When stories don't work
On trauma and imagination
Hi, friends,
I’ve been thinking a lot about imagination and trauma.
In their fullest expressions, these are both altered states of consciousness. Experiences in which you’re reborn, for a time, into a body with entirely different perceptive capacities than you have in the everyday. In each mode, your inner world and sensory apparatus change so thoroughly that the outer world itself seems altered. The parameters of what’s possible shift.
And, crucially, you can’t access both states at once.
I take imagination pretty seriously. I’m studying for a master’s degree in it. And when I’m not doing that, I spend a couple of hours every day writing a fictional world into being.
I take it seriously because I deeply believe that imagination—true imagination, the shamanic kind of expanded consciousness that sparked the birth of human culture in caves, and so of humanity itself—I deeply believe that recovering this version of imagination is the only hope for humans. I believe that losing access to it was the start of all our problems.
And so over the years, I’ve picked up techniques for accessing deep levels of imagination, of imaginally altered consciousness. Jungian active imagination exercises, meditation, shamanic journeying, ways of reading and writing that send me into another dimension. These are the most valuable things I’ve ever learned.
But they don’t always work. For the past year or so, I’ve been dealing with a tricky situation that sometimes unpredictably sends me into fight-or-flight mode. I’m ok, I’m safe, I have a wonderful support network. But it’s not fun, and one of the crucial things I’ve noticed is that when it happens, it shuts down my capacity to imagine. The kind of “imagining” I do in that state isn’t true imagination; it’s a neurotic scrolling through worst-case scenarios.
And I don’t need to tell you I’m not the only one experiencing something like this; that Christ, I have it so easy compared to what some people are living; or how rife trauma is.
So this is where we are, culturally: too often trapped in trauma bodies that make it impossible for us to access the very bodies and consciousnesses that we so desperately need in order to create a society that doesn’t traumatize everyone.
It’s a terrible trap.
I went to a workshop on children’s books at the weekend, and there was a lot of lamenting the excess time children and adults spend on their screens instead of entering the fertile, imaginative world of stories and books. And look, I could not fucking agree more about the importance of stories and books. They’re my whole life.
Yet I would be embarrassed to tell you how much time I also spend staring idiotically at Instagram or some stupid TV show.
When I’m doing that, it’s not because I think it’s more important than engaging my imagination. It’s because I need to numb myself. It’s because I don’t bodily have access to expanded levels of consciousness and experience; instead, I’m trapped in a small, tired body that wants to protect itself from feeling anything more.
I’m betting that in this brutal society, almost everyone is trapped in a small, tired, scared body at least some of the time. And that means that almost everyone is sometimes cut off from their own fullest, highest selves, and all the brilliant things they were born to conjure.
It breaks my heart to think of how much deeply needed brilliance and beauty the world is missing out on as a result.
So what do we do? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not a trauma expert. My client the brilliant Rebecca Hyman is, and you could do far worse than read her Substack on structural trauma, for a start.
From the little area of expertise I’m carving out, in imagination and consciousness, I’d say it’s also critical to remember that Whitman was right in the most literal sense: I do contain multitudes. We all do. In the course of a day you can be entirely different people for whom entirely different things are possible.
Sometimes we’re plunged into a small fear body against our will. But we can learn techniques for crossing the threshold again. First back to normal reality. And then, when it feels safe, when it feels possible, into the expanded reality that’s available through our imaginations, and from where we can begin to create a more humane world.
Most of all, though, we can be kind to ourselves, and remember that even if we need to numb for a while today, there’s a whole world of expanded possibilities waiting for us, whenever we’re ready.
Love,
xx Ellie
PS. I just want to reiterate that I really am ok, and I’m writing about this not because I need help but because it’s given me a tiny taste of a much bigger dynamic that I think is a critical part of the conversation about going home to a better world.