Blessings Come in Many Forms
The crucible of trauma offers a way of understanding conflict and suffering on a global scale
Blessings come in many forms. We hope and wish for the kind that brings happiness and a relief from suffering. But all too often they come wrapped not in sheen paper with pretty bows, but in broken boxes and tattered coverings. And yet, the blessings in disguise are the gifts that keep giving.
A recent article about observations into what determines a person’s ability to survive Navy Seal training offers a profound insight. While the military invests vast sums of money into training, leadership has proven consistently faulty in their effort to predict who will make it and who will wash out. The muscle-bound athletic types often fail quickly, while the scrawny quiet types often succeed.
The History Channel show, Alone captured Maria’s and my great interest. If you haven’t yet heard of it, for each season 10 contestants are dropped off in extremely remote areas, typically within the Arctic circle, with 10 tools of their choosing and given the opportunity to outlast 9 others to take the $500k winnings. But it’s called Alone for a reason. While each contestant is required to have expertise in bushcraft, hunting, fishing, shelter building, and wild foraging what kicks them out faster than any technical inability to secure food and shelter is facing months completely alone in the wilderness. It’s the inner strength that wins.
Meanwhile the Navy is beginning to realize that the greatest predictor of success in the extreme training program required to wear the Navy Seal moniker is not necessarily physical prowess or even the courage to face danger but having experienced some form of childhood trauma. Yes, you read that right, childhood trauma. A blessing delivered in a broken box with tattered covering, replete with pain and anguish.
And yet most who have experienced more severe forms of childhood trauma have lived a kind of broken existence, wrapped in a package designed to distract and numb. But some have risen above. I recall reading some years back an article by Oprah in which she shared that as a child her grandmother had said that she would teach the young Oprah how to clean houses so she would always have a way of making a living. But somehow Oprah knew in her soul that she would never need to know such things. She suffered through much trauma in childhood, including rape, and one could say she has risen far above and beyond her blessing in disguise.
The crucible of childhood trauma is something we would never wish on anyone, and yet it holds the key to profound transformation and a life of deep meaning. But only if we endeavor to a path of healing and growth.
Even more deeply still, the crucible of trauma offers us a way of understanding conflict and suffering on a global scale. Each time we (as in society) feel lulled into a state of complacency we are pressed by calamities on a mass scale. Each mass shooting, the invasion of a sovereign country, financial collapse, political corruption, drought, famine, starvation, and slavery provides us an opportunity to either cave into sadness and anger or aspire to healing and growth.
A book I’m reading, which I highly recommend, is Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love, by Sarah Blondin. It’s a sweet and poetically written practice in connecting more deeply with our feeling center. For me it’s been a profoundly important reminder as to the importance of feeling not just the pleasant and joy filled stuff of life, but everything. We have all been conditioned from an early age to shy away from and even avoid the unpleasant, and seek only the happy, fun, and joyous. And yet such a focus has the opposite effect because the unpleasant, the pain and anguish that comes from trauma, does not go away by us pretending it's not there. It surfaces in all sorts of ways, often subtly, but always persistently.
What Blondin teaches in her book and work, and what serves as an important reminder for me, is that the only way we can metabolize the pain is by feeling it, and that feeling it will not hurt us but heal us. So I’ve been practicing embracing literally every feeling that comes up.
Here’s a question for you. Have you ever made the decision you want to get into better physical shape and made a commitment to join a gym and begin a new regime? Or perhaps you already are a fitness-oriented person. In either case, consider how challenging and physically painful it can be to work out when the body is not used to it. And yet we push through. We might even hire a trainer or join a workout class. We may purchase a Fitbit to track our progress so we might feel motivated to keep pushing. It’s hard stuff with a huge payoff. Over time we feel better. We have more energy and flexibility, the heart muscle grows stronger, we drop pounds, and so on.
If we seek an additional degree or certification or learn a new language, such things can be challenging, but through the challenge we overcome.
And why would healing from trauma be any different? It’s hard. It’s scary, even terrifying at times to relive what we’ve deeply buried within us.
And why too, would it be any different for our collective global traumas, our political and economic traumas, our religious ideology that promotes separation, our steadfast belief in economic models that serve only a select few, while exploiting both nature and humanity.
World War I was not called World War I. It was considered the war to end all wars. Until another world war came along. Then we decided to number them. In other words, we didn’t learn. We didn’t fully metabolize the trauma from the first world war, or the second. We haven’t fully metabolized slavery or Jim Crow or public executions or the Civil War or even COVID 19.
Because we want to feel good. Because we seek the pleasant and comfortable, while avoiding the unpleasant and painful. And yet facing into the unpleasant, by feeling everything that comes up, we move into a new kind of living — an aliveness, a vibrancy, and a beauty. It’s when we avoid feeling the unpleasantness of life that it becomes stored trauma.
We won’t break if we feel. We won’t fall. We will strengthen, like steel forged in a hot fire, we become the folded steel of strength to face any challenge, within and without.
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