Trust your timing.

“Procrastination does not stop a project from coming to fruition, what stops us is giving up on an original idea because we have not got to the heart of the reason we are delaying, nor let the true form of our reluctance instruct us in the way ahead. To procrastinate is to be involved with larger entities than our own ideas, to refuse to settle for an early underachieving outcome and wrestle like Job with his angel, finding as Rilke said, ‘Winning does not tempt that man, This is how he grows, by being defeated decisively, by greater and greater beings.’ ”
— David Whyte

I have been juggling a number of projects lately, some better than others, and I was reminded of my constant wrestling match with procrastination and timing. I am a perfect mix of impatient and driven combined with task averse which makes me really good at being anxious about what I haven’t completed. The problem is that all tasks aren’t the same. There are tasks, like mailing packages, or doing paperwork that really need a pro-active stance, and not a pro-crastination stance. But much of the creative world—writing, creating, healing, helping—is served by a more fluid style where the active and pensive are comingled and you can’t always tell them apart. And you can’t always see the progress you are making until it leaps ahead. But there can be so many days of self-doubt before that.

This summer I read the biography of Einstein by Isaacson and I was struck by the weight that Einstein put on thought—on daydreaming—and how productive it was. The time for creative thought was the soil that helped grow his ideas. The problem with our driven and productivity-oriented world is that creation is rarely linear. Much of it is an organic growth process that has its own trajectory, its own wisdom. At best you can distract yourself with things that look like tasks that keep you out of the way while the real creation happens. At worst, you can interfere or give up because ‘nothing is happening.’

Some of the best things I have created happened much later than I planned. I had planned to be ready to go, ready to be finished much, much earlier. Yet, if I had finished the project too quickly they would never have become what they needed to become, or I wouldn’t have been able to shepherd them the way I needed to. The whole project—the idea, and who I was needed time to grow in to the project. It’s those moments I need to hang on to when I find myself frustrated that I am not moving fast enough—when I am not ‘getting things done.’

And don’t mistake my message. I am not opposed to productivity. The world is filled with false dichotomies—and this is one of them—this creativity vs. productivity split. I aspire to David Allen’s Getting Things Done as much as the next person. But clearing your desk is a means to an end. Not the end. And once it is clear, if you are engaged in a creative process, then the next phase is slower, is organic, it isn’t the same as getting through your to-do list. And of course you need the flexibility to be able to do some of both. Even on your creative days you need to ‘show up’ in some way—be engaged, follow your instincts, your interests. Minimally, you often need to get your butt in the chair--ready to work.

I suppose I wanted to write all of this to say that in the process of healing, in the process of bringing fragmented parts together, in the process of building whatever you want—there are times of progress and there are times of slowness and it is so important to trust your own timing. To believe in an inner wisdom that knows better than you do what you need to do now, what you need to do next. To believe and trust that there is growth happening even when you can’t see it. And sometimes in order for growth and healing to happen there must be slow times. It is required.

This time of year in the northeast is the perfect reminder for that. In my garden, under the ground, are my tulips, and daffodils, crocus, snowdrops and scilla. All spring bulbs sleeping quietly in the frozen ground. It looks like nothing is happening. It would be mistaken for a waste of time. Yet without this cold winter they wouldn’t bloom. They rely on the cold of winter to trigger the biochemical process necessary to flower in the spring. Without this period of cold dormancy they would not become who they are supposed to be.

So take some time to appreciate your slow times this winter.  And take time to wrestle with your reasons for procrastinating. Both are important questions. Is it time for me to rest, to be dormant, to daydream? And is it time for me to climb back up, to push against the soil, to break through what is difficult and shine? The questions may be more important than the answers. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016


Gurus in Life Preservers

Maybe it’s this long New England winter, and the recent reminder of warmth that is making me long for summer and a swim in a lake. But my mind keeps going back to the lake at a camp where I taught swimming lessons. And mostly I want to tell you about four girls who have been my gurus for the past couple of weeks. It was a wonderful summer for so many reasons, but nearly thirty years later, I hang on to the lessons that those girls taught me about courage and trust and perseverance.

I had one group of African-American teenage girls from inner city Newark who had never been swimming before. And certainly never swam in a lake (“EEEEW there are fish in there! They are going to bite me!”) They stated from the outset that they were NEVER going to go in. But swim lessons were basically mandatory, so they had to come to the lake anyway, so the four of them humored me and came to the lake, but refused to wear suits and refused to get in.

