trauma

Sasha Chapin describes trauma as a 'splitting off' of difficult or painful experiences as memories that the mind tries to avoid accessing:

That’s all we’re talking about, that’s splitting: you split certain painful things off. 

Now, off-limits doesn’t literally mean that you can’t think of this material. You’re just disincentivized because it feels bad to touch. It can feel bad in different ways. Sometimes there’s a somatic response: you think of it and shudder, or flinch, or tremble. Sometimes you freeze up, or go into a daze, or get irritated for a bit, or pick a fight with someone. It’s essentially memory stored with a “feels really bad” tag on it.

I would add to this that, to me, the somatic response is connected to the somatic part of the memory itself. The thing that is stored in memory is the full gestalt, an association between imagery, sounds or tastes or smells, mental talk, and body sensations, including a rich pattern of muscle tension and the corresponding flow of (for lack of a better term) energy or chi. Retrieval brings up all of these things together, including the inclination (however subtle) to clench my stomach or hunch my shoulders or tense my neck or whatever pattern of movement is connected with the memory. Shuddering or trembling usually seems to be the body's way of dissipating this energy. It helps distract from the painful memory; physically it drowns out (and potentially loosens) the traumatic tension pattern.

What's interesting is that the somatic association seems to work both ways. The existence of traumatic memories reduces our everyday felt sense of freedom and safety in the body, because the bodymind subconsciously tries to avoid moving or tensing in ways that would activate the memory. Something like this is John Sarno's diagnosis for how repressed anger often leads to back pain.

TODO: what is the relationship between trauma and samskaras in Buddhist thought ?