The Trauma of Everyday Life

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.

“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,”

The infinitely poignant beauty of creation is inseparable from its diabolic destructiveness.

“Body exposed in the golden

All that is subject to arising is subject to

The effort required to ward off the possibility of trauma—the rush to normal that the absolutisms of daily life encourages—is itself traumatic.

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.”

The mind that knows knows itself knowing.