Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. The fundamental issue in resolving traumatic stress is to restore the proper balance between the rational and emotional brains, so that you can feel in charge of how you respond and how you conduct life. When we are triggered into states of hyper- or hypoarousal, we are pushed outside our window of tolerance—the range of optimal functioning. We become reactive and disorganized; our filters stop working—sounds and lights bother us, unwanted images from the past intrude on our minds, and we panic or fly into rages. If we are shut down, we feel numb in body and mind; our thinking becomes sluggish and we have trouble getting out of our chairs. People who are long before they see a thing, when once it strikes them, see it in the strongest light. As long as people are either hyperaroused or shut down, they cannot learn from experience. Even if they manage to stay in control, they become so uptight that they are inflexible, stubborn, and depressed. Recovery from trauma involves the restoration of executive functioning and, with it, self-confidence and the capacity for playfulness and creativity. The fields of air are open to knowledge. Only ignorance and idleness need crawl upon the ground. Reconciliation is the tenderest part of love and friendship: the soul here discovers a kind of elasticity, and, being forced back, returns with an additional violence. There are some dangers which, when they are braved, disappear, and which yet, when there is an obvious and apparent dread of them displayed, become certain and inevitable. 

If we want to change posttraumatic reactions, we have to access the emotional brain and do limbic system therapy: repairing faulty alarm systems and restoring the emotional brain to its ordinary job of being a quiet background presence that takes care of the housekeeping of the body, ensuring that you eat, sleep, connect with intimate partners, protect your children, and defend against danger. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. A moment of peril is often also a moment of open-hearted kindness and affection. We are thrown off our guard by the general agitation of our feelings, and betray the intensity of those, which, at more tranquil periods, our prudence at least conceals, if it cannot altogether suppress them. The rational, analyzing part of the brain, centered on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, has no direct connections with the emotional brain, where most imprints of trauma reside, but the medial prefrontal cortex, the center of self-awareness, does. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues have shown that the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness, i.e. by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that notices what is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we are feeling. (The technical term for this is interoception—Latin for looking inside.) Most of our conscious brain is dedicated to focusing on the outside World: getting along with others and making plans for the future. However, that does not help us manage ourselves. Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves.  

Also, traumatic reenactment is the source of most of the violence in the World, which affects us all. Yet, as common as trauma has been throughout history, we have been slow to learn how to resolve it. Since the healing of trauma involves somatic and spiritual processes, the field of psychology has had little to offer over the past century. Because of its effect are so intense and pervasive, trauma can be a catalyst for profound surrender and awakening. I see it as a wake-up call for the human race, especially in light of the hundreds of Americans that have been killed, on American soil, by gun violence in the Summer 16. Trauma is a primary cause of human suffering, and yet it can only be truly resolved by coming home to the eternal now. In the healing of trauma, we must let go of the mind’s illusion of control and discover the beingness that is always present.  Therefore, the healing of trauma has the potential to help bring about transformation and awakening in the human species. Otherwise, trauma will continue to be a painful and destructive force among us. Our survival as a species may depend on the resolution of trauma and traumatic reenactment. Fortunately, now is the time when both the healing of trauma and awakening to our true nature are better understood and increasingly possible. As I see it, our individual psyche and physical body are sacred manifestations of our essential Self, Spirit, or Being. They are centers of expression for our greater transpersonal awareness. Officially, nonduality is abidance in and as the Self, from which wisdom, compassion, and power spontaneously arise and flow forth through the unique qualities and capacities of our individual self. Could you know from afar the feelings of someone jilted? On my birthday, which has already passed, what I wanted was not an invaluable gift, but I simply wondered what song you would sing me.