is there a buddhist way to get over your hurt when someone has assaulted you?

by Vic Shayne
author
The Enduring Myth of the Buddha: a hero’s journey into enlightenment

This article was prompted by a Reddit post I read by a young woman who was assaulted. She was trying to figure out how she can be a better Buddhist to rise above her feelings of anger, shame, and trauma.

People hurt other people intentionally in many cases. In the wake of this abuse, the victim suffers and goes through all sorts of emotional and physical responses because an impression has been made on the mind. The mind wants to figure a way out of the ensuing emotions and to make sense of the abuse and its aftermath. But what can be done? Is there a way to rise above the emotions or erase them?

being so spiritual that you invalidate the victim
No one can let go of the anger or pain. No one. People who say that this is possible are only making assumptions that are not true. Or they are misinterpreting the observations of some supposedly awakened spiritual leader suggesting that we can put trauma behind us by taking control of our thought processes. Let’s pause here for a moment to see why this is not possible.

The sense of self, which is the ego, is a sense that we have fragmented ourselves away from the totality of life. In this fragmentation we are left with a dual appraisal of the world — me versus you or him or her or them; and me versus me. It is this latter duality that makes self-help a failure. So when someone says we can take control over our minds to allay our trauma, the suggestion is that the self should alter itself. Control is effort, and control requires a controller, which is a fragment. A fragmented mind is in conflict with itself and all else. It is the same (egoic) mind that is both suffering and trying to stop itself from feeling, reacting, and suffering. This is an example of neurosis. Denying, suppressing, and controlling our feelings does not lead to overcoming emotional trauma.

don’t blame the victim
You would need to see this for yourself to know it for certain, but invalidating victims of abuse is the end result of suggesting that the victim should take charge and get over her anguish. We are all human beings and therefore heir to feelings, emotions, and mentations. When we are hurt, these emotions become known to us in waves, often persisting for the rest of our lives to one degree or another.

our emotions are embedded in consciousness
The full range of emotions that we experience to one degree or another are within the sense of self and are its contents. Thus, they are within us: This is what we as human beings are emotionally made of, as much as we are physically made of blood, muscle, organs, brains, cells, tissues, and all the rest. The contents of consciousness are our consciousness.

We are all psychologically conditioned since birth by influential people and their ideas and beliefs, whether we’re talking about you, me, the Dalai Lama, the Buddha or any other sentient being. This is a fact, not an idea. This psychologically conditioned mind forms the sense of self, and within this self are all the emotions on the spectrum; we all share these. There is not a plural of anger, fear, shame, etc. There are different reasons, degrees, and manifestations for these, but not different versions. Your anger is my anger, and so on.

However, it is a matter of whether we identify with this psychologically conditioned false self or whether we identify as the singular consciousness that creates, nourishes, destroys, motivates, and moves life. Consciousness alone is the doer, while the ego, the self, is only a mirage, an illusion. If this illusion of the self tries to evade, control, modify, or destroy its contents then it is only fooling itself, because it is not possible for the self to be independent from itself.

watch your sense of self and its emotions
When you have been assaulted, abused, cheated, invalidated, and so on, the emotions, such as anger, fear, hate, frustration, etc., come to the surface. They are not created, because they have always been present. Observe the emotions and let them arise and fall as thoughts. Be who you are in totality, not what you think you should be. This means to recognize what you are as anger, hate, fear, and all the rest.

We are human beings because we are heir to our human emotions; only in death do we escape this body and its unique set of experiences. But the contents of consciousness live on. Even if we can move the attention into the totality of consciousness, as long as we are alive we are heir to all of the emotions.

The woman who was assaulted, mentioned at the outset of this article, was looking for a Buddhist way to address her feelings. The Buddha was not a zombie or devoid of feelings and human emotion, he simply did not identify as them. But he didn’t deny them. The body does not just disappear when one is spiritually awake, and neither do all of the contents of consciousness.