A New Series—On Cling­ing

The remain­ing arti­cles in this series:

8– habits
9– emo­tions
10– ide­olo­gies

Trauma Dra­mas

It was so… so… trau­matic, I just CAN’T move on!

Some time ago, I was inter­viewed on a radio show called “Pain Tamers,” a show run by a woman named Helen Dear­man. She’d had sev­eral back surg­eries, and I believe she was due for num­ber 10 just a bit after we talked.

One of the con­cepts she pre­sented is one that I have worked with a lot since I talked with her. She said that she used to go in to see her doc­tors and when they asked her what her level of pain was, on a scale of one to 10, she would report that maybe she was feel­ing a five or six or even an eight.

Then she would turn to her doc­tor and say,

“Are you inter­ested in my level of suf­fer­ing?”

She reported that most of the doc­tors were quite puz­zled by this idea. She’d say, “My pain level might be an eight but my suf­fer­ing level is only a two.”

Her point was that there is a dif­fer­ence between pain and suf­fer­ing, and I want to talk about that as we look at trau­mas. I’d like to sug­gest that there is a par­al­lel between:

• pain and trauma, and between
• suf­fer­ing and being a vic­tim.

Here’s what I mean.

“Stuff Hap­pens”

“This is going to be really, really hard to come back from…”

There’s no ques­tion that in every life, stuff hap­pens. Some of the stuff that hap­pens is really, really uncom­fort­able. Some of it even qual­i­fies as a full-blown trauma.

It’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that my goal here is never to dimin­ish or negate the trau­matic expe­ri­ences that you have expe­ri­enced. How­ever, heal­ing and mov­ing on requires one thing.

You must learn that trauma is one real moment in time. Thus, a trauma does not go on.
What can go on is imag­in­ing (and suf­fer­ing over)
this past event.

If you think about it, this is some­thing that we talk about a lot here. We believe that our life exists as dis­crete moments — we talk about being present — and that pres­ence is moment by moment. This is espe­cially impor­tant to remem­ber when were think­ing about trauma or pain.

“Some­thing tells me I’ll be stuck on this for life…“

What usu­ally hap­pens for many of us is that we begin to look at our suf­fer­ing sto­ries, and we turn them into some­thing of an idol. In other words, it becomes a part of our iden­tity, and at the point that this hap­pens, we become the vic­tims of our own sto­ries.

It’s almost as if we become addicted to our sto­ries. It’s the only way we see ourselves.

And then a new sit­u­a­tion hap­pens that is only slightly related to that orig­i­nal event (or it may not even be related to it at all) and we’re away to the races. We see an end­less string of incidents.

Our sto­ries seem to over­ride both our present expe­ri­ence and our com­mon sense. We see our­selves in a cer­tain way, and as we’ve said many times in the past,

we fit our expe­ri­ence to the story we’re telling ourselves.

So if we see our­selves as a vic­tim of some sort, then it only stands to rea­son that as things hap­pen to us, we may choose to see our­selves again and again as victims.

It’s an odd one. Things were going along as nice as you please, and a new sit­u­a­tion hap­pens, and we look at it, and we scare our­selves.

I describe this as how it’s like we are film­ing our lives, on video­tape, in our heads. Each video­tape con­tains cer­tain kinds of data. So we might have a data tape about women, and a data tape about men, and we might have a data tape about dat­ing and relat­ing. We have a data tape about sex, and a data tape about work experiences.

Each time we expe­ri­ence some­thing new, it gets tacked onto the end of one of those tapes. When we recall the new event, the rest of the tape plays, too.

Now, some have a trauma tape that says, “I’m the poor help­less vic­tim of past abuse of some sort.” When some­thing new hap­pens that might per­haps be bet­ter cat­e­go­rized as, “How I choose to relate to men or women,” or “How I do rela­tion­ships,” or, “What’s hap­pen­ing at work,” instead that expe­ri­ence gets tacked onto the end of the trauma tape.

I’ve seen this hap­pen more often than I can tell you.

It’s a pretty scary phe­nom­e­non. For exam­ple, some­one will be hav­ing a dis­cus­sion at work, and the dis­cus­sion turns into some­thing of an argu­ment, and before you know it, the expe­ri­ence is being tacked on to the “My dad never under­stood me!” tape. The per­son then begins to relate to the per­son at work as if that per­son were the father.