So I called their bluff and I brought down a giant mixing bowl from the kitchen, filled it with lake water. We had our lesson on the dock so they could learn to blow bubbles and do the rhythmic breathing required of the crawl stroke right there in the mixing bowl. They thought it was hilarious and played along. Then they practiced just dangling their legs in. When it was agreed that they could get in the water, they said they weren’t getting in the water unless they could do something. And that was, they each got two life preservers, and put both of them on. And two kickboards. And for the next couple of days they just stood in the water, brave enough to stand waist deep, wearing their life preservers and holding their kickboards. They didn’t care what they looked like. They didn’t care that they were the only ones with that much equipment at the waterfront. They just did what they needed to do. It was slow and incremental over the two weeks that they were there. Being brave enough to dunk their whole body in. Brave enough to pick their feet off the ground. And brave enough, eventually, to take the life preservers off and try swimming. And they did it. All of them passed the Red Cross Beginner’s test that session.

I have never forgotten this because I am still in awe about how brave they were to try something that they were so frightened of, and how smart they were to ask for what would allow them to feel safe enough to try. I have never forgotten their willingness to learn something that was so difficult for them and to keep at it. To be willing to be a beginner at something that all of their peers could already do. To decide that learning was more important than saving face.  And their genius at knowing themselves well enough and listening to themselves about their own incremental steps.

Maya Angelou used to say that we are never alone. That wherever we go and whatever we do we can bring others with us. We can bring ancestors, teachers, loved ones with us. Of my many inner teachers and gurus I pull on, these girls hold a particularly revered spot. I pull on them whenever I need compassion for myself or someone else who is up against a big fear. Up against something they wish they could do, but can’t. Something everyone else seems to do, but you can’t. They are the perfect visual reminder of what it takes to bravely overcome your fears—you get interested in taking on the challenge, you start as small as you possibly can, you oversupport yourself, and you stay with it day in and day out.

And this wisdom from them is especially useful when you are learning to dive in to emotions you find frightening. Almost everyone has an emotion that is more difficult for them than the others and if you have experienced trauma, the emotions can feel louder and more extreme. They can have an all-or-nothing quality not unlike how my camper girls saw the lake water: either I am safe on the dock or I will drown in the water. There is no middle ground.

The lake and swimming in it are intertwined. The girls were afraid of the lake and they hadn’t learned to swim. And I could say the same about my experience. My emotion and the way I protect myself from my emotions are also intertwined. It’s a big lake of emotion and I am still learning how to swim in them.

The key to stretching your capacity with difficult emotions is to do exactly what those girls did: Find the smallest possible increment to feel it. And stay with that until you are ready to move on.

What I have found helpful is the sheer repetition of talking about it: Sometimes even just saying the same sentence again. Even if it feels silly. Even if it is the emotional equivalent of blowing bubbles in a big bowl. Or sometimes if it gets to be too much. Stopping the conversation. Getting out of the water for a moment. And then dangling my feet in the water, heading back in to the conversation slowly. This practice of feeling something, pulling away from it, and heading back to it helps you reestablish a sense of control again.

Keeping those girls in mind helped me see what I needed to do. These past couple of weeks I have struggled with disappointment—an emotion I detest. I had the mistaken notion that ‘good disappointment’ looked like “Oh well.” As in, “Oh well, it didn’t work out.” But, in fact, this isn’t good disappointment, it’s indifference. This isn’t swimming with the emotion. This is staying on shore. What I needed to do was figure out what my life preservers were and stand knee deep in the emotion. Not drown in it. But just stand in it. Bravely. Knowing I had what I needed to be safe. And having the hope one day of freely splashing around.

The thing is you don’t have to swim perfectly to have a sense of accomplishment. The whole experience gives you pieces of that feeling. Every day those girls came to the waterfront—they tried something new, and they laughed, and they met a part of themselves they hadn’t met before. This is really what it is all about. You become bigger each time you meet a new part of yourself. You don’t make the difficult emotion smaller. You make yourself bigger. You meet parts of yourself you haven’t met before.  The lake didn’t change. The girls did. I didn’t master disappointment this week. But I ventured into deeper water than I had before without going under. I met parts of myself I hadn’t met before. And so what if I am still holding a kickboard as I stand in the water. It means I am closer to swimming than I was before.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2018

 

Book Excerpt: Read "The Invitation" from Journey Through Trauma

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Invitation

Dear Reader,

There are so many things I want you to know. I want you to know that healing from trauma is possible. I want you to understand how being hurt, how living through trauma, how the difficult act of survival has affected you. I want you to know how all the things you did to survive and protect yourself have saved your life and how they may also now be robbing you of the life you could live. How they could be robbing you of your ability to do the work you want to do in the way you want to do it. How they could be robbing you of your important relationships with the people you love and who love you. And most especially robbing you of a relationship with yourself: of any kindness or compassion toward yourself. I want you to understand this because understanding how trauma has impacted you helps you know why the hard work of healing is worth it.

