Tired of the Old Story? Ask New Questions.

“...no way/
to your future now but the way your shadow could take/
walking before you across water, going where shadows go/
no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass/
except to call an end to the way you had come/…”
— David Whyte, excerpt from Finisterre, Pilgrim

Tonight when it finished raining, my dog politely requested a walk. He does this by sitting next to me and intently staring at me until I get the hint. I am new to this neighborhood and decided, since it was going to be a short walk, that I would walk the other way, to the end of the street. I live on a dead end and I thought I knew where the walk would end and yet as I neared the end of the paved road, I spotted a path. So I kept going and found that the path went out through woods toward the river and to what looked like an old bridge embankment. You think you are at an end in one place, and you find another end, a different end—maybe even a beginning.

The river was moving quickly with today’s rain and it was leafy and green in the woods on the banks. It was a magical spot. Totally unexpected and it was only yards away from the neighborhood, but it felt a world away. It was a lovely jolt—to be suddenly transported, out of the work I had been doing and out of the neighborhood I thought I was in.

The funny thing is that it wasn’t the first dead end I had hit today. Earlier I had hit a dead end inside myself—a place where no matter how hard I try, I run up against one of my edges. I mostly try to ignore these edges, walking the ‘other way’ to avoid these dead ends. Walking the other way means avoiding situations or conversations that would have me in that dead end. But it’s hard to avoid them all the time, so mostly I rant against these edges and despair about them. In some ways the particulars of the dead ends don’t matter. It doesn’t matter so much what my dead end or your dead end is: Loss, fear, rage, shame, abandonment, vulnerability, despair. We all have some dead ends in our inner neighborhood—places we can get into, and it seems we can’t get out.

It occurred to me today that when I hit these dead ends I don’t need answers to my problem, I need new questions. Beautiful questions, as the poet David Whyte and the Pilgrim Satish Kumar described them in my class last year at Schumacher College. David Whyte describes ‘beautiful questions’ as questions that disturb our current thinking, or as he says in his poem ‘Sometimes’  questions “that make or unmake a life….that have no right to go away.” They are questions that put you in conversation with yourself, with your core, with your past, present and future. As he says in his Letter from the House:

“One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true - it actually never was true. Not now not ever. ”

The story I had about my street was not true. It was a dead end for a car, but on foot it continued—and it didn’t just continue on, but it continued to beauty, to respite, to refuge.

So what about the stories I tell myself about the dead ends that I hit within myself? Can I ask that first question: Can you see a different path ahead? Is the story I am telling myself about this true? Is it still true today? If I kept walking, if I continued on and left the spot I call the end, what might I find? What am I afraid to find? What is the question I don’t want to ask?

These questions don’t fix your problem with your edges. You will still hit an edge, but it won’t be in the same familiar place. The thing about my walk tonight was that I still hit a place I could no longer walk forward. I stood on the path looking at the river and my dog put his paws up on the old granite bridge stones and peered over. For one thing, this dead end felt different. It felt expansive, beautiful, restful. But it was an end of the walk. Any next phase of travel would require a boat or a bridge or some other means of getting across water. But a dead end is only a dead end if you limit yourself to what you were doing before: if you only go forward in the same way you have been going.

And that is what I have to remember when I hit my own internal dead ends. You have to be willing to take a different route, different path, throw away the old plan and especially the old story. In order to ask yourself different questions, beautiful questions you must have courage. But I believe a fair warning is in order. If you ask beautiful questions you risk ending up in new places. You risk the heartache of leaving something or some part of yourself behind. You risk the story you know for a new story—and the knowledge that even this new story will also have to be left behind at some point.

So what is your beautiful question? The question that opens up a different path? The question that would change the conversation you are in? The question you don’t want to ask?

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Pilgrim
By David Whyte
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Combat the learned helplessness that comes from another mass shooting.

When a traumatic event happens once—humans are generally spurred into action by their biology—a huge release of adrenaline which makes you ready to fight, ready to act, and which sharpens memory of the event so you can remember it clearly to protect yourself from it in the future.

When traumatic acts are continually repeated, as they have become now for us with acts of domestic and international terrorism, mass shootings and violence, we have a different set of reactions. Our human physiology is built for efficiency. Traumatic events require a lot of energy from us and 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 so you can’t hear it anymore. 

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.

Survival is important. But surviving traumatic events without being able to control what is happening or what you are enduring can lead to another psychological phenomena: learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was a term coined by Maier and Seligman  (1967) about the impact of uncontrollable traumatic events. What they found in their research was that when you can’t control repeated traumatic events, you can become passive, and as Seligman describes, “come to believe that nothing you do will have any affect on the outcome, so why do anything?” Learned helplessness is the behavior of passively doing nothing, even when the possibility of action, escape or change in the traumatic experience is possible.

