Confession of a former connection-phobe..

and the wisdom of trauma

Hello everyone,
I hope you are well.
Here in Vietnam, we just had the second big wave of the pandemic. I am on my sixth day of quarantine in my own apartment since my floor in the building has one infected case.

Anxiety is in the air. Everything has to be delivered. Compared to the rest of the people here, I am doing very very well, even enjoying the drastic change. Suddenly so many lovely friends check in on me and send in too much stuff to eat, as you can see here.

Your friend, still alright 😀

You may already know what is it like to be in lockdown. This feels like another level though, for it seems like only you are confined. It's weird to look outside the window and everyone else is still walking around.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
This brings me to contemplate on a quintessential human experience: being left alone and being abandoned.
Don't expect this to get dark that fast? Read on... (and it will eventually get lighter, I promise)

Confession of a former connection-phobe.

“Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone ... ” - David Whyte

About half of us will identify more with the fear of being abandoned, while the other half will be with the fear of losing oneself or being engulfed.
For a long time, I thought I was the latter. By all accounts, I need a lot of space, and this quarantine seems more like a blessing in disguise.
I get very uncomfortable upon the intrusion of time and space. Nowhere did that play out more clearly in intimate relationships, where I was and still is a hard bargainer for my own time. I am afraid of losing my own freedom and autonomy.

Here is the kicker though.
While I was in effect saying "don't come too close to me", what I also wanted (but did not even know to express till recently) is "don't stay too far either". Don't just disappear, because I'll be very alone.
And that's darn confusing. How can a person who seems to be so happy to be on his own also be afraid of being abandoned??
This very human paradox, the dance of aloneness and togetherness is most clear in the childhood game of hide and seek.

Take a moment to ponder. Have you ever enjoyed the thrill of hiding, especially when you found a place where there is no way the seeker could find you?
Fun, right? This is the pleasure of being on one's own, of true solitude. Nobody can ever reach you. You don't want to be caught, for being caught is to lose yourself.
Yet, in that very game, have you ever had a moment when you realized that you were not being sought anymore? After the initial excitement "haha he can never find me here", you begin to doubt. "Could he find me? What is he doing? Is he playing anymore? Does he care anymore?" Perhaps you may stay in that place of doubt for hours, pretending that you are playing hard-to-get so you can eventually win. More likely though, you get scared and tentatively come out. You don't want to be left alone, to be abandoned.

That is how behind every fear of losing oneself, of being swallowed by togetherness, is the fear of abandonment.
Of course, on the day-to-day, most of us seem fine, not consumed by this fear at all. Yet this is one of those truths that once you have seen, you cannot unsee, and you begin to see it everywhere.

Just a few months ago, I'll look at this and laugh.
"Ha! Me being afraid of being abandoned? No way. Don't you see how I am so enjoying being on my own already? I am the one who left relationship because I want my own freedom!"

This all changed recently, starting from a few relational encounters, this unexpected self-quarantine and in particular this new documentary, The Wisdom of Trauma, about the work of Dr Gabor Mate.
Here is a poignant conversation where he talked with a former drug addict, Alicia.

A:I am of afraid being abandoned. You know, as homo sapien, we are all afraid of being thrown out of the cave.
G: What is that fear?

A: Well, naturally I'll die, unless I do all the stuff for other people.

G: When you are doing stuff for other people, what are you doing to yourself?"

"Hmmm", she paused for a moment in response to this pointed question and said "I am abandoning me".

"Yeah" he said, so matter-of-factl-y "so you are actually enacting your worst fear".

Oh my. That moment landed on me like a brick. I could hear in my tummy a thmmmmm. It's that kind of moment when you see with naked eyes what you are doing to yourself.
In what other ways may I be enacting my worst fear of abandonment? And that whole thing is unconscious!
Who is to say that when I am on my own, I am not abandoning myself? What about all the crazy distractions, frustration and self-neglecting behaviors?
Oh my.

Something shifted. Now if I were to be honest, I am afraid of being left alone, and I am dead sure I am not alone in that.
I was sharing this discovery with my mentor Dr Home. Surprising to me, he, an autonomy-lover, 'let me do my own thing" maverick, also came to a similar conclusion in his 23 years of marriage.