If you can take a step back from this you can see how inap­pro­pri­ate and waste­ful of our time and energy such an approach is. All of a sud­den, here we are (again!) upset­ting and scar­ing our­selves now over some­thing that hap­pened in the dis­tant past. And because we’ve added the expe­ri­ence onto the tape of “All the men who have ever treated me wrong,” we end up feel­ing really, really bad over some­thing that has absolutely noth­ing to do with the orig­i­nal trauma.

In other words, and in keep­ing with our theme, we are cling­ing to the story we are telling our­selves about past trauma, and then try­ing to con­vince all and sundry of how hard done by we are, what a vic­tim we are, and how it “just keeps happening.”

When I point this out to my clients, there is often a ten­dency to want to defend the errant beliefs. And it’s a defense of a pecu­liar kind. Their minds go back to the ini­tial trauma, and then they attempt to per­suade me that the old trauma is real.

I have no doubt that their rec­ol­lec­tion of the orig­i­nal sit­u­a­tion is fairly accu­rate.
What I am puz­zled about is how it applies to the
cur­rent sit­u­a­tion.

In other words, I’m try­ing to get them to see that cling­ing to the story is what is keep­ing them in their present state of suf­fer­ing. There is no past, so all suf­fer­ing is here-and-now suffering.

Yet, they are so com­mit­ted to the story that they are inca­pable of see­ing that the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is always an event in and of itself.

It won’t sur­prise you that I think
the solu­tion is self–exam­i­na­tion.

What does “The Watcher” watch,
and who does the watching?

Think­ing that some­how the whole world is going to coöper­ate in a “Don’t make me a vic­tim” exer­cise is silly in the extreme. Instead, this is the per­fect place to cre­ate what I call “The Watcher” — you can read about this here.

A “Watcher” is a part of our mind that “sim­ply watches” the activ­i­ties of our minds. In Bud­dhism the watcher is a really impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tic of “no-mind” — and some­thing that takes time to develop.

That being said, it is essen­tial to cre­ate one — if we want to stay in the moment.

The idea is that we need a part of our minds that objec­tively watches what we are think­ing, where we are going, and how we are inter­pret­ing our reality.

We estab­lish this char­ac­ter­is­tic of mind —this “Watcher”—and from there, are able to bet­ter under­stand the games our mind plays.

Here are five ways to set this up:

1. Mon­i­tor your body

“Tied up in knots?
Me?”

It’ll come as no sur­prise to you that the first step in this process is to become aware of what’s going on in your body.

In almost all cases, you’ll find that there’s some part of your body that tight­ens up when you’re going into suf­fer­ing / vic­tim­iza­tion mode. You’ll find that your stom­ach gets queasy. Your neck gets tight, or per­haps you feel pain in your lower back. It is impor­tant for you to dis­cover for your­self where in your body you hold stress. Then, as you imag­ine this char­ac­ter called “The Watcher,” give this char­ac­ter per­mis­sion to con­tin­u­ally mon­i­tor these parts of your body. The idea is that the quicker you can notice that you’re tight­en­ing up, the quicker you will notice that you are tor­tur­ing your­self. And as you notice, you can have a breath and take a step back.

This, really, is how the game is played out. As with all of the arti­cles in this series, the way past cling­ing is through let­ting go, and the only place we can let go is in the here-and-now. So, ulti­mately, every­thing I write about, and every­thing I explain, has to do with being present.

If you allow your­self to think about it, if you are present, there are no sto­ries. All there is, is presence.I am expe­ri­enc­ing my expe­ri­ence. If I find myself com­ment­ing on my expe­ri­ence, I am no longer hav­ing the expe­ri­ence. I’ve jour­neyed up, ever again, into my head. Up there, there is no reality—there are just sto­ries, inter­pre­ta­tions, judg­ments, and suffering.

The way out is to stop giv­ing energy to story mak­ing, and instead to give all of my energy to expe­ri­enc­ing expe­ri­ence. This will seem a lit­tle weird until you get it, yet as you get it, you begin to taste freedom.

Ram Dass said it best. “Be Here Now.” Your “Watcher” is the key to begin­ning the process of liv­ing moment to moment. Day to day. No sto­ries. No attach­ments. Just here.