Where do you turn to escape reality?
When a part of you has split-screened itself onto your frame of attention, constantly calling you out on your deliberate efforts to avoid painful thoughts,
When none of your streaming indulgences and bestseller exploits hold any allure anymore, because you always come away feeling like it was a waste of time and not even entertaining to begin with,
When you don’t have the patience or commitment to start a sparkling new habit, and are too much of a coward to experiment with psychedelics over the fear of slipping away into the kaleidoscopic fractals and not being able to return in time to pick up the kids from school,
Above everything else, when you have introspected yourself into a corner,
It becomes painfully clear that it is about time you faced your difficult thoughts head-on.
In writing about Dissociative Identity Disorder and exploring how the human brain handles traumatic memories, I got reintroduced to a hard fact that has been staring me in the face all along, a fact that was the very reason I started this journey but lost sight of in the dazzle of the teachings along the way.
Every one of us lives our lives from a place of fear.
By that I don’t mean rare instances of visible meltdowns, extreme phobias, or panic attacks, but that every single one of us, from moment to moment, experience our thoughts and actions based on a continuous undercurrent of fear and its subtler versions like doubt, anxiety, insecurity, hesitation, avoidance, and addictions, big or small. If we look closely, we will realize that love and attachments are based on anxiety over abandonment – “I don’t want to lose them”, beliefs and stories about the self are based on identity crisis – “Who will I be if not for these”, and our noble search for God and peace are based on a sense of lack – “I am not good enough”. Even constructive practices like the presence of mind, cautiousness, foresight, and clarity that serve a practical and functional purpose in life stem from the fear of making mistakes, concern over shame or embarrassment, and worry about missing out on things or letting others down. Our most positive and sunny yearning “I want to be happy” is actually a silent vibration of “I am not yet happy” and by extension, a subtly nervous, “Will I ever find happiness?”
“Ultimately, attachment is caused by desire and fear, desire for the good and fear of the bad, desire for pleasure and fear of pain, desire for life and fear of death. If you examine fear and desire you will see that fear itself is based on desire, fear of death is a desire for life, and that its opposite, fear of life, is a desire for death.”
A.H. Almaas
Adding to this garden variety fear, there is another kind of trauma embedded deep within our body and psyche that we have no direct knowledge about. It may sound impossible for us to carry any trauma in our body and mind because we know for a fact that our childhood didn’t consist of sexual abuses, abandonment issues, or any other PTSDs, but this doesn’t mean we are free of trauma entirely.
Locked within the folds of our unconscious is a cache of traumatic memories that comes from beyond our personal experience as an inheritance from the previous generations, not only as stories and knowledge in the socio-psychological sense, but also as biological imprints in our genes. Research in the field of epigenetics claims that trauma leaves a chemical signature in a person’s genes that when passed down affects how the gene expresses itself in the descendants. This has come by as a surprise to the research community because right at the beginning of conception when the sperm meets the egg, the chemical markers on the parental chromosomes get stripped away for a complete reset and new ones are put in place. Yet how the signature of trauma survives the reset and still gets communicated across is a challenging inquiry that has forced the scientists to now look into little-studied aspects of genes like RNA molecules and other epigenetic mechanisms.
The take-home inference here is that even though the emotion of fear itself cannot be, by any means, transmitted genetically to offsprings, the fears experienced by one generation is known to trigger changes in the gene expression creating a heightened sensitivity to the same fear in the next generation.
“Part of our consciousness is the inheritance of great suffering of mankind, not only personal suffering but the immense suffering of man who has been through thousands of wars, thousands of actual physical pain, all recorded, all shaping our brain.”
J. Krishnamurti
There is a very real legacy of pain passed down from generation to generation, subtly altered in its intensity between generations, but never completely free of it. Wars, famine, and genocides imprint a shade darker in our genes than in our history books, and under the three-pronged tutelage of the fear-driven mind, global catastrophic threats, and trauma-packed genes, it is an evolutionary miracle that humans haven’t already gone extinct.
We are no different from those individuals with DID, in that we too have deep-seated pain and triggers, most of which we are not even aware of. But where the brain of someone with DID recognizes the traumatic memories and creates alters to deal with, ours simply shoves the motherload of trauma under the id and allows the latent fear to color our every thought, emotion, decision, and action. On ordinary days, we carry on as business as usual unaware of the low-pitch influence of fear and trauma, but on days of excess trigger when the barb-edged reality stabs us in the chest, our heart breaks a little and we drown in our own suffering. We continue to live along waiting for the next heartbreak when another unknown, unfamiliar pain creeps from the deep crevices of our unconscious and implodes within, keeping us forever in a fear-based loop.
How do we deal with our difficult thoughts, when we have been conditioned bottom up on a molecular level to fear the fear itself? We think the best way to protect ourselves from traumatic thoughts is to keep them at bay, yet here we are married to the memory millstones spinning forever in a slow dance in an eternal void.
So the real question is, why are we so afraid to face our fears?
“If we want to live without fear, we first have to learn to live with it. There is no way around that.”
Rupert Spira
Cont.
