Wisdom is Born of Emotional Trauma
When I was growing up in the nineties, there was never a whisper of trauma, or healing, or integrating. One functioned more or less beneath the shadows of the psyche, compensating for the stress of such a life with various vices—alcoholism, money hunger, lusts, etc. That’s what I witnessed as a child in my parents and absorbed. When I was seventeen, though I was not conscious of it at the time, I chose to go deeper into the shadows of my psyche rather than ‘out into the world.’ I had no boundaries and that was one reason I felt too sensitive to try my luck at any vocation—it was only in the underneath world I seemed to have any talent. I could, by locking eyes with someone, make them erupt with deep feelings, and then I’d find myself in the mystical realm of my joy. Also, I was armed with something—my saving grace—the only plateau I ever had as a child in a sea of lineage, subliminal influences, and parental misguidance—the written word. I had been writing stories, grappling with the mystery of my desires and my consciousness since before puberty. I was armed with my journal and this daily practice of pouring my soul into it when I decided to follow the twisted road of the unconscious. It was because of this armor that I did what others would call unconscionable, signing up for immense college loans when I didn’t even show up to class, betraying friendships, sleeping with enemies, friends’ boyfriends, and dangerous men, living willingly in poverty and in hoods, getting into different drugs, eventually heroin, flying to different countries with my college loan money only to walk around, searching for symbols. The things people protect by acting proper seemed empty to me—the acquisition of money, societal roles. Even family and friendship, even love, I felt betrayed by everything. My parents had seemingly had it all, financial security, a marriage, but underneath they weren’t happy people, they weren’t pretty either—with worn out, desensitized bodies. Then it came to a gruesome end, my father’s abandonment, my mother’s painful death, a hodge-podge of kodak photos, a jar of coins for a vacation never cashed. I had grilled my mother at fourteen—she knew nothing about death, sexual bliss, ascendance, transformation, she only had a deceptively safe place to read romance novels and drink white wine. But her death changed all that for me. She had never been safe. Somehow I knew even before all that came to a crisis—she had nothing to teach me. I didn’t believe in anything she or my father stood for, so I was a rogue youth, with no morals and no boundaries. My body was open to laceration and abuse. I wanted to wear my pain, and be my pain (there’s a Scorpio for you) but ultimately, secretly, and deep in my unconscious, I didn’t want to stay that way. I wanted to transcend, and I wanted to know real joy.
When I was twelve or thirteen I began to feel riddled with pain that had no explanation. I didn’t feel safe in my body. I was bothered by nervous ticks, I was often sick to my stomach, overcome with anxiety, knocked in the head by rage—as a teenager I bathed in the inner hot spring of my own rage. It kept my parents from coming too close to me, from teasing me with the false hopes and false knowledge they’d fed themselves with, which their parents had fed them with. I didn’t even let friends come too near, and I had no early lovers—I was a voracious reader and an exploratory writer. I had these tools for life, and they sufficed until the agony became so extreme that I ended my hermeticism, and 180ed into a realm of extreme experimentalism. At first I could only experience joy through outside stimulus—sex, drugs, eventually love, and many many years afterwards I found it with no stimulus in my own self, finally achieving what I set out to do, though I had nothing external to show for it, no elevated position, no mortgage, or savings, or diploma. It was a solitary inner feat, unrecognized but by myself— the buried treasure of having delved for so long deep in the underground of my psyche.
Interestingly, there is never an end to emotional trauma. One epiphany doesn’t cut it. We see the longest shadow on the brightest days. The deeper and deeper I traveled the road of my pain, abandoning basic security and protection for myself by the wayside, the more profound of a shock I needed to electrocute myself back into the arms of my bliss. The unconscious did this for me as it was clear I couldn’t do it on my own—leading me into the arms of men who had the key to my trauma without me speaking it, who unlocked all the deeply buried joy I had so repressed. But there could be no lasting relationship, for me, without having come to the holy grail I set out to find—my own joy. Having mistakenly hinged on someone else for joy, I was doomed to aloneness again and again. The relationships always failed spectacularly, and my depression and hopelessness afterwards was so deep and the tracks of laceration I was used to taking so engraved that, starved for joy, the cycle would just repeat.
We can’t have the ecstasy without the agony. There is no joy without integration of the shadow self. There might be joy hinged on other people or substances but that never lasts. Or there might be a kind of numbed pleasure, but I don’t think that’s any different than what my father felt in front of the television at night drinking gimlets, or my mother as she read her romance novels in the summer evenings—escapism teaches much too, but that’s not joy. Joy is very of the body, joy is when the synapses that have come to alertness through trauma begin to fire in a harmonious way. This doesn’t happen without first experiencing disjointedness, pain, rage, deep deep sorrow. In Tarot the card of sorrow, the three of swords, is analogous to Binah, the third sephiroth on the tree of life in kabbalism, basically the symbol of the ocean itself, the trough of humility, what makes us all human. We cannot love without knowing this ocean of the body of our own sorrow, and having swum in it. It is through intimacy with our own pain, our shadows, and the underneath world that joy gets unlocked.
