Trauma & Pusillanimity
"Some of the reason why we are far more fearful, inhibited and sad than we should be is that we are – unbeknownst to ourselves – wandering through our lives with a huge burden of unresolved and unobserved trauma...
A trauma is not merely a terrible event, though it is very much that too. It is a terrible event that has not been adequately processed, understood and unpicked and that has – through neglect – been able to cast a very long and unwarranted shadow over huge areas of experience. Many of our greatest fears have nothing at all to do with actual dangers in the here and now; they are the legacy of traumas that we have lacked the wherewithal to be able to trace back to their origins, localize and neutralize...
The solution, in all such cases, is to get a better sense of the specific incidents in the past that have generated difficulties in order to unhook the mind from its expectations. The clue that we are dealing with a trauma – rather than any sort of justified fear – lies in the scale and intensity of feelings that descend in conditions when there is no objective rationale for them. We know then that we are dealing not with ‘silliness’ or madness or indeed genuine danger, but with an unprocessed incident from the past casting a debilitating shadow on a more innocent present...
As traumatized people, the memory of the founding incident is within us, but our conscious minds swerve away from the possibility of engaging with it and neutralizing it through rational examination. Unable to mourn or decipher the event, much of life becomes mournful and not worth living. At the same time, the trauma breeds symptoms and neuroses which we cannot trace back to their founding moment; we forget why we are so scared, we just know that there are risks everywhere. A trauma is an agony that the conscious mind has lacked the support and resources to process – at the cost of our ability to love, to be free and to think creatively...
Our challenge is to make sense of a specific agonizing hitherto obscure problem or event so as to strip it of its all-embracing impact. Countless situations will be problematic and frightening so long as individual incidents have not been understood and thought through with kindness and inventiveness. By properly gripping an original event in the claws of a rational adult mind, and stripping it of its mystery, we will be able to repatriate fearful emotions – and render the world less unnerving than it presently seems. Life as a whole won’t have to be so terrifying once we understand the bits of it that truly once were."
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