I carry the trauma of things that I once could not process, that I could not give a place in my experiences until then. And that is still with me as undigested food in my intestines. Unspoken, incomplete, unfinished. Which waits to connect with the rest of my experiences. Parents are there for nourishment, warmth, touch, love. Any other behavior I could not place. Where did that beating fit? No idea.
A collective trauma also lives on in me. Undigested pain in society distorted into collective dissociative behavior. Rituals, learned behavior, so-do-we-do-that-here, lore, label, manners, laws, morals, culture, proverbs, sayings, in our language. Anything that makes me unconsciously not free to respond appropriately in the moment.
Case in point are religions. Who also usually took over things from religions from periods before. Just as the Catholic Church adopted customs from pagan nature beliefs to make it more acceptable to potential “customers. Dissociation upon dissociation. Solution upon solution and anything to avoid feeling certain pain. Covering something with the cloak of love. Everything went from generation to generation. All conceptual, often elusive superhuman concepts.
Thus, language carries our collective trauma within the frames of the words I unconsciously choose, the semantics. In sayings and proverbs. The collective trauma of humanity is interwoven between everything, is the space between all dissociations. Like a great mellee, like an inextricable tangle of wool.
How my survival does not take the original trauma directly visible but the trauma encapsulated by the solution does live on in me.
By removing the solution, the band-aid on the wound, the original pain of the trauma resurfaces and will need to be processed, felt, but now by the adult.
The resolution behavior (visible part of the trauma, the unfelt pain) is her tip of the iceberg. By addressing “unwanted” behavior, behavior that does not fit the current situate or is disproportionately intense to what is happening now, in a cautious way and step by step, knowing that there is pain underneath, the pain can be released in a dosed fashion, aware of what is underneath and aware of the original pain. Without the cautious approach, change is exciting, difficult, and resistance can be intractable. Often too exciting to actually and permanently change. Because we immediately dissociate back into old or other unwanted behaviors, often subtly different but still the same at the core.
10 monkeys in a cage. Ladder in the middle of the cage and above it hangs a banana. So all the monkeys fly up the ladder to grab the banana. Logical! After taking banana a few times. the monkeys all climbing up the ladder are sprayed wet with a fire hose. No fun, then, for the average monkey. So we have to avoid that. Shortly thereafter, some of the monkeys begin to go to the ladder again to grab the tempting banana. But while the first monkeys are on the ladder, all 10 are sprayed wet. This must be prevented! So when a monkey makes an attempt to climb up the ladder, the other monkeys dive on the monkey and forcibly stop it. At least this way all the monkeys stay dry. Now we take 1 monkey out of the cage and place a new monkey in the cage. This monkey doesn’t know anything about spraying wet. Once in the cage, the monkey sees the ladder and banana and makes a move to climb. D other monkeys beat up the newest monkey to avoid getting all wet. And so, one by one, we replace the original 10 monkeys with new monkeys. And the same ritual repeats itself. When all the monkeys are replaced, it remains taboo to go up the ladder while the original cause is unknown. Monkey number 11 is also kept from going up the ladder when no one has witnessed the original event. The moral of the story: ‘This is how we do things around here’
