Healing from Trauma? Use Training Wheels!

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I have decided that the only thing more difficult than having training wheels is not having training wheels. Feeling tippy is better than being stuck, or afraid to move. In my current place of growth I am in a ‘tippy place’ where I wobble precariously from one side to the other side trying to find my balance: I am moving forward, and I can feel my own hard work, and every once in a while I get the sensation of what it might be like to not have the training wheels at all, where I can feel open space, where I can glide. And then moments later, I reach towards something new and I feel the wobbliness again.

New learning in adulthood is awkward. And learning or re-learning any of the skills of relationship or attachment is really hard. It’s not easy to find your center from the wild swings to the edges. Training wheels can be perfect for learning because you can actually start with them right on the ground—as if you had a perfect third wheel. You get to feel what it is like to sit and steer with the bike completely balanced. Having training wheels lets you incrementally decrease your need to rely on an old source of support so that you can rely gradually on your new skills and sources of support.

What is the psychological equivalent to training wheels?  The stepwise and incremental progressions of mending a heart and repairing trust?  How do you shift a worldview from one that is always vigilant—to one that can relax and lean in to safety and in to relationship?

We always want the solution to look more complicated or exciting than it really is. We don’t like to admit how even a small adjustment can make us feel wobbly. So how do we begin? The starting place for creating your metaphorical training wheels is a sense of solid ground. But what feels solid and comfortable?  In my book, Journey Through Trauma, I talk about the first phase of healing from repeated trauma as the Preparation Phase. The Preparation Phase is where you work on all of your resources for healing and you find some solid ground for yourself: where you make things more predictable or more routine or more supported than you have ever had, or than you will eventually need.

And then as you begin to take in the experience of safety and predictability that you have put in place—not unlike the training wheels set to the ground—you may begin to try to find some new edges of learning. You feel safe enough in a relationship to ask for a need to be met. You risk saying, “No.” You admit how you are feeling. Finding your learning edge in the  psychological world than they are in the physical world can more difficult than it is in the physical world because in the physical world you can see clearly what you are using or not using. One of the best examples of this kind of learning comes from Norman Doidge’s book The Brain that Changes Itself, where researchers figured out what it took to bring back full functioning to a person who had experienced a stroke, where the stroke makes impairs functioning on one side of their body. The prevailing treatment had been to work with the side that was not functioning with physical therapy—to teach it to work again. But that treatment had slow and intermittent success—most people reverted to using their ‘good hand’ to do most of the things that they needed to do, and the less functioning hand rarely gained functioning again. Instead, the new treatment intervened by strapping down the good arm or leg with an ace bandage, or putting an oven mitt on it—making it impossible to use the good side at all.  In the absence of being able to use the functioning limb, the brain appears to rewire the weaker side and eventually allow a person to gain complete functioning. So learning and healing is not just about what makes you feel more solid or helping you lean in to new learning—it is also about knowing what needs to be unlearned, or unused so new learning can take place.  And psychologically, what are those things you need to put your oven mitt on so that you have no choice but to lean in to the new learning?

How can we bring these ideas to healing from trauma? For learning or re-learning attachment? We need to remember that repeated trauma, and really, any relational trauma, is really three forms of trauma— what did happen (the trauma that occurred), what you did to survive--the protections you used to survive the trauma, and what didn’t happen— the growth and development you missed. And the work of creating training wheels is twofold—one wheel is like the oven mitt used for stroke patients— it is a set of behaviors that will keep you from using your old protections, and will keep you from following the old rules of survival. By putting a metaphorical oven mitt on your old protections—you will have to lean in to new behaviors and new attitudes. And these new behaviors and attitudes are the other training wheel—the things you may never have tried before.

So now you get to practice with the training wheels. You head to one side thinking you can use your old protections but you can’t because you have covered them with an ‘oven mitt’, so you wobble to the other side looking for refuge, and instead you find a new behavior that feels like a risky new behavior—which you try and feel anxious so you lean back toward your protections which you are bravely giving up and you go back and forth –sometimes gloriously finding the center—finding something brand new.

