Trauma and Awakening

It may seem strange to write about trauma and awakening in the same sentence, since one of the first things our bodies do in response to trauma is shut down. But, trauma does not just shut us down. It also offers unique opportunities for awakening. 

The Experience of Trauma

Trauma symptoms are hard to ignore, so they easily become the focus of both those experiencing them and those who try to help . This is unfortunate because it is the more subtle, subjective experience of trauma—particularly the somatic component of a given experience—that is most crucial for both healing and awakening.

Everyone’s experience of trauma is unique and what one person experiences as traumatic, another might hardly notice.

For many years, I have worked as a consulting psychologist, helping a global adventure tourism company deal with critical incidents encountered while 10,000 people a day travel in 120 countries. In the middle of the night of November 23, 2007, their expedition ship hit an iceberg off Antarctica and immediately began to sink. All 154 passengers and crew were safely evacuated but endured hours of bobbing in lifeboats in darkness and sub-zero temperatures. Each of them experienced this differently. Several were quite traumatized. Most, however, reported no problems, and many said that the trip wildly surpassed their expectations and immediately signed up for another adventure!

The good news about trauma is that it is possible to move beyond it, not merely back to some point of time before it. But before we examine this possibility, we need to first be clear about the concept of awakening. 

Awakening and Sensation

As I use the term, awakening is the burst of awareness and clarified perception that comes when we become fully present to the somatic dimension of our sensory experience. 

Awakenings start with a sensation—not an insight or understanding, but a sensory experience that arises in the body. Sadly, most of us are so deficient in body awareness that we fail to notice subtle somatic experiences. However, noticing brings awareness, and this is the first step toward an awakening. 

But there is more. Sensations are always accompanied by a surge of energy that invites us to respond. We feel pain and want to recoil. We feel an itch and want to scratch. Without a response, there is no awakening. 

For example, during a recent walk in a marsh near our home, I suddenly heard the distinctive cry of red-necked grebes. That was the sensation. The associated energy took the form of curiosity and desire. I responded by walking to where I could better see them. Suddenly, I became aware that I was not simply watching birds but standing on holy ground. I felt a strong desire to be as aligned with my essential being as the birds I was watching. I cut my walk short and returned home to process the experience in my journal.

This is all quite ordinary. Awakenings generally lack drama and are easily missed. Even if we notice the sensation, we quickly slip back into our self-preoccupations. We are terrified of being fully awake. Each awakening is, however, a small step toward building the reservoir of presence and attentiveness that moves us closer to a stable state of being fully alive. 

Powerful experiences may change us, but they are never enough to automatically awaken us. This is why Fritz Perls, the founder of gestalt therapy, urged people to lose their minds and come to their senses. As we will see, his advice is particularly apt when it comes to the possibility of awakenings in relation to trauma. Our minds may produce understanding, but attentive engagement with our bodies is essential for an awakening.

 In his book One Minute Wisdom, Anthony de Mello describes a conversation about enlightenment between a seeker and a spiritual master that is equally applicable to awakening. 

“What can I do to make myself Enlightened?”

“As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”

“Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”

“To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”

Replace the word “enlightened” with “awakened.” There is nothing you can do to produce awakening. If you want to experience the rising sun, you need to notice and offer your consent to the invitations to awaken that life offers you. 

Awakening and Trauma

Anything can be an occasion for awakening as long as it draws our full attention to our inner somatic experience. If we have the courage to attend to sensations, not merely symptoms, we encounter the possibility of moving forward in our unfolding.

Let me illustrate this with the story of a blind, albino girl I started treating when she was six years old and worked with until she was seventeen. Anna (not her real name) was sadistically tortured, physically and sexually, by her biological parents for the first five years of her life. Finally coming to the attention of child protection services, she was removed from her home and admitted to a children’s hospital where I worked.

Everything about Anna broadcast her vulnerability—her white hair, her pigment-free white skin, and her white cane. Not surprisingly, the first dimension of her inner experience that I encountered was her profound fear. For months, she refused to speak to me, hiding in a storage cabinet in the play therapy room where I saw her several times a week. Her first communications were drawings that she pushed under the door of this cabinet. They powerfully revealed her overwhelming terror and inner chaos.

