Trauma Therapy and The Divine Comedy

Inferno

I fell apart in September of 2019. I’d been sweeping a slew of problems under the rug for years, convinced myself that I could run away from a lot of bad childhood experiences if I just used willpower. In Alcoholics Anonymous, they’d say I was “white-knuckling” my pain. The folks at AA use that term for alcoholics attempting sobriety through sheer willpower, which typically makes them incredibly uptight and rigid since they’re just a hairpin trigger away from full-blown relapse. While I wasn’t an alcoholic, I used dark music and dissociation to numb my pain. And just as the alcoholic needed just the slightest trigger to relapse into a binge, the passing of my uncle sent me back into the event horizon of the black hole of trauma that I was trying so hard to escape. 

I went through therapy, did an outpatient program at a psychiatric hospital, tried basically everything to run harder. But once you’re past the event horizon, there is no escape. The turning point came when I chose to stop running away from the pain. Instead I rode the waves into the trauma, beginning to emotionally release what I’d been stuffing away for so long. I took up meditation and began to read books on psychology and spirituality. I’d chosen to wander into the forest of my fractured memories and banished selves just as Dante stumbled into the forest at the start of the Divine Comedy. Dante’s terror at the threshold of his journey mirrored the turbulence I felt as I started to uncover why I fell apart and how the past reached into the present. And just as Dante found Virgil to guide him through the depths of Inferno, I found wisdom needed to heal in my therapist and the books I was reading. 

As I began to journey into the Inferno of trauma, I was mortified to learn how things I’d buried away continued to affect me in the modern-day. This journey began with ease, starting with learning basic mindfulness, but I continued exploring my mind and going deeper, continuing to ask “why are things this way” and found more and more pain buried away. I consulted a variety of books and videos at each checkpoint. Every time I thought I’d found a quick fix to my problems, reality hit back and sent me spiraling, searching for more clues as to what was really going on. 

Eventually, I found the root cause of my suffering, a little known condition called CPTSD. The C stands for “complex” and PTSD is “post traumatic stress disorder”. The condition was a good explanation for why I struggled with mundane things that a “normal” person could do with ease, because innocuous things in the present would trigger a chain of memories and negative cognitions I had become totally unconscious to, causing my amygdala to dump adrenaline and cortisol, turning me into a panicking or depressed mess. Unfortunately, I’d also been conditioned to avoid seeking out help and to think that I could simply “beat myself into submission” to function. In reality, I was just perpetuating my suffering more and building self loathing. Soon after I found that my symptoms matched the ones caused by CPTSD, I started reading books on the issue. Finally, I was able to make sense of my dysfunctional actions and struggles over my life. 

One would think that I’d be able to find the exact help I needed pretty quickly after I got sent to the emergency room (before I really fell apart), but I’m a stubborn bastard, for better or worse. While this stubbornness has been a boon in the past and has let me power through massive amounts of pain and internal strife to get something done, it also makes me oblivious at times, and at its worst, robs me of self-awareness. I’m sure there are people reading this who know me well that can attest to this fact, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve hurt people and brushed it off as though it’s nothing due to this stubbornness (I’m really sorry). In any case, when the doctor at the hospital told me I’m suffering from PTSD from what I told him about my childhood, I brushed it off and just thought that I was being over-dramatic. The reality is that it took four more months of suffering for me to finally accept that what I was dealing with was PTSD (complex PTSD at that). Through the months in between, I’d managed to convince myself several times that I’d completely healed myself of whatever I was dealing with through meditation and that I’d reached some sort of “new state of consciousness”.

While I’d understand if reading that last sentence made you roll your eyes, I want you to understand that learning you’re dealing with something like CPTSD is not pleasant. There was a period of grief involved with accepting the reality that something more serious was going on underneath and that it wouldn’t be something I could muscle my way through in a few weeks. There is a silver lining to coming to accept this fact though - I’d been saved from continuing to do the same broken and dysfunctional things that had brought me to the rut I was in. Many individuals suffer from CPTSD for decades before they get help, and some don’t get help at all. 

In the end, awareness and understanding had given me the gift of clarity about my dysfunctional behaviors, shone the path out of Inferno. Just as the saved Christian is blessed with God’s grace to climb the arduous path of Mt. Purgatory, I’d been granted the miracle of the chance to heal. Thus I ended my long residency in Inferno and set my sights on healing the deep trauma that was at the root of my pain. 

