The Value of Trauma

Doing good is not always straightforward

I think it's great that there's so much focus these days on trauma - on how suboptimal conditions and events in our childhoods affect our personality as an adult.

Our personal profile of trauma and conditioning will affect such aspects of our life as:

• The position we take within a hierarchy

• How much aversion to risk we have

• The degree to which we will stand up for ourselves, or be swayed by the crowd

• How comfortable we are with showing vulnerability

I think this increased focusing on trauma is really, really healthy. And, at the same time, for me as a therapist, who also did a lot of therapy to overcome the conditions of my own personal childhood, I have to also raise a slightly dissenting voice.

This is because how discussions around trauma usually progress is towards getting rid of trauma in the childhoods of kids being brought up now. And, of course, this seems like a really great idea. Who wouldn’t want to have a childhood where love was the baseline, and we felt it? Who wouldn’t want to have a childhood where our natural intelligence wasn’t stifled and suppressed? Surely such a childhood would be a “win-win” for the child and society?

But, like I say, I have to also raise a dissenting voice. Because I came from a background of high trauma and when I look back now I see that this actually worked for me.

I don’t like to put openly into the public space my whole childhood, that doesn’t feel appropriate. And certainly not because I’m just shy about these things. But I was an adopted, mixed-race kid and a lot happened, and my way of coping was to just shut down, dissociate from my body, and go into protection. This I maintained for some decades after my childhood was well and truly over. I dropped out aged 21, became a hippie and then a punk (I was too angry to be a good hippie!). I lived very much at street level throughout most of my 20s and 30s, busking on the Underground, living in squats in north London. I drank copious amounts of alcohol, initially because it brought me out of myself. I used plenty of other drugs too. I had only one remotely normal love relationship, which lasted four or five years. By any normal therapeutic or psychological standard, my life was abnormal and dysfunctional throughout this period.

But at some point, something did start to break open within me and I began to realise that I needed to change, that I needed to seek out help. And that if I didn’t start soon, I was just going to become terminally addicted to alcohol and bad living. The level of pain I was holding inside began to motivate me to seek help.

And, over the years, therapy worked for me. I changed, little by little, and became simply more functional as a human social being. What worked especially was that I knew there was no way back. I had to keep taking risks, doing workshops and putting myself on the line, until I felt functional.

Looking back now, with a fairly happy and successful life as a therapist, I can consider what might have become of me if I had had relatively no trauma as a child. If I’m honest, I fully imagine that, now in my sixties, the untraumatized version of me would not be at all happy. I would no doubt be living out the end of my days in a relationship I wasn’t happy with, in some grim suburb of London, and no doubt suffering from a heap of unspecific ailments. In short, I’d be suffering the same fate as many from my generation and background.

Why? Because I don’t consider myself particularly special or unique in any way. If I hadn’t been severely traumatized, I would simply have followed the path of least resistance offered to me by life in the southeast of England at that time. A job at some company, marriage to someone I was briefly in love with, a couple of kids, mediocre friendships and a career that slowed down when I didn’t want to put in the energy to step up to the next level. Plus all the usual low-level substance and behaviour addictions that come with this, to help cope with all the dissatisfaction.

In my case, what liberated me from such a life was the trauma. It was the fact of being traumatized, and coping with it through shutting down, that meant that I couldn’t get my social needs met. It was all the suffering of not being able to get social needs met that led me to radical therapy. It was radical therapy that got me to understand the supreme value of self-awareness and that healing couldn’t happen without it. In short, trauma made me.

This doesn’t mean that trauma is good. Far from it. But it points to the reality that, in the absence of a culture based around self-awareness and self-development, most people will simply follow the path of least resistance that life offers them. They will seek comfort. But in comfort there are no developmental challenges. And without developmental challenges, and the support to face them, life can finally be little but meaningless.

Trying to make our childhoods less traumatic is thus pointless if it is not accompanied by equal attempts to make life a meaningful developmental challenge. In seeking to take away the trauma, but offering nothing else that could lead to self-awareness, we may be condemning children to an utterly flat existence. They simply become addicted to anything that will comfort them and there is never sufficient feeling inside to lead them away from the path of least resistance.

But, with the trauma, there’s at least some chance that they will be motivated to step up and create a better life.

Yes, to a degree I’m playing devil’s advocate here. But I sincerely believe that this aspect of social change has been acutely missed in all the feel-good initiatives to make life less traumatic.

Thank you for reading.

Devaraj

(Find my books on Amazon here)