Unhealed trauma makes us anxious, and anxious people infringe on sovereignty
As a little exercise, I decided to tally up some of the adverse events in the lives of people I have shared a home with, which preserves the privacy of those involved by being merged together. Here is a quick list of the sources of trauma:
- Death of mother at age 15
- Alcoholic father with PTSD
- Parents in a cult
- Both parents survived a concentration camp
- Physical abuse as a child
- Eating disorder
- Refugee due to invasion
- Socioeconomic collapse at end of Communism
- Parental abandonment (lots)
- Divorce
- Homosexual in non-Western country
- Undiagnosed learning disorder
- Raped as a child and/or adult
- Transgender misadventure
- Violent forced medication
No doubt you have your own comparable list, possibly with even worse attacks on one’s inner peace and childhood innocence. As you might imagine, living under the same roof as those who have endured such sufferings creates the conditions for, err, “learning experiences”. My own life has been quite a wild adventure, too. I once gave a short presentation at my old school in the headmaster’s office to the heads of year, with two pictures of me from decades earlier:
On the left is your “star pupil”. He got a scholarship to attend the school, competent rower, computer whizz, then one of the highest exam scores in the country on leaving, mathematics degree from Oxford, successful international IT and tech career, blue chip executive, widely admired blogger, cited in press as expert, respected industry event speaker. You could put him on the cover of the school prospectus. On the right is a serious mess: did drugs, got divorced, engaged in debauchery, career disasters, endured disease, suffered from depression, and even had a brush with death. You wouldn’t want anything to do with him and his cursed reputation. Of course, both are me, and all of us have our polished persona, and less wonderful shadow self; our job is to integrate them.
The “light and dark faces of reality” is more than just for the individual. The Great Awakening is an identification with the collective shadow of society, with all its harrowing horrors of child abuse, mind control, and genocide. A paradoxical part of “where we go one we go all” is to recognise that many of “them” are actually “us” but who have been seduced by evil. We are all capable of wrongdoing and wickedness, but a combination of context and character delivers different situational outcomes. It is easier to have compassion and forgiveness when you recognise your own frailty, although justice still has to be served to that there is accountability for immoral acts.
Each of us has a personal awakening journey, too, which is to seek out our shadow, embrace it as part of us to be loved, and allow ourself to be whole without having to split into good (“us”) and bad (“them”) parts. As a super-empath “autist” with hyper perception I am also particularly prone to being traumatised. A teacher once came up to me when I was around ten years old and noted how I was a very sensitive boy, and he was right! The world can easily overwhelm me, and emotional attack from angry conflict can put me into a kind of “overload emergency shutdown” mode, where I become very sleepy and unable to interact.
The part of our collective awakening that is not often examined in this context is our interpersonal relationships. There is a lot of generic advice, much of it extremely good, and located in a path of growth and understanding. Yet the bridge to spiritual warfare is generally left out, and that is where I want to focus here. It is well understood wisdom that to heal the world you have to heal yourself, just that this needs spelling out in detail and evidential support from personal stories to make it real. In particular, everything tends to be turbo charged in wartime, running at a tempo and energy that can leave you absolutely exhausted and unable to cope.
If you are really committed to the journey towards a sovereign, autonomous, and free future then you have to confront the toxic parts of all three pillars: the outward society; your inner psyche; and the relationships that join the former to the latter. A person who is sovereign not only asserts their divinity and innate rights in the context of the public sphere and the state. They also avoid infringing on the sovereignty of others in their interpersonal encounters, and this can be through any kind of interaction or intercourse. Merely being able to cope with your inner wounds is not the same as healing them and ceasing to pass on the pain.
For instance, given that our enemy seeks to attack the essence of life, sexuality is a subject that features heavily in the awakening community. Paedophilia, perversion, mutilation of the young, abortion, promiscuity, undermining masculinity, denigrating femininity, destruction of the nuclear family. You know the list of disturbing topics and how far we have fallen short of the ideal. Plenty of talk about sexual sickness, but how much time and effort is spent on writing about genuine sexual health and wellbeing? Is this part of your church congregation or “awake” community meet-up? If not, why not?
How often have you been reassured that abundant, loving, intimate, connected, responsible, committed, monogamous sex is a part of a healthy lifestyle? Where do we celebrate that we deserve to enjoy the “cellular music” our body plays when rubbed against another? When was the last time that a patriot or awakening event discussed the nature of marriage, and made speakable the universal struggle to find and sustain a “love life” in its most meaningful sense? The only way for the deep state to be stopped from coming back is through deep love for one another, in every dimension, including the erotic.