Purgatorio

I came across EMDR therapy (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) through Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score. It was supposed to work. It would neutralize the memories and the horrible anxiety and depression that would flood my body, and banish the negative cognitions that plagued my mind. It also wasn’t easy. 

I began reading Purgatorio as I prepared to start EMDR. Just as Dante found himself at the foot of Mt. Purgatory with Virgil at his side, preparing to make the arduous journey up the mountain, I found myself absorbing as much information as possible and noting everything that I wanted to process before really beginning this intense therapy. Dante’s mountain symbolizes the difficult process of growing that every human has to face, and I felt a sort of kinship with him as I prepared to climb my own mountain.

When my panic attacks began to worsen and my sleep started to dwindle, I decided I’d done enough preparation. I called a therapist to begin the process and passed through the threshold to the path up the mountain. 

Mt. Purgatory has seven terraces of purging, each corresponding to one of the vices in Christianity. At each terrace, souls go through and remove themselves of the vice through hard labor, and thus become immune to committing sin again. Not only do they become more virtuous,  but they also learn how each vice harmed their lives and kept them from true equanimity. And while going up the mountain, it is of paramount importance to not look back - once you’ve committed to the path there is no return to Inferno. My trek through my own mountain brought me similar wisdom of learning how negative cognitions tied to painful buried memories continued to make me act in a dysfunctional manner. I came to understand how a lot of things that I didn’t like about myself came to be in the first place. Just as the souls on each terrace did taxing work to purge themselves of vice, so did I during the purging of old memories during my EMDR sessions. I wish I could say I only had to do seven sessions, but there was a lot of processing to be done and some seriously horrifying moments. 

At the end of the seventh terrace, just before Dante enters the Garden of Eden and Beatrice brings him to Heaven, he is asked to step through a fire. While the fire may be intensely painful, no true physical harm would come to him. He passes through in the end, bearing the suffering but cleansing himself of the compulsion to fall back to vice again. He then finds his place in the Garden of Eden, where he comes to understand the nature of suffering in the divine order. While I never got the exact wisdom Dante received in the Garden of Eden, there were several times where I had to walk through fires, experiencing the same terror of annihilation from sheer pain while I was actually physically safe. The only difference was that the fire was inside of me, a horrible burning sensation in my chest brought about by my body dumping adrenaline and cortisol on me as I reprocessed traumatic memories of times I felt near death. During these episodes, I felt like I was living life minute by minute. I was brought to the absolute edge of my will to live as the pain was so unbearable and felt so inescapable. But just as Dante passed through the flames, so did I pass through these episodes of Hell. 

There were many times in which I regretted trying to process trauma. The process was just too difficult and I wasn’t sure how long I could push through the pain. While I’ve dealt with difficult situations in the past, including recovering from a heart operation, I’d never been pushed to the extreme that trauma processing brought me to. However, I stayed the path as I felt a deep resilience which was backed by a faith that grew after passing through each set of flames. It wasn’t the faith in the Christian God that guided Dante through the Divine Comedy, but faith in my own strength and will to live that transcends myself and is present in every human. I’d found a God of my own, with the same characteristic of being impossible to describe yet unquestionably present. Just as the purged souls felt lighter when vice was absent from their psyche, I felt lighter and freer after processing trauma. I felt pride in knowing that I was becoming a better person as I saw that my impulse to criticize or condemn others dwindled and the side that values humanity and kindness grew. Processing the trauma through EMDR helped me become a better person and gave me an avenue to reclaim the self-esteem that had been denied and locked away for so long. These glimpses of a better life during the arduous task of processing were windows into what a life without complex trauma would look like. 

Paradiso

While Dante never spoke about the views he got to see from checkpoints up Mt. Purgatory, my own climb up my mountain of healing trauma had many rest-stops where my mind would clear up and I’d enjoy periods of serenity and peace. When in this state of mind, I’d notice that things that would bother me before or even trigger a full blown traumatic stress attack suddenly were neutralized. I saw the fruits of my labor as my agency and ability to live with peace increased. These vistas into tranquility were what I considered Paradise - the reason I decided to climb the mountain in the first place. 

