This is Part 5 of a series called “5 beliefs about emotions I gave up to truly heal”. You may want to check out Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 before reading this one (or go back to them after reading this one!)

There’s a post that comes up in my Facebook memories every summer that makes me absolutely cringe. I wrote it about ten years ago, and it says “from the ultimate perspective, there are no victims and no perpetrators”. I wouldn’t dream of saying something like this today, but at the time I really, really wanted this to be true and I’d done a good job convincing myself of it. Of course, there was context to why I’d latch on to a concept like this: behind the scenes, I was dealing with the aftermath of several traumatic events including an assault and an illness that almost cost me my life. Completely overwhelmed and broken down, I went through several months of hardly eating or sleeping, and then threw myself into work and a school program that left me hardly a second to think about anything that had happened. In some ways, this helped temporarily – I could sleep again simply out of sheer exhaustion, for example. Coping mechanisms aren’t necessarily bad. They do cause problems when they become a rigid part of your worldview, though, and avoidance became part of mine for a while. Floating above the harsh realities of pain and trauma was soothing, and it’s not hard to see why an idea like “there are no victims” would appeal to me given the circumstances.

It didn’t take long to start telling myself that only my reactions to the traumatic events were the problem, not the events themselves. If I could just see things from a high enough perspective, transcending the limited lens of human emotion, I could avoid being hurt and harmed ever again. Without even consciously realizing it, I began to aim for a kind of superhuman non-reactive state as my end goal. And what really stands out to me from this time is how many people not only saw nothing wrong with this, they encouraged and applauded it. I was validated and praised for focusing on “the lesson instead of the loss”, and since people started to tell me I seemed like I was doing much better, I felt like that had to mean I’d done some deep healing.

But I hadn’t. I’d done no deeper processing or reflection, and no therapy at all (not to say traditional psychotherapy is always necessary for healing, but when working with complex trauma, it certainly helps). The seemingly calm, almost meditative space I could go into was not some state of emotional mastery: it ranged from minor escapism to full on dissociation. And since this became my habitual response to my own pain, naturally, it became how I responded to the pain of others as well. Floating in that state of numbness cut me off from deeper empathy and intimacy with others when they shared vulnerable stories with me. One instance in particular still sticks with me to this day, and I deeply regret it. I ended up reconnecting with a woman I’d been friends with in elementary school, and while we were catching up and reminiscing she revealed to me that an adult we’d trusted had been sexually inappropriate with her. It was clearly difficult for her to talk about, and I’d recently experienced similar things and could have been a caring, empathetic listener…but I was so emotionally numb and distant that I couldn’t bear witness to her at all. Not only that, I glossed over and minimized her pain, just as I was doing to my own.

I know it can be tempting to look at an experience like this and think “you couldn’t help where you were at”, “it’s not really your fault”, “maybe she was meant to get support from someone else”, etc. I told myself all of those things, and there’s truth in all of them. But it’s also true that my focus on transcending my emotions led me to feel and act superior to someone who was suffering, in a moment where I could have honoured her and told her she wasn’t alone. I did find her online a couple years ago, acknowledging and apologizing for what happened. But really, I’ll never know how many other people may have said similar things to this woman before I did, or how my words truly affected her at the time. I know that when others dismissed and silenced me when I was dealing with the aftermath of assault, I felt deep pain and betrayal that I can still recall vividly.

I never reached any kind of genuine healing in this “transcendent” state: I pushed it away, and I also pushed away people who could have been supportive of me (I think we do some of our deepest healing in our relationships with others). I had to come back down to earth to actually work through things, and at first it was scary to be up close to the wounds I’d been avoiding by soaring high. Being back on planet Earth also meant I had to take on responsibility for how my trauma and coping mechanisms coloured my interactions with other people and sometimes caused harm.

I’ve noticed that during COVID, people’s desperate desire to transcend pain and harsh realities is in full force. While I definitely have compassion for this and know intimately what that desire feels like, I also see all the ways it’s harming others, particularly when people who have power, influence, and a large audience are the ones preaching the gospel of transcendence. I’ve seen and heard things that range from mildly harmful misconceptions to outright cruel statements: people are only getting sick if they’re at a “low frequency”, people dying is just “culling the herd” and part of a “higher plan”, there’s an “awakening” that will just leave the undeserving people behind, etc. This reveals a deep lack of empathy, and also a desire to not take part in collective responsibility. I’ve been there, and I know how appealing it is to check out when things feel awful – but I also know it won’t save any of us. Transcending our very human responses to the world may neutralize our pain and fear temporarily, but it also neutralizes our fire. When we’re moved by the world, we move: we take action, create change, dismantle bullshit systems, and create community and connection.

In order for us to get through this pandemic as a species, we need to get our hands dirty, face reality, and live up to the responsibilities of interconnectedness. Transcending our humanity won’t help us do that – embracing it will.

I really hope you’ve enjoyed this 5 part series – I enjoyed writing it, and I hope some of what I’ve written has resonated with you, and thank you for reading!