The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (19 page)

The Buddha, in recovering his capacity for nonsensual joy, learned that this joy was limitless. He found that if he got himself out of the way, his joy completely suffused his mindful awareness. This gave him the confidence, the stability, the trust, and the means to see clearly whatever presented itself to his mind. In the curious bifurcation of consciousness that meditation develops, where we can be both observer and that which is being observed, the quality of joy that he recovered did not remain an internal object. It was not only a memory or merely a feeling to be observed; it was also a quality of mind that could accompany every moment of mindfulness. The more he accepted the presence of this feeling and the more it toggled between being object and subject, the closer the Buddha came to understanding his true nature. Splinter of rock or no splinter of rock, the Buddha was figuring out how to relate.

Implicit Memory

N
ot long ago, while cleaning out my bookshelves, I came upon a videotape, a VHS cassette, that had slipped behind a layer of novels on an upper shelf. I wondered about it as soon as I found it; I had recently transferred all my home movies from minicassettes to DVDs, but this discovery was of a different size and make from the others. I ran quickly to watch the tape on my television, congratulating myself on not having thrown away my cassette player yet, and found myself face to face with a forgotten episode from my past. The scene was from 1986; it was recorded when my daughter was five weeks old by a friend of a friend whose house we were visiting in upstate New York. I had not given the tape a single thought since it was recorded—I’m sure I had just stuck the cassette on my bookshelf and never watched it—yet as soon as the images began to play it all became very familiar.

Or so I thought. The video, which I watched about twenty minutes of, ostensibly focused on my wife’s nursing and our care of our baby daughter. But it also caught me acting in a peculiar way I never would have remembered on my own. As the tape unfolded, I began to squirm as I watched my younger self in action. My own conduct, faithfully recorded by the camera, alarmed me. It was like being transported back in time and being simultaneously in my body and observing it from afar. I could see the 1986 version of myself confidently doing his thing, but I could also see much more. There, in vivid display, incontrovertibly, I could see myself acting out a destructive pattern of behavior that I was clearly unaware of. I was shocked to see myself acting in this way, taken aback by the level of discomfort I could sense in myself and by the discomfort I was inflicting on those around me. I was clearly anxious, or angry, or anxious
and
angry, but I was also, quite apparently, not in touch with whatever was going on inside me. Nothing about the scene felt familiar as I watched; it was like seeing an alternative version of myself in a parallel universe. If I could have, I would have refused to even recognize it as me.

But there was no mistaking the scene. My wife looked every bit herself, a lovely postpartum glow animating her as she nursed. And I was definitely me, although there was clearly something strange going on. Were it not for the videotape, I doubt I would have ever been able to own this particular aspect of myself. The video gave me access to something that my own defenses had kept out of my conscious mind. It let me witness the way my own trauma spilled out unbeknownst to me, the way it ran through and colored my young daughter’s early life while traumatizing my wife’s entry into motherhood.

After passing the baby back and forth, about five minutes into the recording, my wife took out a little toy that would later come to be an important element in our world. It was called a “wiggle worm,” an eight-inch-long, yellow, stuffed rattle with little green plastic triangles along the breadth of one side. Once, several years later, we left the wiggle worm in a taxi we had taken to the airport, and we had to track it down and retrieve it, an exhausting endeavor that spoke to the wiggle worm’s central importance in all of our lives. This tape marked its first recorded appearance.

I watched as, very tenderly, my wife held the wiggle worm aloft in the gaze of our baby daughter. She had just finished nursing, and her extemporaneous play was redolent of the mother-infant bond. She made the wiggle worm dance and sing, very gracefully, very adroitly, her voice very fine and light. She was incredibly attuned to the baby, who followed her movements carefully with rapt attention, the toy hovering just within her field of awareness. Then, in the next moment, inexplicably and out of the blue, I grabbed the wiggle worm and began shaking it loudly and clumsily in my daughter’s face. “Wiggle worm, wiggle worm!” I cried. Jumping around like a monster, I brandished the thing like a weapon. I was like a caricature of an adolescent big brother stepping on my sister’s precious dolls. In the movie, my daughter looked confused and then scared. What was I doing?

