Hanging on to the Good and Bad to Heal from Trauma

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Last year in an article in Vanity Fair on PTSD in the military, Sebastian Junger highlighted an important problem with recovering from the trauma of war: there are parts of war, or parts of ourselves we found in war, that we don’t necessarily want to give up. Yes, soldiers experience trauma, but they also experience camaraderie and courage. As one soldier described it, "There was horror, there was beauty, both co-existed." And they can experience closeness with their fellow soldiers that is hard to find anywhere else. With the trauma of war, your identity and your survival become intertwined. The trauma can have you experience the best of yourself and the worst of yourself. And healing from it can be tricky because it’s not so easy to untangle them from each other. Fear of losing the good can make you not want to let go of the bad.

Trauma can make experiences feel more real than any ‘normal’ life. It washes the experience in an intensity that can be harder to recover from than any violence that was experienced. And when that experience was shared with comrades as can be in war, or family violence or gang violence, it can be especially hard to let go of. Not because you want the war back, but because you miss the closeness. You miss mattering that much. You miss having someone’s back and you miss someone having yours.

I don’t think this dilemma of the good and bad of trauma being intertwined is limited to war veterans. In any long term or repeated experience of trauma, your life was rarely a single experience. Even with repeated trauma there were good moments and beautiful moments and funny moments. There were brave moments and strong moments. And all of it belonged to you. It is always a mix of experiences.

And it’s not only the trauma that has these mixed experiences. So does healing from it. The good with the bad cuts both ways. Sometimes in healing you have to hold the bad experiences to keep the good ones. You have to be able to hold the memories of war to hold on to the memory of yourself as a loyal friend. Holding both aspects of the memory allows you to be whole.

And sometimes you have to hold the difficult emotions, like grief, when the good parts of healing happen. Healing doesn’t happen in simple sound bites where the experience is just one thing or another. It barely happens in sentences or paragraphs, where there is one line of thought. Healing really happens in poetry—where the paradoxes are written in emotion and contradiction and metaphor. Where all things can exist. As Rilke says, “Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.”

As I have said before, repeated trauma is really three kinds of trauma, 1) what did happen, 2) the protections you created to survive the trauma, and 3) what didn’t happen.  And these two opposing poles that Rilke describes can be seen as what did happen and what didn’t happen. And it is my experience as both a therapist and a client—that when you finally get some of what didn’t happen—that grief can crash down on you. Not a painful keening grief, but a heavy weight that sits on your chest. It catches you off guard because for a moment you are happy, you are relaxed, you have settled into a brand new feeling. And then suddenly the grief crashes down.  

With the new good feeling, you have to take, for a while, the grief that held its place for a long time. And with the scary things you experienced, you also have to hold the good days you had. This is complicated work—this holding both, this holding all. I think we all hope for something more simple—and so do the people who love us and try to console us. We wish for a world where good and bad reside on opposite ends of the town, not in the same house, let alone the same body. We wish for the ability to live in a simple uncomplicated world. But with the experience of trauma comes of life of complexity. You didn’t choose it, but its yours. Both in the experience of trauma and the healing from it. Between those two opposing poles, where God learns, you will heal.

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Training Wheels for Mindfulness: The Quiet Place

The first practice for your work ahead with mindfulness is to practice sitting quietly. This is the step before meditation—before mindfulness. This is a practice of learning to simply sit and not do anything in particular, and to do in such a way that you feel comfortable and soothed.

The quiet place is not a new concept. Almost every organized religion has some concept of this stillness. Prayer and meditation are common examples. These have existed for thousands of years because stillness was useful to the practice of the religion. But how is stillness useful to us? Why be still? From my perspective stillness, regardless of how you choose to use it, is like letting the water settle in a tidal pool. Suddenly all of the life that lives below the surface, which feeds the health of the whole sea, can be seen clearly. When the water is churned up, the life below the surface can’t be seen it. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there, it just means that you can’t see it.  When the water is still, you can see it, and appreciate it, and get a better sense of what lives beneath. And, we all know that the water will get choppy again. No seas on earth remains at the same level all of the time. Tides rise and fall, winds pick up. It is all part of it.  But learning to create stillness is an important balance to the choppiness we have all learned to create. All of our “addictions” and busyness keep us away from the rich life below the surface.

In this spirit, perhaps you need to find a comfy chair and wrap yourself in a blanket. Or maybe you will choose to sit on the porch, or on the patio. There is no right place. If you need music to keep yourself soothed and comfortable, that is OK too. (Wordless music would probably be best so that you may be more aware of your own words, but remember that the“music police” will not show up at your door—do what works for you). The advice I give the adolescents in my meditation groups is to “Get into any position that is comfortable to you.”  For now you are just going to practice the experience of quiet and stillness. Later on you can experiment with more formalized sitting/meditation practices. But right now the goal is not the posture. The goal is the state: letting yourself just be in the water, still or choppy, high or low tide.

