The Trauma of Everyday Life

Before saying a word, he motioned to a glass at his side. “Do you see this glass?” he asked us. “I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shel

“Outside is pure energy and colorless substance. All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

“a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream,”

In so doing, the Buddha’s mother acted out an inadequacy that many a mother—like many a lover—is vulnerable to, an inadequacy fed by thoughts of doubt and fear that erode confidence and corrode connection.

All that is subject to arising is subject to

“In a blindfold world I go to beat the Deathless

Especially in situations in which unbearable emotions are stirred up, the self’s only choice is to wall itself off from whatever is threatening it, to remove itself from what it cannot regulate.

Traumatized people are left with an experience of “singularity” that creates a divide between their experience and the consensual reality of others.

We emerge, as infants, from a relational matrix and then struggle to come to terms with the trauma of aloneness.

“It is a joy to be hidden,” wrote Winnicott of the struggles of such children, “but disaster not to be found.”