I want you to know that healing is possible regardless of how long it has taken you to get here. No matter when you come to healing, it is possible. I know that many of you think that it isn’t. I know you believe that it is too late. But actually, it’s never too late. However old or young you are, healing is possible. Our brains are malleable and they continue to grow throughout our lives. The brain’s ability to grow is what allowed for our survival, and that same plasticity allows for our healing. It will take work. It will take help. It will take practice and persistence. It may involve tears, sadness, anger, and frustration. But it is possible.

I want you to understand how trauma works—how it impacts brains and bodies. I want you to understand the genius of our brains and bodies for survival. For getting us through. I want you to understand the mechanisms of trauma because understanding them will help you understand yourself, and will help you know what to expect in the process of healing. I want you to understand how trauma works so that when you catch yourself doing certain things, your attitude isn’t mean or judgmental—but instead you think to yourself: Of course, this is what I do. And then you have the ability to say: What else can I do? Understanding how it all works gives you a solid platform from which to grow and leap and try new things.

I want you to understand that all that turmoil that can happen inside you makes sense. You aren’t crazy. This is just what happens when you survive trauma. That doesn’t mean that what you are feeling feels good, or how you are behaving is necessarily the best thing for you or is supporting your relationships. It means that what you are feeling and how you are acting makes sense in the context of surviving trauma.

I want you to understand that all trauma is not the same. It can look like it if you are trying to find information on the Internet. If you look up post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) you will find a list of symptoms and a set of recommendations. But it is not all the same. Just as physical trauma is not all the same. If you were run over by a car, there couldn’t possibly be a standard protocol for your healing. It would entirely depend on how the car hit you—did it break your arm or leg? Cause a head injury? Internal bleeding? And psychological trauma is no different. Trauma is the very definition of something being utterly shattered. And what gets shattered differs for each person.

And I especially want you to understand what I call repeated trauma. This is the trauma that happens more than once. There is a big difference between the trauma that happens one time, like a car accident, and the trauma that gets repeated. If you are in a car accident, a whole host of responses are expected from any onetime trauma. When a traumatic event happens once, humans are generally spurred into action by their biology—a huge release of adrenaline that makes you ready to fight, ready to act, and that sharpens your memory of the event so you can remember it clearly to protect yourself from it in the future.

But what if instead you were in a car accident every day for years? It sounds crazy—a car accident every day for years—but this is exactly what it is like when traumatic acts are continually repeated, as they are for people who live through war, or child abuse, or sexual abuse, or domestic violence, or gang violence. When trauma gets repeated we have a different set of reactions. Our human physiology is built for efficiency. Traumatic events require a lot of energy. Our brains and bodies tell us that we can’t afford that much energy and attention. So if trauma gets repeated, instead of gearing up, we go numb. When a smoke alarm goes off in your house once, you pay attention; if it goes off every day, then you cut the wires or pull the battery so you don’t have to hear it anymore. Going numb is the trauma equivalent of pulling the battery on the smoke alarm. Going numb serves the important purpose of allowing us to go on with our lives. It is what allows soldiers to keep fighting, and survivors in war zones to keep living. It is what allows abused children to keep going to school. It keeps you from taking in each new act of violence. It protects you from the extremes of emotion that could affect your memory, your health, and your safety. It is the emergency response system that your body automatically employs when trauma gets repeated—hunkering down so you can conserve energy.

So, repeated trauma isn’t just about what happened to you. It is also about how you survived it. It is about how you protected yourself from the years of it. In order to understand why it is so hard to heal from trauma, it is important to understand that repeated trauma is really three aspects of trauma that combine to make up what we call repeated trauma. The first aspect of repeated trauma is what did happen—the experiences

of terror and helplessness that you remember. The second aspect of repeated trauma is what aided survival—the protections you created to survive the trauma, the ways that you shut down or geared up or escaped. And the third aspect of repeated trauma is what didn’t happen—the growth and development you missed because you were surviving being hurt, the help you didn’t get, the conversations you didn’t learn to have, the skills of everyday life that you missed learning. Healing from trauma requires you to work with and repair all three.

I also want you to know that no one heals alone. You will need to find help in order to heal. This book is a way to understand the impact of trauma that you lived through, how you protected yourself, and what you missed in your growth. It is a way to understand the impact of what happened to you and how you may be still living as if the trauma could still get you, as if it were still happening. But this is not a self-help book. This is a how-to-understand-and-use-help book. It is a what-to-expect-from-trauma-treatment book. This book demands that you get help, but it also provides the information you need to feel empowered and secure in your helping relationship.

