Trauma is devastating. A person is never the same before and after a trauma. Many people wish they could go back before it happened but unfortunately that’s not possible. Accepting this difficult reality requires grieving the loss of what was.
Likewise in society now, there's no going back to “normal”.
A lot of people want to go back to how things were before 2020. But we can’t go back to before the trauma happened. The trauma is already drilling deep into the souls of individuals and humanity, even if the denial is still blocking the awareness of it for many people.
We will have a lot of grieving to do. Many of us have already been in this process for the last couple years, facing reality and seeing the trajectory of where this is going step by step. Even if it all ended tomorrow, we will never be the same, as individuals or society, and yet this isn't necessarily the worst thing.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
~Rumi
Trauma and wounding come in many forms. Sometimes it’s through spontaneous catastrophe and other times it’s due to the evil acts that other people inflict upon us. These painful experiences serve as a spiritual initiation, and one that wouldn’t be possible without the intervention of the trauma.
We can't change what happened in the past. There is often no real sense of earthly justice after a trauma occurs. What we can do is make the best of what happened and use it as an opportunity for growth and expansion of consciousness.
We can transmute the painful experiences into valuable lessons and purpose.
Trauma is devastating and destructive. It's also awakening, like a lightening bolt. It's the ultimate red pill because it catapults you out of your mundane grind and limited vision, forcing you to see yourself, others and life differently. This gift of new perspective provides the raw potential of a new future.
Potential is the key word. It’s not a given. It depends entirely on what we do with it.
Trauma is a powerful force that can drown a person in sorrow and pain if they are unable to transmute that power instead of being consumed by it.
Trauma puts you in contact with the unconscious. It forces you to face the shadows, the darkness, the wounds that were cut deep into your soul. This is also the place where your power is hidden and waiting, not yet actualized.
The process of making the unconscious, conscious awakens the fire of the human spirit.
A new sense of meaning and purpose is born from the ashes.
When we are unaware of the hidden potential in trauma, we can get caught in a repetition of unhealthy behaviors struggling to numb or escape the pain but instead getting the same painful results, and often even digging a deeper hole.
This painful and impotent frustration can lead people into self-destructive habits like addiction.
Addiction is the masking of the pain.
That's what often happens to trauma survivors who haven't resolved the trauma. The addiction creates a feeling that numbs the pain. The person isn’t usually addicted to the substance or behavior, but rather the feeling they get from indulging in the addiction. That feeling is a welcome distraction from the pain.
It’s important to ask, where is the pain coming from?
Pain is rarely random. It usually has a message from the personal subconscious and a line of communication to the greater collective unconscious. If you reflect on a pain that you have, or had (whether physical, emotional or spiritual), maybe you can relate to the desperation of wanting to make it go away.
It’s normal to want to avoid pain. It’s not fun at all. But the problem is that we can’t move beyond it without going through it, without piercing the very center of it. If we want to heal the pain, it can’t be circumvented and any so-called pain-killer will only bring fleeting relief.
The unhealed wounds distort our perception and navigation through life.
We often don’t see our wounds because they are hidden in the shadows. What we do see are the behavioral patterns that we have adopted as defense mechanisms in order to protect ourselves from feeling that pain.
So if you want to track your wounds, you can start by noticing your particular defense mechanisms that play out in your relationships with others.
You might recognize some of these through introspection by observing yourself in solitude, reflecting on your actions and the role you typically play in relationships. You’ll likely find that these defense mechanisms show up when you interact with others. These dynamics will be most visible in your intimate relationships but also present in your friendships and work relationships to some degree. Yet you can also notice the same dynamics when you interact with people at the grocery, at a coffeehouse or any other random life situation with strangers.
Our relationships often provide us opportunities for new perception, where we can see ourselves through the mirror of the other.
The challenge is that our defense mechanisms often have a Fort Knox level of lockdown protection, with layers of built-in security features (ie: rationalization, normalization, minimization, denial, repression, etc.), making it difficult to become aware of them.
The hurt and scared parts of the soul have clever ways of hiding and evading detection.
These are the parts of you that developed in an attempt to survive difficult and painful life experiences. They become a false sense of security. They’re trying to protect you from getting hurt again, yet at the same time, they’re holding you back from thriving and feeling connected to self, others and life in general.
It requires a LOT of energy for the nervous system to keep the wounds and pain repressed, suppressed or hidden from our awareness.
When you find yourself utterly exhausted, it’s probably because you’re working overtime trying to keep yourself from feeling the pain or acknowledging the wounds.
A part of the exhaustion could be due to a toxic relationship or life situation. What you might notice is that you’ll feel significantly better after ending those relationships and exiting those situations, yet the exhaustion persists. This is because the inner transmutation work is yet to be done. A source of the re-wounding may have been removed, yet the earlier life wound is still there, unresolved and aggravated by the compounding of new trauma.
I want to encourage you to explore the pain instead of avoiding it.
