What Backrooms and conversations with clients and friends reveal about the mind
Key Takeaways
Trauma distorts both what we believe is possible and what we deserve.
The map that is built after trauma is not the whole territory.
If we rebuild our trauma-shaped map, we expand what we believe is possible in our lives.
Observation
I recently watched the film Backrooms, and couldn’t shake the metaphor it revealed about the inner workings of the mind, consciousness, and trauma. A company, the Async Research Institute, that originally built MRI machines (to image the hidden parts of the brain) pivots into research after stumbling upon the discovery of a world that is limitless in capacity and never fully explored. In one scene in particular, the camera pans downward from a room completely intact and oriented. Descending lower and lower, floor by floor, the same room changes in size as the furniture, books, and objects of every kind fragment, distort, and melt into the walls, much the way our memories can distort over time. This distortion, fragmentation, and compartmentalization happens to a greater degree when catalyzed by trauma. The protagonist of the story, a man lost and stuck in his own patterns of rage and anger, is concomitantly seeking therapy, but remains unable to change what is rooted and injured in his mind.
Watching this movie reminded me of recent conversations with clients and close friends who are moving through difficult seasons. Their lives and their stories shaped by traumas—known or not, named or not. And while their stories are all different, the same beliefs kept resurfacing: “this is as good as it gets,” and “this is all I deserve.”
Revelation
Our lives move forward from birth to death in what is meant to be a continuous line, an autobiographical timeline. When we live through abuse, neglect, exploitation, manipulation, isolation, or even a mean word, a piece of that timeline can break away and become marooned, walled off from the rest of our lives. What determines this is not the event, otherwise we get caught or lost in what is known as comparative suffering. The determining factor is how the event is perceived and the resources—internal and external—we have available to help us process and integrate it.
When our systems or environments overwhelm our capacity, those marooned pieces become fortified. We build walls, boundaries, and partitions, and over time many of us come to believe that the map we are left with is the whole territory. We shrink our happiness and our joy to fit inside its edges, and an unconscious resignation settles in that this is as big as our world can be.
Meaning
Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Our inner world has no such edge, containing both the possible and impossible. Consciousness—the internal map that shapes us—is generative. It holds our memories and makes room for the relationships we build and break, the moments we experience, and the feelings that pass through us.
I do not believe our trauma-informed edges are as big as one’s world can be. Years of personal transformation alongside nearly a decade of transformational healing work with clients confirm this. A reality larger than our wounded vision is waiting. The journey of finding out who we are is where the healing happens, how our worlds expand, and where we correct the distortions of a mind shaped by its attempts to protect us. There is no one right way to do this. There are many paths up the mountain.
What to Carry Forward
When you hear “this is as good as it gets” or “this is all I deserve,” you may be nearing the edge of an old map, a place where growth stopped and where it can begin anew.
Reflection Question
Where in your life have you accepted your limits? And what might lie beyond the edge of that map?
With love & light,
John Moos, MD
Soul Surgeon