069 - Rebel Wisdom and the Trauma Myth

Portals of Perception

Many news platforms today still at times refer to the struggles of life in 2023 as residual pandemic trauma — directly influenced by the painful events beginning in 2020. Is it really fair and accurate to connect today’s behavior and attitudes to a three-year-old ‘trauma’?

There’s no doubt the pandemic caused pain and suffering, and trauma, for millions of people directly affected. But as everyday life finds a post-pandemic new normal, is it helpful to our personal and collective healing and rebalance to see ourselves as traumatized? Or has trauma become a convenient rationale and strategy to avoid fully facing unsettling aspects of our changing reality?

The pandemic is one example of how trauma can become what some people describe as a culture and identity — a myth we hold onto to explain and excuse our behavior, where every struggle is attributed to trauma. We explore the nature and outcomes of this all-encompassing focus on trauma in this Portals conversation between Aviv Shahar and Alexander Beiner, author, podcaster, and co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, a highly regarded platform for new ideas in this time of change.

Alexander traces his journey to Rebel Wisdom and reflects on the extraordinary phenomenon of its rapid growth as a global community. The conversation then takes a deeper look at the trauma myth.

Among their insights:

• The distinction between a healthy, constructive self-introspection, and one that is narcissistic and destructive, is important because they sound similar but have very different outcomes.
• There's something healthy about starting with a baseline that life involves suffering, rather than a modern Western consumerist notion of life as the pursuit of happiness.
• Cognitive flexibility builds on the understanding of brain plasticity; you can create new synaptic connections and circuitries through learning — exposing yourself to new experiences.
• We reframe resilience from bouncing back to bouncing forward; not reestablishing the old balance.
• If the story we tell ourselves is that we're inherently fragile, the culture we create prevents the innovation and risk taking needed to come through the mental crisis we're facing.
• It's a time of great overlapping crises; in Greek crisis means decision point — we must make huge decisions about who we are and the kind of society we want to create.
• The universe now needs more of the human coming online, not in buildings and churches made of stone, but on the inside, which means turning on the interior lights.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

TWEETABLE QUOTES

“As well as for me personally, a lot of the countercultural, psychedelic, countercultural visionary kind of thinking that I was used to, which really gave a message that we can change systems, it is possible. And it's a question of overcoming what was known as the prosaic fallacy, which is this idea that we simply can't imagine a different way of doing things, that doesn't mean that a different way of doing things isn't possible. So that was a big influence as well.” (Alexander)

“So it was actually quite a long process I went on and the instigating factor of me wanting to write something about it, or actually originally make a film about it, was a piece I read by Parul Sehgal, who's a literary critic, it was in the New Yorker. And her piece is called ‘The Case Against the Trauma Plot’. And I thought, uh, huh, interesting. What she's arguing is effectively that a lot of writers of modern stories are using trauma to explain their characters.” (Alexander)

“So I gathered a circle of friends, psychologists, practitioners, and we spent two years working on the project of resilience and the five key ideas we qualified. And then it became a tool that I've been using for the last 15 years now, with all the teams I've worked with.” (Alexander)

RESOURCES MENTIONED

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