The chapter on Breaking Free in Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth makes interesting reading in light of what I was sharing about anger and traumatic reactions yesterday. In this chapter he explains how past pain manifesting in reactive triggers of what he calls ‘the pain body’ keeps us projecting onto new situations angst that is not necessary once we can become aware of the charge from the past of rejection, fear, anguish or hurt which fuels and drives these triggers.. Many of us have been doing this work for some time, we may also have been working on watching our thinking : thought forms or repetitive patterns that, in the words of a prayer I was given many years back by someone in AA says ‘lead nowhere’ apart from round and round and round in circles inside what Sarah Woodhouse called the ‘trauma loop’ and Peter Levine has spoken of as the ‘trauma spin/cycle’.
Louise Hay in many of her talks and writing says that may of us scare ourselves with our thinking, some ouf us punish ourselves over and over with our thoughts or use certain critical thought to keep people at bay (such as in anxious and avoidant attachment patterns). Robert Firestone, a therapist worked a lot with these inner voices or thoughts which would often arise in a person when the opportunity to draw closer to someone or to themselves came up. Donald Kalsched has also done a lot of work to understand what can even become demonic or archetypal figures within which function as a self care system to keep the threat (and longing) of deeper connection and attachment at bay. Sometimes these figures or thoughts will bring about the person’s death or suicide, they may lead them to terminate therapy if the therapist cannot be skillful in dealing with the client’s anxiety and traumatic pain.
I am of the firm belief that there are ancestral components to this pain body a to these thoughts/beliefs/schemes/or traumatic sentences in terms of how full of fear, grief, anger or anxiety our parents were as well as how much loss did they (and their parents and their parent’s parents) go through that then kept getting repeated. This came to mind last night when I was reading a book on anger in addictive families I had come across 16 years ago. This book shows what patterns of the pain body or anger style keep being fueled within us or lock us into challenging and difficult patterns that make life and relating well impossible, as well as making it hard for us to deal effectively with anger when it gets triggered.
I also know that a penny dropped for me back in 2017 when I read in Mark Wolynn’s book on healing multi-generational trauma that he decided he was not healing by disconnecting from his family and spending so much time in a spiritual quest in an ashram. He came to the realization that he needed to go back and develop a relationship with his mother based on understanding her own past and what she bequeathed to him in terms of an anxious/avoidant legacy. The bulk of Mark’s work deals with how emotional distancing or split offs as well as the breaking of linkages and heart to heart connection can cause trauma and problems in descendants further down the ancestral line and it would appear in an astrology chart often with strong aspects to the personal planets Uranus in particular, but perhaps also Pluto and Neptune
I seem to have diverged a bit here while trying to explore how a pain body may be carried, especially when profound traumas that occur in families are passed down but not spoken of.. And just possibly today, in the dark of the Moon as we head towards this eclipse at 19 degrees of Gemini my maternal Great Great Grandfather is very much on my mind.. this eclipse hits the Solar configuration in his chart as he was born in June in 1847.
Eckhart reminds us in that chapter that awareness of and insight into the operation of the pain body or trauma cycle can occur as we use our mind to awaken, the pain is therefore the medicine that may just set us free. Once we can understand the traumatic reaction pattern or pain body/cycle is just a reactive pattern of the mind we are carrying it may help, but one problem may also be that once traumatic imprints get encoded in cells releasing them can be a huge challenge.. it takes a lot of presence and mindfulness to understand what is going on and there is something about trauma survivors being so overwhelmed that we tend to loose consciousness, becoming swept up in the wave so to speak.
In a lovely example in that chapter Eckhart talks of how he helped an elderly neighbor, a survivor of the Holocaust in Germany to break out of an anxiety loop one day when she came knocking on the door by just being present with her and not reacting.. Scott has managed to do this with me many times when I get triggered and it always helps. If we can stay calm in the face of someone else’s spin out we may help them more than we ever know.. The lady in question realized that the issue she bought to Eckhart was not really the big deal she was making it into, what was being triggered, was instead THE PAIN ALREADY EXISTING INSIDE OF HER..
Sadly many pain bodies end up driving others away if those around us cannot have compassion for the thorn in our paw at the time.. It does no good to rage at or try to entrap, silence or pin down a wounded beast.. the beast may have to run off and lick its own wounds for a time.. the more pain we endured and could not get to connect with deeply in presence, acknowledge, release and process the harder it can be to break the cycle.. And as Eckhart says it may seem we are being a bit cold when we do not join another in their own reaction, for a time the person has lost touch with the goodness because the hurt or badness held deep inside only eclipses everything.. just as the Sun is soon to be eclipsed by the Moon.. a powerful metaphor of the emotional self (Moon) becoming very strong and for a short time blotting out the open reason and bright Solar quality of spirit and yet such darknesses once endured over and over again may help us to learn very important lessons about what happened to us and how and why we react as we do.
Emerging From The Dark Night 