It’s challenging to get back to the discussion of trauma during a Sonoran super bloom, and when the internet, as always, is ablaze like an amygdala pursued by a grizzly bear. Thus, the amygdala is as good a place to start as any. It is balanced and non-reactive among the songbirds and blossoms of a super bloom. It is activated like an alarm when confronted with a firehose of digital content designed to make it react and signal the limbic system that danger is imminent.
The amygdala is a wad of neurons the size of an almond in the middle of our brains. There are myriad ways in which this little wad of tissue directs our thoughts and behaviors below the line of conscious awareness. It’s at the core of what hijacks rational dialog. Rational dialog, in turn, is necessary for communal witnessing, one of the most crucial components in trauma recovery.
Trauma survivors—be they first responders, military veterans, sexual assault survivors or targets of toxic aggression in childhood—must have communal witnessing to heal. This amounts to community-level acknowledgment of the trauma and weight of its impact, which is profound. It is the death of the pre-traumatic being. The one who may have felt safe in the world, and never will again, possibly for generations to come.
This is why it takes active community acceptance to make a traumatized individual begin to feel safe in the world again—starting with that community.
There’s no becoming un-traumatized. Innocence and the sense of safety are instantly erased in the course of a traumatizing experience. By “innocence,” I mean the carefree mentality of being completely unaware that what has happened can happen. When your house is swallowed by the sea or engulfed by fire, you may have vaguely perceived of the possibility in the abstract, but your brain is incapable of fathoming the experience itself until it occurs. Even then, it will take years—maybe a lifetime—to process the information, through flashbacks, triggers and mourning events.
This trauma will live on in your cells, and certainly in your amygdala. Millions of years of evolution have programmed it to record danger so danger can be avoided in the future. Profound trauma irreversibly changes the human being. This is something non-traumatized individuals continually fail to understand. Barbra Streisand gave a public display of this ignorance recently when she dismissed the experience of two men who opened up about being sexually abused as children by the late Michael Jackson.
It is clear to anyone who has suffered trauma that these two men are traumatized. It is clear that Ms. Streisand is merely ignorant. Not maliciously ignorant, but ignorant in a biologically predisposed and subconscious way. Like many non-traumatized people, she is ignorant about what she is ignorant about, and fear for her sense of safety may be preventing her from learning.
This type of ignorance was illustrated in Edwin Abbott Abbott’s “Flatland,” in which two-dimensional geometric “beings” cannot perceive of three-dimensional geometric beings. This ignorance defines a tribal identity so entrenched that challenging it is considered madness if not heresy. This reactivity is a repeating social dynamic, from the times of Jesus and of Galileo, to the LGBTQ community and our understanding of animals today.
Humans have long had a very hard time comprehending life beyond the limits of our own minds, and we often react in fear (amygdala alert!) when challenged to do so. What does this mean? First, we must understand that we are not nearly as smart or self-aware as we believe ourselves to be. We are all just tiny, fleeting, pin dots of electrified mud in an infinite fabric of an existence we can barely comprehend. The collective knowledge of humankind will go unnoticed by the stars, but this reality can be uncomfortable for the egoic self.
Our egoic-self experience is the one in which we are central to everything in existence. It arises from conditioning and the process of identifying oneself—of forming the identity—the ego. There are countless influences in the formation of one’s ego that can lead to healthy or non-healthy outcomes. An optimal, or healthy, outcome, is one in which the ego is regulated and balanced through co-identification with larger phenomena outside of the self. One example of a healthy outcome is hospice workers, who must necessarily possess an acceptance of death—the ultimate external phenomenon—to be around it so much.
A sub-optimal, or non-healthy, outcome, is identifying entirely with only the ego and very little else. One need look no further than the ubiquitous spoiled celebrity model to see examples of individuals who define the world entirely through the lens of their own needs. The egoic self does not identify with anything beyond the limits of its own thoughts, and is deluded into believing everything it thinks. The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle describes the egoic self this way in his book, “Stillness Speaks:”
“When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with the voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego, a mind-made ‘me.’ That mentally constructed self feels incomplete and precarious. That’s why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces.”
When this egoic self dominates the amygdala, almost all new information about outside or unknown phenomena is processed as threat. So even as much as Ms. Streisand’s remarks were ignorant, they may also have reflected her ego defending itself at a subconscious level. Her mind may not have been able to process the duality of Michael Jackson as both a destructive pedophile and the gentle, childlike person she encountered. Because if we cannot easily see a threat, does that mean everything is a threat? The egoic self scrambles for the safety of the familiar by employing denial.
It is easier for the non-traumatized person to deny the experience of someone else’s trauma than to comprehend it, because when trauma is comprehended, we face the truth that it can happen to any one of us in any moment. It is easier to imagine that that person must have done something wrong. Underneath this type of denial is a moral malignancy that blames the victims. We may even drag God’s will into the justification.
This is because trauma is terrifying. Losing one’s innocence—one’s sense of safety in the world—is terrifying. The idea makes the amygdala light up like a Christmas tree, which steers our thought patterns away from the frontal cortex where they might be tempered. This amygdala-inspired, egoic-self-defense reflex encodes us with fear for what might happen to us. Not what is happening, or what has happened, but what might happen. This is arguably a software bug in human wiring, because what might happen is not imminently dangerous. It is not a grizzly bear at our heels. It is not even a real thing.
Gaining insight about how the amygdala affects our behavior—how it bypasses presence of mind to focus on a nonexistent future threat—can help us gain the wisdom to accept the vastness of what we cannot know about life, and about the lives of others. This acceptance of what we cannot know helps us navigate those future unknowns with greater equanimity. We are more equipped to survive threats intact when we can be at peace with what cannot be known. This can help us to become fully present with people whose traumas are terrifying to us, and to help create the communal witnessing so necessary for healing trauma.
Why is this important? Don’t closed support groups provide sufficient communal witnessing for healing? The simple answer is, no, they do not. Trauma manifests from a wide range of experiences, as I have previously discussed. I have often searched in vain for someone—anyone—who could relate to the type of trauma I have experienced. Others have told me likewise.
Because I am open about my struggle with trauma and depression, countless people have confided in me about their own private struggles. Professionals who grapple with depression. Geniuses who know their way around suicidal ideation. People whose hormone imbalances make them feel they are losing their mind. Parents who fear their child won’t be accepted in a certain school if that child’s depression is acknowledged outside of the family. On and on and on it goes. I have witnessed women sobbing about being sexually abused as children by siblings. About the fathers who regularly drank too much and unpredictably flew into rages. About rapes, loss, rejection, hopelessness, grief and deep isolation.
People bring me these secret hurts because they know that I see their trauma as something that happened to them that they did not deserve. If their hurt is beyond my comprehension—which it always is—I will tell them I cannot know what they must be going through, but I am so very sorry. I am present if they want to say something, or nothing at all. I accept that they are wounded, and do not insist they pretend otherwise.
This is the nature of witnessing. This allows the wounded individual to relax safely in the company of another human being. It is the first step toward recovering one’s sense safety in the world at large. This recovery will proliferate as more people become aware of their own egoic-self defense encoding and learn to be fully present with survivors of trauma. In turn, they will become more resilient should they experience trauma in their unknowable future, because they will not be left feeling utterly alienated from their peers and their communities.
There are 17 types of trauma identified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. No one deserves to be traumatized. If you wish to share your own trauma experience, please e-mail me at DearTraumaLady-at-gmail-dot-com.
Image: MRI coronal view of the amygdala by Amber Rieder, Jenna Traynor, Geoffrey B Hall, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain.