Psychological Time and Trauma: Why Trying to Escape Suffering Keeps You In It

Written by Roland Bal

When you suffer, you naturally want to get away from that state. When you're in pain, your mind goes to its opposite of not wanting to be in pain. If you're anxious and that overwhelms you, you don't want to be anxious. If you're very angry, there's a part of you that doesn't want to be angry — or you might want to be non-violent. If you're overwhelmed by sadness, at some point, you want to find a way out of that.

That is a natural, instinctive way your mind responds in trying to overcome discomfort. The issue is that it creates a problem of its own.

The Gap Between Where You Are and Where You Want to Be

This instinct creates psychological time between where you are and where you want to be. Within that space, within that creation of psychological time, that trying to overcome — you create all the other emotions that are possible. You're trying to achieve. You might fail. You get depressed. You get frustrated for not arriving. If you arrive, you have a sensation of achievement, a short moment of fleeting pleasure.

Then again, that cycle repeats itself — because if the initial point of departure rests on a state of suffering, then you will always come back to it. You will always gravitate back to that.

Why the Cycle Repeats

When you're angry and you say to yourself you should practice non-violence, that non-violence still rests initially on a state of anger. Something will upset you, or bring you out of balance, out of that idea of non-violence you've created — and it will put you back in touch with the anger.

The same goes with anxiety. You might do courses on being more assertive, more willful — but eventually that is a superficial layer you've created on top of the anxiety. You fall back into the anxiety the moment your energy starts to drop.

Psychological time is the perpetuation of suffering. The moment you stop the movement of achieving, of getting somewhere, of becoming — you close the gap of dissociation.

Striving as a Form of Dissociation

This is the part that gets missed. The act of trying to overcome an emotion creates a split between what is and what you want to be. That split is a form of dissociation. You are no longer in contact with the actual state — you are in contact with the idea of a different state, and the effort to get there.

In trauma, this is the engine that keeps reenactment going. The original injury creates an unbearable state. The system organises itself around not feeling that state. Everything that follows — the achieving, the becoming, the self-improvement, the spiritual bypassing, the addiction, the workaholism — is psychological time. It is the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and the gap itself is what produces the suffering.

Closing the Gap

It's important to realise that psychological time perpetuates suffering. The moment you stop that movement of achieving, of getting somewhere, of becoming — you close the gap of dissociation. You close the gap of psychological time, and hence you stop the suffering it produces.

This does not mean the original emotion disappears. The anger, the anxiety, the sadness — they may still be there. What disappears is the second layer: the layer of resistance, of striving against, of trying to be somewhere else. That second layer is what generates the cycle. Without it, the original emotion has room to move, to be processed, to integrate.

This is also why containment matters. You cannot close the gap by force. You close it by learning to stay — with what is, as it is — long enough that the system stops needing to escape.