Finding hidden Treasures in Trauma

It seems we all agree that trauma is an essential, inevitable and necessary part of life. But we still have to examine what the purpose of this experience might be and whether it makes a difference if the trauma is minor or major. I do not think that all such experiences can be handled or understood in the same way. While I agree that relatively minor traumas can be integrated into our normal functioning, I think that major trauma can only be properly met by allowing for the sea change it produces and represents.

This is equally true in the biological sense. If we suffer an injury or a bacterial or viral attack on our physical integrity our bodies absorb the invading organisms by making antibodies against them and repairing the wounds. That is a form of integration of trauma. But when our body is hit severely enough to become completely incapacitated integration and healing are not the end of the matter. When working with people who have lost limbs or who are paralysed or in locked- in syndrome integration of the trauma is not sufficient and indeed impossible: a re-arrangement of their entire existence has to be engaged with. The original injury will continuously throw up new challenges and these cannot just be absorbed. They require a new attitude of readiness for the conflicts and contradictions that will continue to emerge ever after. For there will not be an end to it. The person will not come back home to the safety they had come to expect. Their only way forward is to learn to live with openness to this new state of affairs. They have to learn to live in the abyss, or as is more often the case, to learn to span the abyss whilst establishing some safety elsewhere. In some cases they will learn to go between this safety and the abyss on a regular basis and acquire the strength and the courage to live with this. But the people I have known to be most effective at transcending trauma are those who have managed to live by shooting down new roots into the abyss itself, or who have learnt to create what I have come to think of as ‘air-roots’.  Being rooted in the abyss is to draw strength from the very trauma that nearly killed you. Drawing from air roots is to get purpose from an overriding goal that makes sense of the experience itself and employs it to good effect.

I have found this powerfully the case when working with people with war trauma, especially with refugees, who realize that there is no way to integrate the experience or to find an entirely safe home ever again. They have to be prepared to live with the insecurity and the knowledge of the possibility of the end of all safety. They can neither forget or accept or integrate this. People around them may find this tedious or upsetting but that is just how it is.  If you cannot return to your home country because you would be killed if you did and if you have to live in a country where you never feel settled and you are revisited by memories of persecution and the slaughter of your entire family, the very basis of your life becomes tenuous.  The visceral awareness of the human capacity for cruelty is one example of something you can never forget or integrate, ever. People with such experiences do not want to let go and forget. They want to hang on to what they have seen, learn to face up to it, get strong enough to effectively oppose it and go beyond it. This is not about therapeutic soothing. This is about learning from experience and in action. I aim to enable people in that situation to stand strong and face the abyss. I teach them to learn to live dialectically towards transcendence. This means understanding how human existence works in reality and make the most of it. It means to face down with them the conflicts, the pain and the horrors they have witnessed and help them to value their suffering. The only way beyond it is to not forget and work towards contributing to a better and safer world. Transcendence by action, I call that.  Frankl’s contribution to such work was enormous. He understood that we have to find meaning in trauma and that human challenge born bravely leads to greater human capacity. This is how our consciousness evolves. In becoming thus called to the awareness of the abyss we can only ever find peace as long as we remain dedicated to understanding how to live with it. Peace is found in doing something about it and also in living in fellowship with others who have experienced the same kinds of hurt and who are equally prepared to remain aware of it. I believe people who have become familiar with the abyss and who have learnt to accept they will always live with the knowledge of that darkness, are stronger in body and mind than they were beforehand.

From an evolutionary perspective emotional trauma takes us to a different plane. It is not just about losing our safety or being injured or infected. It is, and here I agree with you both, about being broken apart, about losing our integrity of being and becoming homeless in the world. But remember that this is the beginning of truth: Unheimlichkeit, not being at home, being ill at ease, is a primary experience of human being. We are on the way to truth as we feel thrown into the abyss of being and become acutely aware of the possible end of all that we know and value, including our self, our love and life itself. Emotional trauma exposes us to nothingness and to negativity and introduces a dimension of existence that is normally hidden.  It is as if the veil is lifted.  To live with that is a huge challenge and the temptation is always to draw the veil back over the wounds. My only way of getting a grip of what is required of us as existential therapists is to use the Socratic, Hegelian and Sartrian models of dialectics.  In evolutionary terms I think this is exactly the human challenge: to span the opposition between being and nothingness and to find a way to transcend it, which means to include both opposites without integrating them. It is in holding the opposites that we transcend.  What we do is to build on their synthesis, spanning the tensions as much as we can, holding open the paradox instead of prematurely foreclosing it.  As I said before, I do think that integration is part of the process of integration of small traumas, but in relation to life changing threats that make us homeless we need a lot more than that! When I speak of the dialectic of transcendence I do not speak of ‘getting over’ but of rising above the experience so as to be able to place it into a wider perspective so that we can re-collect it, explore it and see its context, history and future possibilities. It is to make good on the invitation fate has extended to us to visit such wider dimensions of reality.

In that process people learn to treasure their trauma. They do not want to let it go and waste it. They want to hold on to it and own it. They want to learn the lessons of it and pass these on to others. The dialectic of transcendence is about drawing truth from trauma, realizing that the deep truths of the abyss are well worth having and that we can build on those foundations more surely than on any surface. If you are interested in finding out how I do this in practice, you might enjoy reading my long case illustration in the second edition of my book Everyday Mysteries (Routledge 2010).