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I was following an online seminar, if it could be called that, on techniques for trauma recovery. A bit too new-age fluffy, and statements made about the neurology did not match some of the latest research I’d studied for the second part of a book I finished writing last year. The book is a true story about a street boy in early seventies London, whom I called ‘Thomas’ when I switched from writing in the first to the close third person. It makes things easier. 
Below is a short essay I wrote last year summarising the main points of this second part. 

Thomas and the Mirror of Negation.

Prefatory Note

This essay explores the intersection of lived experience, trauma theory, and philosophical reflection. Drawing on models of dissociation (Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele), contemporary neuropsychology (Eustache), and the Zen-influenced thought of Miyamoto Musashi, it seeks to understand how the human psyche reshapes itself in response to trauma — and how recovery may involve not merely healing but transformation.

Trauma, Memory, and the Shifting Self

In Eustache’s view (“Mémoire et Émotions”), traumatic experience may be “bracketed out” of conscious recall, while the emotions attached to it remain vivid and enduring. Such emotions, he suggests, can “retain their original charge” even when the narrative memory fades. This distinction reflects how the two parts of the brain most involved with memory and emotions, the amygdala and hippocampus — one mediating emotion, the other memory — become decoupled under extreme stress. Van der Hart and colleagues, in their structural dissociation theory, describe trauma as splitting the personality into an “apparently normal part” (ANP) and an “emotional part” (EP). The ANP
handles daily life; the EP holds unintegrated emotion and traumatic reaction. But this model risks implying that the ANP is a fixed state of health, and the EP an aberration — when in lived experience, the two may continually interpenetrate, evolve, and exchange dominance.

Thomas: A Case of Adaptive Transformation

Thomas’s story challenges neat psychological boundaries. Before trauma, he lived a “normal” childhood. Entrapped in exploitation, he rapidly adapted — a survival evolution rather than a breakdown. He became functional within a brutal system, learning its codes and power dynamics. When later rescued and returned to safety, family members described him as “a different person, as if dropped from Mars.” Yet, during the period he lived with a supportive couple, he was described as happier, even whole — suggesting that his new identity was not purely a mask but a true synthesis, a provisional but authentic ANP integrating his former EP. The difficulties that later emerged may thus
reflect not regression but re-fragmentation — the loss of the adaptive, street-forged self that had achieved temporary integration. When the pre-street self resurfaced, it brought with it inherited shame and repression. Trauma was not simply an interruption; it was a crucible of transformation.

Negation and the Human Mirror

What Thomas witnessed among his clients was the paradox of affirmation and
negation. Desire expressed itself as a search for life, yet immediately turned upon itself as shame and destruction. He saw men who, in affirming desire, negated both themselves and him. Over time, he learned to reverse that dynamic — discovering power in the ability to evoke and control the desire that once victimised him. Negation became mutual. This mirrors the existential tension Zen calls the interplay of affirmation and negation — forces
that, in their unity, drive transformation. As Musashi wrote in The Book of Five Rings, one must sometimes “descend into the world of confusion to find the true way.” Thomas’s descent, like Musashi’s paradox, was not moral decay but a movement through suffering toward insight.

Integration and the Journey Beyond Victimhood.

If we accept, as Eustache proposes, that emotion and memory can become uncoupled, we might also accept that recovery involves their reunification—not by suppressing emotion but by giving it context and meaning. Thomas’s challenge in later life lay in reintegrating conflicting selves without rejecting either. In this light, the ANP is not a permanent refuge of normality but a work in progress—a construct shaped by experience, culture, and moral imagination. Musashi’s Zen-informed teaching reminds us that descent into darkness can, paradoxically, refine character. He wrote that “the way of
strategy is the way of nature; it cannot be learned from others.” In this spirit, trauma may be understood not as the annihilation of self but as an encounter with its limits. It is not romanticising suffering to recognise that pain, faced directly, may deepen one’s capacity for understanding and compassion. Eustache warned that modern societies risk becoming “collectivities of proactive victims” — people who make woundedness the cornerstone of
identity. True recovery, therefore, must involve reappropriating one’s history without being trapped within it. Thomas’s journey — from innocence to survival, from negation to awareness — suggests that healing is not the erasure of trauma but its transformation into wisdom.