Understanding trauma is not enough to heal it. Healing from trauma requires leaning your weight on the support of a therapeutic relationship in order to let the traumatized parts of yourself heal. If you broke your leg and didn’t use crutches to take your weight off the broken leg, you couldn’t properly heal the break. It is the same with trauma. Some of you may choose a therapist: a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, counselor, or member of the clergy. Some of you may choose some form of group therapy. But I am telling you up front, at the beginning: in order to heal, you will need to get help. I know you will try to look for the loophole in this argument—try to find a way that you can do this on your own—but you need to trust me on this. If there were a way to do it on your own I would have found it. No one looked harder for that loophole than I did.

The problem isn’t that you or I aren’t self-sufficient enough. Or strong-willed or brave or tough or hardworking enough. The problem is that the trauma most people experience happens between people. I’m not talking about the traumas that are natural disasters—tornadoes or hurricanes. I’m not talking about car accidents or medical illnesses, even though all of these things can be traumatic. I am talking about relational disasters—the nightmares of people perpetrating violence and terror on other people: war, child abuse, domestic violence. That is what most psychological traumas are—they are repeated relational traumas.

And herein lies one of the most difficult paradoxes of trying to get help when your problem is trauma: you have to get help in order to heal, and because the trauma happened in a relationship, it is very hard to believe in and trust help. It’s the moral equivalent of surviving a plane crash and being told that the only way to get help is by getting therapy on a plane every week. I want you to understand that the things you did to survive being hurt repeatedly are the very things that can get in the way of asking for and trusting help. This is a normal and expected response to repeated trauma. This doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. It means that you did a good job surviving and now you have the difficult task of healing.

And even though you can’t heal alone, and you will need help, healing from trauma is still your job. The trauma that happened to you wasn’t your fault, but healing from your trauma is your responsibility. Only you can do the hard work of healing your trauma—no one else can do it for you. Your therapist or group can help guide you and be there with you along the way. And your family and loved ones can support you and cheer you from the sidelines. But no one can fix it for you. This is your journey. Your healing belongs to you. You are creating your life, and your healing is your accomplishment—the gift you give to yourself and the people in your life.

Healing takes a lot of hard work, and you will likely feel worse before you feel better. Healing from trauma doesn’t mean that in the end you will feel great all the time in the same way that a “happy childhood” doesn’t mean that kids are happy all the time. Happy childhoods are filled with lots of struggles and difficult moments. Complete and utter meltdowns occur for all the good reasons that children need to have them. Happy childhoods aren’t happy because the kids are always smiling. They are happy because the kids are free to grow up—to focus on their own growth and development—in a safe enough environment that supports that growth. Growth can be hard. And a healthy adulthood, or an adulthood where you have healed your trauma, doesn’t mean you are never sad or angry or frustrated. It doesn’t mean never getting triggered by your trauma again. Healthy means whole; it means you get to have a self, with all of its complexities. It means you get to have a whole life made up of all your experiences: the traumatic ones and the nontraumatic ones. It means that you have the right to have all the ups and downs of normal growth and development for your developmental age. It means that you are living in the present with a sense of a future—not just surviving or living in an ever-present past, protecting yourself from what has already happened.

I am writing about trauma because I believe it is possible to heal. I believe it because I have seen it. I have worked as a therapist for over two decades in large clinics, clinics in housing projects, in residential treatment facilities, on psychiatric units and medical hospital units, and in private practice. I have worked with survivors of World War II, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam, and 9/11. I have worked with survivors of childhood physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, and community violence. I have seen people struggle through their trauma and come out on the other side.

But my motivation for writing this particular book—about what the healing process is actually like—is also that I have watched many people who experience trauma give up. I have watched them give up on treatment, give up on themselves, on relationships or jobs that were important to them. I have watched them despair and lose hope. I have watched them start the healing process and not know ahead of time that the road to healing is difficult; it is steep. They hit hard spots. They think they are going to “feel better” and instead find that working with trauma is challenging, and that it brings up lots of painful feelings and memories. I have watched as their old protections or defenses begin to crack, or they know they need to give them up and they hit the inevitable long and difficult stretches of healing, the relapses, the setbacks, the slowness of the healing process—and they think, This is impossible. I can’t do it anymore. And they quit.

