When Trauma Changes Worldviews

The episode of Living Myth begins with a study on how our brains and our bodies respond to traumatic events. Apparently, our brains do not fully distinguish between something traumatic happening to us directly or something we observe that is harmful to someone else. To our brains a threat is a threat, whether we are actually experiencing it personally or are witnessing it on a personal device. Because humans are essentially social and typically empathic creatures, the same instincts that help connect us to each other can cause us to feel stress and pain by watching almost any kind of traumatic event.

A key issue is that in consuming mass media coverage of the flood of traumatic events that now plague the world, we cannot simply resolve the sense of threat and fear of harm that penetrates us and causes our brains to trigger our fight or flight responses. Our body remains convinced that we are in some kind of danger, yet we can neither completely escape by flight nor effectively engage with fight. As the world becomes more and more chaotic and this process repeats, we become intensely activated, but with nowhere for all the energy to go. We can feel increasingly on the verge of overwhelm as well as physically and emotionally worn down.

Psychologists who were consulted offered helpful suggestions such as setting boundaries on news consumption, calling friends or family members who can have a settling effect on us or spending more time in nature. However, the report also included the statement that under the pressure of repetitive traumatic stress a person's worldview might radically change. This greater fear involved the sense that in the midst of all the chaos people would conclude that life has no real meaning or purpose. However, the idea of an altered worldview can also be seen as our psyche’s instinctive way of seeking genuine healing and finding meaningful ways to change the course of both our personal and collective lives.

Ancient wisdom along with ideas of depth psychology suggest that in order to truly change we must start right where we are and accept the mess we are in if we would find deeper understandings and wiser ways of being. For it is precisely in the dark nights of the soul that we can experience revelations of both our deeper sense of self and the regenerative energies that are essential aspects of both nature and the cosmos.

Chaos as disorder and cosmos as regenerative order are the two huge energies that continuously make, unmake and remake the world. As things fall apart, the knowing self within us moves closer to the surface and seeks to become more conscious to us. Seen through the lens of the deeper sense of self and soul, the traumatic events that we experience and/or witness are not simply intended to defeat us or overwhelm us or make us numb, but rather, they are secretly intended to awaken us to a greater understanding of our own inner capacity to change and be part of the life-enhancing, life-creating dynamic through which chaos turns into cosmos, through which we can individually be redeemed from our own darkness and also find ways to contribute to a re-imagination and re-creation of a more coherent, inspired and interconnected sense of human culture.

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