[112] Silence.

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When I was in elementary school, my dad drove me and my brother down the hill to Sport Chalet to buy some new basketball shoes. On the way, my brother and I got into an argument.
This was not uncommon.
My dad pulled over, turned off the car, and told us that we needed to stay completely silent for twenty minutes.
This was our punishment.
When one of us complained, he added time to the clock. We must have sat there in silence for forty minutes in my dad’s Mazda 626.
This was traumatic.
My dad was a good man. He was committed to integrity and the truth. He was one of the most intellectually curious men I’ve ever known. He worked hard and coached our teams and took us to sporting events and cleaned the kitchen just about every damn night.
But my dad could not handle chaos. Because he grew up in an alcoholic household in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in suburban Seattle.
When he was a teenager, his grandpa Tom (who I am named after) came to stay in his room for a brief stint towards the end of his life. One day, in a frustrated rage, Tom chucked his shoe through the bedroom window. My dad flew the coop and did not come back home until late that night.
I cultivate a lot of compassion for my dad when I picture him as an adolescent, responding out of his trauma.
My dad coped with chaos by distancing into silence.
I’m not sure what’s more traumatic: complete chaos or complete silence.
Dr. Resmaa Menakem says that there is an important, often overlooked kind of trauma that can’t be traced back to one single event. He calls it hazy trauma.
Dr. Francis Weller calls it slow trauma.
Growing up in the dissociating paradise of Southern Orange County, I was inundated with the slow, hazy trauma of silence. Not just from my dad on the way to Sport Chalet. I got the mute button, the silent treatment and one-word answers from all sorts of adults in my life
I tried to read minds to figure out what the silence meant. I interpreted most of it as disappointment. I surely let them down. I must have done or said something wrong. I was, no doubt, a failure. Or even worse, a total fuck-up.
In my teen years, my basketball coaches broke the silence with explosive rage. They told me precisely where I fucked up - on and off the court. But their praise was intoxicating too. I got caught in an endless cycle of belittling and love-bombing.
My identity and value were external and conditional. It felt completely chaotic.
In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel Van Der Kolk says the trauma that occurs in relationship is generally more difficult to treat than traffic accidents and natural disasters.
Dr. Van Der Kolk says that when the people you naturally rely on for care and protection reject you, or terrify you, you learn to shut down and ignore what you feel.
I learned to manage this relational rejection and terrorism by running away from it.
After school, I dribbled my basketball down the street to the elementary school court, where I played imaginary games against imaginary opponents. I hit a lot of imaginary buzzer-beaters. I felt safe and heroic.
I distanced myself from the chaos and silence so I could control my environment and perfect my craft. I hoped that my performance and production on the court - in real games - would lead to the eternal adoration my soul longed for.
Unfortunately, controlling and perfecting are the opposite of healing and freedom.
I know that my slow, hazy trauma is not the same as being sexually assaulted, or racially profiled, or being called a “terrorist” for wearing a hijab, or getting harassed by managers and customers at a minimum wage job, or being gaslit by a lover caught in infidelity, or trying to survive occupation and genocide.
I also know that I need to take my trauma just as seriously as the most terrifying kinds of trauma. Because my trauma has seriously impacted how I operate.
Dr, Van Der Kolk says that trauma is not the story of something that happened back then, it’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside us.
After trauma – even if it is slow and hazy – we experience the world with an entirely new nervous system. When trauma gets stuck in the body and not addressed, the body’s threat-perception system becomes extra sensitive, and we perceive threat where there is no threat at all.
When this happens, our “thinking” brain goes totally offline, and the body reacts just like it would if we were actually in danger.
Anxiety, depression, addiction and codependency are the consequences of a dysregulated nervous system due to unhealed trauma.
When situations get chaotic, or when people go silent, I get irritated and unreasonable. Most of the time, I don't even realize it.
It’s a vicious cycle.