This is where we need to fight our biological autopilot that is telling us to just conserve our energy, sit tight, stay quiet and survive. This is an important biological gear that we have to save our lives, but it is also a gear that can keep us from changing what is broken, dangerous and actually within our control. Learned Helplessness comes from forgetting that we do actually have control. We can act, and not just passively accept the traumatic events.

The antidote to learned helplessness is action, it is taking control of what is in your control and working toward a safer and healthier situation. So rather than watching the news all day and lamenting another shooting. Do something to change the situation in any way that fits your values and integrity to create a safer more connected community and world. Learned helplessness is changed by starting to act. Small acts that can begin to remind all of us that we matter. That our actions can have an impact. That we don’t have to just sit passively by when bad things happen.

Turn off the television. 

Write a letter.

  • To an elected official about what you think needs to change in order to have a safer community. If you live in the US you live in a representative democracy and in order to make it work, you need to act: you need to vote and you need to let your elected officials know your viewpoints. Write or call the president, your governor,  your congressional representative. Contact information for all elected officials, national and local
  •  Write thank you cards to the Orlando Police Department (100 S Hughey Ave, Orlando, FL 32801) or the Orlando Regional Medical Center (52 W Underwood St, Orlando, FL 32806) thanking the first responders and the medical personnel for their hard work and care. 
  • Write a letter of gratitude to a member of the armed services who is working on your behalf to fight terrorism. You can use this resource to write.

Donate:

Build community.

  • Create a healthy dialogue in your community about creating safer and healthier communities. Kinder communities. More respectful communities. You can use this resource or this organization. 

Do something kind.

  • Do something kind for children, for the elderly, for first responders, for anyone: Do something. Bake a cake, mow a lawn, read a book out loud, donate clothing, volunteer with a troop, offer to make or bring dinner, no matter how big or small. Act with kindness. 

 

 

A Healing Cartography of Lost

“The Catalan Atlas was the definitive mappomondo of its time. It included the latest information brought back by Arabic and European travelers. But perhaps the atlas’s most important contribution was what it left out. On other maps, unknown northern and southern regions were included as places of myth, of monsters, anthropaphagy, and sea serpents. But the truth-seeking, fact faithful Catalan Atlas instead left unknown parts of the earth blank. This blankness was labeled simply and frighteningly Terra Incognita, challenging every mariner who unfurled the chart. Maps of history have always been less honest. Terra Cognita and Terra Incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain as transparent as rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory. ”
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

I am not sure of where to start, but even in this statement, I am revealing the truth about the problem: it is hard to describe lost.  The very nature of feeling lost can make your words scramble in your brain and crumble in your mouth. It can make your thoughts dissipate like clouds. Lost keeps you lost by making it feel nearly impossible to give directions to anyone else of where you are when you are lost.

Lost is the exile of survival. It is where you escape to and then can’t find a way out of. Lost feels like it follows the rules of old legends and tales—you cross a threshold, and you are in. But once in, you can no longer find the entry.

Lost is sort of a double edged landscape. It can feel awful to feel so isolated, so abandoned, so left behind. And yet, lost can be the best protection you may have known. It may have been the perfect hiding places for parts of a self that you wanted to save, wanted to protect from whatever war or grief or terror you have experienced. Being lost may have felt safe. May sometimes still feel safe.

But I have learned something important this week, or learned something again, as if for the first time.  Lost is on the map. Lost is a place. It has edges, it has boundaries, it can be found. Which means you can be found. Depending on your history and how you protected yourself, lost can be vast and occupy entire regions—or it can be just a very deep valley somewhere.

I have always found that lost is the place I run from—desperately running toward anything else.  Lost is the terra incognita of your particular map. It is what remains unknown, but not entirely. As Anne Michaels states, “Terra Cognita and Terra Incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space.” The problem with lost is not that it is entirely unknown, nor is it that it is known. The problem is that lost is unexperienced, undigested, unintegrated—it is a series of feelings, events, fears, frozen in time. It is a museum of protections. The landscape of every way you tried to survive.

When you can feel in your heart, in your bones, on the soles of your feet that lost is a place everything changes. If lost is place you can know it, explore it, map it. You can name the swamps and forests that have trapped you. When you can know the edges and fences of lost, then you can find how to enter and exit. You can leave the gate open and realize that entry is a choice, and exit is a choice.

You realize that the only way to explore lost is to stand still. To sit. To stay with yourself. To not run. The best way to explore lost is with someone else. A guide, a fellow explorer, someone who has mapped their own territory of lost. It’s not easy to let yourself be seen in lost, to let yourself lean on help in lost. But it is the way out. It is the way through.

When you can feel that lost is a place then you realize that it is a place in need. This feeling you have run from for years, feelings you have hated, or scorned. This feeling is something that needs your care—not just any care, yours. When lost is a place you can stop running towards something because you are already there. You can stop running away from something because you will still be there no matter how far you run. When lost is a place you can finally stop and rest. You can make camp. You can look around.  You have been found.

© 2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

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