An Autobiography of Trauma

1. Trauma's Deep Roots and the Body's Memory

Trauma is not so much what happened to us, but, rather, what we hold inside, in the absence of an empathic, mutually connected, witness.

Childhood violence endured. The author's early life was marked by profound violence and intimidation, including mafia threats and a brutal sexual assault at age twelve. These experiences, coupled with his father's legal struggles and imprisonment, shattered his sense of safety and left deep, unaddressed wounds. The pervasive fear and uncertainty eroded his self-confidence and vitality.

Body remembers what mind forgets. Despite consciously burying the memory of the assault for forty years, his body "remembered" the terror. Daily, his body tensed, and breath constricted, hyper-vigilantly preparing for another attack. This implicit body memory manifested as a pervasive sense of shame and "badness," driving obsessive-compulsive behaviors like avoiding sidewalk cracks and compulsive praying.

Healing through witness. Resolving this deep-seated trauma required accessing and releasing these "body-memories" with empathic support. By gently approaching the periphery of difficult sensations and linking them to positive bodily experiences, he gradually restored self-compassion. This process allowed him to finally place the memory in the past, breaking its debilitating "spell."

2. Somatic Experiencing: Healing from the Bottom Up

Indeed, one of the core principles of Somatic Experiencing lies in discovering new and more powerful experiences in our bodies, ones that contradict the feelings of overwhelming helplessness that are the hallmark of trauma.

A new healing paradigm. The author developed Somatic Experiencing (SE) over fifty years, a method that gently guides individuals to the periphery of traumatic sensations, emotions, and images. Instead of direct confrontation, it encourages accessing pivotal positive bodily experiences first, building sensations of empowerment and strength. This "bottom-up" approach contrasts with traditional "talk" therapies.

Ethology's profound influence. His fascination with ethology, the study of wild animals, provided crucial insights into trauma and healing. Observing subtle gestures, postures, heart rates, and breathing rhythms in clients, much like ethologists study animals, revealed indicators of autonomic activity. This naturalistic observation became a cornerstone of SE, recognizing humans as mammals with shared basic systems.

Resilience through discharge. His doctoral research challenged the passive "bank-ledger" view of stress, proposing instead the concept of core resilience. He demonstrated that the nervous system, when facing threat, "charges" but can also "dis-charge" this activation under the right conditions. This dynamism restores equilibrium and balance, promoting resilience, as observed in astronauts' responses to stress.

3. Unseen Guides and Synchronicities Shape Our Path

The question of whether these encounters with Einstein were real or not misses the essential point.

Einstein as an inner mentor. During his doctoral work, the author experienced vivid, lifelike "visitations" from Albert Einstein, whom he invited to dinner. These "active imagination" encounters provided Socratic-like exchanges, opening new vistas and deeper understandings for his scientific inquiries. These conversations felt profoundly real, guiding his intellectual journey.

A fated connection revealed. His mother later revealed that a pregnant her and his father were rescued from drowning by Albert Einstein and his stepdaughter. This astonishing story provided a context for his inner guide, suggesting a deep, unconscious bond formed during a moment of life-threat and salvation. Einstein remained a fruitful internal guide, accessed through intuition and the "collective unconscious."

Listening to divine guidance. Dreams and "synchronicities"—meaningful coincidences—served as crucial guidance from Spirit. An early dream about a man seeking a sign from God, unaware of a blinking turn signal, taught him the importance of noticing subtle messages. These intuitive awakenings allowed him to midwife his life's work, a gift to himself and humanity.

4. Ancestral Wounds and Intergenerational Healing

Was it possible these clients were somehow being impacted by a potent, racially specific, cross-generational transmission of their parents’ and grandparents’ trauma in the death camps?

Holocaust's lingering shadow. The author's family history, marked by the Holocaust and the murder of his paternal relatives, left an implicit memory engram. His grandmother's suicide, possibly triggered by a visit from a distant cousin who survived Auschwitz, highlighted the delayed survivor's guilt and the profound impact of such nightmarish traumas across generations.

