Where Are You? Inner or Outer Circles?

As you think about your current situation in life and the issue that is bringing you the most discomfort, perhaps the main reason you picked up this book, ask yourself the following question: Where are you right now in terms of the distress that is most interfering with your ability to function? Are you on your innermost circle or on one of the outer circles?

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The goal here is to become more aware of where you are in this moment. We want you to begin to really examine how your suffering has expanded into a variety of aspects of your life. Remember, the goal is not judgment. Rather, it is waking up and noticing where this path has led you. The rest of this book will be about showing you ways to sit with the inner circle of pain without turning it into suffering. However, starting right now, if you find yourself in the outer circles, stop and see if you can do something different that would keep you from adding unneeded suffering. Bringing a mindful stance to this process without judgment, justification, or defenses may be one way of responding differently to finding yourself in the outer circles at this point.

Eliminating the Suffering

There are three characteristics of pain and suffering worth highlighting prior to ending this chapter. First, as we have indicated above, pain is inevitable. Second, the path of recovery will weave in and out of added suffering. Third, you cannot get rid of your past history; you can only influence what happens from now on.

The Inner Circle of Pain Cannot Be Eliminated Look back at your answer to question 1 in exercise

Look back at your answer to question 1 in exercise 3.3. See if it isn’t the case that no matter how many layers of suffering you have added, the original pain, in one way or another, has not completely disappeared. Some examples from our clinical experience:

The drinking wears off the next day or whenever the drinking stops, which could be years later, and the reasons one started drinking, such as sadness about a divorce, are still there, plus some.

Financial and academic accomplishments may never seem enough to get rid of thoughts like “I’m unworthy” or “I won’t amount to anything.” There are not enough successes in the world to quiet such thoughts forever—a fact to which many an accomplished person, including CEOs of multinational companies, can attest. There is always Bill Gates to compare oneself to, or Gandhi, or the street vendor on the corner who interacts lovingly with his daughter. For each of us, there will be different buttons pushed.

Reassurances from others that you are smart, lovable, or attractive may seem short-lived. You may find that you put yourself or others through endless tests: “Am I still lovable even if I tell you I hate you or I leave you waiting for three hours?” or “I know I was a straight-A student in high school, but the true test is whether or not I can make it in… (fill in the blank—college, graduate school, business, medical school, etc.).” If your pain feels like a bottomless well, it probably is, because pain of this sort cannot be eliminated with reassurances, whether from others or oneself.

Even physically painful actions like cutting or burning oneself may remove the immediacy of some of the emotional pain, but it soon returns, with the addition of shame and guilt over the self-injurious behavior.

Sometimes pain seems to have disappeared, only to come back unexpectedly in full force. A father who lost a child, for example, may be able to go on with his life,

child, for example, may be able to go on with his life, deeply care for his other children, laugh aloud while seeing a comedy in the movie theater, or thoroughly enjoy a vacation in the Caribbean. AND, all of a sudden, he may be again overcome by sadness and grief years later, perhaps when one of his other children graduates from college or perhaps on his deceased son’s birthday.

All these examples highlight the facts that the pain in the inner circle cannot be completely eliminated and that it’s the nature of internal pain to come and go of its own accord. See if you can notice—as a fact, not something to believe or disbelieve—that pain cannot really be eliminated or pushed away permanently. [Notice any thoughts or judgments coming up for you.]

Unfortunately, there is no real escape by using ordinary, everyday means. Some people think that if they just do fun or positive things they can avoid reminders of old traumas. However, sometimes even a very pleasant event, like the graduation in the example above, may trigger remnants of an old pain. These positive experiences can remind us, for example, that we are alone and don’t have someone to share a beautiful sunset with, or that this moment will soon pass, or even that we just went to the movies to try to avoid thinking of a relationship breakup. If our posture toward pain is that of defensiveness and attack, it leaves very little that can be done that is healthy and stops the rings of suffering from being added.

