Never Again - How Pain Creates Suffering

I grew up in the shadow of September 11th, as my parents grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. The cultural attitude toward these horrors was to hold on, to “never forget” and to never allow such tragedies to happen again.

On both an individual and collective level this response to trauma is the exact calcification that keeps one in a state of perpetual suffering. We feel helpless to stop recreating a sense of victimhood, and act out through violence toward ourselves or others.

Therapeutic clients become particularly aware of this, but we all have hardened ourselves against the world, vowing never to allow ourselves to be hurt as we once were. In Core Energetic theory, this visceral rejection of “what is” is called the Lower Self. This part of the personality is characterized by rage, cruelty, and hatred. The Lower Self manifests as physical and emotional violence, ranging from the individual - domestic abuse, murder, emotional violence, to the collective - terrorism, racism, genocide.  

The Lower Self is often rejected in its raw and honest form because it is too threatening to individual egos and social constructions. We therefore learn to varnish it with the Mask (another layer of the personality), which justifies our actions - even the violent ones - as necessary rather than pleasurable.

Rhetoric like “never again” and “never forget” evinces a terror still alive for Americans and Jews. But, if the fear behind these words was truly owned, these traumas could be processed and we could learn from the tragedies of the past without compulsively acting them out again.