Darth Vader- An armour of Trauma

”Anakin Skywalker was weak. I destroyed him.”- Darth Vader

Darth Vader. Not just a villain but a living illustration of what happens to a body narrative when a human being becomes so overwhelmed with pain, shame and unprocessed trauma that they end up building an entire armoured suit around themselves. In somatic terms, Darth Vader is the archetype of the armoured body, the body that has sealed off to avoid feeling ever again. Or is it so?

The most recognizable aspects of Vader’s trauma are his voice and his suit. His mechanical breathing is slow, forced and unnatural. Somatically this is a body that cannot access organic natural breath, a system fighting to stay live when emotionally dead and a chronic sympathetic activation trapped inside a parasympathetic freeze. Vader’s breath is the sound of trauma managing life. The breath of someone always bracing. His deep distorted voice mirrors a constricted throat chakra. The modulation of his voice is the modulation of someone who has lost their authentic self-expression and the natural tone of truth.

His suit is metaphor for somatic armouring, and emotional anaesthesia. A wall when people build around themselves when pain is unbearable. In trauma, people often experience muscular freezing, fascial rigidity and a loss of interoception. Vader lives in a permanent state of hypervigilance, bracing and loss of bodily agency for his suit controls him more than he controls it. His armour then becomes a cage trapping the man- Anakin Skywalker inside it physically, emotionally and psychologically as the sith lord Darth Vader.  The primary function of his suit is to keep him alive, but it does so while inflicting perpetual physical and psychological torment. The full body armour and skull like mask isolate Vader from the rest of the galaxy and he comes to embrace his isolation. The pain and suffering inflicted by the suit are channelled into hate and rage which in turn fuel his strength towards the Dark side of the Force. Vader meditates on his anger to sharpen his power, a stark contrast to a Jedi’s meditation for peace. Trauma physiology states that when the nervous system is overwhelmed it can trap someone in a hybrid state of fight and freeze both together. Vader is fight on the outside and freeze on the inside. His aggression shows up in his stride, the way he holds his head, his fist, and his low threatening mechanical voice. His anger is simply an overflowing sympathetic charge with nowhere to go but to turn against one’s own physicality. His nervous system is forever juggling between the two traumatic dualities of an inner rage and ice for it is molten lava that burns the skin of Anakin hereby forcing him to don the cold icy exoskeleton mask of Vader. As Lord Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker’s chassis is forever encased in a coffin of fire and ice.

Darth Vader is essentially driven by fear. Somatically, the most honest emotion he carries. His fears originate from his childhood grief of losing his mother, the death of Padme his wife, fear of facing his real self and confronting who he once was- Anakin. It is because of fear that his body is a prison; his breath is mechanical and his shield is a machine. Vader is a perfect example of what happens when fear becomes who you are. But how does Anakin fall to become Darth? For this we need to roll time back to his childhood. To his age between 0-7 years and see what events shaped his mind and body thereafter somatically, psychologically and emotionally.

Born into slavery on the arid planet Tatooine, Anakin was conceived by Shmi Skywalker with the help of the energy of the Force. He was a prophecy come true for all the Jedi as the Jedi scrolls said he was born to bring peace and order to the galaxy. But trauma is like a wild river and once it sets in, it can be catastrophic. Without a real human father, Anakin always felt something amiss. As a young child he was separated from this mother to join the Jedi order. This severed his only secure attachment and instilled a profound sense of fear of abandonment which became the defining characteristic of his life. Upon returning to Tatooine as a teenager, Anakin found his mother captured and tortured by creatures called Tusken Raiders. She died in his arms succumbing to her injuries. His inability to save her triggered an explosive rage and extreme disassociation from his human emotional self where he slaughtered an entire village of the Tuskens including women and children. This vengeance over coupled with helplessness set forth an established pattern of reaction to fear and loss with a disproportionate violence. Add to this the rigid dogma of the Jedi order of emotional suppression of love and detachment from attachments. This denied young Anakin the tools to express his aggression in a healthy way. The distrust of the Jedi council to rank him status of a Jedi Master further alienated him, thus intensifying his feelings of inadequacy and seething resentment. According to psychologists’ stressful experiences between ages of 0-12 years often sets the stage for the brain and body for adult trauma manifestation. Thus, the unresolved trauma from his mother’s death manifested as a constant obsessive fear of losing Padme Amidala his wife. Also, Anakin’s near fatal duel with Kenobi which left him physically mutilated. When told that he was the reason for his wife’s death, that is when Anakin snapped, for his only emotional anchor was dead, leading him to fully embrace the persona of the dark lord Darth Vader.

But underneath this metal mask, Anakin still lived. For when his son Luke refused to fight him, Vader experienced a sensation his body could defend against. An underserved compassion. Luke tunes then into the morphic resonance of his own body when he tells Vader- “I feel the conflict within you.” This is somatic language as Luke Skywalker could feel the trembling of his father’s chassis under the armour of trauma. Luke then becomes a mirror to Vader’s buried innocence (Anakin) and a co-regulating presence offering a moment of connection rather than fear. Trauma melts when it meets safety and this is the somatic engine of this event in the life of Anakin Skywalker Aka Darth Vader.

Blood is blood after all, and blood is magnetic in nature. As the Emperor tortures Luke, Vader’s iconic freeze response surfaces but this time it’s a freeze at the precipice of his transformation. Inside the armour of trauma and metal, something stirs in Vader. His head turns back and forth shifting between the remnant memories of the man he once was -Anakin and the machine he is now -Darth. And here is the moment when his trauma breaks open. Luke screaming at him- “Father please,” shatters this final layer of the armour of trauma of Darth Vader. Vader lifts the Emperor in the air which is a nervous system rebellion. A liberation as he kills him finally by throwing him down a deep shaft.  This is a somatic release of a raw human emotion. When Luke removes his father’s mask and Anakin says – “Let me look at you with my own eyes”, Anakin is asking for something that trauma has stolen from him. His real self. And this marks the end of fear, the end of disassociation and the end of the armoured body. In this moment Anakin Skywalker reclaims himself from his own myth of being Darth Vader.

We all embrace armours around us throughout our lives. When we give into rage, when we cannot let go of resentment, when we hang our bodies in shame and when we live in fear. But the universe has given us all an arc of healing. And healing happens when we allow our bodies to awaken to a somatic surrender. Healing can then become A New Hope. Let’s awaken this Force. May the Force be with You always.

“I am a Person and my name is Anakin.”- Starwars: The Phantom Menace.