Over time, Anna slowly allowed the door to her hiding place to open—first a crack, then a little more, until eventually it was open enough that I could see her back as she faced away from me. This was when she first spoke to me, telling me that she would only come out of the closet if I shut off the lights. She was inviting me into her world of darkness. 

Sitting in the dark with her for the next several months gave me a wonderful opportunity to get to know her inner experience of blindness. What I discovered was that her blindness gave her a sense of safety. She knew it didn’t protect her, but it did offer her comfort.

It was in the safety of darkness that Anna first told me about her recurring dream. It was a traumatic reenactment that conflated all the horrid things she had experienced. She said that nothing ever changed in the dream, not even in the slightest way. Because I had discovered that it was the changes in repeated dreams that were most important, I suggested we play a game. I told her that if she was really attentive, she might be able to notice small differences in these dreams. The game was to see which of us would first spot a difference. 

Entering the playroom for our next session, I noticed she had a sly smile on her face. Proudly, she announced that she had won the game because she noticed that there was slightly more light in the room in which her latest dream was set. When I asked how she saw light, she said she couldn’t actually see it, but could feel its warmth—even in a dream. Now we had a somatic component to her inner experience, something that was to prove critical to both our clinical work and her eventual awakening. Without this, it would have been very hard for her to ever again learn to embrace her body. 

Now let’s jump ahead a few years, to a point where her symptoms were all resolved and we talked primarily about school, friends, and her foster family. In one session, we were discussing her sense of not trusting someone, and I asked what she felt when she was with someone she didn’t trust. She said that dangerous people had a sharp smell that made her want to hold her breath. I then asked about people she trusted. She said she wasn’t sure, since she focused more on identifying people who were dangerous. Because we were at the end of the session, I asked her to notice what things helped her know that someone was trustworthy.

Anna seemed quite excited when she arrived for her next session. She had noticed that, in addition to not having that strong, sharp smell,  safe people breathed more slowly and evenly than dangerous people. This sensory awareness was the start of her learning to trust others. 

Life gave Anna lots of opportunities to sharpen her discernment of these subjective, sensory-based intuitions about who was safe and who was dangerous. As would be expected, she made misjudgments. But her focus increasingly became watching for safe people, not simply dangerous ones, and she moved from being a cautious, fearful person to one who lived with increasing confidence and joie de vivre. By the end of our work together, she was routinely using public transit in a large metropolitan city, had a boyfriend, and was socially very active. She had even taken up rollerblading! She was thriving.

A number of years after we finished our work together, I received the following message:

Hi Dr. Benner. 

It’s Anna. I hope you remember me. I will never forget you. Mostly I remember how you helped me learn to trust myself and other people. I live with my boyfriend and am training to be a counsellor. I almost never think about the bad parts of my life, only the good ones—and there are lots of them. I hope you feel the same. 

Your friend, Anna.

Anna illustrates the way trauma can be the womb of awakening. Trauma had, as it always does, narrowed her field of consciousness—first to matters of survival and then to her fears. It blocked her awareness of her compensatory sensory acuity that was just waiting to thrive. Once she was ready, noticing her somatic experience became the portal to not only her healing but also the blossoming of her development. This is the hidden gift that trauma can bring, but in cases of complex trauma like hers, that gift can usually not be either noticed or accessed until some degree of healing has been experienced.

Seldom, if ever, is awakening a one-time matter. But with each act of noticing and responding, awakening begins to gain momentum.  As we do, we move closer to the state of full presence and sensory groundedness that trauma has helped us access. 

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2021 © Dr. David G. Benner

Adapted from an article that first appeared in ONEING: 
A Publication of the Center for Action and Contemplation, 
Vol. 9 No. 1 (2021)

• How have I remained shut down and lacking trust in myself, others, or life in response to traumatic or unwelcome experiences?

• What invitation to awaken am I aware of, and how will I choose to respond to it?

• What could I do to nurture more presence and wakeful attentiveness to my life and the world that surrounds me?

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For more on awakening, see Dr. Benner’s book, Spirituality and the Awakening Self: The Sacred Journey of Transformation (2012).

Spirituality and the Awakening Self

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