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.