Trauma Doesn’t Make It Less Real
A caveat before diving into this one. I am not focusing my studies on trauma, nor do I claim to be expert on the confluence between altered states of consciousness and trauma. That said, I find this is one of the first places people go when dipping a toe into this terrain, an easy gotcha to discount experiences that go beyond the five senses or traditional notions of space/time. So I’d like to at least try to address it.
It is obvious to both casual observers and ardent scientists/clinicians alike that those who have endured trauma, particularly as children, often report more paranormal experiences.* There is a variety of fascinating research on this, ranging from traditional psychological approaches seeking to cure what is seen as pathology, to more expansive transpersonal approaches viewing these experiences not as pathological but as both real and potentially contributing to healthy societal engagement.**
Before my career shift, I used to see this data point as an either/or, believing that either paranormal experiences were real and society had wrongly pegged the individual as pathological OR that experiences were imagined and thus fake, born out of some type of ill health. I now believe that someone can be traumatized and suffering from challenging mental or emotional states AND have real paranormal experiences. Both can be true.
For me, the most compelling way to conceptualize the mind and consciousness is that the mind acts as a filter for a universal consciousness, allowing us to experience what we can hold and integrate. The mind is not consciousness, but rather strains out all sorts of stimuli, enfolding us in a protective casing made up of a concoction of individual, familial, cultural, societal, ancestral, and karmic patterning.
I am far from any sort of neuroscience proficiency, but have been fascinated by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris’ entropic brain hypothesis and its implications for consciousness.*** It describes how the richness of subjective experience is mirrored by brain activity. Altered states of consciousness (e.g., psychedelic states, near-death experiences, dream states, even divergent thinking/creativity, etc.) function at a higher level of entropy or chaos/disorder – basically parts of your brain become hyperconnected in these states, and the boundaries that separate brain networks dissolve or at least relax. One intriguing area emerging from this hypothesis is that a healthy brain would be able to fluidly and flexibly transition between brain states, from chaos to predictability, expansiveness to rigidity, deconstruction to reconstruction, and back again.
Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel
Back to trauma. My perspective is that trauma rips open that secure filter and forces a porousness or deconstruction that some people are not ready to experience. For many who experience trauma, this may lead to a low entropy brain state, whereby their filter grows increasingly rigid (this might be manifest in a heightened resistance to change, depression, OCD, etc.). But others may gain an opening to other states of consciousness or paranormal phenomena, whether sought after or not, that might be more inaccessible to those with more unyielding borders.
That is not to say that people without trauma do not experience paranormal phenomena. In my next post, I will discuss one hypothesis I have for how the experience of the multiplicity of identities might be another type of portal to expanded consciousness. But before I do, I thought it was important to talk about this elephant in the room, which is one way that mainstream society seeks to discredit those who experience anomalous phenomena, particularly in cultures that venerate the scientific method and its discoveries as unassailable and omnipotent.
Even though such extraordinary experiences have occurred consistently across time and culture, we somehow hold fast to a belief that we are uniquely situated in a stretch of history in which we have transcended old-world superstition and the paranormal. We have thus developed an uncanny ability to filter out, slander, forget, and ignore any experiences that chafe against this worldview. And those on the edges of society who both suffer psychologically and experience the extraordinary are the first we exile and malign.
Read more:
*On early trauma and its connection to the paranormal:
Paranormal experiences, mental health and mental boundaries, and psi
“God apoke to me”: Subjective paranormal experience and the homeostatic response to early trauma
**On the potential for exceptional or paranormal experiences to be healthy
Varieties of voice-hearing: psychics and the psychosis continuum
Learning to discern the voices of gods, spirits, tulpas, and the dead
