The Conditional Particularities of Trauma

Your suffering does make you unique.

It does not make you unique in having suffered.

It makes you unique in who you are for the same being.

It makes new structures of identity. Particular people creating particular emotions at particular points in time.

Trauma creates identity.

It creates conditional particularity.

The desire to be unique assumes that uniqueness is not already available.

The desire does not originate because uniqueness is intrinsically desirable, but because we get lost in other people, we cannot feel ourselves, and to the identity-addled, uniqueness speaks the most comprehensible promise of resolution.

We are after our is-ness.

We are after the sense that we are real. But reality is not conditional. That which depends on circumstances which apply at times and not at others — such things are not really real.

Pema Chodrin said, offer yourself up to annihilation to find the part of you that can’t be annihilated.

Change the circumstance, turn up the heat on life’s furnace, and see that part of you that stays.

Your suffering makes you unique, in many of the wrong ways.

There is never a time when uniqueness is not available.