Dissociation

The other day I did the flurry of posts–shit, was it yesterday?–I meant to mention that the conscious cultivation of happiness is the last stage of personal growth, and can only happen once your psyche is relatively in one piece.  Otherwise, the darkness is always just outside your door.

I think of the Lemony Snickets movie, which begins happily enough, then cuts to the real story.  I think people who have unprocessed grief and terror are always waiting for the real movie to begin, the other shoe to drop.

It has often seemed to me that much of the New Age movement consists in the desire to say and do and live happy things, without admitting knowledge of the darkness without.  Yes, they give lip service to the “shadow”, but they overvalue niceness much too much to truly fool anyone.

And I will comment too that hypervigilance is only ONE possible outcome of trauma.  HypOvigilance–too little vigilance and too much trust–is the other possibility.  These are the broken people who stand up for nothing, trust everyone.  They are the doormats.  Yes, they get angry, but rarely appropriately, at the right people, at the right times, for the right reasons.

I think it is safe to say the Europeans are quite hypovigilant at the moment, as are a distressingly large number of Americans.  I wish life were easy, sometimes, but the fact is that it demands we stay awake.  That is the rule of the game.