References

Eustache, F. (2019). Mémoire et Émotions. Odile Jacob.
Van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Steele, K. (2006). The Haunted Self: Structural
Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatisation. Norton.
Musashi, M. (1645/1993). The Book of Five Rings. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Shambhala.

Wanting to be accurate, this second part is on hold pending a trip back to London and maybe, hopefully, checking by a suitably qualified and up-to-date neurologist. 

 

Deleted the previous post. The thought behind it was the question of why meaningful action on climate is proving impossible. Is negation real? It sort of went off on a tangent and into something I didn’t plan to write about until my current project is wrapped up.

Also, for a good few years now, some scientists have expressed concern about the possibility of a hothouse Earth. Whispering in the backroom, away from microphones. What that is, that warming continues and triggers a cascading series of feedback loops, warming becomes runaway, and when that happens, there’s no use even praying to whatever God you pray to, even if it’s wealth and pleasure. It’s game over.

Yesterday, I came across a paper on the possibility of a hothouse Earth, and, given its authors, it appears that prominent scientists are finally openly speaking about the end of civilisation. It’s a certainty short of drastic action to save our descendants from a living hell.

I’m not holding my breath waiting for action. There’s a thing that needs to be understood, aside from the reality of negation, and it is that our political system is no different from the power structures of the Middle Ages. Umberto Eco wrote an essay in response to a newspaper article that asked whether we are returning to medieval politics. His answer was that, yes, there are striking similarities: the power of a king depended on the goodwill of the aristocracy, who provided money and soldiers when needed. Today, in a democracy, a prime minister or president depends on the goodwill of the new aristocracy, that is, the billionaire class. Trump’s dismantling of all and everything related to climate is simply because doing so was part of a deal that enabled him to become president. Life was sacrificed on the altar of an old man’s ego.

It’s just Spock logic: it is too late, and we should all enjoy our lives, as said Professor Lovelock a long while ago when asked about climate change. That the plebeians enjoy life appears to be what the politicians also want us to do. Last Monday, I was at that Sydney demo that turned violent because we dared to be upset by the slaughter of children and their families, when we should be enjoying football and throwing shrimp on the barbecue. Below is where you can download the hothouse paper.

https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322%2825%2900391-4

 

Silence

Yesterday I acted on the feeling that there is no point in further talk.

I understand Thomas Aquinas when he put down his pen and left the Summa Theologica unfinished. Not comparing myself to that mind — only recognising the moment. He said what he had written felt like straw compared to what had been revealed. There are things that do not survive translation into language. Once spoken, they shrink.

The old samurai wrote that by knowing what exists, we know what does not exist. We look at the world and infer the absence. When a government sets morality aside for convenience, we do not need a lecture on ethics. The absence is visible in the act.

I once told a Zen story about a young monk who wanted to travel to a neighbouring kingdom and rebuke a king who ruled through fear. The head monk refused permission. The king would not listen, he said. People must sometimes follow their crooked path to its end. Only then might they see it for what it is.

I feel that now.

We are watching two collapses running almost in parallel — the erosion of the planet’s life-support systems and the erosion of democratic restraint. International law bends. Morality becomes negotiable. The powerful fall occasionally — Epstein and the like — but only when their utility expires. For every one exposed, there are many who remain useful.

I used to think argument mattered more than it does. Now I am less certain. There comes a point when speaking is no longer courage but performance. Noise layered on noise.

And yet I write this.

Perhaps silence is not the absence of words. Perhaps it is the refusal to shout into a storm that feeds on shouting. A narrowing of focus. A conservation of energy for work that might endure.

My turn on the merry-go-round is nearing its end — not tomorrow, not dramatically — but visibly. Age does that. It places a frame around things. Death is the one certainty that does not negotiate. In the end, the only ledger that will matter is the imprint left on other lives.

Seeing what unfolds now — children killed without consequence, institutions hollowed out — I suspect that if there is judgement, it will not be theatrical. It will be quiet. A reckoning with what we permitted.

So I return to the desk.

There is work to finish: a section on the neurology of trauma that needs precision before I send it to a neurologist whose judgement I respect. There is the question of affirmation and negation — how different traditions might be reconciled if we rise above semantics and attend to the spiritual core. In conversations with Muslims, I have found that when language loosens its grip, agreement is not rare.

This is not withdrawal. It is selection.

Less proclamation. More labour.

If silence comes, it will not be emptiness. It will be the space in which something more exact can be built.