Epigenetic transmission confirmed. Clinical observations of clients reporting the acrid smell of burning flesh, despite being vegetarians, led him to question generational trauma. Brian Dias's mouse experiments, showing fear responses to cherry blossom scent transmitted over five generations, provided scientific validation for "epigenetic transmission." This confirmed that trauma could be passed down, even without direct experience.

Healing the unexperienced trauma. This understanding became crucial for healing clients impacted by ancestral traumatization, including descendants of Holocaust victims, enslaved people, and First Nations communities. Carl Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious" and Einstein's "ego points" metaphor of distorted wave patterns offered frameworks for addressing these deep-rooted, unexperienced wounds, moving from fixity to flow.

5. Integrating Eros: Reclaiming Our Life Force

I can have either physical and emotional closeness or awaken to my sexual feelings, but not both.

Early sexual shaming. A childhood erection during a bedtime story led his mother to abruptly withdraw, creating a profound split: emotional closeness or sexual awakening, but not both. Later, his father's shaming of adolescent sexual exploration with a friend further drove his emerging sexuality underground, where it languished for decades.

The journey to wholeness. This early wounding manifested as a struggle to integrate emotional connection with his sexuality, leading to fractured relationships. His healing involved confronting these hidden wounds, sometimes through supportive erotic relationships that fostered attraction, playful flirting, and shared sensations. This process allowed him to uncouple surrender to orgasm from past rapes and shaming.

Eros as life energy. The author defines Eros not merely as libido or sex drive, but as "life energy"—the desire to create, procreate, and express vitality. Reclaiming Eros meant embracing his full life force, creativity, and sensuality. This integration, often facilitated by open and caring relationships, allowed him to move beyond fear and embrace a vibrant, embodied existence.

6. Community as the Crucible for Collective Healing

In his understanding, trauma didn’t exist in isolation. It was not something that happened to the individual, but rather only occurred when there was a break in the connection between members of a tribe—or in our terms, a society.

Indigenous wisdom on trauma. Encounters with the Brazilian Krenek tribe and Hopi people revealed a profound understanding: trauma is not an individual affliction but a break in communal connection. Healing, therefore, must occur within the group. This wisdom challenged Western individualistic approaches, highlighting the salubrious climate of belonging and mutual support.

Rituals of reintegration. The Navajo "Enemy Way" ceremony exemplified collective healing, reintegrating warriors with PTSD back into the tribe. Through drumming, chanting, and communal presence, the medicine man tracked the warrior's body language, releasing age-specific traumas. This ritual, culminating in facing the rising sun, purified and returned the warrior to "Hózhó"—a state of balance and beauty.

Western society's missed opportunity. The U.S. Army's post-WWII "truth serum" therapy for PTSD, though effective, was suppressed to maintain a "warrior myth." Unlike the Navajo's lifelong honoring of veterans, American society often stigmatized wounds, offering material comfort (GI bill) but lacking communal cohesion. This societal failure to acknowledge and heal collective trauma perpetuates its reverberations.

7. Bridging Science and Embodied Spirituality

Only later did my access to embodied spirituality organically emerge from a rock-solid foundation of biophysics, neurobiology, and ethology, combined with complexity theory and systems theory.

The body's innate wisdom. The author's journey began with a profound disconnect from his body, viewing himself as "all mind." Mentors like Charlotte Selver and Magda Proskauer introduced him to body awareness and breath as a bridge between conscious and unconscious processes. Selver's exercises and Proskauer's breathing therapy revealed that deep body awareness could lead to transcendent states, akin to psychedelic experiences.

Scientific validation of somatic experience. His work at UC Berkeley, designing a physiology class, allowed him to scientifically explore the correlation between breath, muscle activity, heart rate, and blood flow. He observed that subtle physiological shifts during body awareness practices led to states of "flow" and inner expansion, validating the objective reality of subjective bodily experiences.

Uniting mind and body. Ida Rolf, the "Iron Lady" of Structural Integration, taught him "soft seeing"—perceiving the body's complex relationships beyond conscious filters. This ability to see the "web without the weaver" further solidified his understanding of the living body's emergent properties. These mentors collectively inspired him to hold together the polarities of scientific rigor and the felt, lived world.

8. The Power of Intuition and Unconscious Wisdom

We are all capable of tapping in to such possibilities. But it takes a degree of willingness, curiosity, and trust to notice and then explore these priceless opportunities when they arise.

Pouncer: A canine avatar. His Dingo-Australian Shepherd mix, Pouncer, became his most trusted friend and teacher of joy, attachment, and love. Pouncer's uncanny emotional and cognitive intelligence, including a "sixth sense" for troubled children, taught the author to trust deep intuition and engage spontaneously with respect, love, and play.

Mira Rothenberg's profound empathy. Mira, a formidable force in healing disturbed children, possessed a rare capacity to connect with vulnerable children in their deepest hiding places. Her work with autistic and traumatized children, like Jonny and Peter, demonstrated how unwavering presence and intuitive connection could coax individuals back from terrifying abysses of isolation.

Synchronicities and the "karass." The author reflects on how seemingly chance encounters with mentors like Mira, Charlotte, Magda, and Ida were "synchronicities"—meaningful coincidences guided by unseen forces. Kurt Vonnegut's concept of a "karass," a group linked to fulfill a divine will, resonates with his experience of these teachers connecting with his essential "spirit."

9. Emergent Properties: The Whole is Greater

Rather than a living organism being simply the sum of its individual parts, the whole is much greater than the sum of these parts.

Beyond reductionist science. Inspired by Aharon Katchalsky and Ilya Prigogine, the author explored "dissipative structures" and "negative entropy." Prigogine's Nobel-winning work showed that open systems, by exchanging energy with their environment, could self-organize into higher levels of complexity, challenging the second law of thermodynamics. This mirrored his clinical observations of trauma healing.

Catastrophe theory's insights. René Thom's catastrophe theory provided a mathematical framework for understanding how gradual changes can lead to sudden, abrupt effects. This helped model how small shifts in the autonomic nervous system could profoundly alter behavior, and how subtle interventions could balance the system, promoting stability and clarity.

Consciousness as emergence. His dream of an elevator in a tall building, with Leon Harmon's disapproval, symbolized his shift from a mechanistic view of the brain to one of emergent properties. He realized that higher functions like intellect and consciousness are emergent from the "lowest level" of the autonomic nervous system and brainstem, akin to how ant colonies exhibit complex behaviors unpredictable from individual ants.

10. Embracing Mortality: The Cycle of Death and Rebirth

This life’s journey is about the welded unity of Eros and death.

Eros and the "little death." The author reflects on the inherent connection between Eros (life energy) and death, exemplified by "une petite mort"—the "little death" of orgasm. This momentary loss of consciousness and surrender into "ecstatic oblivion" is both a physical release and a spiritual opening, a microcosm of facing ultimate mortality.

Conscious encounters with dying. A dream about "death meditation" and a conscious request during cataract surgery's anesthesia provided early tastes of "mini" death, fostering a beginner's mind toward mortality. These experiences, devoid of fear, spurred a deeper inquiry into dying, seeking release from attachment and a full embrace of life's final act.

Toad Medicine and renewed life. Using 5-MeO-DMT ("Toad Medicine") with clear intention and supportive guidance, he confronted his core anxiety and fear of death. This powerful psychedelic journey led to an "ego death," a terrifying disintegration, followed by a return from the "underworld" to verdant pastures. This encounter with oblivion brought renewed "joie de vivre," demonstrating the universal cycle of death and rebirth.

Last updated: August 23, 2025