“If that guy doesn’t provide some quick and easy instructions on how to get rid of traumas, then he shouldn’t write about it at all, because it won’t help people to know they have some traumas…”
That’s how I could summarize a certain group of opinions on the question of traumas and their solutions. This “guy” referred to one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, Gabor Maté. I talked with various people about his books and repeatedly encountered the opinion that “it’s better not to know”…
Basically, I learned that in our general pursuit of Victory, such information that inner traumas exist can actually “throw” a person off. Instead of focusing on what is “really important and what counts,” they start to dwell on their old grievances and failures and look for meaning and a way out of them… And that is a waste of time and not important at all, because the only thing that counts is the Great Victory, the Huge Achievement, the Epochal Success… You simply need to take a “professional attitude and focus on performance” and above all, not to be “soft”…”
And when a person achieves their Great Victory, then they can laugh at everything and everyone, especially at all those old grievances and failures, because that crucial success unequivocally proves that they are the Best, that they are the Winner…
Actually, I could also learn this a bit from the “therapeutic” side. When, thanks to my articles, I was able to talk to people about their experiences in altered states of consciousness in recent years, I repeatedly encountered the fact that some of them expected some kind of miracle from me. Some kind of “magic” that would help them easily and quickly get rid of all these bad experiences and they would be “finally totally happy as it should be”…
And some apparently expected me to significantly support them in their journey towards Victory and Happiness… The same “quick and easy miracle” was also expected by many people from psychedelic trips and holotropic breathwork. One session and everything will be great… After all, several people directly spoke about deciding to do the trip with the psychedelic toad bufo alvarius toxins to quickly achieve “enlightenment” and not have to slog through some “tedious paths.” An express elevator to the top, jumping nicely between the most enlightened ones, and that’s it. No big deal. The magical toad will take care of everything in a few minutes…
Unfortunately, I don’t know if it really worked for anyone, the people I could talk to, all had the opposite experience. They said that after “having bufo alvarius trip,” they had to work hard to put themselves back together, and it took a lot of integration effort to gain something useful from that experience…
Others approached it “shrewdly,” using the expanded state of consciousness to push all those traumas even deeper, so that they would “finally be gone”. We no longer suffer, traumas no longer jump out our subconsciousness, we’re free… Not at all… I found than that the deeper traumas are pushed inside us, the more they begin to reflect strongly from the outside. Simply put, the collective consciousness seeks to establish balance.
In my opinion, Gabor Maté has repeatedly shown incredible courage and an amazing effort to achieve balance in his books. In his latest book, “The Myth of Normal,” he confesses to many of his mistakes and shortcomings, admitting that he caused a lot of trauma to his loved ones precisely by not dealing with his own traumas and only trying to Win over them…
So maybe it could inspire us. If we would have the courage to see that the Pursuit of Victory simply doesn’t work… Eventually, we may find that resolving our traumas and establishing greater balance within ourselves was much better than any Victories in which name we had to suppress everything and just relentlessly run forward… Relentlessly run forward in our great Wheel of life, where we all run around in circles, we just don’t want to see it…
And the fact that we mark some of our experiences as “grievances and failures” stems directly from the pursuit of Constant Winning, because we are convinced that everything must be absolutely the brightest and absolutely the best, otherwise it’s just not “right” and it’s not good enough for us…
Just a few days ago, I saw a beautiful quote on the internet – “life is a journey of learning, it’s not a competition… the goal is not to constantly have as many toys as possible and have only those experiences we mark as “the best ones”… the goal is to learn and gain greater wisdom…
