us. We become not half-alive survivors of trauma, but beautifully scarred elders, visionaries, and healers of our tribes. We become living shrines who carry sacred knowledge for our entire culture. We become able to take a meaningful position in the world, not in spite of our wounds, but because of them.
It has been my greatest honor to be involved in these profound journeys from mere psychological survival into the sacred territory of stage three. Many survivors never make the journey—that’s true. Our prisons and streets are filled with survivors who become twisted and brutal and desperate in their endless cycling between stages one and two. Our everyday lives are filled with survivors who live in a waking nightmare of distraction, avoidance, and misery as they pretend not to be trapped in the same two stages. But my unusual healing practice brought me into contact with those brave survivors who continue to hope, love, strive, and believe in stage three, even though their lives have given them no reason whatsoever to do so. They stand before me with their thousand-year-old eyes that have seen the horror of human cruelty, and they share their desire to be well so they can be of real use to the world. They want to dive in and enter stage three so their individual traumas can end and they can take their sacred place in the trauma-centered tribe all around us. Though it may seem backward, I have found my greatest belief in humans and my clearest vision of joy through the work I have been honored to share with survivors of dissociative trauma.
The French author and trauma survivor Jean Genet spoke to the heart of this three-stage healing process in his harrowing written account of his own post-traumatic journey, The Thief’s Journal: “Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is because an action has not been completed that it is vile [italics mine].” When we cycle unconsciously through the dismal first and second stages of unrelieved trauma, our actions are vile—not because we’re vile or life is vile, but simply because we don’t move to completion. When we don’t know of the third stage, all we can see is the vileness of trauma. We cannot grasp the beauty and power that live on the other side of the wound, and we cannot see an end worth working toward. In response, we repress our true emotions, memories, and traumas, and tumble into desperate and unconscious post-traumatic replays. We attempt to distract or dissociate ourselves from our wounds, but our denial only intensifies our cycling through the first two stages of unconscious initiation. We may seek practices, substances, or therapies that provide some relief from our painful symptoms, but we don’t stop feeling vile somehow. We also don’t understand that the vileness is a function of not moving to completion and not moving to stage three; instead, we internalize the vileness and lose our way.
I see in many trauma-healing modalities, though they are well-meant, a terrible short-circuiting of the true healing process, of that beautiful movement to completion. Many trauma-relieving practitioners use techniques that attempt to erase the trauma from memory. There are techniques that involve breathing, bodywork, eye movements, hypnosis, and even tapping on certain areas of the skin. There are also numbing techniques that run survivors through traumatic memories exhaustively until there’s no emotional content left at all. I call all of these processes erasure techniques. They attempt to heal trauma by deleting it and its aftereffects from the psyche—which might be a good idea, except for the fact that traumatic initiations have a sacred function in the soul and in the culture. Many healers in the trauma field, because they don’t understand the soul’s three-stage process, try to erase the trauma from the psyche. They want to remove the trauma; they want the baby to stop crying and start laughing at Mr. Bunny. Unfortunately, that’s not the genius path, that’s not the soul-making path, that’s not the path that will heal the culture, and that’s not the path to stage three. My experience is that taking the opposite path—of diving directly into the trauma from within a fully resourced psyche—helps people not only to heal, but to enter fully into the most profound currents of life.
The erasure techniques have some value in extreme post-traumatic responses (long-standing insomnia, self-mutilation, amnesia, psychosomatic illness or paralysis, and so on), but most of us don’t fall into that category. Most of us have been taught to function fairly well around our traumas through ingenious avoidance or addictive behaviors. Most of us deal fairly well with our dissociation and repressive or expressive behaviors. We’re not whole or well-moderated, but we do all right. Most of us don’t need the drastic erasure techniques, but we gravitate toward them because they have a sirenlike quality. Though I was as interested as anyone in these erasure techniques, I have found that I cannot recommend them in any but the most catastrophic cases. (However, a truly grounded and soul-honoring trauma-healing modality does exist: please see Dr. Peter Levine’s works in section entitled “Further Resources”.) Many of the erasure techniques do indeed work; they erase the memory of trauma from the conscious mind, but while the memory of the trauma may fade, the psyche remains unstable. The erasure techniques are symptomatic fixes that don’t lead to stage three. Rather, they may remove the memory of stages one and two so that stage three cannot occur. The erasure techniques are the ultimate in avoidance behaviors; in their attempt to avoid pain, what they actually avoid is true wellness and soul-making.
If we understand trauma not as a mistake or a tragedy, but as our initiation into the deeper currents of life, we won’t want to erase our memories. Even if our initiations were performed in the most appalling and unconscious fashion, they were still initiations. If we understand the sacredness in even the most profane traumatic initiations, we won’t want anyone fooling around in our emotional landscapes and erasing our pathways to the center of our own souls. When we can complete the act begun in trauma—however vile it may have been—the end will be beautiful. If we can honor the trauma and let our emotions transport information consciously and honorably within our whole selves, we’ll move consciously and powerfully into that third stage, and we’ll be new beings.
Reintegrating the village inside ourselves is the important first step in the healing of dissociative trauma, but it is the emotions that actually help us move into and out of the memories and sensations that are associated with the original wound. Our emotions transport us to stage three. With their help, we can make the profound journey into a visceral understanding of the troubles—and the beauties—of our human culture.