SUPPRESSION
The human organism is a biological marvel and can adapt to both physical and psychological pain. Its power comes to full play when the pain is not hidden in the mist of our minds, when the pain is not constantly restimulated by the inner effort to get away from it.
We don’t see trauma because it likes to hide. We can’t simply point the finger at it and see where it is. Trauma works best running below the surface of our conscious mind. From there it prevents us from seeing the inner changes it makes. Inner changes that run deeper than you probably would imagine. Trauma creates conflict and eventually a distorted view about who we think we are — you are not the same person as you used to be. The change you’ve gone through and the persisting insecurity you might feel can create confusion. Confusion about identity, confusion about what you think you deserve and the things you think you are capable of.
In long term exposure to traumatic experiences you’ve been living for too long in a traumatic state and its chronic stress. It has become the new “normal” and trauma grew deep in your being without you really noticing it. Trauma hides itself best through repression and when it shows itself, when it boils up to the surface, you won’t recognise it as such, but will ignore it and suppress it again. In repression you deny. You put your experience, your anger, negative thoughts, and your shame, back in the dark basement of your mind where it can grow bigger. Bigger and stronger with more foliage. And while this continues you haven’t got a clue it is driving your daily behaviour. From that very same basement it sets out the course of your daily thinking and actions.
What has happened to the individual- and collective refugee mind is madness, is unnatural. Human biology, human design, has built in capacities for survival and fear responses but when things of sheer absurdity happen, the biology–the bodymind system as a whole–gets confused. Especially when there is too much of a thinking mind involved that lives in the past or future and thus denying what happens now.
In our thinking our minds tend to repeat and get reminded too often of anything related to the traumatic events. Our coping mechanism gets messed up and our being wants to get away from the psychological pains and distress. As a result there is conflict between what is and what we want. We want to get away from reality, away from the confrontation. This behaviour doesn’t serve the adaptive forces of our miraculous biology. Hence you suppress the inner chaos; you simply lack the internal coping mechanisms with a mind that wants to “forget”.
To get away from it, to forget, with a mind that lacks understanding, substitute explanations and coping mechanisms may arise. That’s how the mind works; it creates personalized “solutions”. Apparantly there seems to be no other way but to substitute. You need to get away from those thoughts and feelings, you need to regulate these emotions in a way that takes away these feelings. You don’t want to be confronted, instead you want to avoid it! Of course you want to avoid it and thus you might engage in totally different thinking, behaviour or sometimes even dangerous and self hurting activities.
To give an idea of how things can play out in real life, it could be that your inability to respond to the traumatic event results in reacting to other things as if these are catastrophes. The mind then simply avoids and redirects its attention to what is supposedly important. It is a form of projection and as a result the inner volcano might burst when it’s totally unnecessary. All of a sudden there are many things, small reasons, you react to and get stressed about. In these cases you may feel sudden anger, fear, panic or stress that release tension, that substitute reaction to the initial traumatic event. And by doing so you might blame it on the people around you who have evoked that small vulcano eruption. As a consequence of your blame and problems with people, you might shut yourself down as a form of protection. You then stop interacting with others, maybe with people you care for, and isolate yourself which eventually only empowers the trauma.
Compensate
Because we blame ourselves and put ourselves down we sometimes attack others. We get angry and react fiercely as a form of compensation, to make us feel better and compensate for the inferiority / pain that is present on a deeper level. Finally we can feel in control for a change (at least that’s how it feels for a moment). What runs parallel to this kind of behaviour is to take high risks or cut oneself. You then project it on a different place, you put the pain somewhere else, somewhere physical, somewhere where it is more grass, more concrete. Some place where you can actually feel it physically instead of the foggyness in the mind. It regulates the emotional feelings, it gives relief (or it distracts) from the mental pain, from the guilt, shame or whatever you are feeling. Or maybe you just want to punish yourself because in the story of the mind you couldn’t prevent it, you are to blame for what happened. The reason is not always easy to find, remember that the reasons are not always clear cut, not the same for every person.
Obviously any traumatised human being needs some sort of relief or explanation about what happened. Moving away from pain, from reality, makes sense. You don’t want to experience that pain now. You move away from present awareness about how and what you feel. Instead you move into distractions and thought patterns about past and future. But even if it soothes, it remains a substitute and it doesn’t solve what is really happening inside of you. Hence the overall effort in this course to bring it to your conscious mind, to create gradual awareness and to work towards a broader (helicopter) view of what goes on inside of you. Understanding is key! Your intrinsic intelligence can deal with so much more when understanding is there. It is simply too difficult–without awareness–to see what is happening in your being. Besides that, and this is essential, the more you want to get away from trauma, the stronger it becomes, the more tension it creates, and the more inner seperation you will experience.
In our growing awareness we create more understanding.
Understanding will make sense, will create acceptance that comes from within.