The way I unlocked my joy without any stimulus was when I found a rock to wedge in between the deep cyclical unconscious patterns. I was really down, I felt on the brink of death—I had lost all my weight, was sick to my stomach, my yoni shut off, I could not eat, my lover was gaslighting me, and at that deep deep down bottom I had a vision. It was a light, and in that light I saw my mother’s face. A wash of memories I had disassociated from or had no previous consciousness of came over me. I was able to accurately conceptualize her—her chronic romanticism, and confusion over worth and sexuality that got projected onto me, the lack of acknowledgment when I grew into a woman, so that I never knew what it was to be seen and loved. How asleep my mother always was. But by coming into consciousness of these memories, I got to be the one who saw, the one who acknowledged, I remembered back to my fourteen year old self bleeding for the first time and I showered her with the joy I was never given. I met my most innocent self and felt a deep fierce love for her. For the girl who clearly became sexually vulnerable and emotionally unhinged because of the lack of emotionalism I experienced between my parents and their ‘soma’-like lifestyle, why I think I was born a Scorpio with Venus and Pluto rising, but my Moon at a hard angle so I could have no peace. Yet my joy, my own joy in this life, is so tightly wound up with these traumas that there is really no distance and no difference. What I respect most in myself draws from trauma, what I love most about myself seems to have derived out of the mists of trauma. One seems not to exist without the other. Because of my path I know wisdom, I have equanimity, I have access to the secret of all secrets, spontaneous joy, abundant within myself, freely accessed, and protected. I had to uncover what my mother did to my innocent self, and my father too, beneath the muck of so many years, and unlock an early state where joy should have been bestowed upon me and shared with me but was not, dismiss that old rage, stem the blood that ignited all these endless cycles, to finally access joy on my own.
Once I discovered I was innocent, the relationship I was in dissolved away, and while my children were sleeping or at school, I began to sit with myself. Talk with myself. I showed love to my body, and ritualized care for myself. I gave recognition to the beginning and the close of each day. I was sick too and I gently attended to myself—using herbs sure, but mostly just being present and showing myself love and patience. At first joy began to break in upon me through wrenching tears, through a pain that made me feel nearly suicidal; occasionally I’d feel joy like the break of a wave. And then I’d cry, because it was the person in pain who deserved the joy. It wasn’t like I was going to be saved and she left behind. No, the person in pain finds it, the person in pain is transcended. The person who is one with his or her trauma and lives with it and shows up for the sunrises and sunsets shows up too for the moment of joy. It’s worth navigating the days for, and going through slowly, because joy is found in slow and present motions. Of course joy was always available to be accessed for me in the eternal present but I could not access it because of how deeply tunneled in I was, like the man in Edgar Allen Poe’s story deep in the walls, his screams muffled—or the heart beneath the floorboards—at this time I often dreamt I had murdered someone and buried him beneath the floorboards of an attic and I was guilty and waiting to be discovered. But it was what I had been doing to myself, as it turned out. When I came into bodily awareness through this epiphany, the dreams stopped.
It was that vision of my mother which helped me to detach myself from her, and bring into consciousness the psychological and physiological responses I had begun in reaction to her, because of her, or while in the skirts of her shadow. They’re not over, I still deal with them, but at least I’m aware now and that awareness is always present. As I said, I’m a Scorpio—and I believe that the Scorpio loves so deep because they love both the shadow and the light of people, which makes them very vulnerable to the unintegrated shadow and its drastic expressions. For a person unconscious of their shadow must express it one way or another, and Scorpios are good with their enscorscelling language that delights in picking at scabs at bringing all that to the surface for other people. Was maybe one reason so many traumatized men found me.
Loving one’s self is possible after the darkest of misdeeds, the deepest of self-hurts, the deepest of wounds given to another person. But deep exploration must be done in the underworld of your own self. It’s why the hero must first go down into the depths, it’s why Persephone descends before spring comes, why the unconscious rules over the consciousness, why the girl whose father cut off her hands wanders homeless before her hands grow back. Exile, the underworld, these are all related states to becoming conscious of one’s particular legacy of pain. It is that legacy, wrung free of blood and tears and brought to life, which unlocks joy in the body. For once everything is laid bare, and the cycles wrenched to a stop with a rock of consciousness, then we can do this lovely little ritual called washing one’s self clean of shame and wearing the clothes of the most exalted self. It is a long road, too, that, and it’s interesting how few people have read the Paradiso as compared to the Inferno, but wokeness feels better because at least joy can be found along the way.