I call these moments new beginnings, they are ‘what didn’t happen.’ But how can these moments become woven in, become the new default? I have another example from Norman Doidge’s book, where a woman has severe vertigo from a reaction to antibiotics and is unable to stand or walk. As treatment she uses a helmet that serves as an external vestibular function for her inner ear that has been damaged. When she puts on the helmet she can stand up and stay balanced and doesn’t feel nauseous. That the helmet can support her this way is amazing, but what is really amazing is that wearing the helmet gives residual benefits that increase over time. The longer she wears the helmet, the longer she can feel the benefits even when she takes the helmet off: the helmet re-teaches her brain how to experience and manage balance. And this residual learning mirrors my own experience of psychological training wheels: you get a benefit in the moment of the new learning experience—but if you can stay in it with some constant repetition—you can begin to feel a residual benefit long past the actual practice time.

These moments of new beginning give you the brand new experience of growth—and the more they happen, the more of these moments that can get strung together, the more they have residual effects where you can pedal for a while without the wobbliness. Where you carry your center with you.

In healing the relational aspects of trauma what I have noticed is that these new moments of growth give me a sturdiness, I can feel my own two feet.  They give me a feeling of elasticity— I can feel like relationships have an elastic quality that will allow some give and take, and they give me a feeling of openness and expansiveness where I can look up and around. For me and many people with a history of trauma there is a hyper vigilance that is the constant background noise—the constant operating system running in the background all the time. Finding the tippy place between the two training wheels means living in a place where that operating system isn’t in the background: its acknowledged and worked with. In the tippy place you have owned the protections that keep you from learning a new way, and you have identified the new behaviors that are your learning edge. In the training wheels model you aren’t denying your problem or wishing it away—you are living with it—and working not to use your old protections so that you can try something new.

© 2018/2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

For What is There and What Isn't

For What is There and What Isn’t

Sometimes the mountain you climb

is the one you carry inside—

a weight, a sorrow, a hope,

a heaviness with each footfall.

I find myself on a path

soft with red pine needles

twisting along a narrow pond.

All is calm and still,

cattails swaying in the slight breeze,

winter’s grey giving way to green.

If someone told me that this cove

was the entrance to heaven

I would believe them.

The swans with their arched necks

swimming slowly as sentries

in front of the tall grass.

Like heaven, it is so quiet

until your ears adjust—

and then you hear the music—

a cardinal singing high and clear,

the red wing blackbird shrills,

the goldfinches flicker from branch

to branch to the surface of the water.

Sometimes the mountain you climb

carries you home.

Last week the Ramapos and the Catskills,

the Adirondacks and the Berkshires

bore me with such kindness and patience

guiding me home until they gently

set me down in the valley.

Mountains can give us sight:

upward, outward, inward—

and anyway,

they all hurt my heart.

My feet are tired and

the cove is long and deep.

Beyond the tall grass

is a tangle of trees and bramble

and I can’t see where it ends.

And it is hard to tell in this

afternoon light whether the cove

is the entrance to heaven

or heaven itself.

Whether the longing I carry in my heart

is for what is there,

or what isn’t.

© 2025 Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD

Finding a portal to possibility

Late last year my bed completely collapsed as I sat down to put on my shoes. Collapsed with a bang just like they do in the cartoons. It was the fourth, and what I decided right then, last time it would collapse. The jury rigged bolts by the moving guys from a number of moves had become both stripped or had broken inside the frame, so I took the bed apart and set the pieces in the hallway. I put my box spring and my mattress on the floor.

I thought it would be an inconvenience to have my bed on the floor. Instead, it was an elixir.  Sitting on my bed on the floor I was instantly transported--I am nearly forty years younger, I am just out of college at any one of my first few apartments, when all I had was a futon on the floor and a milk crate as a bed side table.

The amazing thing is that when I say “I felt young again” it was as much a sensation as a mix of feelings. I felt the way I felt, I could see the world through the lens I saw through then. It was an experience of virtual reality except it was actually very real for me at one time and the physical experience of being on the floor brought it all back in living color and surround-sound feelings.

It was such a strong reminder that our physiology at any given time can be such a strong force on our psyches—in every real sense our physiology is our psyche—and the complete shift in my worldview by merely viewing the world from the floor brought this point home.