Why does it matter? Because when we are aware and can name the hidden force that is really driving us, then we can relax instead of being all caught up in terrible loops of "why am I doing this again?"
We can begin to hold it, lightly so.
That's a GOOD thing that we feel the fear. It sucks, but boy, it means we are humans, and we do care about being together.
In fact, seeing a new fear comes up should be celebrated. That means you are out of the old loop and onto something new!
So what do all this inquiries about being alone have to do with the t word, trauma, then?

It is not what happened to us

Here is a penetrating insight from the documentary.
"Trauma is not what happened to us. It is what happens inside us as a result of what happened to us."
Let's bring this to our inquiry of feeling alone. Given that I've written about it many times before, and somehow I am still drawn to it means there is still something there.
If what happens inside us is "feeling lonely" or that we don't feel connected here, not to this family, place, group or perhaps worst, to the person that I thought had and would cared for me (probably a semblance of a childhood caregiver), then that's trauma.

"WOW WOW WOW HOLD ON NOT SO FAST. Of course all of us will feel lonely at least some of the times, that doesn't make us traumatized right? Otherwise, aren't we all?", you might protest.

I know, I protested that too.
My initial reaction to this realization was "I want to be open to that idea, but it's too painful so I'll close off with disbelief, skepticism or judgment that you are crazy/not scientific enough/ too new agey/ insert your favorite justification here".
And that's why this realization felt world shattering.
Let's consider this once more.
What if our original state is of ever deepening connection, joy and blissful mutual existence, and that everything else is a symptom of some kind of trauma? That the original trauma is of separation, of feeling like a separate individual, alone in this world and certainly in his struggle?
"THAT'S CRAZY. What are you saying?"
What if your struggle to believe what I am venturing to guess here is the very proof that my hunch is correct?
If it's too hard to believe, well, then perhaps it is because it counters everything we have been raised to believe. "Life is not supposed to be that good". That voice often screams in my head too.
But as I sit here to write this while mindlessly biting a marvelous piece of cinnamon roll a friend made for my lockdown, perhaps that voice isn't true. Perhaps life can indeed be that good.
Here is another proof. Have you ever felt something so beautiful it almost hurts? That's the sign that a part in all of us still hasn't lost that knowing of what Charles Eisenstein calls “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”.

Aloneness as a sign of trauma.

It turn out that fear of being abandonment is not caused by someone leaving us in this moment. They only remind us that at some points, we felt left alone, and that pain has has never gone away.

Even if we have learned to cope with that aloneness by minimizing our needs "that's fine, I can live with that" (classic me, btw) or rationalizing "ah I don't need people right now" or "it's too much of a hassle to find someone", that pain is still there. We still feel left alone; we am just distracting ourselves with excuses.
Don't believe me? Here is how you can test.
Ask yourself honestly: would you prefer to be doing your thing alone or in the quiet presence of a good friend?
You probably will choose the latter like me.
My instant reaction is "of course the latter BUT... [insert favorite excuses]
that BUT is the coping. It's the pain. If you have it, then congratulation, you are a human too.
This hit me hard. It flew in the face of my own independence, autonomy, "I want my own space" self.
The good thing though, is that now I am a lot more comfortable expressing that I am afraid of being left alone, and how much I want to and love to be nourished by connection.
Owning that makes it a lot easier to receive, and boy, how much life has got better. 😀 Sure I can do many things on my own, especially things like soothing myself for feeling left alone.
AND doing those in the loving presence of others is way better, more fun and ease.
I hope my little digging also sparks something in you. If so, let me know!

Reflection for this week: in what way are you abandoning yourself?
Would you like to return? Gently bring your attention back to the atmosphere within the body. Breathe. It's okay that we have abandoned ourselves. It's time to return.

Last poem for all of us, a beautiful and poignant ode to this returning to ourselves.
Much love,
Khuyen
ps: the whole movie is worth watching, and is available again for this weekend. Here is the link again, The Wisdom of Trauma.
pss: A COMIC TO LIGHTEN US UP BECAUSE I PROMISED!