And I understand why they quit. I have wanted to quit many times myself. I am not only a psychologist who has helped others with their trauma, I have lived through it myself. I grew up with the stories of trauma that my parents lived in their childhood, and the terror and fear that they created in our household—to watch my mother taken away in an ambulance, unconscious after being hit, or to stand for hours while she screamed in a rage, not knowing who she was talking to. I know what it is to watch my brother get slammed against the wall because he didn’t put his napkin in his lap, or to watch as furniture got broken. I know what it feels like to feel terror, and I know what it feels like to live with the consequences of that terror. I understand and believe in healing from trauma because I have guided others, but I believe it in my bones because I have traveled these difficult miles of healing myself.

Healing from trauma is not an event or a linear process. It is a series of cycles that spiral through recognizable phases. These are stages you will cycle through again and again as you move toward health and wholeness. This new method of healing allows you to know where you are, what the work is, what the challenges are, and what you can do to move through the stages gaining the healing and learning you need. So I have written this book as a trail guide, as a way to know and recognize the terrain of the work that you are doing, of the healing you are seeking. This is not a book about other people’s stories, and it is not even entirely my story, though I will speak to some of my experiences and the experiences of others to deepen your understanding where I can. This book is intended to be as accurate a description of the trail and the territory as I can give you so that you can make your own journey, create your own maps, tell your story, and heal from trauma.

Reprinted by arrangement with Avery Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Gretchen Schmelzer, 2018.

Journey Through Trauma will be released on February 6, 2018 and is available for pre-order through your favorite retailers here. 

 

 

My Fair Lesson

“Fail, fail again, fail better. ”
— Pema Chodron

I'm just back from a high school reunion where you get to see people you haven't seen in years--people who have struggled and people who have succeeded. People who have had a great year and people who are in a tough year.  People who love their kids and their families. But in addition to seeing old friends at a reunion, you also get to see yourself, your high school self--and wonder at the things that high school self did and the things she didn't do. The things she said and didn't say. And the the kindnesses she shared or held back. And on the four hour ride home from the reunion I had the time to reflect on the things I tried to do and failed at, and the things that I persevered at and succeeded--all of which I can see as the seeds of competence or perseverance across my life. But the seeds of courage were different. They seem to rest in the things that I didn't do then or couldn't risk. I can see that my adult courage began as fear. 

In the fall of 1981 I was not the star of the high school musical. The star was a young woman named Stacy Jarvis. She played Eliza Doolittle to Joe Scorese’s Henry Higgins in what I remember as one of the great New Jersey high school renditions of My Fair Lady. The real reason I was not the star was because Stacy was a gifted singer with a beautiful voice. She had been singing the national anthem and starring in high school shows since grade school.

But the important reason I wasn’t the star or even in the play at all was because on the afternoon of the audition I walked out of the auditorium.  After weeks of practicing the songs at home with the album from the library, I took one look at the crowd of kids gathered by the seats and walked out the door and sat under the stairs that led to the second floor.  From underneath the stairs I could hear everyone else, and I imagined that at some point I would regain my nerve and actually go and audition. But I didn’t. I waited until everyone finished and then I walked home.

I don’t remember now exactly what sent me hiding under the stairs, but I think it was fear of failing. But I do remember exactly how I felt on the walk home. I felt like I had lost the opportunity to do something amazing—as if I had been asked to suddenly go to Hawaii, and instead I had said “no” and walked home. I felt a huge sense of loss at the possibilities and the adventure I had left behind. I think most of all I was shocked that the mistake of not trying something –of protecting myself from failing, felt so much worse than failing itself.

I would never have gotten the role of Eliza. But I didn’t trust myself enough to survive the fall- or risk failing. Over the last 35 years I can’t say that I have grown to love making mistakes any more than I did then. I am not a personality that likes being a beginner—I like being able to already ‘do it.’ But the mistake of not making a mistake has propelled me into more experiences than any other. Whenever I feel fear of a new project, new conversation or new situation there is still a part of me that wants to pull back, that wishes for some protection from the anticipated mistakes, that is looking for the 2017 version of the stairs. But the other part of me is sitting at opening night in 1981.

On opening night Stacy wore a white dress and gloves in the scene at the Ball. Joe wore a tuxedo. I don’t remember what I wore, but if I had to guess it was jeans and my favorite Penn sweatshirt. When I am unsure about doing something new or risky I can see that sixteen year old girl in the audience looking at me. I see her watching a show that she wanted to be singing in. And she sees me and says, “whatever you are afraid of, it’s not as hard as this is. Go do it.” I know now that the risk of singing off key is not nearly as dangerous to the psyche as seeking safety under the stairs.  And with each passing year I remain committed to singing off key, to trying it anyway, knowing that I can as Pema Chodron says, fail, fail again, fail better. 

© Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD 2017