Trauma Physics > Quantum Physics
Why the world felt real, why oneness felt impossible, and how trauma collapses reality
Trauma Physics > Quantum Physics
Why the world felt real, why oneness felt impossible, and how trauma collapses reality
I have been studying topics like quantum theory for decades. So much so that I was given the nickname quantumgirl. It was, as a trauma survivor one of the many avenues I have gone down to try and find healing, understanding, and relief. It has stayed with me as a point of interest, and I’ve just begun to look at it again to understand its implications for a survivor of childhood trauma, and years of adult trauma.
For years, it has felt like there has been a strange split within me, whether I was aware of it or not. On one side, there’s this part of me that has lived through brutality, neglect, sexism and misogyny, unchecked narcissism, and varying degrees and kinds of danger. It is the part that says: this world is real, this pain is real, everything hurts because everything can hurt me. And on the other side, the part that studied quantum physics, non-duality, and Native American wisdom, and even felt deep oneness with the silence of nature, there’s this deep intuitive knowing that the world is fluid, interconnected, illusion-like, made of something softer and more expansive than the nightmare I grew up inside. Those two truths never lined up - until now.
What I understand now more than ever is there is a bridge that can bring these sides together… the understanding that if something can hurt you, your nervous system concludes it must be real.
Pain collapses the world into a single, solid form. Pain becomes the observer that freezes possibility into the only version of reality you are allowed to experience.
Experience is always colored by the state of the body and mind through which it is filtered.
_Rupert Spira, The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience
In quantum physics, everything exists in a field of infinite potential. A wave of maybes. A shimmering expanse of all possible outcomes until something measures it, observes it, or something looks at it. This is the wave to particle, and particle to wave experience of quantum theory. That act of observation collapses the wave into one particular state. The collapse isn’t dramatic; it’s simply the moment a system takes shape. And in human development… as I’m understanding now, the “observer” that collapses reality is the nervous system. I was never the observer it was my nervous system – the first responder and protector for a child in an abusive, dysfunctional, toxic home. A child doesn’t work with probabilities or philosophy – a child works with sensation, and nothing in the universe sharpens sensation like pain.
The act of observation changes the observed.
When a child grows up in a hostile home with a narcissistic parent, an explosive parent, or an absent parent, and in a chaotic environment where the emotional weather changes without warning, their nervous system isn’t operating in the quantum field - it’s operating inside threat! Every scream, every silent treatment, every emotional abandonment, every dark look of disgust, anger or hatred, every unpredictable shift becomes a measurement. The pain forces coherence. And the child’s entire reality collapses into one conclusion: The world is dangerous. I must stay small, stay watchful and vigilant, and stay ready. This is what life is.
There is no room for possibility in that kind of world. No internal expansiveness. No field of maybes. Just the single fixed outcome of danger-as-truth. Our identity is then fused with the pain and the danger. This collapse becomes the self, hypervigilance becomes personality, distrust becomes intelligence, bracing becomes instinct, and trauma becomes the architecture of reality.
