Best Of

@person said:
I look at it like this, take two people who experience the same painful experience. One says to themselves, this is so bad what happened to me, I'm hurt and damaged, I'm set back from where I should be. The other says to themselves, that sucks, what can I learn from this, how can I use this experience to better myself and the world. This language is loaded as its been weaponized for the culture war, but is your mindset one of a victim or a victor?

To me this is a typical viewpoint of someone who has no lived experience of trauma, and it sounds rather disrespectful. You don’t get to make a choice about how to live with the experience, instead it just happens to you. Its main feature is that it overwhelms reason and your defences, taking up residence in the hindbrain only to emerge again as lifelong anxiety or sudden bouts of crying and shaking or crippling post-traumatic stress disorder.

Low levels of trauma can be cured just by gaining insight into what happened to you and what you told yourself, and this is very much worth doing. This is work Gabor Maté has been involved in for many years, amongst addicts and the severely ill. I think that if you consider his work a “lingering in pain” then you are taking a wrong turn.

The book makes a good case that a trauma-focussed view is exactly what Western society needs right now, there is a lot more trauma around than people are willing to acknowledge. If you read the book you’ll soon notice it in the Indigenous people, the prison population, the black people (and everyone who has suffered racism), the lhbtq population as well as many ordinary people who had difficult parents.

As the book notes, the root of healing is wholeness, and that is the goal. Trauma is often a divisive experience, where memories get tucked away in hidden corners because they’re just too painful, and the self ends up being divided. Trauma healing is about looking unafraid and with compassion into those dark corners.

@Jeroen said:
It alerts you to the importance of trauma and encourages you to look at your own trauma’s more carefully. Even those of us who think we have had a happy childhood probably are suppressing a few things, such as the ex-prisoner in Gabor’s story who thought he had a happy childhood but in fact the father was an alcoholic who often fought with the mother and the tension in the house could be cut with a knife due to his temper. This man had built a picture of a happy childhood out of a few carefully selected memories.

The way I tend to look at something like this is that such events teach us things that are often unskillful or served us at one time but now hold us back. It isn't about denial, its about seeing ourselves honestly and looking forward at what will serve us better rather than looking back with regret and thinking of ourselves as damaged goods.

Going back to an example Mate has used in interviews, he talks about how the trauma of his youth caused him to excessively strive and become a therapist. To me, that achievement is something to celebrate and be grateful for, while at the same time its possible to recognize the downsides of that striving attitude and seek to change. His attitude came across as all negative and regretful. He only talked about the pain of it.

So in a way the ‘myth of normal’ is that there is anyone who is entirely normal. We all have our sensitivities and come out of childhood having taken some damage.

We're all unique, and part of that is how our lives shaped us. Maybe its just me, thinking of myself as damaged is an unpleasant way to view myself. I've learned to like myself as I am, while at the same time wanting to be better. As Shunryu Suzuki said, “Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.”

@how said:
Neither!
Couldn't justify the carbon footprint involved in doing either trip at this point in time.

Yes, I can understand that. I used to travel quite a bit but since returning to the Netherlands I’ve been in a mode of not travelling… I was in my flat by the beach, high up, and I would study Buddhism, do a little meditating, walk or cycle in the dunes. I’ve hardly left the country for about ten years, let alone gone on a long intercontinental flight.

The proposal to go to Egypt was my dads idea, he is now 75 and doesn’t want to go by himself so he invited me. We’d each pay our own way but it wouldn’t be cheap, about 1800 euros. But included would be visits to the Pyramids, the valley of the Kings, the temples at Luxor, a Nile cruise, the museum of antiquities in Caïro, and a few other things.

On the one hand it is quite tempting, on the other I find looking at man-made artefacts a lot less fascinating than I used to. Even here in the Netherlands I have found I visit museums a lot less than I used to, maybe once every few years.

@Jeroen said:

It does seem to be one of those things that a lot of people are doing. If you have a choice between a once in a lifetime tourist trip to see the antiquities in Greece and Egypt, or doing an authentic Ayahuasca healing journey with indigenous shamans in the jungle… what would bring you more in the end?

Egypt hands down for me