Lately I’ve been thinking about the following quote that I heard in an interview with author, Safiya Sinclair with author Elizabeth Gilbert.
Sinclair wrote a beautiful memoir called, How to Say Babylon. I highly recommend it as it was gorgeously written and taught me a lot about the Rastafarian culture of Jamaica. Sinclair is a poet and her use of language in the book is exquisite.
However, in this interview Gilbert posited this thought:
“Why do some people’s trauma turns them into tyrants; and some people’s trauma turns them into angels.”
I regularly marvel at this.
And it is worthy of question and our attention. I mean, after all, the more I’ve learned and read about certain conditions, like NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) they are both considered maladaptive personality disorders that are developed often when someone has a traumatic childhood.
Understandably, then, it may lead some of us to feel badly for these individuals. And yet—
Most of us have trauma. And moreover, what causes some people to have trauma and take that trauma, using it to develop more compassion and empathy for others, rather than playing a victim card, splitting people and antagonizing them as good/bad with no nuance in between, a grandiose sense of set, entitlement that you are deserving of things that you are not able or willing to deliver to others? A lack of accountability?
These are some of the above characteristics that develop with the trauma of those with BPD and NPD.
Why do some do that and then others go the other route?
Instead, developing co-dependency, or retaining inner child wounds that manifest in an abandonment of self and a complete denial of sense of self worth?
I consider my mother.
Someone for whom had a rougher childhood than most. She had every reason to develop a self-protective shield with the trauma that she endured. I’m not sure that anyone could/would blame her for then wallowing and abandoning others feeling in self preservation.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she seemed to develop an even bigger heart, in touch with empathy and compassion, for her students especially—the ones that were abandoned or rejected in a vast number of ways. She took these students under her wing, undoubtedly because she knew what that felt like, as a foster child whose mother had abandoned her at age 13, on her birthday.
It is amazing to me, as I consider the poet Rumi’s words, The wound is where the light gets in.
Indeed, it does. Or it can.
Conversely, it can also make you become a pretty big asshole.
Selfish. Wallowing. A victim. Entitled. Self-righteous. Full of yourself.
I do believe that those above, with NPD and BPD, do have self-loathing as well. However, they over-compensate, and do some interesting mental gymnastics to let themselves off the hook.
I both envy and marvel at that.
It is fascinating how trauma manifests in different individuals.
I dwell on this because so much of my life, obviously, especially within the last 9 years has been rooted in trauma. It is has been the defining parts of my life over the past near decade. It has shaped who I am, indelibly. I cannot deny that or pretend otherwise.
So, therefore, the question becomes—
Intentionally asking myself and remaining accountable to the daily question of my healing journey, which is—
What will I do with my trauma?
How will I use it to become a better person and use it in service to others and to develop myself?
Rather than see myself as a victim and create different rules for over-compensating for that deficiency? In what ways do I need to face my trauma and my repressed hard feelings, and work to heal, rather than to continue on in unhealthy and dysfunctional patterns that I may have seen presented to me throughout my life?
This is my choice. This is my life’s work. Because stagnancy and the models I had outlined for me are not an option.
Also not an option is not addressing my trauma and instead allowing it to warp me into a self-involved person.
Instead, I both choose and will work towards allowing my trauma to help me transform, into a better person—holding space for others pain and trauma, and also, for my own.
It is not easy and I do not mean to suggest it is. It is hard fucking work. And yet, and yet—
It is much, much better than the alternative(s).
My therapist—still working on her hours to become certified—validated me recently. She thanked me for working with me and entrusting her with my care. She said (about me), “This one has real trauma.”
I felt heard. Seen. Validated then.
It sounds perhaps silly. After all, doesn’t 2/3 of your family blowing their brains out and finding your father’s brains, constitute trauma? Doesn’t that make me deserving of a seat at the table?
It sounds ridiculous. And yet—
We often times only relegate the title of trauma to those who have endured a genocide, war, or been in active combat. That is why PTSD is so often thought of or understood as synonymous with only being a condition of war or that vets have. And while, yes, this is true, also, also—
Trauma is incredibly, incredibly common.
And though I know—I’ve read the literature—that it is not the external event so much as what happens within you as a result of it…
Still, even me—
I guess in the back of my mind is the thought—
Is it really trauma?
That’s sad. Not sad for me, but sad for what it represents, on a much larger scale.
If I won’t even own my trauma, how much more for others traumas?
And don’t we need to own what happened to us? To validate our existences? Own our experiences?
In saying that, that’s what my therapist did for me. She bore witness to me and said—
“I’ve seen you. I hear you. You have some real trauma.”
Thank you.
And with it, I intend not only to do in good service to others, but also, and most importantly, in the development of my self, in the healing of my own person. So that I may also be of better service to others.
My story does not, will not, end with the victim of trauma having the last word. Nor in my justification for my mistreatment of others.
Instead, I intend to use for good.
I didn’t choose the trauma, but I can author and choose the rest of my story, in how it unfolds and what I use it for. And that is the mission of my life.