“If there are supernormal powers, it is through the cracked and fragmented self that they enter.” William James.
Trauma and
depression are everywhere – former soldiers struggling to cope in civilian life
and often not succeeding, child abuse survivors speaking of their pain, war
refugee and torture victims. The damage inflicted can be lifelong, leading to
drink and drug addiction to dull the anguish, and suicide when it all gets too
much. Not for nothing is it called the ‘black
hole of trauma’ into which the personality, shattered under intolerable pressure,
falls.
What William James
and Carl Jung discovered many moons ago, though until recently it was never
accepted in the mainstream, was that experiences that threaten to ‘break’ us can
also ‘open us’ to another dimension of experience. Light comes through the
broken places.
Soul is not a word in
common currency nowadays outside of churches but is the best way of describing
what can emerge from catastrophic damage and is a pathway to healing. Not necessarily a come-to-Jesus moment, it can
be Buddhist, Shamanic, contact with a spirit guide, a mystical connection with
nature or animals. Many individual paths to one goal.
Men, especially in
the military, are resistant to talking about feelings but one PTSD specialist
found that even the most taciturn soldiers open up when she says: “Tell me
about your soul.”
In our tattered,
torn and splintered world, with organized religion having less and less relevance,
there is a desperate need to reach out for a deeper meaning and purpose than
the nuts ‘n bolt slog of everyday living can offer. Rising suicide rates point
to a deep social and existential malaise which begs for profoundly new approach
which can offer hope beyond a narrow experience of a miserable life. And as
Donald Kalsched points out in Trauma and Soul ‘Ironically trauma survivors are
in a unique position to claim this larger vision because they are forced
prematurely into “ non-ordinary reality.”
Which isn’t to
downplay the misery and torment victims suffer and not all make it through. But
those who do may become unwitting trailblazers into a more spiritual realm and
a wider world that we’ve lost connection with. With the rise and arrogance of science,
what is acceptable as ‘known’ is only what can be measured and replicated. Which
effectively amputates what lies beyond reality and rational dissection, a
region that often carries a greater truth and resonance.
Treatments for
trauma and PTSD now include bodywork as more becomes known about how memories are
imprinted in the biochemical and glandular systems, and alter the brain’s functioning.
Standard therapy that tries to alter ways of thinking can’t be effective if the
body is grimly hanging on to the experience. This paradoxically opens up a radically new approach
to mind body interaction in a way that modern medicine has lamentably failed to
do.
Who’d have thought
that unbearable horror would lead the way towards a deeper understanding of the
links between mind, body and spirit? Three centuries of rationalism have split
us asunder, elevating thought above feeling, sensation and intuition, as if a human
being was a computerised robot. ‘I think therefore I am’ has outlived its time.
The pendulum is starting to swing for the oddest of reasons as trauma therapists,
neuroscientists, bodyworkers and spiritual practitioners come together in an extraordinary
alliance.
Shakespeare’s ‘There
are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
philosophy’ may be coming back round to its moment.
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