Unfortunately your personal pain is not going to go away until you deal with it. The same is true for us as a collective society, living in the pain that our species has carried for centuries and millennia.
The longer it goes on, the deeper hole we could be digging for ourselves and future generations. When the pain doesn’t get resolved, it gets passed down the generational lineage.
Unresolved pain becomes the next generation’s burden.
It is our responsibility to resolve our pain if we don’t want to leave that legacy.
It’s not all darkness though. And it’s definitely not about a punishment.
The purpose of the pain is to force us to look deeper, to contact the parts of ourselves that we haven’t discovered yet, and are vital to connect with, in order to cultivate a sense of passion, meaning and purpose in life. We don’t really feel alive until we start transmuting the pain that’s weighing us down and keeping us trapped.
"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding."
~Kahlil Gibran
When we resist the pain and stay stuck in our defense mechanisms, we exhaust ourselves and find constant obstacles and roadblocks, suffering countless more disappointments and devastations. Until we face the darkness with the courage and grit required to make it through and out the other side, no matter how hard we try, it will seem like we keep getting set back and feel unable to move forward in life.
People can get stuck in states of learned helplessness and total despair where they feel like there's no way out. In that place, it feels impossible to summon the amount of energy required for escape velocity.
This is how people fall into patterns of self-destruction.
We are seeing that in society now. The longer this goes on, the worse it’s getting. Addictions are skyrocketing, as are overdoses and suicides.
Over time, the abuse causes learned helplessness. Another description of this state is debility dependency and dread, a form of psychological torture that has been studied and used by nefarious agencies around the world for decades, in order to break down a target.
The self-destructive behavior is a form of acting-in the pain and helplessness.
Sometimes people internalize the pain by hurting themselves. Other times people act out the pain and transfer it to others.
This energy also bleeds into the destruction of relationships where the pain gets acted out toward another person or group of people. Notice how the narrative in the mainstream media provokes people’s legitimate pain, then provides them with a declared enemy toward whom they can channel all their rage.
In relationships, the pain causes a disrupted connection when the defense mechanisms are triggered without the person’s awareness. For example, a person triggered into defensiveness might unknowingly create walls and distance to keep others away, or even feel a generalized sense of distrust and hostility toward the other, making a connection impossible.
Most people have lost family members, friends, clients and subscribers during the last couple years as we have been subjected to ongoing psychological torture as a society. Some of these parting ways were probably big surprises. We might wish that all this never happened so we could go back to how it was. While it’s very sad to have to mourn these losses, this isn’t actually all bad.
We are in a process of filtration, sorting out those who don’t share our core values and desire to heal and grow, those who don’t really have our back when it most matters, and those who try to pull us down so they can feel better. It’s best to discover that sooner than later.
We are each discovering who our real crew is. This wasn’t as easy to see before we got 2020 vision.
Our sense of social connection is being stressed and pressured to the breaking point.
If we lack the self-awareness, humility or tools to do the inner healing work, then we will find it very difficult to feel connected because there’s an intangible obstacle between our heart and the heart of others. If we are unable to discern the people who belong close and not, then we will keep attempting to make impossible or otherwise unhealthy connections.
Our ability to relate and connect with one another is being targeted by the divide and conquer tactic as well as the effects of social isolation caused by the trauma.
The divide and conquer tactic must be used to keep people unable to unite. Otherwise the abusers and tyrants would have no power. They would be outnumbered if everyone would ban together. The same dynamic happens in an abusive family as it does in society at large. People are isolated and pitted against one another.
What I’ve realized through personal experiences, and hearing the stories of hundreds of people, is that the divide and conquer tactic only works when those aren’t the right connections. People who are truly connected based on something real, cannot be driven apart by any earthly forces or even the insidious voice of the Evil One.
Before 2020, most people already had prior traumas that haven’t been resolved. The recent additional traumas of increased isolation (social distancing, lockdowns and fear of the other) as well as triangulation (pitting people against each other in the Divide and Conquer game) are disrupting the innate human drive for spontaneous social behavior.
Of course there are many additional layers of trauma taking place, and that stress, even though it may appear more indirect, is also affecting our relationships social connection.
Unfortunately the unresolved childhood trauma added to the recent traumas caused by public health policies and the way it’s all spun in the media, trapped a lot of people in the narrative.
When we transform our own unhealthy patterns, that changes our life experience as well as our relational dynamics with others.
Not everyone will respond positively to our internal changes, in fact sometimes it’s just the opposite. The amazing thing though, is that as we grow, heal and transform ourselves, we have a much easier time connecting with others who also want to connect in healthy ways.
Some people ask, does everybody have trauma?
I think so. I don't think that we get through life without some degree of trauma, and for most of us, this started in childhood.
We are born into this trauma-based world. For some, the experiences of trauma may be more severe than others. Even the process of birth can be traumatic. Stanislav Grof’s work in perinatal matrices is fascinating on this topic.
