A PUZZLED MIND

Empathy can be a difficult skill to develop, particularly after not experiencing empathy toward ourselves and repeatedly being told that we must be pretending. Our feelings were repeatedly dismissed and not acknowledged by the ones we loved or who should have cared for us. It hardens us temporarily as we encapsulate ourselves for protection, until we allow ourselves to thaw and wake up. Yet with the awakening, the inescapable memories and the truth about the past also return. Not everyone will go there, and not everyone will heal the same way. This is exactly where the world needs to learn more about empathy and compassion toward others so we can all heal from our collective traumas as much as our individual ones. Empathy and compassion are key in healing work but should never be used to pacify illusions, so be authentic and transparent with your experiences. During trauma, or one of its triggers, the brain goes into alarm mode. Your ability to think and retain memory shuts off because it’s not required for survival, and your brain is trying to protect you. This is why it’s so darn difficult to remember the trauma itself, especially if you’re being confronted by people like police officers, lawyers, or friends and family who don’t want to believe you. The triggers of trauma that you acquired during your life are sometimes very unique and will quickly put your brain back into alarm mode, and you won’t be able to go there. The trauma memories might not be accessible at all. For example, if you’re a survivor of repeated childhood rape, the minute your bedroom door opened, your brain was sounding the silent alarm, and your body was responding. This put you into a frozen state as the hormones triggered by your nervous system flooded your body in order to numb you. The increase in hormones disrupted the normal memory storage function. This causes flashback memories to appear—often months, years, or decades later—and on many occasions, the memories aren’t intact. They are fragmented and dreamlike, and you may even observe yourself floating over the situation. As I stated earlier, out-of-body experiences are commonly reported by survivors of rape and other trauma. Even as an adult, you may still respond to triggers with temporal dissociation, like a deer-inheadlights reaction. This isn’t a fault but a normal reaction from your body to trauma or something that triggers it. You never had a chance. Here’s another memory of a trauma-induced out-of-body experience. I was in my room in my bed and suddenly realized that something wasn’t right. I woke up to a voice asking me a question. I began to cry and whimper as someone asked if he’d hurt me. It was a trigger that made me sweat and realize something was very wrong. My heart broke as I let out an ear-shattering cry of despair and turned my head to my right side—only to find myself outside of my body. I turned my head to the left, looking at a face full of pain and tears, bangs in my eyes beneath my Coke-bottle glasses, and an absolutely awry and out-of-this-world kind of feeling overcame me. At first, I didn’t recognize myself, wondering for a second who the person was, until I clued in that it was in fact me