Observing myself on the television, I was aghast. I am often impressed, when I see photographs of myself or see myself on film, by how tense I look. I want to look away. This was a similar feeling, but much more intense. The violence in my actions was hard to take. While I had no recollection of these events, when watching them unfold on the tape, I had some sense of what must have been happening for me when I began to act out my dance. I was vaguely embarrassed by the delicacy of my wife’s treatment of the wiggle worm. She was making it too alive. It was mattering too much. I wanted to make my friends laugh, but I was also, not so subtly, making fun of my wife. Only in retrospect could I see how uncomfortable I must have been with her attention to my daughter, how jealous I might have been, how much I needed to run roughshod over her or claim the attention for myself. And only later could I make a connection between my actions and the nursing that was the ostensible subject of the tape. Seeing my behavior on the screen put me in mind of my anxious dreams on my retreat. In both situations it was as if I were being taken over by something outside my control. It was one thing to try to make sense of it coming up through my dreams and another thing to see it in such prominent and vivid display on film. I felt sorry for my wife and my daughter, both of whom seemed bewildered, and ashamed of myself. And I could see that I was, in the language of psychotherapy,
enacting
something that was completely outside my capacity for reflective self-awareness.

Psychotherapists have long recognized that people color their experience through the prisms of their own particular minds. When this happens in therapy, it is called transference—it becomes the therapist’s job to help patients understand that the ways they are misperceiving the therapist contain clues about early traumas that are being reawakened in the therapeutic relationship. But it is not only in a therapeutic relationship that people are subject to transference; people act out unprocessed emotions all of the time: at work, with their loved ones, even when stuck in traffic or waiting on line at the store. Unresolved trauma waits at the gate of experience, looking for an opportunity to express itself. As I could see in the videotape of myself, however, there is a peculiar quality to this expression. It pours out unbeknownst to the person engaging in the behavior. It is
enacted
with remarkably little self-awareness. Even after the action is completed, one has little idea of what was being expressed. One of the fascinating things about reading the Buddhist scriptures is seeing how this tendency was described twenty-five hundred years ago. Not only did the Buddha act out his dissociated aggression in his ascetic pursuits but, once awakened, he became expert at recognizing and treating this tendency in others, in ways that anticipated the work of today’s most experienced trauma therapists. He became adept at interrupting the unconscious perpetration of trauma from one person to the next.

It is interesting that
sati
, the word the Buddha chose for mindfulness, means “to remember.” In his choice of this word, it is as if he already understood today’s most recent thinking about how trauma encodes itself in the mind and body. While the remembering aspect of mindfulness is usually taken to mean “remembering to be aware of whatever is happening in the moment,” there is another quality to it that relates more directly to the way trauma cleaves to our experience. Re-membering also connotes bringing that which is dissociated back into the self. It can mean rejoining, or becoming cognizant, in the sense of bringing something into consciousness that has been lurking outside awareness. In the case of trauma, this second meaning of remembering is especially relevant.

One of the distinguishing qualities of trauma is that it cannot be held in normal memory. Because the feelings associated with it are by definition unendurable, they never make it into the part of the brain that makes sense of emotional experience. Robert Stolorow describes it this way. Developmental traumas, he says, “derive their lasting significance from the establishment of invariant and relentless principles of organization that remain beyond the influence of reflective self-awareness or of subsequent experience.”
¹
The neural pathways on which these emotional currents run are based in the amygdala, deep in the brain, and they operate outside the influence of conscious thought. They can hijack the mind and blank out awareness, as my reaction to the wiggle worm made clear, so that it feels as if one is suddenly in the grip of something over which one has no control. Stolorow makes an interesting point about the impact of trauma, one that the Buddha’s psychology also supports. Trauma takes us out of time. There is no past or future when one is overtaken by it; it is as if it were happening
now
. “Experiences of trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned through the portkeys supplied by life’s slings and arrows,”
²
he says. The sense of one’s own continuity, of what he calls the “stretching along between past and future,”
³
is collapsed by trauma. The traumatized individual lives outside time, in his or her own separate reality, unable to relate to the consensual reality of others. The remembering quality of mindfulness counters this tendency. It allows the experiences of trauma to come out of their frozen states and back into the warmth of time.

