Indestructible You by Shai Tubali

Author:Shai Tubali [Tubali, Shai; Ward, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-941-2
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2015-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

Try to recall some memory of intense weakening in your life. Reconnect with the humiliation and pain that inevitably followed it. Then honestly ask yourself: “What was the will that I wished to impose on the situation? Could my will have driven me to the situation in the first place? Could it be that my negative experience was nothing but the weakening of this will?” Can you see that the hurt and agony here are only the weakening of your will?

One example from my (Shai) therapeutic work is the story of a fifty-year-old German woman. She was an elegant, reserved and impressive lady, but when she described her traumatic memory, she started sobbing like a little child. She told me that since this traumatic experience occurred, it had marred her entire life! It happened with a woman who was the elegant lady’s therapist and spiritual mentor. She had decided to leave this teacher and to develop herself independently. But when she had come to her mentor to say goodbye in one last therapeutic session, the teacher had entered the room and exclaimed: “You? What are you doing here again?” She had been stunned by this reaction. In exploring the moment with her, the German woman realized her expectation had been that her teacher would release her with a smile, thus demonstrating once again the “unconditional love” that she, the student, had always demanded. “I wanted her love forever, and I was trying to control it,” the lady admitted to me with a smile, now that she was looking at this drama through the eyes of her grown-up self.

But what about all those cases of abuse and coercion? Surely no will drove a person into such painful situations. There are indeed cases of powerlessness that are completely uninvited, from tsunamis to sexual abuse. In such horrific incidents, what got weakened was the person’s fixed belief that people should behave in a certain way (supportive and reassuring), and that life should be the way we want it to be (safe and peaceful). Even babies carry such instinctual wishes and demands: they want to be nurtured so that they can grow and get more from life.

It’s the person’s will for a perfect life and peaceful surroundings that shatters. It’s our incredulity that mothers can be unloving, that fathers can be abusive, that life can be cruel and brutal, which lies at the heart of our traumas. Tragically, when naively optimistic beliefs shatter, the person freezes and imprints new generalizations about life. Such generalizations pretend to be “realistic,” but in fact they are faulty. For example: “Mothers are cruel and unloving,” or “If you go into the water you will drown.” Believing these generalizations, born of trauma, keeps the person living in irrational fear that limits their lives.

In the end, all the wills and expectations that precede traumas boil down to one single will: the will to never experience weakening. Indeed, the feeling of weakening during trauma is excruciating. But deep down the trauma that really happened is that you didn’t get to live in the world that you wanted.

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