As I sat on my bed on the floor I noticed a couple of big things. One is that I was flooded with contentment. At twenty-two I didn’t need much. I was happy to be out on my own and didn’t notice or didn’t care that I didn’t have much. I didn’t care that any furniture I had was picked from the trash. I had a job, I had a place to live, I had friends, and that was all I wanted. And that same feeling of having all I need came flooding back. Adulthood is filled with responsibilities and each new responsibility is often connected with needing more and more resources whether it is time or money or people. Sitting on my bed on the floor catapulted me back to the reality that you can experience abundance in very limited circumstances.

And the next feeling that washed over me was the feeling that the world is full of possibility. At twenty-two I had no idea what I was going to do for the rest of my life, but nothing was ruled out. It is an expansive feeling like looking out at a wide-ranging landscape. You look over the whole horizon wondering where you want to walk to. And really there is no pressure to go anywhere at all: just the freedom of looking out with the ability to wonder can be enough. And sitting on my bed on the floor I suddenly had that same experience of expansiveness and possibility.

These two big feelings: the contentment of having all I need and the feeling of expansiveness and wonder combined to create a really powerful energy, an energy that made me feel like I could do anything I really wanted to do. At nearly sixty I know that everything isn’t really a possibility—and I am actually much more settled in who I am than I was a twenty-two. But the energy I had then was great—and getting reacquainted with it was an amazing and surprising gift from finding myself on the floor with broken bed pieces at the start of a day.

There’s a psychological term for this feeling of nostalgia --the reminiscence bump –the strong vivid memories we can get of our youth and especially our early 20’s. There are many theories for this but the strongest is that this is a time of life when we are forming our narrative—when we discover through our experience who we are. Which is why it is so powerful to not only remember it—but remember it vividly—with full feeling.

So, if you are feeling like you could use some of your youthful enthusiasm or hope, or if you would like to tap back in to the part of yourself that once could operate with a sense of wonder, instead of certainty—if you want to travel back through a portal of possibility, you need to find your own version of my ‘broken-bed-time-machine.’

Maybe you never slept on a futon on the floor. But maybe you went barefoot, or drove with the windows rolled all the way down with no particular destination. It might be a certain kind of car, or drink, or a certain view or sitting in the bleachers watching your favorite sport. Or maybe it’s your favorite music that takes you back when you hear the song. Or maybe it’s a special place where you get a sense of possibility. When I need to reconnect to the possibility in myself I go back to my college campus and sit in the amphitheater where Dr. Maya Angelou was our Class of ’87 graduation speaker. She sang, recited poetry and stated clearly that there were big problems in the world – problems like racism, sexism, ignorance and hatred, saying that there needed to be people to take those problems on. She paused and then asked, ‘Will it be you?’

You don’t have to wait for your bed to break to find possibility. You can seek it out. Whenever I need to find the feelings of possibility, passion and purpose again—when that battery needs recharging-- I drive out and sit on the grass seats -- and I argue with myself, the world and the problems as I see them until I am reminded of the possibility for change that I once felt.  

© 2025 Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD

For some inspiration, two sources of Dr. Angelou at Mount Holyoke College graduation 1987

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The Temple Builders

The Temple Builders 

The temple builders

are mostly tired I think,

not visionaries,

so much as laborers.

Moving one stone at a time

with calloused hands

and long ropes—

using strength and

leverage and hope.

One lifetime,

one corner,

one stone,

is not the scale

we aspire to.

We want the finished temple

before us at the end of the day.

We want to stand back

and admire our finished work,

certainly not our daily labor,

one simple stone.


It isn’t some higher calling

that gets them up each morning.

No, it is the old woman

who lived through

the dark years, the dark days,

when no temples were built,

except deep, deep in the heart

where they could not be found

or destroyed.


She knows,

though they do not,

why they must build the temples,

shifting them out of their hearts,

and onto the soil,

one stone at a time.

 

In morning dark,

she rouses them without apology,

for she knows

that without them

the temples will crumble

and be buried in the hearts

of those who have

carried them for so long.


Now is the time for labor,

she says,

and she hands them

a pail of rice.

This has built temples for centuries,

she says,

and she doesn’t mean the rice

Someone must hold the vision,

she says,

and she doesn’t mean the temple,

or at least not the whole temple,

but the single stone

they will move today.

© 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD