Integrating Trauma with the Help of Basic Goodness
Basic goodness is a gift from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. It is essentially within all sentient beings naturally but often becomes overshadowed or hidden as a result of trauma. He did not manufacture or conjure it up; his gift is to remind us to look inward in order to become aware of its presence. When we begin to understand and open up to this potential, we see that we are all born with basic goodness. Our task is connecting to it. This is easier said than done due to the strong tendency we have to forget and to give allegiance to our habitual thinking about ourselves as being basically bad.
According to Trungpa Rinpoche, basic goodness is good, because it is so basic, so fundamental.
“It is natural and it works, therefore it is good, rather than being good as opposed to bad.”
In Buddhism, there is an understanding that because beings long to be happy there is a constant preoccupation and movement toward this potential happiness and a momentum of aversion away from suffering. We can see this play out in humans but also animals, insects, and essentially all sentient beings. The non-stop fixation and grasping for the objects of perceived happiness are also basic ways to survive; searching for food, physical comfort, and a mate. This longing for happiness signals the presence of basic goodness within all of us. The recognition that we share a fundamental inclination to be happy allows us to relate to and empathize with the same wish that all beings have. Yet the way animals and humans approach life events, especially traumatic ones, vary.
In talking about Peter Levine’s book, Larry Kessler wrote:
“For most animals, the final response in a chain of responses to trauma is to energetically release it by shaking or closing down for a short while. Then they move on. Animals, unlike humans, release their traumas and don’t carry them through life. An animal can’t survive in the wild if it freezes or gets confused by holding onto its past traumas.”
Humans possess the capacity to utilize trauma as a way to grow emotionally or spiritually but when our reactions are left unexamined we become entrenched in the storyline, which magnifies the pain. Animals have the instinct to physically shake off their trauma in order to stay engaged in the basic functioning that addresses their daily needs. We tend to be more complicated as our habitual judgments take over the interpretation of trauma. That intensifies the experience of trauma by translating it to mean there must be something intrinsically wrong with us, further solidifying the belief in negative storylines rather than looking directly at ourselves. This is the thief of basic goodness as this habit has the tendency to steal us away from our birthright.
The storylines can often confuse us and keep the trauma from being integrated into the rest of our lives. We develop distorted perceptions about ourselves based on how we interpret trauma. These perceptions can lead us to involuntarily acquiring major mental health labels, or at the very least, to disruptions that impact our daily lives. When left unexamined, we allow our interpretations to rule our world without awareness of the influences trauma may be having on us.
In the conventional mental health community, trauma is often seen as a way to assign a diagnosis and to create a plan of treatment including a timeline not only to satisfy insurance company requirements but also to stay in step with our quick-fix, result-oriented culture. In general there is no luxury of time to develop a trusting relationship between therapist and client. As a result, there is a heavy reliance on numerous techniques to relate with trauma. Some of these techniques do serve a purpose and can be effective in relating to the initial trauma response.
However, the question is whether techniques alone can help an individual gain long-term understanding by integrating trauma in order to regain a basic level of functioning at a minimum as well as contribute to one’s growth. For instance, EMDR can give some immediate relief to an individual who has experienced a major traumatic event but in order for the same individual to continue to thrive in life they will need the insight of connecting to their basic goodness.
The DSM-V offers a significant section titled “Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders.” Within that is a subsection called “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder” which offers a detailed description of the diagnostic criteria and defining features of trauma. The first diagnostic criteria is:
Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways:
◈ Direct experience
◈ Witnessing an event in person
◈ Learning that the traumatic event occurred to family or friends
◈ Experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of traumatic events
This edition of the DSM-V expands the definition of trauma to include a variety of causes and conditions seen in human existence. Thus is an improvement over past manuals where trauma was defined as “an event outside the range of normal human experience,” yet it neglects the individual, dynamic nature of human encounters and our capacity to interpret them based on countless factors that are both seen and unseen. Trauma in my personal experience and in working with clients is an every day occurrence that is a part of all sentient beings’ lives.
From the moment we are born to the time we find ourselves on our deathbed, there are numerous events and experiences that we might interpret as traumatic. The experience of transitioning from being in the environment of our mother’s womb to joining this world of sights, sounds, and animation is our initial life event. There are further opportunities to feel trauma during the relentless aging process heading toward our impending end. It is our interpretation that will reveal whether this ubiquitous occurrence of being born, growing old, experiencing sickness eventually death will reverberate as traumatic responses throughout our lives.
According to Mark Epstein, “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one” (The Trauma of Everyday Life, 2013, 15). He goes on to say, “Trauma is not a failure or a mistake. It is not something to be ashamed of, not a sign of weakness, and not a reflection of inner failing. It is simply a fact of life.”
This paper explores how we might coexist with various traumatic events that are a fact of life so that we might utilize these experiences in order to connect with our own basic goodness. I do not pretend to be an expert in trauma and have respect for the time and effort exerted by others into developing methods to address this topic. I am using my own life experiences as research to delve into my trauma in order to see first hand how this applies to the human experience. The questions to keep in mind in this inquiry are: Is the goal to get rid of our experience of trauma altogether? How do we make friends with all aspects of our life experiences? Is it possible to integrate trauma into our lives?
Personally, I think it would be a loss to negate it without integrating with the assistance of basic goodness. Depending on a variety of factors in our lives, we have the potential to interpret any life circumstance as traumatic. This can be compounded by our past undigested experiences, which further substantiates the position of our negative projection of ourselves and the world. We have responses and reactions to events on a regular basis that influence our lives in major or minor ways.
Our unique interpretation based on our past experiences and karma is key to how trauma manifests in our lives. What one individual experiences as traumatic and has a hard time getting over, another may be able to go beyond without much difficulty at all. Karma can seem mysterious this way because we cannot directly see how the cause and effect of our actions influence the unfolding of the events for the rest of our lives. We can respect the unfolding of our own karma with some relaxation of trying to control what happens in life.
The wind of my karma brought me from Myanmar to India en route to the United States in the span of one year. I turned ten years old in Louisiana. Before I stepped foot into my elementary school, I didn’t realize that my skin color would define my place among the other students. There was a demand for me to identify myself as either being black or white, as if it was up to me. It was a most isolating feeling to realize that I did not fit into either category. I had never been so acutely aware of my loneliness as when I was in fifth grade grappling to learn English and the customs of my new culture.
Looking back, I see how my vulnerability made me a target for ridicule and harassment from the most popular guy in school, the only individual who inspired the gathering of kids to enthusiastically chant his name in unison when he came up to bat at a school baseball game. I, on the other hand, was the sole brown person in a black and white situation, so I solicited fear from my classmates because they were unfamiliar with my kind. He had support from those around in his harassment of me since it was unclear to the kids whether I minded what he was doing—I didn’t speak up or defend myself. I was frozen in my response to being bullied so I shut down and created a storyline to make sense of my predicament: that I am bad, there is something intrinsically wrong with me, that I am basically bad.
This went on for a couple of years until I went to junior high. I would stay quiet and unemotional in front of my tormenters then go home and cry alone in the bathroom, as I was too embarrassed to let my family know about my dilemma. In my ten-year-old mind they would blame me for being bullied. I did my best to keep it inside.
I remember the day I could not keep it in any longer; I spontaneously cried in front of the entire class as I was being harassed. It seemed to dawn on some of them that I was a person with feelings and that my prior silence was not consent to continue their behavior, but that I was suffering. After I broke down I had the sympathy of a few kids who came to comfort me and immediately after that, the bullying stopped. Is that all it took for the bullying to stop is to show my emotions? Why did I suffer for so long alone?
That period of time has a strong influence on how I experience my life, even now. I became a psychotherapist to help myself integrate this, and other experiences, to understand how I suffer and what I can do with that suffering. I realized that, along with learning how to speak English, I could speak about my experience of the pain I felt. My habitual self-denigrating belief that there was something intrinsically wrong with me was being challenged as I stopped blaming myself with the help of others. As I reflect back, I was discovering my basic goodness, although I didn’t realize it at that time.
I became curious to explore my own mind further and how it works so that I could help others who suffer in big and small ways. Exposure to Buddhism gave me a platform to look closely at my experience of suffering and how to work with it. I came across Trungpa Rinpoche and basic goodness when I started to work at Windhorse Community Services. I felt excited to read about our shared human experiences and descriptions of basic goodness as “the natural situation we have inherited from birth onwards” (Sacred Path of the Warrior).
Trungpa Rinpoche says the first step in realizing basic goodness is to appreciate what we have (Sacred Path of the Warrior). This process of rediscovering, the most straightforward path is gentle with ourselves and relaxing our harsh views about ourselves.