This is why the research on the parent-infant relationship is so relevant. In a good-enough setting, a parent helps her child metabolize feelings over time. She prevents them from becoming traumatic. Through her attention, with her subtle combination of mirroring and irony, she provides comfort and soothing and in the process helps a child know feelings from a place where they can be symbolized. She helps her baby give shape or texture to her emotions, helps make them safe, so that eventually the child can hold them for herself in her mind. In trauma, this process does not occur. Developmental trauma results when the primary caregiver cannot fulfill this function for a child. Other traumas result when a person, or his or her meaningful others, cannot do something similar. Brain scientists, in their efforts to understand memory, have illuminated the probable explanation.

There are at least two kinds of memory: implicit memory and explicit memory. Implicit memory is the kind we use when we learn to ride a bicycle or throw a ball. We do not have to consciously recall anything when we utilize it; it is just there in our bodies ready to be used. This kind of memory is handled in a deep part of the brain, away from the higher cortical centers that manage conceptual thought and conscious awareness. There is behavioral knowledge without conscious recall; the memory is called “procedural” or “sensorimotor.” It is as if it were lodged in the body, outside what we normally think of as the mind. Implicit memory develops naturally before verbally based memory comes into focus. It is the only memory available in the first eighteen months of life and is the foundation not just of motor skills but of learning how to do things with others.
⁴
Much of what we think of as “relational knowing”—joking around, expressing affection, and making friends
⁵
—is based in this kind of memory. We know how to do it without thinking about it. It does not require deliberate attention or verbal processing, yet it is intrinsic to who we are.

Explicit memory, on the other hand, allows for conscious recollection. It is also called “narrative” or “declarative” memory, and is what we normally think of when we talk about remembering something. It is mediated by thought of one kind or another and has a quality of reorganization. Raw experience is sorted out and reformulated and given coherence by the mind. A process of symbolization, of which language is a tool, is employed. When a parent helps a child regulate her anxiety by reflecting back what is happening and making it more tolerable, she is setting the stage for this kind of second-order symbolization, for a flow between the implicit and the narrative. Explicit memory functions through reflective self-awareness—when we have this kind of memory, we know that we are aware. It is accessed through thought, not directly through the body.

Traumatic experiences, it is now understood, are held only in implicit memory. Therapists who work with posttraumatic stress disorder see versions of this all the time. The emotional reactions of fight or flight associated with a specific trauma live on in the bodies of traumatized individuals as if in an eternal present. The traumatic reactions are locked into place, ready for a threat the individual has already seen but not explicitly known. The defense of dissociation cements the memories in place in the part of the brain that normally stores behavioral knowledge. The trauma is never processed by the higher centers of the brain. It leaks out when reminders surface or when one’s guard is down, and it is only accessible through the traces it leaves in the body or in unconscious memory. As Philip Bromberg has written, “What a patient is able to hold and symbolize cognitively versus what he must hold without symbolic processing and must thereby enact is the key issue. What is
there
is going to be registered in some form or other, and some unprocessed aspect of it will be enacted.”
⁶

When I saw myself on the videotape twenty-five years after the fact, I could see that I was enacting some kind of unprocessed aspect of myself. Held in my implicit memory, it was being pulled out of me by something in that particular situation that was bypassing conscious thought. Seeing it all these years later, I could, with some reflection, grasp what might have been going on. My wife’s play with the wiggle worm, in the context of breast-feeding my daughter in the first weeks of her life, was making me uncomfortable. It was hitting me in a place I could not tolerate and making me act out aggressively. Why? Winnicott, with his exquisitely sensitive descriptions of the dynamics of the mother-infant relationship, had an idea. Reading him, I could sense how much my wife’s play with the wiggle worm embodied something I ostensibly valued but was also made anxious by. She was manifesting just that quality of mind that helps a baby navigate emotional experience without becoming traumatized. In witnessing her demonstration of it, my own trauma resurfaced and I enacted it once again.