I’ve come to believe that Paradise is a state of mind as well as a choice that we make. It’s a choice to not act from the parts of us that pulled us into Inferno and to act in line with what is Objective and True. While the nature of such Objectivity or Truth, and whether it even exists at all is a debate to be had another time, I’ve come to believe in its existence through the clarity that therapy brought. I realized that there is a way to treat people that is objectively Right and that there is some fundamental aspect of Self that exists free from suffering and attachments to the material world that’s connected to something more fundamental. The difficulty comes from realizing that we have the choice to act in ways that are not pathological, in ways that aren’t results of past pain. When we’re locked into trauma, these choices are closed off because we default to the actions that will ensure our survival. And this is not to say that it’s as simple as choosing to feel better. Merely taking a second to step back and act from a place of our values and morals as opposed to reactivity doesn’t alleviate the pain we may be experiencing. It allows us an opportunity to orient ourselves towards a better life, and when practiced repeatedly over a long time span, creates a life healthier than the one we feel locked into. 

In the final section of Paradiso, Dante finally witnesses God in his true form. I found the language to be reminiscent of how Krishna speaks to Arjuna throughout the Bhagavad Gita, and I don’t think this is a mere coincidence. Just as Dante had his prophetic visions that led to him writing the Divine Comedy, the writer of the Gita must have had similar visions that led him to using the language he did in his book. I believe I got a taste of this inability to use language at certain points during my healing. There were EMDR sessions where I felt I’d recovered a part of my soul or felt deep joy that was both foreign yet familiar. There were sessions where I re-experienced happy childhood memories that I had forgotten happened. These healing experiences were facilitated by something I feel unable to put into words, and is what I believe people for millennia have considered God. As I brought fragments of my traumatized self to a place of safety within my mind, I began to experience positive emotions that had been locked away for so long and reclaim my life. A long time ago, I used to be a staunch atheist, and later considered myself spiritual and had all kinds of logical explanations for what God is, using ideas from psychology and mathematics to justify my positions. But true belief never came until I really experienced deep healing from therapy. Through my healing, I feel like I understand why Dante wrote the comedy. And while my idea of God isn’t the Christian God, I understood Dante’s portrayal of God and realized that it’s not so dissimilar from the experience I underwent. 

Reality

Unfortunately I’m not in Paradise completely. I’m not done. In fact, it would be too much to say I’m even completely out of Inferno. But to lament this reality is to miss the point.

One doesn’t just exit the Inferno, climb up Mt. Purgatory, and sit in Paradise for the rest of their life without any worry. While Dante, the pilgrim, represents us, the commoner, Dante the poet died miserably while in exile from Florence. The comedy is just that, a fiction with truths hidden in it. As readers, we’re supposed to figure out the truths in the fiction but remember that applying the truths won’t give us the fiction itself. 

Just because I’m out of the hardest part of EMDR doesn’t mean that I’m “cured”. I still have bad days and feel stress at times. While I don’t fall into the hopeless spirals that are reminiscent of my worst times, I still am working on little things. I still can get down on myself about my work and feel imposter syndrome. There are times where I feel disconnected from my friends and family. The future still fills me with bits of dread, though it’s a step up from not even being able to imagine it at all. 

It’s okay though. The psyche is a mosaic. I’ve found a lot of the pieces that were stuck in Inferno, helped them through Mt. Purgatory, and integrated them into Paradise, and these were the most traumatized pieces. I’m in acceptance of the fact that things won’t ever be perfect, and find it to be a bit liberating. I could view it as a tragedy, that even after all of this work and pain I don’t have the perfect life that I dreamed of. But EMDR has helped me recover agency and choice, which was taken away from me for so long as the traumatized fragments of my younger self came to believe that my fate was to live in misery. With that choice, I feel hope that as I continue to make mistakes, I can keep treading this path of awareness and commitment to a healthier life and continue improving myself, cultivating a better experience. My perspective will probably change too over time. In as little as a year I may consider the version of myself writing this piece to be naive, unaware of the full extent of reality. And that’s also okay, since that’s a natural result of more self-awareness and the path of healing. 

And most of all, if I forget the path and descend back into Inferno, I hold faith that Virgil will come rescue me again and point me towards Paradise.