This is from The Art of Stillness, by Pico Iyer
As Marcus Aurelius reminded us more than two Millennia ago, it’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which you respond to them; a hurricane sweeps through town, and one man sees it as a liberation, a chance to start anew, while another, perhaps even his brother, is traumatized for life. “There is nothing either good or bad”, as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so”.
I find myself wondering about what “being traumatized for life” could possibly have to do with thinking. My first thought is trauma is not caused by thinking about the hurricane, and it’s an extreme physiological reaction to overwhelm. How can one think about being traumatized for life as anything but bad? Certainly I have experienced it as pretty continuously painful, and among other things it wrecked my marriage by making it impossible to be sexual.
Then I think because I felt myself to be defective, I went into therapy, and learned to see my dysfunctional behaviors which I could do something about. I think, even without trauma, the damage done by my mother’s “mis-representation” was considerable. I suppose my efforts to change my dysfunctional behaviors could be considered “good.” I can’t see Mother’s “mis-representation” as anything but “bad,” it certainly prevented me from possibly accomplishing something very necessary in our culture at this time, though I have no idea what that might have been.
Alternatively, a different paradigm to our culture’s materialistic one is that human beings are all contained in a single energy field. My work on my own trauma changes that energy field, and actually contributes to the healing of everyone who has trauma. I have no way to assess the truth of that idea.
But I did find a post that talks about trauma being necessary to my vocation.
The only good I can see about being traumatized, and the other damage, was it taught me compassion for people who are having a hard time, in a culture which blames people for having a hard time. “You just want to be miserable.” Sometimes I think I was born with it, but probably I always had compassion for such people because I knew what it was like to be hurt.
Looking again at the original quote, I see that it says that we are formed by the ways that we respond to experience, not by the experience itself. One thing I see immediately is that I responded to Mother’s traumatizing me, not by blaming her and staying stuck, but by doing what I could to heal myself. Also, despite the difficulty of severe depression caused by the trauma, I managed to write a book, The Feminine of History is Mystery, be part of Journey into Courage, and build and endow Neskaya. To be able to do such things, I found support, which was breaking the pattern my parents taught me to not ask for help.