In adulthood, we get stuck in the old pattern, replicating the trauma responses that kept us safe when we were kids. We get triggered into flight mode, or a fight frenzy, or a freeze position, or a fawning posture where we go along to get along.
I flee and fawn like my life depends on it. Literally.
We are so conditioned to live out our trauma responses that we don’t even notice how ridiculous they are. We might even come to believe that this behavior is completely normal. As if this was just part of our personality.
Our chaotic culture exacerbates everything.
Dr. Gabor Mate says that the urgency of Western society conspires against us. We are flooded with influences that exploit and reinforce our trauma.
Work demands.
Family expectations.
Fresh opportunities.
Endless entertainment.
News updates.
Notifications.
Multitasking.
So much more.
Dr. Mate writes:
We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us in, not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.
The pace of life is crazy. But at least it isn't silent!
Much of my own healing work is committed to reclaiming the present, to staying connected – to myself, to the person in front of me, to Something Else – so I can get free and emotionally available.
This is much easier said than done.
“Healing involves discomfort,” writes Dr. Menakem, “but so does refusing to heal. And over time, refusing to heal is always more painful.”
My marriage to Lindsay for the past two decades has been the most important factor in healing the trauma of my childhood and adolescence. Lindsay uses her words to express feelings and to describe what is actually happening. She defies denialism. Daily. She is also allergic to conflict avoidance.
Of course, this is the relationship where my unprocessed trauma responses get measured on the Richter Scale.
Accountability is crucial. So is being accepted, loved, forgiven, as my weaknesses and warts are fully exposed. Lindsay's tender touch has moved mountains within me.
My healing journey also runs through therapy, homeopathy, 12-step recovery meetings, and tender, intimate relationships with kindreds who have the courage and capacity to break the silence, to share vulnerably out of the mess of their own lives.
I am deeply blessed to sit in circles of men who provide a mirror and model of masculine expressions detoxified by the divine feminine.
My daily contemplative prayer practice is also a balm for my soul. Because it flips the script on my slow, hazy trauma.
Something Else dwells in silence too.
The Benedictine monk John Main said that meditation leads us into the experience of love at the center of our being.
“The extraordinary revelation of the gospel,” Main once wrote, “is the absolute value of the ordinary and the potential of the ordinary to be transfigured by the divine power, the universal power, the universal energy of love.”
Contemplative practice is ordinary – and mundane – and it is soaked in a Power greater than me and totally committed to my well-being.
Divine Love defies all the cultural influences that exploit and reinforce my trauma, that try to get me to obliterate the present.
Contemplative practice, for me, is about surrendering to Something Else in total silence. Of course, my mind starts going crazy with obsessive thoughts about the past and the future. I can let go of these chaotic thoughts. Because now is all I need.
Contemplative practice is all about entering as fully as I can into the now. It is not a devotional or intellectual exercise. It is directly participating with Being, with the universal energy of love, just letting go and resting in this Other Presence.
In my seven-minute sits, I seek to empty my mind and fill my heart at the same time.
I die to my ego self, to that part of me motivated and conditioned by past pain and trauma, always clawing for identity and value outside of myself, always trying to flee the scene of chaos to reclaim a death grip of control.
The Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr says that, in contemplative prayer, we go through an emotional conversion. We stop letting the ego drive our ship. We stop comparing, competing, analyzing, critiquing, judging, labeling, and positioning.
We start calmly relating to our pain in a compassionate way.
This week, my spiritual director Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera-Colon compelled me to start using an icon in my practice. I started opening my eyes and meditating on Christ of Maryknoll, an icon created by Robert Lentz that portrays Jesus, the dark-skinned Palestinian Jew, peering through a barbed wire fence.
He looks an awful lot like he could be a young man in Gaza or the occupied West Bank today.
It’s not clear whether he is outside of the prison camp looking in – or if he is inside the prison camp looking out.
I believe it is both.
Love intimately dwells with us inside the prison of our old pain and trauma.
Love also conspires to set us free.
Love is always doing both of these things, even when all we hear is silence.