Healing Trauma: Better Than Holding on to Trauma

By far!

Photo by Chris Spalton on Unsplash

Sometimes, I semi-accidentally write stories that are bigger than life, and this story is one of those. It can be applied in equal measure to geopolitical and personal circumstance. I hope it is useful, please let me know.

This story is about the tremendous practical significance of refusing to nurse and prolong your very real trauma. It is about why it’s healthy to refuse to give your trauma an inch more than absolutely necessary for your soul growth —and why, no matter the circumstance,  it’s preferable to divorce it asap and get on with your unshackled life, for joy.

Why I care about it

First, a personal thing. I happen to have been born benevolent toward others and long-tolerant of other people’s nonsense, as long as it’s sincere.  The super benevolent approach to others is not a quality that I adopted from an external source, not something learned or grafted. It’s how I was born, and it brings me joy. I am excited by kindness, by love, by healing, by meaningful cooperation, by togetherness, by helping each other grow. Intelligent love really can do miracles. Old wounds can heal, the soul that has been dormant for decades may suddenly sprout and produce miraculous growth, all good things.  

A perfect example is how my dear friend Anaïs Tekerian (Substack) helped me come out of a sadness-induced block on my musical endeavors and start singing again, sending me on a journey to record Armenian songs. That touch of love was all I needed to shed the sadness and come to life in this particular way. And it so happens that love is both healing and pleasant. When one’s soul is in place, it just comes. One doesn’t need to read a book how to love, it’s always there, waiting for be allowed to get to work.  

As far as ideas … I care very little about other people’s ideas, or even my own ideas, for the most part. It could be because I’ve lived under very different isms and “boot” brands, and I have observed that attachment to ideas over live soul relationships hurts people.

“Officially correct” ideas can change overnight, and people get thrown under the bus—like the generation of my grandparents was betrayed by the political leaders when the Soviet Union fell.

Different talking points may be in “competition” with each other—causing war and suffering—but if they function as mere domination-justifying talking points, they are just different versions of the Holy Algorithm. On my end, I am strongly opposed to the invitation to come under an algorithmic boot of any sort, and I am also strongly against the “missionary position.” In my opinion, the “missionary position,” by virtue of assuming one’s dominance over the free will of others, is at the root of most current civilizational problem, including the not so great reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In practical terms, it means that when I interact with others, I focus on their heart, on their sincerity, and—if need be—I filter out the ideological differences that I am not psyched about. Now, of course some people practice ideas that make connecting to them more work than fun, and in that case, I just don’t connect. But I still view them—as long as they are sincere and not deliberately trying to hurt me—as my fellow travelers in this very mysterious journey we all share.

And here comes the conundrum. Since I am generally benevolent and consider it a necessity to act honorable,  when I do my usual, i.e. cooperation and love, and in response I get some flavor of a horse’s arse, it hurts, and the pain is very real. And naturally, under such circumstance, it’s tempting and logical to feel dejected and sad.

But here is the thing. It may very well be logical but getting too serious about one’s trauma is not good. The best is to cry to the necessary degree, then take a broom, and sweep the pain out. The party who acted on their weakness of some sort and caused the hurt is responsible for their part of the thing, and I am responsible for mine. And the universe always balances all. (Hopefully, in a sweet and healing way, I am not into anger, I am into healing, and I insist.)

(If at this point of this story you are voicing an objection to my phrasing, i.e. that I said “the universe” as opposed to “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” I am just going to ignore the objection—with actual love—because I just described how I filter out dogmatic ideas and focus on the heart. I don’t believe that the Creator ever directed anyone to look down on other human beings who pray in their own words. I think it’s tragic that people do that, and I think that the notion of a jealous, discriminating God is to this day the biggest psyop in the entire history of human kind, and COVID is a baby scam comparing to that scam. My objection is to the Mother of All Psyops, my objection to that is from my heart, and my love is real.)  

Anyway, I’ve been a philosopher since I was a kid,  and I have observed the long-term result of marrying one’s trauma.  It’s a sad result. It often happened to the women in my homeland. They would get hurt by the lack of gratitude for their good deeds, or they would get wounded by being let down by their men (in the form of being lazy and unsupportive, or abusive, or cheating, or whatever the case may be)--and they would take in that betrayal and that feeling of being  abandoned and dejected, and allow it to eat them and eat them, until they burn out like a candle without the oxygen of soul-respecting love.

It led to bitterness, to martyrdom, to sickness, to joyless eyes, and it many ways, I feel like that dynamic—and the sense of betrayal—has shaped the culture of my people in a big way. The cultural gloom and the sense of desperation are to a large degree an ancient cry of good-hearted Russian women for being heard, and their self-punishment for not being heard.

Observing that dynamic made me a strong opponent of allowing my trauma hang around any longer than it’s necessary to grow my soul.

Again, I do believe that the universe balances all. And as hard as it is to face any flavor of horse’s arse in response to benevolence, it is important to be connected to love from the inside and order the sadness to go away. We are not victims. We are dignified people, and it is much better this way.

Boring theory and a little COVID

When dealing with trauma,  we are really dealing with four things, and four questions can be asked:

• Is my feeling of trauma real?

• Has an injustice occurred?

• Do I have the ability to change the external circumstance quickly?  

• What is the most beneficial thing for me to do this very second?

• (And the fifth, if you are philosophically inclined) How will my choice impact the world in the short term and in the long term?

The feeling of trauma is usually real no matter what. Just like a small child may cry over small things, a child-like adult may cry over small things as well. Emotions are subjective,  and definitions are unstable nowadays.  :)

Some people may choose to not be traumatized by serious matters, and others may feel like their barely-together world is shattered every time they hear someone use a “bad” word.

 In fact, it seems like there is a treacherous campaign to turn us all into emotionally shaky children on wobbly legs, dependent on the establishment mommy and daddy for every thought. The purpose of this initiative is to confuse us and then steal our stuff—turning both trauma and justice upside down.

In the upside-down world, firing a person for declining a medical treatment is democratic and just, and using an undesirable pronoun is a violent act of hate. The irony—and the tragedy—is that the people who are not solidly grounded in their love are very easy to confuse—and so their trauma over “bad” words is actually real. Just like when my abusive ex lost it every time when he couldn’t find his TV remote—those broken individuals losing it over undesirable pronouns are ridiculous but sincere.

And when it comes to COVID totalitarianism (or any deliberate or callous injustice, for that matter), I am a supporter of pushing back with dignity and—yes—pursuing accountability for abusers with titles but without bitterness on the inside. Bitterness is like rust.

The situation that I personally find the hardest is when the act of being let down is real, and the person or people who did it are sincere. Not enemies, not people with bad intentions, just people whose vulnerability of character has expressed itself in this way.

It’s difficult because this dynamic breaks the healthy spiritual assumptions about the world, and our hearts aren’t stupid, and so they feel the pain. But while the pain is real, I strongly believe that our trauma is not there to hurt us, it is there so that we can grow our soul. And I divorce from the pain and insist on joy. Always.

And sometimes, life balances things out in a weird way. For example, this song that I published quite a while ago, called “Duduk Imitation,” was really called “You abandoned me.” It was a cry from my heart about injustice. Very strangely, the person who inspired the song, is currently in jail for attempted murder, which I absolutely couldn’t even imagine at the time I was grieving And I obviously wish him well, some kind of healing, something. But I have let it go, and life has balanced it out this way. Who knew.

I feel a little raw after typing this long story but I hope it’s useful…

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