The Mental Stage
It can be incredibly helpful for those healing from trauma to recognise that their mind is like a stage upon which performances take place.
What do I mean by this?
Our mind creates our reality.
Our mind appears to have an inside and outside:
- Inside — our inner world of thoughts and feelings.
- Outside — the external world of people, places, and things.
This may be difficult to accept at first, but the truth is that our minds create both the inner and outer experiences. Our conditioning goes much deeper than our personality — we can only recognise objects we have previously learned.
Consider the different experiences of walking through a botanical garden between a keen botanist and someone who knows little about plants. Both individuals are in the same physical environment, yet their subjective realities are very different based on prior learning and conditioning.
Our minds create our internal and external realities based entirely on previous conditioning. For trauma victims, this means they experience a more frightening version of reality compared to someone who has not been traumatised.
Recognising that our perceptions are conditioned by trauma helps us realise that these responses are not who we are. Understanding that our heightened responses arise from conditioned experience allows us to recognise our trauma and begin to neutralise its effects.
For example, without understanding that our perceptions are conditioned, we might feel invalidated when others do not share our view of an event. We may argue about how something appeared and feel frustrated that others do not understand. This lack of validation perpetuates the problem for both ourselves and others.
However, by recognising that our phobic responses are conditioned — not our true self — we can stop taking them so personally. As we cease to identify with the trauma, without clinging to or rejecting it, the tendency is for it to gradually subside.
Our perceptions, feelings, and thoughts are entirely conditioned. Recognising this robs them of their power. Any attempt to identify them as ‘me’ or ‘mine’ should be gently dismissed.
Our sense of self, in which these conditioned thoughts, feelings, and perceptions arise, is dynamic. It reflects how we currently respond to experience — not a fixed identity.
“With our thoughts we make the world.”
— The Dhammapada, Verse 1