The Rawness

In response to my last post, I discussed among other things the three faulty ways of coping with core problems: surrender, overcompensation and avoidance. Commenter YOHAMI wrote the following:

So what to do? how do I heal this stuff. Im always in pain. Sometimes its great for making music. I meditate or do stuff I love (ehrr. avoidance?) and it goes away. Then something triggers again.

I think I got the picture. I´d like to know if you have a method to get rid or solve or transmute or whatever has to happen.

I think he raised a good question. Is meditation a type of avoidance of core problems?

There is a Vipassana meditation book called Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana that tackles this subject and says the following:

[Meditation is not running away from reality.] Meditation is running straight into reality. It does not insulate you from the pain of life but rather allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and go beyond suffering. Vipassana is a practice done with the specific intention of facing reality, to fully experience life just as it is and to cope with exactly what you find. It allows you to blow aside the illusions and free yourself from all the polite little lies you tell yourself all the time. What is there is there. You are who you are, and lying to yourself about your own weaknesses and motivations only binds you tighter to them. Vipassana meditation is not an attempt to forget yourself or to cover up your troubles. It is learning to look at yourself exactly as you are to see what is there and accept it fully. Only then can you change it.

Mentally running away from reality is not meditation, but rather dissociation. It’s a defense mechanism we often use to mentally escape the discomforts of real life. Dissociation can range from daydreaming to taking drugs to get high to getting absorbed and zoning out while watching TV to  situations as extreme as developing multiple personalities.

This article goes further:

Think of a more common captivity situation, like child abuse or domestic violence. Victims of abuse are in a captive state psychologically. They dissociate to cope with being abused. Dissociation during sexual abuse is a classic example. Many people who have been sexually abused as children report leaving their bodies and watching the abuse from above themselves. This is a more extreme form of dissociation than simple daydreaming. This is the mind’s ability to cope with horror at its best. Instead of having to be emotionally experiencing sexual abuse, the mind helps your soul escape. Your experience of being is not in your body, but on the ceiling somewhere witnessing abuse that is happening to you.

There are varying levels of dissociation:

• Everyday Dissociation we all experience that is healthy in general
  day dreaming
  • spacing out
  • fantasy
• Traumatic Dissociation that comes from trauma and is not integrated in the psyche
  • numbness
  • deadened emotions
  • leaving one’s body
• Severe Traumatic Dissociation comes from major trauma that is not integrated in the psyche
  • derealization – constant experience of dissociation
  • depersonalization – not feeling the sense of “Me” or feeling your body as belonging to yourself
  • forming separate identities or self-states
    • fully formed identities
    • partially formed identities with specific roles
    • emotion states that are fragments

In its most extreme form, dissociation can actually cause a sense of fragmentation or various self-identities within one person. This happens to children who endure horrifying torture and extreme forms of abuse. Instead of leaving one’s body, an entire separate identity is created to handle the abuse the child has to endure. It isn’t uncommon for children who develop different self-states to form several personalities to take on various roles. The more personality states created, the more abuse has occurred. This form of dissociation only happens in childhood, when children are most vulnerable, and endures through adulthood unless therapy is sought out. Therapy can help people with multiple identities to either learn to manage the fractured pieces of themselves more effectively and improve their overall quality of life, or to integrate the fractures into one sense of Self.

For dissociation that interferes in your quality of life, therapy can be extremely helpful. Traumatic dissociation happens when you are overwhelmed by a traumatic event or a series of traumatic events. It is self-protective. The problem is that in order to put the past to rest, the painful feelings of the past trauma have to be re-integrated into your sense of self, and a new sense of the integrated trauma needs to be internalized.

Many people feel that even if their childhoods were emotionally dysfunctional, so long as they didn’t consist of extreme abuse such as lots of beatings, sexual molestation, etc, they don’t really have any trauma to complain about, but that’s not true. Dysfunctional families that don’t provide emotional nurturance, even the ones that don’t have physical, verbal, or sexual abuse , are usually very traumatic to a child.

Some people tend to dissociate easier than others, and kids who grew up dysfunctionally and used dissociation to cope often become adults who chronically dissociate all the time. This is one of the reason alcoholism and drugs are so so appealing to people with bad childhoods; they create an easy way to induce dissociation through use of chemicals. It’s a type of repetition compulsion; by bringing about dissociation via chemicals, they’re re-experiencing one of their preferred coping mechanisms of youth.

For those who tend to dissociate easily, mentally moving away from reality, meditation can be very difficult because it is the polar opposite, mentally moving toward reality. Some people think they’re meditating when really they’re just dissociating and calling it meditation. Some people go into meditation chasing a high or a trance that feels similar to what one enters when taking drugs, which again is just more dissociation. This is why some think it’s so important to have the guidance of a good teacher before seriously undertaking meditation.

I took a class in Vipassana (Insight) meditation myself recently and it helped a lot as far as telling the difference. I was fortunate to have a good teacher who explained the difference between meditation and dissociation very clearly. She then recommended a few books, including the two I’m giving links to below, that helped even more.

Also, in regards to your other question, yes I do have some suggestions about how to go about correcting a lot of these issues. It’s a process I still struggle with myself, but I’ve come across techniques that have done wonders for me. I will discuss them later in the Reader Letter series this month.

Recommended Reading:

• Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. This book is the more essential of the two, as it discusses the how of meditation.

• Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom by Joseph Goldstein. This book is a good (but not essential in my opinion) supplement to the previous book that discusses the why of meditation.

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