On the Necessity of Trauma
Birth is suffering.
A Noble Truth in Buddhism, this suffering extends throughout life.
So really I should have said life, as a whole, is suffering.
Too often we get caught in the oscillation between avoiding things we’d prefer not to do and seeking pleasure, consequently fixating on the pains and taking for granted the pleasures. Indeed, this is perhaps the irony of aging: we cannot appreciate our pleasures when we are young and we cannot escape our pains when we are old.
We begin life weeping and wailing: exposure to reality is itself traumatic. The hunger, tiredness, and other workaday discomforts are, for the infant, literally the worst things she has ever experienced. Yet, interestingly, this baseline trauma is an essential part of learning to navigate the world. Even the capacity to suffer itself is reliant on previous traumas — that as we experience it, our tolerance increases (Cf. http://time.com/4085001/pain-tolerance/).
Suffering these traumas allows the infant to understand herself in relation to her caregivers, later how to become aware of her needs (and eventually meet those needs herself), and, as I will posit, to develop the internal life of the mind that typifies the higher, self-aware consciousness of the human experience.
As a note: Trauma as I am exploring it here occurs starting at a much lower threshold than most people initially think (particularly given the truly profound traumas that so many people suffer). I do not mean to discount the severity of deeply traumatic events, but am simply exploring the relation of how we approach the world, our experience of consciousness, and the prevalence of suffering.
Returning to the infant, her physical suffering and the related growth is mimicked in mental/emotional suffering and growth. Enduring boredom (i.e., patience), overcoming fear and anxiety, sustaining focus, and so on all increase with experience. As we mature, this growth is slow, remaining largely under the radar with any particularly acute lessons being forgotten as other experiences crowd them out. We discount the origin of our development as we go.
Let’s take shame as an example of a commonplace yet realistically traumatic occurrence. When we feel shame, it is a complex amalgamation of experiences: we understand we did something wrong relative to some external social code (be that moral, ethical, or simply popular), we internalize the guilt (that is, allow ourselves to feel the guilt that we might otherwise reject), and feel a sense of alienation engendered by the non-conforming behavior and the awareness of the judgment of others. This split is furthered by regret, the awareness of an imagined alternate reality. We feel acutely self-conscious and separated from both others and the version of our self in the imagined alternate reality.
The overwhelming externality of our community when we become acutely self-aware as in the case of shame causes a traumatizing dissonance resulting in the split of self. In more severe cases of trauma, there is a withdrawal inward to escape the pain entirely. There is only a shell protecting an inaccessible, internal self. Whatever the case, the sense of self as distinct from others and the extent of consciousness unique to the human experience (as far as we know) is a neurosis engendered by, and even reliant on, trauma.
Self-consciousness (and more broadly, self-aware consciousness) is the felt separation of our intimate self knowledge (internal) and our enacted identity (an inherently social and external performance). It may be as superficial as the difference between what we want to say and what we actually say, or as profound as the ineffable fullness of our self unmediated by other’s limited and limiting perceptions, our self unencumbered by identity. It takes a trauma to rend asunder our personality, yet this schizoid schema is a common component of humanity.
Trauma in this way is an essential component of our highest functioning. Research into Post-Traumatic Growth confirms that trauma does engender higher levels of psychological functioning for survivors with sufficient support. I am pushing this further, claiming that trauma is both the chicken and the egg of self-aware consciousness. It prompts the division of self and other (as in the infant recognizing its separation from its mother) as well as perpetuating mentally and emotionally traumatic experiences (as in alienation from shame) that concretize consciousness. With newfound hyper-vigilance, we grow to be anxious as we anticipate future traumas.
The incidence of anxiety suddenly makes a lot of sense (indeed, what are we but anxious cucumbers?); however, anxiety is under appreciated. If we define anxiety as “the anticipation of threat,” it becomes clear how it is evolutionarily viable. Being so sensitive to anxiety as a sort of animalistic instinct has given humans a leg up.
We have seen how trauma leads to self-aware consciousness, as in the case of shame. Suffering causes consciousness. We have seen how consciousness engenders anxiety, which has been valuable in thriving as a species. Consciousness causes suffering. In this reading we are so mentally and emotionally sensitive, suffering trauma and anxiety, because it is has allowed us to use our anxiety to survive. We are conscious because of the utility of suffering anxiety.
We are conscious in order to suffer.
It’s clear, however, that we no longer participate in the standard tide of evolution. We have engineered technology enough to not worry about being the fittest in order to survive. So, this anxiety is to some extent already obsolete. While perceiving danger (i.e., feeling anxiety) allows us to preemptively protect ourselves, we live lives largely void of these daily threats. Instead, we extend our perception of danger into increasingly mundane contexts. Rather than our anxiety decreasing, our threshold for what counts as a threat is decreasing. Our consciousness is hamstringing us in our pursuit of wellbeing, yet remains one of our most prized characteristics as a species. It is a heavy crown atop our heads.
There are of course prescriptions enough to numb this anxiety; however, I’m far more interested in overcoming the source of the problem itself: the relation of our self to the world.
In reconciling the rift between the internal and external world, however traumatic the initial separation may be, we can escape the anxieties burdening our individual existence. Returning to the Noble Truths, the path out of suffering is not to flee or to escape the world, but to seek internal conciliation. This is practicing mindfulness to unify our internal and external world. This is presence through the good and the bad. This is ceasing the oscillation between resisting pain and seeking pleasure.
By mindfully leaning into that oscillation, while reflecting on the things in our lives for which we are grateful, we can escape the thing that makes us all too human. We can escape the suffering of consciousness.
