Dissolving the pain-body for resolving traumas

Heal mental disorders

Early childhood experiences determine the mental development of a child and if the child faces traumas, he could acquire mental disorders. The movie Shazam narrates the story of Billy Batson, a child who develops the symptoms of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He is a cowardly boy, who, like most people, is afraid of school mates, demons, and other antagonists in life. Billy loses his mother in early childhood, and he does not have a father either. He is brought up in foster homes as an orphan. Later on, Billy whole-heartedly focuses on finding his lost mother. Billy fails to find his mom and goes deeper into sadness, discontent, and hopelessness. Billy carries a constant state of worry, childishness, and a lack of confidence. He withdraws from everyone and be alone most of the time. In the process of finding his mother, he tries to escape the foster homes, plays pranks with policemen, etc., – all in search of his mother’s care. Furthermore, Billy accidentally attains power through sheer luck that allows him to switch into a macho form at will. He uses the powers to fulfill his unmet desires. He comes out of his depressive mood and plays the role of a superhero. In progress, he finds his mother, but he finds that his mother is not interested in him anymore. Moreover, he found that she had selfishly abandoned him and was reluctant to take him back in her life. This puts him in deeper disappointment and depression. Finally, Billy accepts his foster home as his true family and embraces his siblings and caregivers. Although Billy endeavors in the movie to solve his pain of separation through an external solution, he needs to address his deep-seated pains and resolve them in order to reduce his depressive symptoms.

Even though the solution to Billy Batson’s depression seems like retrieving his mother, mental disorders require deeper therapeutic work. Billy who had lost his parents in early childhood developed symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) such as loneliness, withdrawal, worthlessness, and moodiness. He identifies the reason for his loneliness as the missing mother. He finds his own lonely place and prefers to stay indoors. By imagining his life situation as the cause of his mental disorders, he's escaping the true cause of his suffering – suppressing emotions. Generally, people tend to suppress emotions in relationships thereby giving power to the trauma and its symptoms. Suppressing the emotions block the inputs from the body sensations to travel through the brain stem through the limbic brain into the context areas where awareness happens. When an intense event occurs in our life, the overwhelming feelings spread from the senses to your nervous system to our brain stem to limbic areas to the cortex brain. The repression of emotions continues and spoils the internal system of the person. This shuts down the bodily awareness from the neck down and helps us isolate ourselves from the pain, the negative emotions, disappointments, guilt, and so on. The implicit memories propagate through a lack of awareness and kick in depression (Siegel 150). Research has shown that even without being conscious of the stored past emotions, the whole collection of unprocessed feelings influences thoughts, calculations, emotions, and effective decision-making (Siegel 153). Billy, with a traumatic childhood, continues to suppress emotions, increases the symptoms of PTSD, and results in further traumas in life.

Every trauma generates emotions that may not be completely experienced and thereby leaves residual emotions. Tolle says, “every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body.” Tolle calls it pain-body. Billy too developed a large pain-body by being through the intense trauma of separation from parents. Furthermore, he collects more pains from his siblings and caregivers in life. In his school, Billy behaves as a lonely shy boy constantly thinking about his mother. He gets hurt by being bullied by his schoolmates. He carries a pain-body of intense shyness and fear. Due to his attachment to his lost mother, he remains in depression throughout the movie until he finds his mother one day. However, his mother behaves indifferently with him and he finally realizes that his expected fulfillment from his mother’s love was just a fantasy. This naturally creates further pains and inflates the pain-body, deepening PTSD symptoms.

To resolve PTSD, we need to dissolve the pain-body. The pain-body is alive and causes suffering. When a situation causes deep wounds in a person, it becomes too painful to experience for them. These unresolved hurts thus get suppressed and form the unconscious mind. This has got the power to create situations that can trigger the hurt to get resolved. It is a million times more powerful than our conscious mind. Unable to handle the past, we live in control of the pain-body behind the event. All relationships become a ground to express and heal traumas and thus, one cannot foster good relationships in life. Only through ‘Presence’ we can bring awareness to the pain and start the dissolution process. Presence is something we forgot a long time back in our childhood. Tolle says that to be present means to inhabit the whole body; it is about spreading our attention into every part of our body. Attention or the ability to focus on the mind and body is known as mindfulness. In the book Mindsight, Daniel Siegel says, “mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one's own intention”. One becomes intensely aware of the internal seascape of the mind. Tuning in into oneself makes oneself a friend of oneself through a process of self-completion of the pain-body. Pain-body is powered by the most powerful memories of our childhood. Rewinding and reliving the memories in a cozy spiritual environment and releasing them completely is known as the process of completion. If Billy undergoes such a process, there is a high possibility to cure his PTSD.

Resolving the traumas from the past leads to healing the pain-body, the associated memories, and reducing the symptoms of PTSD and depression. The process of dissolution of pain-body, when done by an expert therapist, helps one recover from depressive mind states in a short time. Like Billy Batson, the common man continues in the depressive state of self-pity unaware of his mental disorder and its therapy. He reduces his life to a small circle and remains pessimistic in life. He fails to nurture healthy relationships in life. Even though Billy gets superpowers and becomes a famous superhero and puts him into a breakthrough state, he eventually drops back to depression when his mother rejects him. If he knows the art of suffering, he can enter into a breakthrough state quickly by processing the traumatic memories in a meditation. Once he enters into the breakthrough state regularly, the PTSD gradually loses its grip. One is able to feel positive emotions and gain a mindful state. Mindfulness restores the prefrontal cortex’s ability to stabilize emotions. Emotional equilibrium leads to self-attunement and mental resilience, and one excels in all respects of life.

Works Cited

Tolle, E. (2010). The power of now: A guide to spiritual enlightenment. New World Library.

Siegel, D. J. (2010). Mindsight: The new science of personal transformation. Bantam.

Warmerdam, G. V. (2014). MindWorks: A practical guide for changing thoughts, beliefs, and emotional reactions.