“When you don’t punish or condemn yourself, when you relax more and appreciate your body and mind, you begin to contact the fundamental notion of basic goodness in yourself. So it is extremely important to be willing to open yourself to yourself. Developing tenderness toward yourself allows you to see your problems and your potential accurately. You don’t feel that you have to ignore your problems or exaggerate your potential.”
The journey I embarked on since I endured the prolonged bullying in grade school was to learn to appreciate myself, brown skin and all. I also developed an appreciation for the challenging experiences themselves. The suffering urged me forward to look more deeply, beyond that, to realize that others are also in similar predicaments, often under much more difficult circumstances. Upon reflection, it is clear that the bullying stopped when my humanity was seen, when I could no longer be objectified as an unemotional plaything. We long to be seen as human, that we are basically good and to see others’ humanity.
This perspective gives us freedom and creativity to live our lives fully with a level of cheerfulness. Trungpa Rinpoche refers to this way of being as warriorship; warriorship is our capacity to realize the power, dignity, and wakefulness that is inherent in all of us as human beings. It is awakening our basic human confidence which allows us to cheer up, develop a sense of vision, and succeed in what we are doing. (The Superhuman Life of Gesar of Ling, foreword by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche)
In Recovering Sanity, Ed Podvoll devotes a chapter to “Discovering Islands of Clarity.” These islands are glimpses into our basic goodness.
“There is a moment in the midst of madness when things suddenly begin to make sense again. One feels one has come back into oneself. It is an island of clarity where one is suddenly freed from the fixed mind of delusion. Some people describe this as a feeling, almost a physical sensation, of ‘clicking in.’ Sometimes the moment is fleeting, sometimes it endures—everyone who suffers with psychosis experiences them and reacts to them in different ways, but however brief, moments of recovery from psychosis are universal experiences. ”
The emphasis in the Windhorse approach is not only to pay attention to the history of challenges but also to honor and highlight an individual’s history of sanity. In psychotherapy, recovery can happen in the context of the client /therapist relationship. As a psychotherapist, I do not approach sessions with a predetermined plan or bag of tools to “fix” my clients. I enter the environment of therapy to join them where they are, as I offer my genuine presence to facilitate a possible connection with their own basic goodness.
We all come with a history, both psychotherapist and client. Ed Podvoll addresses this topic in Recovering Sanity, Appendix 2:
“Understanding the landmark events of the history of sanity is something of a paradigm shift that changes fixation on the past (and present) suffering into an open view of basic goodness. In this view, the “instinct of sanity,” that which gives rise to all experiences of islands of clarity, is seen to be preeminent among the other instincts that drive our intentions and behavior, and is raised to its proper place in our ability to care for people.”
Exploring the history of sanity opens up the experiences that have been healing in an individual’s life to counteract the strong habitual emphasis on the most negative aspect of trauma. Within the psychotherapy relationship, the psychotherapist serves as a reminder to clients to look inside and perhaps pass onto them the gift from Trungpa Rinpoche—the reminder of our basic goodness.
I had a client a few years ago who was sexually assaulted by a peer while she was in college. She blamed herself for the incident and did not speak to anyone about it. After several sessions building relationship she expressed her desire to explore ways to heal from the original trauma as she frequently felt fearful throughout the day. She recounted one instance during our psychotherapy session where she heard what sounded to her like two dogs viciously fighting outside the window of her apartment. Her immediate response was to run into her closet, curl up into a ball, and do her best to close off her senses. She could not shut off her mind as the horrible images of what might be happening outside invaded her thoughts.
The images she described based on her fabrication were indeed frightening; perhaps much more so than the actual event taking place outside her window. We explored the potential for her to engage or lean into her impulse to hide, instead to face her emotions with some level of tolerance. We spent several more sessions exploring what integration through engagement meant to her personally by taking small steps towards staying open instead of shutting down in anticipation of trauma. In this case, the reminder of her basic goodness came in the form of her willingness to allow all experiences be present—by talking openly with me and tolerating the intense emotions.
In the last vignette, we can see the value of engaging by staying open. The following vignette explores the judgment we reserve for ourselves that can keep us from moving on after a trauma. In training analysis with Jeff Fortuna, he described an intense incident in his life where he was brutally assaulted by a client. He worked on this trauma from various angles with success, yet he still carried remnants of the question as to what he could have done differently during the time of the actual assault. This came up spontaneously during one of our training analysis sessions where he openly recounted his experience in detail. It was obvious that he had worked actively, unflinchingly, and with great courage to relate to the trauma he had experienced and that he had integrated to a large degree.