It Is Normal to Go In and Out of Suffering Now look at your answer to question 2 in exercise 3.3. If you are like most of us, chances are you are noticing that you are on the outer circle or find yourself going back and forth between the inner and outer circles. That’s to be expected.

If you find yourself judging yourself for being on an outer ring, see if you can notice that and let it go. Remember, this is not a game of “gotcha” or right and

Remember, this is not a game of “gotcha” or right and wrong. Instead of focusing on blame, the invitation is to have you stop adding rings of suffering as soon as possible in order to make your life work for you.

History Is Additive, Not Subtractive The fundamental idea in this section is that you can never really get rid of your past, and trying to do so is part of the cause of suffering. We often act as if we can perform lobotomies on ourselves by essentially trying to find some way to get rid of part of our mind. However, that’s not possible. When you try to get rid of the memories, the feelings, the sensations, or the connections with your trauma experiences, you are actually adding more layers to the parts of this memory in your brain. You cannot, in fact, take anything out. People try all types of strategies to get rid of parts of experience, including drinking, distracting, forgetting, and even the more extreme behavior of dissociating. The psychological gymnastics involved in dissociation may push memories, thoughts, and feelings aside for a while, but over time dissocation usually creates more suffering (Polusny and Follette 1995). To exemplify the fact that history is additive and not subtractive, we would like to try out an experiment that has been adapted from Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson (1999, 126).

Exercise 3.4. What Are the Letters?

Let’s imagine the following scenario. We come to you and say, “Guess what? We have a million dollars to give to you if you can perform one task. All you have to do to get the million is to remember the three letters we mention. We will repeat them only three times, and you will need to remember them—and then we’ll give you a million dollars! Are you ready? Are you completely ready to hear these three letters that may make a difference in your finances forever? Here are the

difference in your finances forever? Here are the letters: a, b, c. The letters are a, b, and c.” What are the letters?

Can you say them aloud? Can you recall them? The letters are a, b, c.

Now, what are the letters?

Can you say them aloud? Now, if we come to you in an hour and ask you to repeat these letters, do you think you’ll remember them? What about in a day? What about in a week?

What are the letters?

Now let’s try a different experiment.

As you can well imagine, we do not actually have one million dollars to give you. It was a trick. So, we will now make a different request of you: Whatever you do, do not think of the letters we just told you.

What are the letters?

What did your mind come up with? Check and see, even if you wrote out different letters than the ones we talked about before. How do you know that these aren’t those letters? You do because, in your mind, you are saying, for example “d, e, and f are not a, b, and c,” which means that in your mind the thought of “The letters are a, b, c” is still there. Try really, really, really hard not to think of the letters as a, b, c. Can you honestly do it? Probably not, right? Isn’t this interesting? After something gets into our heads, it hardly ever gets out when we are trying to get it out. It’s easy enough to inadvertently forget what we learn in class or something on our to-do list; however, the very attempt to try to forget something makes it more memorable (Wegner 1994). So, there is no way of displacing the thought “The letters are a, b, and c” with other thoughts such as “The letters are now d, e, and f” or “I should forget the letters a, b, and c.” When you try, you simply end up with three thoughts in

When you try, you simply end up with three thoughts in your head about the letters a, b, and c. We can only add more things to our brains; we’re unable to deliberately take anything out. It just can’t be done.

This exercise not only illustrates that history is additive and never subtractive, it also illustrates how easy it is to store very insignificant, inaccurate bits of information about anyone, even people we don’t know or care about. Yet, these little bits can stay with us, sometimes for a long, long, time. Even right now, you can probably remember a joke that you hate or find offensive, and yet, there it is, somewhere in the back of your mind, even if you never repeat it. If you check in, based on your experience, you’ll see that you cannot will yourself to forget something, even a simple string of letters like a, b, and c, let alone an important aspect of your history and who you are.

This is an important fact to make contact with, based on your experience and not just because we say so, because this means that the only way to find a life after trauma is with that trauma history. More will be said about that in the remainder of the book.