OK. You have you comfortable position. Now what? There is the old joke about the young monk staring at an old monk who says, “Nothing happens next, this is it.” And on some level that is true. And on some level it is not. There are many texts about mindfulness and many people who have studied longer than I have. And I highly recommend their work. But I have found in my work with adolescents and adults who have had either trauma in their childhood or grief work of any kind, that learning to sit still is a difficult task and should be broken up into smaller steps. I like to think of it like training wheels for meditation.

If sitting in stillness is difficult for you because your thoughts race or you find your anxiety level rising, it may be important for you to start with a more structured road into the stillness world. I would recommend using guided meditation tapes, attending yoga classes, or using guided imagery techniques that helps you feel held and safe. We can go back to the swimming metaphor. If you are just learning to swim, you don’t just dive into the deep end. You are allowed (even encouraged) to dangle your legs in the water. Use a kickboard. Or even water wings. You may want an instructor or lifeguard nearby. I may be dragging out the metaphor too much, but I can’t emphasize enough that this is a very personal process, and you need to do what helps you feel safe. If you terrify yourself, or are too uncomfortable, it is unlikely that you will choose to go back into the water.

“What do I do?” You ask. Just sit. Just notice what it is like to sit. What happens for you? Does your mind wander? What does it wander to? No judgments. Just explorations.  Just like the tidal pool. What is below the surface? What do you see? Starfish? Seaweed? Nothing? What if I get distracted? Just notice it and go back and look into the tidal pool. What if I get bored? Be bored and look at the tidal pool. How long should I stay in this quiet place? And here I go back to the swimming metaphor. Stay in the water long enough to stretch your new skills, but not so long that you get overwhelmed or your lips turn blue.

Learning to be quiet with yourself takes time. I know it sounds simple. It is not. You need to build your stillness muscles slowly and carefully. Choose times which are most conducive to learning. Not your most miserable moments. Learn to swim in a safe, calm atmosphere. Not as your ship is sinking into the Arctic Ocean.

Let’s give you a realistic range of stillness muscle building. I have worked with some teens who can only tolerate 30 seconds of complete quiet (without some guiding instruction) when they begin to learn how to be still with themselves. But even kids with horrendous trauma (kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a car, e.g.) are able to eventually work up to 10 minutes of quiet over the course of months. Quiet muscles that never have been used are like atrophied legs that have never been walked on. You will need to rehab them slowly and carefully. But what a sense of reward when you can use them!

“Nothing is happening.” This is a common statement. Quiet time is not about making something happen. It is not about becoming someone else. Or becoming better, or more enlightened, or anything in particular. It is about knowing what is there. It is very basic, and sometimes may even seem boring. That is OK. Have you ever heard a little kid talk about their day at school? They go on and on, often repeating themselves and as hard as you listen you really can’t discern a plot or even really understand what happened. This is like sitting with yourself in the quiet place. The point isn’t the content of the story. The point is to be present to listen to the story. To hold the experience for the child. What I am asking you to do is hold your own experience. No matter what it is. There is no right way. There is no performance.  Over time this will shift. A child who is able to tell her stories gradually gains confidence in her own voice and it gets clearer and makes more sense over time. This will happen for you as well.

The quiet place is about sitting within a safe, trusted space. It is about building a relationship with yourself. Over the years I have noticed in my work as a therapist, especially with my child clients who live in precarious situations (foster care, etc.), that relationships, like the quiet place, are very basic, but not easy. Trustworthy relationships are really about consistent, benign, attendance over time.  Even the most severe mistrust gives way to this powerful force. Like water or wind wearing away rock. Attendance over time is almost invisible, but it is transformative. This is where the word “practice” comes in. You must find time daily to go to your quiet place. Maybe it is one minute a day. Maybe it is forty minutes a day. There are monks that do this for three years straight –but even they had to start somewhere.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016

 

Finding Light Inside Your Darkness

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work.
— Wendell Berry

Have you ever been knocked down by something in your life? Completely and utterly brought low to a place you hadn’t known? Vulnerable in a way that you never had been before? If so, you will know where I am coming from. And if not, you may understand someone else in your life better. Or someone in your community better.

I am getting over a bad bout of illness. The details are unimportant. There are always people who are more sick or less sick than you. Not unlike grief or trauma where somebody has always had it much worse or much easier than you did. Comparisons are really pointless. What matters is the impact. It doesn’t matter if it was a small tornado or a large tornado that tore down your house. What matters most in that moment is that you lost your house. What matters is how you feel looking at the wreckage. What matters is how you can come back from it.

The nature of this particular bout of illness shattered my illusion of resilience. I lost the innocence of believing I could gut through anything. It’s not that I have never been sick, in fact, I have been sicker. But this small tornado of illness tore down my house –the house I had built, had worked so hard to rebuild, the house I thought I belonged to. A house of energy and can-do-it-ness. A house with rose colored windows that determined how I saw the world. A house that never thought it could get knocked down.