Although I was the alleged client and Jeff was the therapist in this scenario, space was created for me to share my exchange in the moment. I suggested that he consider the potential that he was still carrying the desynchronized notion of “could have, should have” known better and reacted differently during the assault. We talked about releasing that time by invoking a deep awareness that he did the best he could with what he knew at the time and by finding appreciation and discovery of a new friendship with the person who endured that traumatic event—himself. He was basically OK when the assault happened and he is basically OK now. He took a step away from blaming the victim by looking back at the incident through the lens of compassion that I felt for him. This helped him to gain confidence that there was nothing further or different for him to do to alter the karma of the situation. This sense of letting be is powerful and takes tremendous discipline to accept who we are as humans with basic goodness.
Another tendency some of us developed is to anticipate and brace ourselves to protect from events that may resemble a past trauma. We live in our mind, replaying the original trauma so we can stay on guard for any sign that it might arise again. This leads to a strong pull towards avoidance that can curtail the beauty and spontaneity of life. The antidote to what might be termed here “hyper vigilance” is to let go of the compelling story line and rest in the self-confidence of “I will do something.” One does not have to be pre-prepared for all of their life circumstances. The key is to develop confidence that we have the capacity to respond and to understand that it does not have to be perfect.
The truth is we can’t know what we are entering into at any given time. I walked into a client’s room after he had shot himself in the head using a shotgun. Before I entered I was warned that he was in trouble and may need help, but nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed. I went into response mode—I walked out of his room and called 911 without much emotion in my voice and did what I needed to do to cooperate with the emergency responders. I remember hearing myself talking and wondering how am I staying calm? I didn’t break down until I saw my husband several hours later (perhaps similar to an animal shaking off trauma). I physically crumbled and he picked me up and held me, repeating this process many more times for a few weeks. I functioned at work while the major reaction to the trauma surfaced when I was home, often in my bed, jerking me awake at times from sleep.
In my heightened response I did not notice the smell of blood just as I walked into his apartment. I retrieved this memory during an EMDR session. If I had identified this smell at the time, would I have done anything differently?
As I write this, I weep and my heart is wide open. I am glad to be touched and that I can be right there without resistance. My goal is not to get rid of feeling, I do not want to shut off my connection to his suffering, I want to deepen my understanding of how to be present with what life offers. Simply being present is a gift similar to the one Trungpa Rinpoche reminded us about in relationship to our basic goodness.
I went into a solitary retreat that I had prescheduled a month later. It was at that time that I faced what this event meant to fully integrate it into my life. EMDR may have played a small part in facing the initial trauma, but my healing continues as a result of connecting to my basic goodness, which is revealed more and more through practice and retreat.
The DSM–V describes the duration of trauma symptoms vary, “with complete recovery within 3 months occurring in approximately one-half of adults, while some individuals remain symptomatic for longer than 12 months and sometimes for more than 50 years” (277). The incident above occurred over three years ago and I must be one of those individuals who will remain “symptomatic” for perhaps 50 years. I hope so because I would never want to try to escape being touched by what I experienced. I am not looking for a guarantee that I will never witness or be involved in a tragic event that might leave a traumatic impression. On the contrary, as a therapist, I want to deepen my confidence in my capacity to stay open to respond fully in the moment to the potential suffering of my clients.
My interest in trauma has been a journey since I began to notice its influence in my own life, starting when I moved to the United States and witnessing this theme in my clients. I observed that no matter what the presenting issue, there was at the root, a sense of holding onto some kind of event that was interpreted as trauma. I observed this first hand in my own mind, which sparked a passion to share my observations, as I see immense potential for growth for my clients and anyone who suffers in this way. The alternative is being mired in confusion by shutting down around our stories of trauma and letting them congeal and spin out of control. One antidote is to become curious about all the causes and conditions that bring us to this place of shutting down so we don’t feel responsible for events we have no control over in our lives.
In Windhorse, we have a shared language of basic goodness, but there is room for deeper understanding of ourselves in order to share it with others. We can allow the gift of basic goodness to unfold by using our own trauma as an entry point. There are many tools, means, and practices we have developed to help ourselves and others that have served to provide some relief in the face of trauma. At the end of the day, our healing depends on how we interpret and integrate any traumatic event by relying on our basic goodness that is a birthright and is consistently available to us.