Courtesy Everett CollectionAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowOn the train headed back home to New York City, I'm reading, or trying to read, Buddhist-influenced therapist Mark Epstein's new book, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press). I'm feeling tears gather behind my eyes, perhaps leaking out at the corners, but it's a 9 a.m. Acela, full of men in suits with briefcases—I'm not going to start weeping, not that I'm sure I could, even if I were home alone in my bedroom.
More From ELLEIt's not the book that's getting to me, or not just that. I'd gone out with B. the night before—I traveled to Washington, DC, largely for that purpose—but this morning I awoke to an e-mail in which he said he felt terrible, but he'd met someone else right after our first date, and it was a hard decision, and "you're a great girl," but….
Let me tell you about our first date. Midway through, B. rose from the table at the Brooklyn restaurant where we'd met, walked over to my side, sat down and reached for me, and started fiercely kissing me. While planning the date—yes he, not I, had planned it—he inquired as to whether I liked steak. (It's my favorite food.) I'd discovered, through a bit of googling (only a bit, I swear—though my husband and I split a year ago, I still haven't tried online dating), that B. is something of a wine expert, and when I sat down, he asked whether I minded starting with a bottle of white and then switching to red. (Did I mind? You mean I'm not the last carnivore or lover of plentiful libations on the East Coast?) Oh, and did I mention that he does fascinating, excellent work that requires him to travel all over the globe? That he is curious? (He asked me questions and follow-ups.) That we continued making out on a bench outside the restaurant on that cool, early summer night? That when his brother drove up to retrieve him, peering at us through the car's window was B.'s niece, who'd just come from a bar mitzvah. (My elder daughter attended a gazillion bar mitzvahs this year!) That when I got home, I found an e-mail from him saying he'd return to New York in the next few weeks to see me? That in these e-mails he deemed me "magnificent," among other declarations of affection?
But could you really call my rejection by B. even a small trauma? I ask the author of The Trauma of Everyday Life when I interview him in his TriBeCa office. I mean, I went out with B. exactly twice. I'm pretty sure Mark Epstein, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who's written six books and is one of the earliest synthesizers of Eastern spirituality and Western psychotherapy, will say yes—not only because I read his book, but because I can guess how he'll respond to my queries; he's been my therapist off and on for 12 years. (So why ask him, then? Because if therapy teaches you anything, it's that you can "know" something and still find yourself needing to hear it again and again.)
And he does say yes. "Even though you only went out with B. twice," Epstein tells me, holding me in his calm gaze, "you had developed feelings for him and hopes for him, and then out of the blue to spring it on you, that's definitely a trauma."
However B. broke the bad news would have hurt, I protest, adding that my friends rightfully pointed out that B. was kind and prompt, that he didn't lead me on or try to sleep with me when he knew he planned to break it off. "So it's okay to call that little thing that happened to me a trauma, as opposed to…being pulled off the street and raped?" I blurt.
"There's a whole continuum of trauma," Epstein replies patiently. "The Buddha used the word dukkha, which means 'hard to face.' So I think that what's hard to face is traumatic. There's an instinctual feeling that we shouldn't face it, because it's difficult, so we turn away." In conventional psychological terms, which Epstein also employs freely, we "dissociate," or push off the part of ourselves that is in pain, isolate it somewhere in our subconscious. "And that turning away makes us a little more tense, a little more rigid, and a little more cut off."
In fact, I decided to write about Epstein's latest book because, in addition to addressing one of the most pressing issues of our time, the emotional impact of serious trauma, it offers a gentle yet rigorous explanation of how we limit ourselves—and, ultimately, our contributions to the human race—by fending off emotional pain, by insisting on what he calls "the rush to normal." And in an age where mindfulness, yoga, and celebrity visits to the Dalai Lama are all old hat, Epstein also corrects some widespread misimpressions about Buddhism by weaving together his interactions with clients; his own story as a young medical student riven by anxiety and uncomfortable in his own skin; and a fresh take on the story of the Buddha: namely, by focusing on the death of his mother when he was an infant and still the Prince Siddhartha.
Back on the train, Epstein's book in my hands, I endeavor to do what he has counseled over the years: just feel my sadness. I'm hurt, I'm sad, just sad—the words hover before me. I notice a sort of hollowness in my chest, a heaviness around my mouth…and then a yearning, and more words. I'm so disappointed; I had such grand plans. I want to be the one chosen. I'm so sad.
Emotions are not eloquent, as this passage amply attests, or at least their eloquence disintegrates in the movement from sensation to thought. And they're not so easy to stay with. In addition to dulling the point of the dart—only two measly dates!—other thoughts flickered in and out of my awareness as Chesapeake Bay whooshed by. Maybe I was too much for B., too tough-reporter girl, and failed to show my tender side. Or maybe I spoke too candidly of intimations of mortality—admitted that I'd begun considering how I wanted to spend my last 30 or so years on this earth. Again, too much, Laurie. You hardly knew the guy! And so on.
Buddhism teaches, Epstein writes in the first chapter of his book, that "trauma, in any of its forms, is not…something to be ashamed of, not a sign of weakness, and not a reflection of inner failing. It is simply a fact of life."
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