Looking back, knowing what I know now, I see how dissociation is an outcome of living in a traumatizing society. Often pressures start in our families with our parents and siblings with demands that we follow rules and roles without questioning them; and, in order to accomplish this, we disown parts of ourselves and aspects of reality. For so many vulnerable years we need our caregivers. Our survival is at stake. We must learn to fit in, even if it means we become blind to what is in front of us—that is called a negative hallucination, when you cannot see what is in your face. A positive hallucination is seeing things that are not there. We learn that too. I suspect we all have some positive hallucinations that we share with our earliest tribe. We are, after all, one of Nature’s strangest experiments. Our human capacity for metacognition, the ability to step back from instinctual wiring, and to be oblivious to the non-duality of our deepest shared reality. Unlike our animal companions, we can be largely cut off from the foundation of Being. This has provided us with gifts but has also left us prone to dissociation and insanity.

As I’ve tried to portray, my parents’ lived according to their clichés, and though not brilliant, not even half-baked, they were effective at sculpting my limitations and my boundaries. Perhaps your parents had sufficient education, social significance, and enough awards on an office wall that they proclaimed what is real or right or bad or healthy in more logical words and persuasive arguments. Backed up by their “heritage.” multigenerational legacies, some families openly and grandly carry the receipts (usually at bottom these are financial receipts) that delineate success from failure. And so clearly their children must carry on in the same way on the same path or become a failure. Or, on the other hand, maybe the opposite was your experience, expectations were spoken with a languageless brutality, backed by tyrants; or maybe, another possibility, you were left to your own devices and to the weightlessness of a leaderless family, randomly pulled here and there by every passing body with sufficient gravitational pull.

How ever it starts for any one of us, in our homes and neighborhoods we learn to don the headsets of a virtual (dissociated) reality. Though that has become a cliché, it seems apt to me. We don’t know reality directly. We each are born with the machinery to play different games and to embody different avatars. As we run the games, setting off a neural firing pattern over and over, we wear tracks in our nervous system. Then different circumstances, different ages, different challenges and offenses require different patterns, unique avatars. Until we all contain multiples, parts and parts of parts, players that remain long beyond their usefulness, stored somewhere in our psyche and primed to show up again (as triggered states).

Beyond our family, as we are immersed in our schools, our peer groups, our churches, the media messages on constant loops, and careers etc. the programs continue spinning out narratives. As our families recede from the stage, we have new actors (internal and external) to punish us if we ever remove the headsets, incentives to continue on and on, and there is the fear of ridicule waiting if we resist. By young adulthood, we are all assimilated by the full weight of some unimpeachable Powers that demand loyalty (whether you are by this point accepted at an important firm or you are incarcerated some place against your will).

Our mammalian heart cries out

For many of us, the places we pass through in our development (including our family) are environments in which our mammalian hearts cry out to belong and to heal and to grow—yet our hearts are not safe. And many of us are aware in our gut that we live in the dangerous prowling grounds for Outcasts, and Workaholics, Narcissists and Sociopaths. Though different in obvious ways, our current life seems no less dangerous than the prairies our ancestors shared with lions. Today, a modern version of hiding in the bush, we learn to survive the landscape by living dissociated. We Play at Love, Work for Love, Work for Power and/or to Play at Power. These are survival energies that animate roles, forming more of less finished characters that seem to be effective in the Fallen World, allowing us some “solution,” as long as we live outside ourselves, in a protective defense that pillows against what we dare not face. Dissociated and safe. Where we can be fuzzy about our body, our gut and heart, our emotional currents and wisdom. We can settle for a character’s life in someone else’s story, and never claim our innate powers to see, to know, to hear, to question, to refuse and to imagine, to disagree etc. Dissociated and safe. Fractured from life, but secure in the bubble of a busy and mindful intellect or in mindless escapes.

 But as I plan to suggest, we do not have to stay caged by trauma and the traumatizing social pressures and our dissociative protections and delusions. As I plan to suggest, there is more beyond the normal (but truly Abnormal) perceptual apparatus that misses so much Truth and Beauty. There is an Inspired World, but it is not out there. It’s not separate from us. It can’t be adequately known when we pretend to be a driver watching the world through a windshield. Life is not an unconscious material place that we can passively study or actively control or just drive aimlessly through. Inspired life is beyond the headset. Beyond what most of us have known.

I believe our way to this fuller Inspired reality is through a process: an expressive-creative work with a deliberate intention to pierce the dissociation by encountering and questioning the Barriers until we can claim our true meaning and purpose.