Spiritual trauma electrocutes the psyche. The difference between electrocuting and electrifying is the difference between injuring and causing death versus revivifying and restoring. Oppressive religious guilt and fear injure and cause death to the psyche. Love, inspiration, and creativity electrify life and nourish the psyche. When the psyche, the soul, has been injured, or certainly when it has died or a facet of it has died, there is terrible pain and loss. Such an individual can quite literally be dead while still being physically alive. Someone told me that glassy-eyed, perpetually smiling, people remind them of the living dead—--people who have gone through so much bad in life, not dealt with it, repressed it, that they have gone numb and dead. There is nobody home, as we often say. People can end up soulless when the facing of true feeling, to include facing and working through spiritual trauma, has been outrun. We need to get down and deep into the real issues of our life, most especially spiritual matters, teachings and relationships, that have been negative and destructive and have hurt us and hurt us badly. When we work our way through dark places of mind, by facing up to and experiencing hard truths, and come out through the end of this black tunnel, we are then able to know first hand the electrifying, rather than electrocuting, nature of the transformation of self. Within the context of trauma all things open themselves to the potential for darkness or light, numbness or consciousness, denial of trauma or a revivification of the self that leads you back to who you’ve always been but didn’t know it.

When the human psyche is traumatized, there is pain, there is fear, and there can be the desire to give up on self, others, life---a manifestation of intense self loathing. The impulse to despair can be confusing since it means that there is no going back; but, this can be a good thing when not going back means leaving behind negative and demeaning attitudes and relationships. The psyche has been described as a vessel full of grace; but obviously there can be far more than grace in there for those who have suffered the ravages of something like childhood emotional and physical neglect and abuse. Self loathing, the horrid feeling of turning anger against the self, is a destructive alternative to facing what has been done to oneself and then working through this pain and dealing with the relationships that have been involved. This is no simple matter since it implicates not only oneself but people with whom we have been or are in relationship. Relational trauma can be one of the worst types of trauma because then we have to deal with the psychological reality that people can make us crazy, can rob us of emotional and spiritual stability and meaning. There is no way around the psychological injury that takes place when we are caught in relationships that are manipulative, cruel, and lacking in understanding. For example, recent research has documented a correlation between those who suffer from eating disorders and those diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive and borderline personality dysfunctions. From having treated individuals who suffer in this way, I recognize that there is often a history of unresolved childhood pain that translates into present day dysfunction with self and relationships. Self loathing in the form of eating disorders and other destructive behaviors can then pop out like a nightmare jack-in-the-box. The human psyche, however, with all of its light and dark energies, has within it the capacity to transform destructive impulses into powerful insights that generate substantial change. Trauma, if we face and experience the truth that it holds for us, can lead us into transformative emotional and spiritual depths in which we confront angels and demons, the potential to come face to face with who we are and who we are not.