I wonder, however, how one can forgive or accept and keep one's self safe. That is does forgiveness and acceptance leave one open to experiencing the same harm again? ......
There is a whole other element of forgiveness that has to do with one's relationship with one's self. I am continually exploring this element of forgiveness in my life. It too has something to do with acceptance. But again, there is a question of keeping one's self safe from harm.
The question of avoiding harm touches the very sensitive point of the source of trauma.
When we check the more traumatic events in our own life, we can see that our reaction was always related to our self-image and beliefs on what we consider to be our identity.
I will try to develop this point.
We face life through a set of mental and emotional patterns, related to the content of psychological memory.
This content is a synthesis of education, culture, beliefs, painful and joyful remembrances.
These patterns create reactions: grasping situations which create a pleasant feeling, rejecting situations which create an unpleasant feeling.
So, from a deeper point of view, these reactions are not caused by the situation itself, but by the filter of patterns constituting what we call the personality.
From such a perspective, psychological traumas are situations which cause a strong feeling of discomfort, pain or sadness.
If we continue to examine our reactions, we find that these unpleasant feelings are connected to the desire that things should be as we want and not as they are.
If the things don't go as we want, either we are indifferent or annoyed, depending on if the patterns of our personality are or are not involved in the situation.
So we could define a psychological trauma as an event which impedes the flowing of life as we would like it would be.
The stronger the reaction, the stronger the involvement of the I-image.
An I-image is defined by characteristics like: I am good, I am bad, I am beautiful, I am ugly, I am nice, I am not nice, I am intelligent, I am not intelligent.
For example, if somebody tells you that you are an idiot, it will create a reaction only if you are fixed on the belief that you are not an idiot, that you are intelligent, that you must be intelligent.
If there is no such a fixation, the sentence "you are an idiot" does not create any emotional reaction.
When we clearly understand such a schematic example, we can transpose it in the reactions of ordinary life, and see that suffering emerges when such a fixation is touched.
So we can finally thank the traumatic events of having offered an opportunity to put in the light some transparent and unconscious fixations, which one day or another would have emerged in other circumstances.
Seeing is liberating.
So long as such transparent patterns are not seen, they continue to act silently, behind the emotional reactions.
When they have been seen, the need to react vanishes, because you are no more its accomplice.
The vanishing of the reaction is not the expression of a self-control, but of the absence of an I who likesor dislikes.
This choiceless way of life is the result of a maturity where things and situations are accepted as they are.
This natural acceptance, fruit of a living understanding, does not mean passivity.
Passivity is the incapacity of saying no when there is a desire to say no.
The natural acceptance of things as they are means saying no when there is a need to say no, but on an inner level saying yes to this no. There is a full acceptance of the need to say no as an answer to the present situation. So there are no psychological sequels, anger, regrets or guilt.
It is not an indifference, because the sensitivity is fully open, but there is no psychological suffering, because the "I"-filter is not involved.
The reaction is replaced by a correct adaptation to the situation.
In the absence of reaction, there is freedom.
The spontaneous creativity of life is no longer impaired by the emotivity.
The vision of beauty is no longer separated from your own beauty.
Love is freely expressed.
You wrote:
"When we check the more traumatic events in our own life, we can see that our reaction was always related to our self-image and beliefs on what we consider as our identity."
Jean-Marc,
I'm not sure I agree with this statement. The more traumatic events of abuse and violence don't just affect our self-image. They affect our basic safety and survival in the world.
You said: "In such a perspective, psychological traumas are situations which cause a strong feeling of discomfort, pain or sadness."
More than this, they cause a sense of terror and the feeling on the deepest level that one can be destroyed if one makes a wrong move. In working with survivors of severe trauma, issues of identity and self-image are a luxury beside living with the terror of one's annihilation. Until the trauma is dealt with, there seems to be a level of the psyche in which the traumatic event(s) are occurring in an eternal present, along with the terror and rage that are connected to the struggle for survival. How can grasping and attachment to states of well-being be a central concern when, for example, a father comes into a child's room at night and rapes her and tells her that he will kill her if she tells, that she would be responsible for destroying her family if she tells? Or a young child whose parents are divorced who is sent to stay with her father who tells her that her mother has inserted dynamite in her vagina and he has to get it out by having sex with her? Sorry to use such graphic examples, but these are the kinds of situations that I work with every day.
Love.
The reaction to the most horrific visions is always related to a perceiver.
Is it possible to perceive without reference to an "I"?
It means to free the perception from the I-reaction based on a preference system.
One day, a cobra went on the leg of Ramana Maharshi when he was resting.
People around him were strongly reacting, were terrorized.
Ramana did not move and slowly the cobra went away.
Then the cobra turned on himself and looked at Ramana.
Ramana looked deeply in his eyes during a long moment.
Then the cobra went away.
People under shock asked Ramana: "what did you feel when the cobra was
on your leg?".
Ramana answered : "it was cold".
It is a good example of a non emotional involvement in front of a situation.
This absence of emotional reaction in a situation of a physical danger is the sign of a total absence of identification with the body.
Someone else in the same situation might have died from a cardiac attack.
Because he/she is convinced that this body is him/her, a direct physical danger is considered a danger for him/herself.
But is the self concerned with this situation? Or is it only a false I-identification which is in danger?
If there were not a natural intuition that we are not the body, how could some soldiers take such great dangers during a war. Most of the greatest soldiers have such a non formulated or unconscious intuition that the death of their body is not the death of what they are.
If not, they would never take such risks.
Your remark, dear Suzanne, recalls to me the reaction of people who were in the Shoah, and there are many here in Israel.
If you consider life from the point of view of the soul or consciousness, each situation, even the most horrific, is an experience which helps to disidentify to the body-mind, to stimulate the awareness that you are not the body-mind, that you are the knower of it.
Such a language appears very abstract to people who are still under shock. It needs a long time to be able to distance oneself from the traumatic event and to consider it as a blessing, because of the teaching which was contained in the shock.
The more ego-fixed people are, the stronger the shocks of life are. But on a spiritual level, the strongest shocks are the strongest teachings.
I know that such a perspective is not accepted by people who are not healed from what they have experienced in their body.
(They would say "we have been touched in our integrity". But the integrity of whom? We touch again the main question of "who am I?".)
Sometimes, the most aggressive physical attacks create a sudden disidentification with the body and an awakening of that what does not belong to the body.
The near-death experiences are such an example.
And sometimes they arise during physical torture.
So we cannot speak for other people (it would be only projections) but can only share our own experience.
What was the effect of the most traumatic event I remember in my life?
Was there a teaching here?
And if yes, what is the teaching?
What am I really looking for?
Who am I?
These questions bring maturity and help to understand from an experiential point of view the meaning of the trauma and the nature of the one who has been traumatized, if there is such a thing.
If you don't find the one who has been traumatized, there is no more trauma. .
From the Spiramed Internet Forum , May 24, 1997