Trauma and the imperfect childhood

Fighting your expectations of how life "should" be

One of the most common student viewpoints in my Financial Freedom 1 class is the capitalism is too hard. It exploits workers. People can’t make rent, groceries are getting more expensive, there is no social safety net, the rich are unjustly profiting.

All of which is true.

On the other hand, I’ve been emailing with my dad, who has a very different view about capitalism, based on growing up in China and Hong Kong in the 1950s and 60s:

“I could tell you stories of the state of sadness of that period. Village people shared pants to wear and everyday there were starving people dying.”

From 1958-1962, Mao Tse Tung drove China into the “Great Leap Forward” from an agrarian to an industrial economy. While Communist China trumpeted this “advance,” it was actually a great famine: 35-40 million people starved to death. According to the historians, “parents ate their own kids. Kids ate their own parents.” The scale of grief is unimaginable.

For my dad, and most people in Asia, capitalism and what we call “exploitation” was the best thing that ever happened.¹ As my dad explains, in the 1970s:

Deng XiaoPing started the period of welcoming western business. That was MONEY BEFORE POLITICS. At that time, the monthly salary was $6 per month. Western businesses flocked to China to take advantage of that low wage and hard working of the Chinese people.

It was happening throughout Asia, 60% of the world’s population. My neighbor worked in Korea in the 1990s and he had co-workers who grew up in the 1950s, when 50% of all homes had thatched roofs² and people ate tree bark to keep from starving. Then Western businesses sent their manufacturing to LG, Samsung, and innumerous unnamed factories. People working in factories. Now, in less than one lifetime, South Koreans live in a more technologically advanced country than the United States. For most Asians, any complaints about capitalism or working than 50 hours a week would be met with near incomprehension.

It reminds me of my favorite personal finance writer Morgan Housel, who wrote:

Everyone has their own unique experience with how the world works. And what you’ve experienced is more compelling than what you learn second-hand. So all of us—you, me, everyone—go through life anchored to a set of views about how money works that vary wildly from person to person. What seems crazy to you might make sense to me.

Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

Housel points out our individual experiences lead to vastly different expectations on how life “should” be, what is right or wrong, fair or unfair, good or bad. In his book, he relays a story from a Southeast Asian immigrant:

My aunt worked several years in what Americans call “sweatshops.” It was hard work. Long hours, “small” wage, “poor” working conditions. Do you know what my aunt did before she worked in one of these factories? She was a prostitute. The idea of working in a “sweatshop” compared to that old lifestyle is an improvement, in my opinion. I know that my aunt would rather be “exploited” by an evil capitalist boss for a couple of dollars than have her body be exploited by several men for pennies. That is why I am upset by many Americans’ thinking. We do not have the same opportunities as the West. Our governmental infrastructure is different. The country is different. Yes, factory is hard labor. Could it be better? Yes, but only when you compare such to American jobs.

Given my dad’s story, and indeed most of Asia’s story, the fact that I was able to “retire” at age 42 is an intergenerational miracle. Capitalism. And that’s the experience of most of Asia. In one lifetime, billions of people moved from literal starvation to microwaves, Internet, and air conditioning. And worked through everything it took to get there.³

Capitalism and its “exploitation” has been a blessing for the majority of the people alive today. Despite having less wealth than Americans, most Asians are happier with their economic situation than we are. My last few posts have been focused on human’s inability to remain satisfied. On some level, we feel entitled to all the gifts around us, gifts created by generations before us.

The fault lies in our expectations

We are constantly looking for things to get better. Otherwise we’re unhappy. In secular terms, the hedonic treadmill. In spiritual terms, the wheel of samsara.

Either way, humans always warp their perceptions of life to fit their expectations. People constantly move the fence to maintain a equilibrium of satisfaction/dissatisfaction. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains: The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels:

“This is the adaptation principle at work: People’s judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed. Adaptation is, in part, just a property of neurons: Nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they “habituate,” firing less to stimuli that they have become used to. It is change that contains vital information, not steady states. Human beings, however, take adaptation to cognitive extremes. We don’t just habituate, we recalibrate. We create for ourselves a world of targets, and each time we hit one we replace it with another. After a string of successes we aim higher; after a massive setback, such as a broken neck, we aim lower. Instead of following Buddhist and Stoic advice to surrender attachments and let events happen, we surround ourselves with goals, hopes, and expectations, and then feel pleasure and pain in relation to our progress.”

In other words, most Americans can’t feel the fact we’re doing better in absolute terms than the rest of the world, because we are used to it. We only experience pleasure in more, so we keep turning the screw more tightly, we squeeze the lemon harder, we keep moving the goalposts. Our expectation is perpetual growth at 3% a year. Without it, we “suffer.”

“Each of us carries around an unspoken set of assumptions that dictate how we expect our lives will unfold. These expectations come from all corners and influence us more than we admit. We’ve been led to believe that our lives will always ascend, for example, and are shocked to discover they oscillate instead. Our society tells us we should be basking in progress, but our experience tells us we are beset by slip-ups.” — Bruce Feiler

"All expectations are just resentments waiting to happen.” — Anne Lamott

Few people emerge from childhood intact

I have a financial-spiritual coaching client who grew up in India, in a rural village. Poor. Somehow he had a dream to come to America and start a tech company. He told me that when stepped on a plane to come to the United States as a teen, he didn’t know what the roll of toilet paper in the bathroom was. A few years ago, he sold his tech company. He bought a $10 million house and never has to work again.

In typical first-half-of-life thinking, you would think of this as a “success story.” And it is. But what he’s discovering is there is a second mountain to climb. As he’s addressed every external need he could ever had, he’s realizing there are still internal things to face. And there’s a whole second story to tell. A story of healing everything he experienced as a child in rural India.

The psychologist Esther Perel points out that our suffering is not greater today than in earlier times⁴; in fact, quite the opposite may be true (her parents and their entire community were Holocaust survivors). Yet we feel our suffering so much more acutely. As our wealth and external comfort⁵ has increased, our awareness of our internal discomfort has too, and paradoxically, our ability to tolerate discomfort, internal or external, has decreased.

We simply don’t have the resilience to survive being a prostitute or a factory worker in Asia. Because we don’t have to.

Developmentally, this is a great thing.

Because we don’t have to fight the world, we can see our internal discomfort has nothing to do with the outside. We turn our attention inwards because we realize that increasing comfort can’t get rid of the internal not-enoughness. When we look at everything that we have around us, and somehow it still isn’t making us happy, we start therapy, buy self-help books, try psychedelics etc (these things become their own hedonic treadmill too). The turn inwards happens when we start to realize that more achievement, more possessions, and yes, more experiences and even ease of life simply don’t satisfy.

Inevitably, many of us start looking at our trauma responses, our habitual responses and behaviors stemming from distressing or disturbing experiences in the past.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung

“If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” — Gospel of Thomas

But the shadow side of seeing our trauma responses is blaming the world. Whether it was our parents, patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, etc., we blame a perpetrator for our traumatic responses.⁶

It’s easy to slide into victimhood, especially if the events happened when we were young. Mark Epstein, therapy and Buddhist teacher, writes that the wish that our childhoods had been better, that our parents had treated us differently, is one of “our most violent forms of nostalgia:”

This kind of demand is another form of clinging. From a meditative perspective, the feeling of injured innocence is very important. Few people emerge from childhood intact; there is almost always a sense of something missing, of some kind of failure in the family. Often this failure is internalized and a person feels empty or impoverished, an absence where there could have been more of a presence. Usually, along with the empty feeling, there is also anger at the perceived perpetrator…

Learning to “hold” such difficult feelings in meditative awareness, without clinging and without condemning, is a crucial aspect of the work. The investigation of the self that meditation encourages rests on making room for such feelings and recognizing how easy it is to get hung up on them.”

Underlying our victimhood is a belief that we were in a state of perfected innocence before. Then something “traumatic”⁷ happened, and now we are damaged. It is a contamination story. It is the belief that life, or God, should not have given you what you have been given. But the belief that things were better before, or things would have been better without, is really maladaptive, adolescent thinking.⁸

The point of this life is not to remain in innocence. The point is to grow, and you have been given what you’ve been given to grow. As the Detroit civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs writes:

“Over the past seventy years the various identity struggles have to some degree remediated the great wrongs that have been done to workers, people of color, Indigenous Peoples, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled, while helping to humanize our society overall. But they have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than as self-determining, more as victims of ‘isms’ (racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism) than as human beings who have the power of choice… If we want to see change in our lives, we have to change things ourselves.” The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

Joan Didion wrote that self-respect springs from “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.” It’s easy to blame outside factors (capitalism, sexism, racism, bad parenting etc.) for personal instability and insecurity, because those things are real. The benefit of being a victim is you are morally blameless. But the cost of carrying the internal narrative of victimhood is agreeing to be helpless. If we want to see change in our lives, we have to change things ourselves.

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I’m not talking idly about someone else; I’m not lecturing you from above. I’m talking about myself. I’ve had to learn this in a deep, hard way.

I’ve been in the Bay Area for the last couple of months. My aunt, who raised me, has colon cancer, so I’ve been staying with her through surgery and prep for chemo. I’ve alluded to it before: Love felt unsafe and painful for me as a child, so I rejected love and connection as an adult. People, particularly women, getting close to me felt dangerous and annihilating. So I pushed it away, even when it was “clean.” It has been the great wound of my life. And I always thought I was the victim.

So staying with my aunt for her colon cancer has been a long lesson in seeing my own trauma responses. In making conscious choices against habituation. Learning to forgive. Learning to, when I react in anger, defensiveness, or cruelty, ask for forgiveness. To not shy away from love, to not shy away from loving. Practicing all the things I say, but find so hard to do. Realizing whatever happened to me as a child is no longer there, and having the willingness to accept responsibility, moment to moment, for my actions.

“The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realized.” — Henri Nouwen

Being at home with my aunt for the last few months has been one of the most fruitful and trying times of my personal journey. The dark cave I fear to enter holds the prize I seek. I wouldn’t have chosen to be here with my aunt for three months, but… cancer. In the words of my friend Patricia Ryan Madson, I chose the thing that had to be done.

I believe in dark grace. Without entering the dark cave, we don’t awaken. We don’t reach the Light after the Darkness after the Light.⁹ And that is the entire point of the journey.

“The troubles that we experience in the world individually and collectively are there to awaken things that are hidden inside, the abundance of imagination and spirit that can bring new energy to the world. From the perspective of the soul, transformation is the secret aim for the troubles we encounter that provoke the turning in.” — Michael Meade

Descent is necessary in some form for real growth to occur. Seen this way, your (my) traumatic responses are really the soul insistently bringing the unconscious to consciousness, asking you (me) to awaken to the things hidden inside. And in each awakened moment of this consciousness, you (I) have a choice. The temptation when facing everything so uncomfortable within you (me) is to flee back to the surface, to back away from the fear whatever is in that dark cave. But as Rumi says, don’t get back to sleep.

“Only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. … Happiness is the spiritual outcome and result of resilience, full growth, and maturity… Ultimately, we are taken to happiness—we cannot find our way there by willpower or cleverness. Yet we all try! We seem insistent on not recognizing the universal pattern of growth and change.” — Father Richard Rohr

We cannot stay in perfected innocence. Nor should we stay in perpetual trauma. The Light after the Darkness after the Light. The soul’s orders are to find the redemption story, the story that finds meaning in our suffering, transmutes it, and returns it to the community as gold.¹⁰

“First the fall, then recovery from the fall. Both the mercy of God.” — Julian of Norwich

This is a story of God’s love

In narrative theory, a story is

1. A character who

2. wants something and

3. is willing to overcome obstacles to get it.

