Edited by Rosemary Davies-Janes
After reporting from war zones for Reuters and the Financial Times, bouts of depression led Matthew on an exploration of healing practices, and to write Aftershock, his book on military veterans and psychological injury. Studying the principles of individual, ancestral and collective trauma healing via Thomas Hübl’s Timeless Wisdom Training inspired him to begin training as a Collective Trauma Integration Facilitator.
This post is a short edited excerpt of Matthew’s experiences working in conflict zones, recognizing ancestral trauma and reconnecting with his Higher Self. Listen to his full interview on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
What I’ve learned to appreciate through my exploration of consciousness and journey of healing is just how often I haven’t been in my body; how dominated my experience has been by my thoughts, my mind, my stories about myself and the world.
This common predicament in our modern culture has reached such pandemic levels that it’s considered ‘normal.’ We don’t recognize how disembodied we’ve become – why we are dissociating in this way. When facing chronic stress, we energetically leave our bodies and go into our heads. While this response isn’t ‘wrong’, it does have consequences. That’s why a key question in Compassionate Inquiry® is: “How did it help?” Or, “How was it useful to disconnect?”
When the body is overwhelmed with fear, survival, terror, shame or grief, an in-built mechanism helps us to carry on by splitting off overwhelming emotions and pushing them down into the unconscious. It’s how our ancestors survived over thousands of generations.
A phrase of Gabor’s that speaks to this is: “It’s not feeling your feelings that will kill you. It’s trying not to feel your feelings that will kill you.” His words beautifully capture my predicament. It’s so obvious, looking back, that this protective mechanism was actually killing me. But when I was in it, I did not realize that my sense of disconnection was something I was imposing, unconsciously, on myself.
I lived most of my life in this disconnect: working in conflict zones in Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And at one level I was having a good time. I really loved being a journalist and felt a very deep connection to that work. But I look back at that younger version of myself with a lot of compassion because there was a fundamental disconnect between the story I was telling myself about who I was, and who I actually was or what I really felt. The two did not mesh.
The price I paid for leaving my body was losing touch with my intuition and emotions. This led me to crash repeatedly over the years. The final crash, the worst and most humiliating for me as a journalist, forced me to start walking a healing path.
Today, I recognize that some wiser part of myself knew I needed that crash, knew that I needed to be brought down. The ‘false self’ I developed while working overseas had become so misaligned with my deeper soul, with the essence of who I am and my real needs, that this wiser part staged an intervention. I didn’t realize this at the time, of course, but looking back I recognize that the crash had to happen. And painful as it was—the feeling that everything in my life was being torn down—it was absolutely necessary, and ultimately set me on the path I’m on now. It was the doorway to awakening to a much higher level of awareness and consciousness.
When this process begins, we resist and cling and do anything we can think of to avoid that pain. But if we can find practices and communities to support us, the apparent disaster can be the portal to a more authentic way of being.
Once on this healing path, one of the most powerful insights was that I wasn’t fixing myself or somehow attempting to return to a prior status quo, or even moving towards an imagined state of perfection. By stepping into my pain, stepping through that portal into a deep confrontation with the darkness that lived in me, my shadows, my share of ancestral and collective trauma fields, I was becoming somebody new. I was experiencing a literal process of death and rebirth. My old, restricted and conditioned personas were dissolving, and allowing my true self to emerge.
When I recognized this, I realized that the work of healing is only partially about repair, or dressing a wound—it’s actually the work of transforming myself into who I was always meant to become. On that journey, the pain and the trauma that I experienced were not only inevitable and unavoidable, they were essential to unlocking the door to my authentic self. When I realized this, the whole process took on a different quality.
Recognizing and integrating that understanding, even hearing these words, can perhaps help those of us who are still working through the most painful parts of our journeys to connect with the sense of something bigger, a greater resource. We could call this a spiritual connection, or Higher Self—an intelligence that wants us to heal through the integration of all that troubles us, and all the experiences that we label as failures or defeats.
Gabor often quotes A. H. Almaas on this: “Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there is something pricking you in the side, telling you, “Look here! This way!” That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.”
Recognizing that we are in a transformational process, that we’re waiting to be reborn at the other end of this journey, can really sustain us when we’re in the darkest, most difficult parts of that path.
This lesson is one of my greatest resources, even now, as I struggle in my daily life with a trigger or an old wound, as I often do, I try to remember that this is all part of something bigger, that a larger force or connection is supporting my process. And that makes it all much easier to bear.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the interview, and if you like it, please subscribe, rate, review and share it.
