What if I (as a therapist who studies cultures) told you there is something invisible at play in our world, something hiding out of sight, hidden just beneath our everyday lives?
Would you be surprised to learn that our consumer culture is propagating a manufactured reality, one limiting our imagination and our future?
To see what’s really going on in our world, let’s look at the secret lives of my traumatized clients.
Jill had suffered the childhood trauma of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. The person she’d counted on to protect her in childhood had instead stolen her childhood from her. Running to her mother for help, none was given, and instead young Jill was told to stop her lying. She would endure her trauma in silence, burying her feelings deep inside.
In the session, we compassionately attended to her trauma, allowing what was once a frozen memory to melt into tears of grief and loss. But there was more to be done. From my therapeutic vantage, I could see how, outside of Jill’s awareness, she manufactured a reality that was uniquely hers, one where the entire world was a harsh and violent place (much like her father) and where there was no safe haven to turn to (as demonstrated by her mother). This trauma-created reality, hidden in Jill’s subconscious, led her to continuously tuck her genuine self away and to consistently re-experience the profound loneliness and sadness she’d felt in her childhood. Jill walled herself off to feel safe, but she’d also walled herself in.
My client, Jill, secretly hoped the world would one day show itself to be a safe place, granting her freedom from the self-imposed isolation created by her childhood trauma. But, for a long time in session after session, what she insisted we talk about was how unsafe the world was, and then back behind her walls she went.
For my traumatized clients like Jill, healing begins when their trauma gradually floats to the surface and is greeted by my kindness and care. But that’s only the start of their journey of recovery. My clients don’t realize this yet, but their trauma has created present-day distortions in their daily lives, something Freud called the transference of everyday life. When my clients first experienced their traumas, it changed the wiring in their brains, which, in turn, reshaped their relationships. It distorted their internal relationship with themselves, disrupted their external relationships with the people around them, and warped their understanding of the world as a whole. It created a manufactured reality that, unbeknown to them, limited their possibilities.
Similarly, on a global scale, centuries-old collective traumas have created a collective manufactured reality. We’re living in a fabricated world.
Stay tuned for more to come in our next blog post!