In a contract type of marriage, which our society’s standard, we agree to put things in to get things out; it is an exchange. This typically leads to “look across”, with finger pointing as reality falls short of expectations. In a covenant marriage, where two become one with the sacred, you “look up” together, and recognise both have a path of healing and growth and need to attend to their own stuff. The former lends itself to increasing levels of trauma, exemplified by divorce. The latter naturally flows together, as the rain to the ocean, because we abandon the fantasy of fixing the other, and focus on ourselves. It takes humility, as we cease to be able to blame others for our hurt from past trauma.
I keep my (often bonkers) private life private, but let’s just say that I have done many years of work on myself, and much of the writing that people value from me is the product of sustained self-reflection. As you address your own “mummy and daddy issues”, it becomes easier to see them in others. It is not that you are innately better or more enlightened, just that you have done the inner work, and gained conscious competence. From that place, you can spot spiritual incompetence and social foolishness more easily. There are lots of problems that need to be confronted: abandonment, pride, insecurity, anger, grief, and so on — each being a form of mastery that lets us identify the apprentices around us.
To boil things down to their essence, people with trauma wounds tend to be anxious, since they are in a pain avoidance modality. Anxious people then tend to be controlling, and to avoid confrontation with their own shadow. They project their issues onto others so it is “out there” and someone else’s (unwanted) change process to engage with. This then invites the “victim, persecutor, rescuer” triangle of dysfunction, as the recipient of the projection feels injured. When the target protests at their unfair treatment (now being the victim, who tries to rescue via offering insight), it only reinforces the one down status of the other, and makes the lashing out even more extreme.
Eventually, victims become violent in their own way, as they identify with that status as a way of legitimising their own unempathetic bad behaviour. One laudable person who has campaigned for medical justice for decades often calls me, and I have had to learn to avoid picking up. There is never an initial check to see if it is a good time to talk. If it isn’t a good time, my protestations are not heard as the other launches into their diatribe. I get half an hour of distressing download about harm to children at random moments when I am facing my own issues too. My advice is not listened to. I come away drained by the encounter, and have realised that it is actually quite selfish and abusive of the other to treat me this way.
The pillars of sovereignty are unbalanced in this case: being a campaigner for justice in the world, and a committed person of faith, does not allow you to take my time and energy for your own needs without respect, reciprocity, or responsibility. Your unmet emotional needs are not my problem. This person is seeking an external resolution to trauma via final truth and justice in the world, as a way of fully integrating the loss internally. Family and friends have turned away as they find this kind of behaviour unattractive, which leaves an ever smaller pool of people willing to engage. As a result, I get the brunt of the unprocessed trauma, and it is not something I can sustain in the long run.
The conundrum we all face is that many of the most “awake” to the psychopathic criminal society we inhabit are also the most traumatised by it. As a result, being with “awake” people can be surprisingly difficult. Some are extremely egotistical in how they know more about the popular lies or hidden truths, being proud of how much better they are as a result, which is a spiritual folly. Others make a partial journey of healing, see they have risen above most of their close associates in consciousness, then stop looking, being satisfied with that comparative progress alone — an unappealing mediocrity. Hearing traumatic stories or seeing traumatic imagery can stir up yet more trauma in us; the process of witnessing one person’s hurt can (if not done wisely) cause more harm.
If you are truly committed to the sovereign path, then you have accepted that absolute freedom comes with absolute responsibility, including for your own emotional response to every provocation, including deep trauma from early life. You have to learn to differentiate between projections that accuse others of that which we are guilty, versus the gift of loving feedback from those who see our faults more clearly than we do ourselves. You have to escape the violence of the victim, persecutor, rescuer triangle by confronting your wounds, accepting your scars, and healing your pain. Being sovereign is a process that can paradoxically make things worse in the short run, as progress along one “pillar” shows up how we are falling short in others.
Affidavits of truth as being a legal and lawful sovereign are necessary, but not sufficient: you have taken up your power, but not your responsibility to all men and women. Every interaction with any agent of power, be it a policeman, call centre operator, or debt collector, has to be done in “sovereign mode” — and even more so with intimate relationships. You cannot project your own unhealed trauma onto others, as that only stirs up more violence and trauma. Just “hold the line” to stand in your power: assert your authority, and insist on their being responsible for their words and deeds, but don’t let “your stuff” become “their stuff” (or vice versa).
The trauma of mind and debt slavery is pervasive, so our response has to be equally omnipresent in how we live. Sovereigns consciously own their trauma; they do not act it out in unconscious ways. To be fully sovereign is to go on a spiritual journey that paradoxically puts all the “blame” for our external distress on us, as only we can heal ourselves. We may have been factually victimised, but it is a choice whether to remain a victim, and act into the belief that we are entitled to lash out because we are hurt. The spiritual war is won by defeating the corrupt systems that enslave us, but the spiritual peace is kept by how we relate to one another, recognising that all have trauma to face.
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