A good story requires a “something” that matters. Winning championship. Finding great love. Saving a family member. But the point of the story is transformation of the character. Transformation happens not by attaining the goal, but by overcoming the obstacles.

All the second-half-of-life shadow work is a redemption story of the soul. As Peter Block wrote, “All transformation is linguistic....All change entails a shift in narrative.” We’ve been looking for healing of our wounds on the outside, with stories of triumph, of achievement, of “success.” But the second half of life journey is telling a different story: a identity of telling the truth, facing your fears, and embracing the dark grace inside of you. This is a story of God’s love.

In each present moment, if you are conscious, you have a choice. This is a story of God’s love.

“I was born when all I once feared I could love.” - Sufi mystic Rabia of Basra.

This gives new meaning to our deepest wounds. The dark cave we fear to enter is necessary for the redemption. No conflict, no story. The wounds and the healing of the wounds are integral parts of the story, not shameful distortions to be disguised or hidden.

Let go of your expectations of what life “should” be. Let go of your personal complaints and realize you belong to a deeper story. Go to the dark cave. Be tested. In every story the breakthrough is bigger than the breakdown. This is a story of God’s love.

There’s a way not to be broken that takes brokenness to find it. – Naomi Shihab Nye

And in the darkness is the secret: there is nothing wrong with you. You don’t have to blame the world. You don't have to fix yourself. Your wound is part of your story.

You have been given what you’ve been given to grow.

In each awakened moment of this consciousness, you (I) have a choice.

This is a story of God’s love.

Your wounds are hard at work making their sacred medicine in the hidden spaces below the scars. With loss, there may be nothing satisfying for you to reclaim… The sacred task at hand is to let yourself be reclaimed by something deeper than the immediacy of struggle and pain. This something need not be identified or fixated upon, but surrendered to — Pixie Lighthorse

Offerings

1. I’m teaching another cohort of Financial Freedom 1 in April-May. Get straight with your personal finances and your spiritual liberation may follow.

2. Writing this post reminds me that I taught an online course for Modern Elder Academy two years ago called: Soul Narration: Your Life as a Story of God’s Love. I think it would be fun to get a small group of readers to do that course together online. Four 90 minute classes in a month? Let me know if you’re interested. If there’s a critical mass interested, we’ll find a time together! If you want 1-1 time, I also offer financial-spiritual coaching.

1. They call it the East Asia Miracle.

2. Korea winters, with winds dropping from Siberia, are COLD.

3. Hopefully, Africa is next.

4. Or perhaps the suffering of others around the world. Being grateful for your food because “there are starving people in Africa” has never worked.

5. Remember, air conditioning and central air are 70 years old.

6. For a deeper dive, research the Drama Triangle.

7. Strictly speaking, there are no “traumatic events,” trauma is our (normal) stuck interpretations, feelings, and reactions to past distressing situations.

8. I just recorded a podcast with one of my former FF students, Rachel Shadoan, who asks herself, “Is this thought true? And is it useful?” (HT Byron Katie) Wishing our childhoods were different, that someone treated us differently, is not useful.

9. Elizabeth Gilbert at min 56: “My friend Rob Bell talks about "the Light after the Darkness after the Light." There's a lightness that people have that is about innocence, naivety. It's top 40 music, let's go to the beach. It's almost "lite." But it looks like exuberance and fun and good times. And then after that, comes the darkness. Some people don't emerge out of that. Sometimes what doesn't kill you, fucks you up, doesn't make you stronger, it just leaves you a wreck and some people can't get through that and are a wreck and they are in that Darkness. And then there are people who pass through that to the light on the other side of that darkness. And they are radiant with something… Because of that there's a resonance to the joy and the miracle that we're still here…. But they are the Light on the other side of the Darkness on the other side of the Light. And boy, when you're around somebody like that, do you feel it, do you feel the Grace... and the human suffering.”

10. Contamination vs. redemption stories here. Important stuff.