I have tried to explain this new place, post-sickness, and the first description would would be ‘not-me.’ But that’s not accurate. It is me. It’s just a side of me that I have never gotten to know. It’s just a side of me that I have been terrified of, have denied was there, even when it was there. Other times of being hit by life I was able to dodge this side, I had enough energy or something, to slip through some door and leave this darker, slower side behind. But not this time. This time, slow and dark  was all I had.

This period of time is marked by absence—and not surprisingly, feels negative; the very definition of something that is marked by absence rather than presence. But it is really both. It is the absence of the familiar side of the self; and the presence of the unfamiliar. With the slow, dark side of myself that has every right to feel and act negatively—at best, I have flat out ignored this side, and at worst I have been mean and disdainful. And now, after all these years—this dark side and I are roommates.

As Wendell Berry said, when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. And that’s exactly where I am. In this unfamiliar place, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t have my familiar ways of marshaling myself and the world. I no longer know what to do, and I find myself in my real work: learning to belong to this side too. Learning that belonging to our dark side, or our slow side, or our exhausted side means that we belong to something bigger, not smaller.  I had no idea that I would learn this: there is an odd reassurance in sitting so close to the thing that used to scare you away. I wouldn’t say that my slow, dark roommate and I are best friends, but I wouldn’t say we are enemies any longer. She, the slow, darker side, is now a part of the mix; will be a part of the familiar, will be built in to the new house as it is built again. I know this is true, and I have no real idea of what it means. But not knowing, yes, that is where the work is.

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

A little help from our friends

Some days the best cure for anything is friendship. It can show up in all sorts of forms. A text. A phone call. An invitation to dinner. It can be fleeting, light-hearted or thoughtful. It can help with a huge problem, or never even get close to it. But friendship is always healing—it is one of the wonderful strands that connects us safely to this spinning planet and keeps you from falling off the edge.

And the amazing part is that it doesn’t have to be a big thing for it to really get in deep and help you out. We humans are pack animals and almost anything that helps us feel part of the pack—that reminds us of our very ‘pack-ness’ can be enough to bring us back in balance—bring back our spring or resilience.

I had the great good fortune of working at the Stone Center at Wellesley College as a graduate student job. I worked the mail order business. It’s true. I am one of the few psychologists who can say that they worked their way up from the mail room. My job was to take in the orders for the Stone Center’s Working Papers and mail them out. It was a good job because I also got read them all. But it was a great job because I got to occasionally talk with Jean Baker Miller, a psychiatrist who championed the notion that relationships make us more whole—they make both people in the relationship more whole—and relationships are a source of healing.

Jean Baker Miller said that healthy relationships bring a sense of zest or energy to our lives. I loved that phrase—partly because it said so much and completely dispensed with the psychobabble. But I also loved it because I could completely identify the feeling. I could feel that zest. And I am continually struck how contact, relationship, makes us more than who we are—helps us be our best self.

And as much as we decry social media as ‘less than’ contact, or complain about the falsenessof FaceBook, I actually believe that there are opportunities for contact, for healing, for zest in small wonderful doses. I can shift my mood just by seeing someone’s pictures of their kid’s dance recital or school play. I can feel their joy and smile for them. Social media is about small doses of zest, but they can add up. They can be a huge help on a bad day.

I think that sometimes we put too much pressure on relationships and communication to ‘get something done’ or ‘to be helpful’ when some of the biggest healing of all is so much more mundane. It mostly comes down to being there—somewhere holding the other end of the rope. That’s what you need. Most of us grown ups know we have to climb our own mountains. But we just want to know that when it feels steep or lonely or tiring, that there is someone holding the rope. That someone has also climbed the mountain. That even if we stumble, fall, make dumb decisions, that we are still part of the team, part of the climbing party, part of the pack.

Sometimes when you have been hurt badly, you stop noticing small things because you are waiting for the one big thing that will help, will make up for the wrongs. And I think that this is one of those things that can really get in the way of healing. The little things get in and heal better. The little things are a relational dosage we were meant to absorb and tolerate. The little things help us build muscles of care and trust and belief that relationships are safe.

Some days you can give your efforts to the pack and some days you need the care of the pack. That’s just the way the pack works, the way friendship works. The only thing you will never know, is how much impact you really have. You have to just give and create more zest out there for your pack—and it will come back to you. Maybe not directly, but it will because love regenerates, zest and energy multiplies.

So what can you do? Keep reaching out to share your life. Share your joy. Share your struggles. Because both help everyone feel like they are part of the pack. Even on days, or especially on days, when you least feel like it. When you feel like you are the worst person in the world. Reach out. And on days when you are full of energy, reach out. Let it be simple. Let it be small. One text. One call. One silly photo of your daughter singing into to a wooden spoon. Those moments are some of the best medicine of all. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016

The Stone Center became part of the Wellesley Centers for Women you can read more about them with the link.