During the very early months of a person's life, there's an emotional attachment that needs to happen between the baby and the mother. It's called co-regulation. The baby needs to feel the mother feeling the baby, I feel you feeling me. If this reciprocal presence doesn’t happen, the baby’s nervous system will be programmed to feel unsafe.
Mammals need to be able to connect with other mammals. We need to touch each other. We need to look each other in the eyes and see cues of safety in each other’s faces.
When a baby feels the mother feeling the baby, a secure attachment forms. That creates a programming in the nervous system which allows the baby to feel safe.
I don't think I've ever met anybody who has one of those secure emotional attachments. I think there are different degrees of trauma that can happen in that process, from the more subtle to the more severe, and this becomes our early life programming, which then influences our ability to connect with others and feel safe.
During the early months of life when a baby gets this neurological programming, anything could be happening with the mother that prevents her from creating a sense of safety for her baby.
Nowadays the most obvious disruption of this process would be a mother on her phone or other device instead of really connecting with her child. A baby’s nervous system can sense the disconnection and lack of presence.
The mother might have a physical disease or a mental illness.
She might be distracted in an abusive relationship, care-taking an abuser and living in a state of anxiety and dissociation.
She might have her own unresolved trauma from childhood that prevents her from fully connecting with her infant through the pain.
She might be struggling in poverty or trying to survive in a war-torn area.
She might have a personality disorder and an inability to form an emotional bond with her child.
In those cases, the infant gets programmed to feel unsafe. And so the child grows up and goes through life into adulthood with that same unsafe programming in the nervous system, which then plays out mostly in relational dynamics.
The early life programming is never going to be perfect because we're human beings. But the amazing thing is when we consciously choose to end the legacy of pain and trauma instead of passing it forward, when we decide to heal ourselves and do better than what we were given, something wonderful happens.
Not everyone will feel that inner calling to do better than the generations that came before.
A conscious ability to recognize the transgenerational trauma and the desire to do better must emerge from the person’s subconscious into their conscious mind. Not everybody has that realization. I’m not sure what forces of nature are required for such an understanding and drive to do better.
Sometimes people look at their parents and ancestors wondering how they couldn’t see that.
It was hard to see because that was their neurological programing. It’s hard for all of us to see our stuff. Perhaps what’s required for this breakthrough is some kind of awakening of the tenacity of the human spirit.
If a person grew up in a house where there was abuse, alcoholism, addictions or other traumas, that childhood template becomes the programming of the nervous system.
The dynamics could be much more subtle, like growing up in a family with more than a few children and struggling to get attention or needs met, or having a parent whose form of love was emotionally overbearing and suffocating.
There’s always some kind of childhood template, and it’s usually based on some form of dysfunction, with certain cases being much more severe than others. Regardless of the severity of the dysfunction, as a person goes through life, they will unconsciously seek the same unhealthy dynamic, while the nervous system recognizes it as love and home.
This isn’t a conscious decision. It's more like a neurological betrayal.
This also has nothing to do with the intellect or level of education. It’s coming from the more primal parts of the brain and neurological programming.
If we haven't become conscious of that automated programming, then we haven't taken it out of the darkness and into the light of awareness.
Until we become aware of our personal trauma and do the work to heal ourselves from it, we will end up repeating it as we pass it on to the next generation. That becomes the transgenerational trauma and the legacy of pain.
When we have unresolved childhood traumas, that can cause us to accept these same dynamics in other people as adults, or even from our own government.
If these are the things we're used to from our childhood, then we might not even notice it coming from public figures. The government is like a representation of the original authority figures, mommy and daddy.
If a person has unresolved childhood trauma, it’s like they’re locked into a childlike state, even as an adult. On top of that is the social engineering that has intentionally been infantilizing people for decades through advertising, media, education and entertainment.
When a person is infantilized, they're like a powerless child. That makes them feel like a blameless victim who needs someone else to tell them what to do or to rescue them from their life. This creates a debilitation of character and dependency on authority, which forms a compliant, obedient, apathetic, disempowered slave in society.
Healing our personal traumas as well as our abusive relationship with the government starts by taking self-responsibility.
Self-responsibility isn't just an idea. It's a commitment to a practice in every moment. It's about the choices we make to take responsibility for ourselves.
Self-responsibility is our empowerment.
The other alternative is to remain in the infantilized victim powerless slave state. If we don't take responsibility over our life and our choices, then we will let other people make those decisions for us, leading us to exactly where they want us and not where we want to go.
We are living through a pivotal moment in human history, a calling to face the hurt and scared parts of the individual and collective soul. Where we go from here is up to us and the choices we make.
We have two options: to awaken or not.
The awakening, initiated by trauma, is just the beginning.
After that, we must take action to align our inner self and our life choices with the new perspectives of higher consciousness. This is the process of integrating the trauma.
Otherwise, we run the risk of falling back asleep in order to avoid the unresolved pain and grief that we must move through in order to create new possibilities and a world we actually want to live in.
Our individual choices and contributions become the collective movement forward of society.