You Are Neo

The drama goes on and on and on… But you don’t have to be an addict to be addicted to drama. What is drama but some deep wound inflicted? Our culture is addicted to Trauma. Yes, I said that correctly. The stories of harm just go on and on and on. We can’t stop listening to them, it’s like watching a train wreck, you can’t take your eyes off it. I sometimes wonder if we just want to hear or be part of a story of drama more than we want happiness. It reminds me of the movie The Matrix, when Agent Smith was torturing Morpheus. He says, “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost…...But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.” - The Matrix by The Wachowski Brothers

But I am human, not computer, so I believe in more. I believe that we can heal ourselves from our pain. This doesn’t mean that life will suddenly be perfect. Ups and downs will always happen, and we will even sometimes participate in the same drama we try to avoid. But I believe that when we seek healing, we actually seek to rise above our primal cerebrum. Michael Unbroken has said that our brains will always revert to that which is known to it because it thinks that how we survived our past trauma is how we should always survive ‘trauma’.

Because our brains will continuously revert to that way in which we originally reacted to the trauma, our brains will say ‘oh! this is how we protected ourselves from it last time, we know that ‘works’, let’s do that again!’. Even if we were not able to protect ourselves at all, our brains will still only know the method that we used the last time something like that happened. The new ‘threat’ might not even be a threat at all, yet our brains cannot tell the difference, the brain’s job is to ‘protect’ us. This is how we get stuck in a perpetually negative pattern. Our brains just want to protect us and that’s what it thinks it’s doing. We must fight hard to recognize this and rise above it. It takes us anchoring ourselves in our bodies, regulating our breathing, and studying enough to understand the dynamics of the things that are happening around us. We need all of these things to be able to rise above that primal reaction. Otherwise we will stand there, staring at the train wreck, unable to avert our attention, unable to change our reaction, forever stuck in our own Matrix. Maybe The Matrix is just our own thoughts? We must become our own Neo, using every tool at our disposal. Time to put on our education modules, and instead of learning Kung Fu in five seconds, actually take the time necessary to learn about trauma healing and about what happened to us so we can rise above it once and for all.

-Janice M. Burke

Image by Gerd Altmann