"Hey, can you hold this suffering of mine for a minute while I find my phone?"
Are we? Taught to hide it...flaunt it...hold on to it...run from it.... Is "taught" the right word? I don't remember many direct lessons from authority during my formative years on the subject of "suffering"...mostly threats of what "suffering" I might be levied by an unhappy parent or teacher, or God through happenings in this world - a response to "being bad", of course.
Implicit in the workings of the cultures in which we grow from birth are the lessons on suffering. A daughter watches her mother on so many levels, for lessons on how to be...WHO to be. Nothing shapes a girl's sense of self more than her reflection in her mother. And suffering? How does the mother suffer? Why? Who and what "brings" the mother suffering? A dominant male in the family unit? A broken body? Frail mind? Emotional overwhelm? financial hardship? 'systemic' injustice? ...the daughter herself??
Silence. Because in a child's world, they are the unwitting sun around which all orbits...taking their perspective on "happenings" to include at least some causative role.... Even the neglected child, the abused child, the child who experiences natural disasters or war, relate the trauma to their own faultiness. If they were only "good", they would be loved, nurtured, safe, warm, fed, free. Free.
And the suffering we feel without that love...without that safety, that warmth, that freedom...is so deep, we are cut to our core with a wound we may never even remember.
So we suffer. Not because of the inherent painful experiences of human life - the lost toy, the cracked bone, the broken heart - but because of the wound of unworthiness created before we knew our own name.
We carry our suffering, clinging not so much because we were taught to hold onto it, but because most of us were not shown how to let it go. Ignore it, yes. Resist, leverage, flee...yes. But acknowledge it? Dissect it? Remedy the suffering? Where do the sinews of suffering lie, to pluck out and leave behind us?
Ahh, "happiness"! We can goal "happy" to direct our course away from suffering, right? Yet today's happiness rarely cures yesterday's suffering. "Success" just gives us cause to feel more unjustified in our less-than-bliss spectrum of emotions.
If only one could leave the daily grind for a monastery in Nepal, where meditation and contemplative life should resolve all suffering...right? Right?!? How does that work? Watching our mind, with growing awareness of our mental patterning...misses our deeply viscerally held emotional content comprising our woundedness.
Thinking you have conquered your mind without seeing it's workings in the world is like achieving Call of Duty mastery, but never walking on a real battlefield.
Don't get me wrong, many spiritual traditions incorporate (get it? in - corp - orate?) the workings of the emotional body...it's just very different when your 8 year old standing in front of you utters a phrase in contempt that triggers the release of a previously frozen ancient emotional tsunami. I'd pick the quiet of my own mind in a cave in the Himalayas over the Navy SEALs-level emotional obstacle course of single-momming said 8 year old and her 2 teen brothers ANY DAY. Life is a freaking great teacher, just sayin'....
As opposed to "mindfulness", the "Woundedness", shall we call it, is more like a massive black pensieve in our bellies, the memory strands energized by emotions sleeping in inky black liquid...waiting. Waiting for us to look. For us to feel safe enough, curious enough, bold enough to pick up our wand and select a slippery snippet of experience - and relive it. Yes, that's right...I said "relive". Not "relieve"....
Island (1962) by Aldous Huxley tells of a healing technique for trauma, where the practitioner patiently and nonjudgementally listens to the repeated retelling of the survivor's story until the emotional intensity fades. Likewise, The Whole Brain Child (2011) by Dr. Dan Siegel offers a similar practice for parents to help their children process trauma - from the micro-traumas of daily human life to life-changing crises. Compassionate objective listening while the affected human tells their story over and over appears to allow their own capacity for insight, reframing, and safety to do the healing.
Or maybe the Woundedness/pensieve is a safe and healthy repository for our trauma, and we only suffer if the bowl of wet sloshes and spills when we veer off balance, and can't keep everything in its place.
Because it takes ALOT OF ENERGY TO KEEP EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE. Like a computer running zillions of programs behind the scenes, desperately in need of a hard drive defrag, our suffering exists in large part because we are diffused, distorted. We have no bandwidth for NOW, when we are running old loops like "I Love Lucy" reruns on autoplay.
After the more violent of my adult traumatic experiences, previously recounted in this here blog ;), the resources that helped me most were two books: Trauma and Recovery (Judith Herman, M.D. 2001) and Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score (2015).
I was particularly astounded by the research showing that the linearity of our time experience - past, present, future in logical succession - goes haywire with trauma. Experiences of violence are associated with a switch in processing which derails the linear tracing of memory, and deposits the record of the experience in a limbo that looks like perpetual current experience. For trauma survivors ( I use this phrase as if this does not include every human [insert eyeroll emoji HERE]), the wound doesn't heal because the past is not the past - it is the repeatedly occurring present. Like Groundhog Day, every experience is a variation on the theme of the trauma.
Ever notice the people that trigger you usually remind of someone...or something.... It's like that time that you got so mad when.... Different actor, same role, peeps.
I heard TUT''s Mike Dooley give his insight on the challenge for adult survivors of childhood trauma: they experience the emotional heaviness of loneliness, grief, anger, anxiety, despair as attached to the trauma, and therefore incurable AND DIFFERENT than the emotions of other humans without such traumatic history. But no - he says these emotions are a part of the universal human experience, and recognizing that fact soothes our suffering.
Our traumas don't set us apart, they describe our Woundedness...our experience of less-than, of unsafe, of the real human emotions of loneliness, grief, and despair. And the rainbow of emotions in the sky of humanity is brilliant, sometimes really intense, and awe-inspiring. Which brings me back to the universality of human suffering. Maybe by recognizing the suffering in another, we see ourselves. Maybe the Woundedness in one calls the Woundedness in another, until like puzzle pieces made of magnets, we lock together in a Oneness we never saw before.
Unless the Woundedness in another repels you...be careful you don't look too closely at another's pain, if your end goal is avoiding a look in your own well-buried pensieve. As if the tapestry floating just under the surface of the liquid in your belly isn't projected as the life you are living right now. [Insert laughing/tears emoji HERE].
Suffering is unavoidable, and Woundedness is part of our Nature.
But...suffering is not unending. Like storm clouds pass, leaving the garden watered, our human suffering can be a source of nourishment, connecting us in our Oneness. Like Fall turns into Winter, we can experience our seasons of suffering as transient and even functional.
Just like we would never carry around a snow-maker to keep perfect powder ski conditions at all times, we can look at the utility of the suffering we have long carried, and reassess. Maybe opening the book of stories that describe our own Woundedness, and reading aloud with an open ear, over and over again, will open our hearts as well.
Warning: when the heart opens, the places, people, and pain that comes pouring out like a long overdue thunderstorm, will overwhelm. Like the child struggling to find sense of a world where the love and joy born into it with their arrival has gone missing, you will feel threatened. You may question your sanity, your purpose, your will to live...and feel sensations never before experienced in and around your physical body. Do it anyway. Defrag the hard drive.
Literally, emotionally reexperience the event. You can't fake this one, young Jedi. For this, you must go in alone, defenseless, with no certain outcome. But you can take with you the knowledge that just as all humans suffer, all suffering ends. And maybe this time, your suffering will be the fuel for the fire that burns away the life of yours that has been held in limbo for so long. Maybe the life energy in you is growing, like a laser, to focus in this moment, right here, to create the masterpiece you know is you.
Like the universe is the healer, patiently asking you to tell your story, and re-tell it, and yet another time tell your story, until the hurt eases a little, and you are finally ready to turn the page and see what the next chapter holds.