The Power of Despair

GLS, 1997

GLS, 1997

“There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There….We are here—we are here because we are tired now.”
— Martin Luth King, Jr, Montgomery, December 1955

Nearly two Score and Nineteen Years ago on December 1, 1955,  Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus. She didn’t die during her arrest unlike many of the recent events we have been witness to, but many others during that era did. Some died during the arrest, and many, many died after they were taken to jail awaiting trial. Sheriffs simply opened jail cells and let lynch mobs take them. Juries acquitted anyone who was white. This was a long, violent, and tiring story in 1955. It is an unconscionable and exhausting story now. There was reason for despair then, and there is certainly reason for despair now.

Despair is defined as the complete loss or absence of hope and it is one of the human emotions that can feel the most painful and dark because despair knocks the light right out of you. It leaves you without a compass, without the energy to get up, without a reason to. Despair begins to tell you that there is no point to anything, that you might as well lay there, not get up. Nothing matters.

As someone who is wired as an optimist I find despair one of the most intolerable emotions. I am usually not just a glass is half-full person, I usually imagine an additional glass entirely. I have wielded hope as a massive source of energy and protection against despair. But eventually it doesn’t work: you find yourself face to face with the endless of fight against injustice—against something so very wrong—and whether that injustice or wrong happened just to you, or someone you love, to a group you belong to or all of humanity—you see it for what it is and you can’t imagine how you are going to live in a world and know, really take in, that injustice. That wrong. That level of sorrow for knowing that you couldn’t change it and knowing the size of it now, not knowing how it can be changed. You believe it is impossible. You are brought to your knees.

And paradoxically that is often the turning point of despair. At my most despairing I have gone in to talk to my therapist and chosen to sit on the floor, instead of the chair. I wanted to sit on the floor because I wanted to be where I was—the bottom—the place ‘you can’t fall below.’  And in admitting I was at the lowest place possible, I found the ground. I found something that felt real and solid. The healing part of despair is that it can actually be incredibly grounding: you know where you are, you see the world as it is, and you can get some clarity about what is wrong—what is really wrong at the root of it all.

In despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of ourselves. And in despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of our communities. In finding our darker sides we are, ironically, more whole.

John Lederach who has worked with communities post-conflict on peacebuilding talks about the fact that the pessimism of the people who have lived through the worst cycles of violence may be one the biggest sources of true change. He calls their pessimism a gift, not an obstacle. Lederach calls pessimism grounded realism: “grounded realism constantly explores and questions what constitutes genuine change. For people who have lived for long periods in settings of violence, change poses this challenge: How do we create something that does not yet exist in a context where our legacy and lived history are alive and live before us?”

Despair brings us in contact with our most authentic selves and it compels us to demand that authenticity from the relationships around us. When we are feeling despair we cannot in any way tolerate fakeness, clichés or bullshit. When we are despairing we need authentic, we need real. We need it from ourselves and we need it from others. Hope is the fuel that helps us keep moving toward healing, toward the better imagined state. But hope often keeps us from being able to see and take in the trauma that has occurred- and it keeps us from seeing how we protect ourselves from knowing this—hope can keep us from becoming whole. You can’t do surgery in rose-colored glasses.

Despair is a turning point. In a state of despair you see the bigness of it all—and because of that you are freed from a world of simplistic duality—of there being an easy answer, of it being this-or-that. Despair helps you hold the complexity, which is the only real hope of healing. So we need to sit with our despair, sit on the ground if necessary, and we need to be able to sit with other’s despair as well. We need to trust that the ground that has been burned by despair is preparing for the seeds of change, the seeds of growth. And we must be the faithful gardeners of this growth by holding our pessimism and distrust and risking our hope again. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016


Want to Heal from Trauma? Go Vote!

This has not been a typical United States election. I come from a family that runs the gamut of political views and typically, as Americans, we disagree on issues, on how big the government will be, how the government will run and who will get what resources. These differences have always been challenging enough. It isn’t always pleasant, and many a Thanksgiving dinner has been awkward when politics gets brought up. But that holiday awkwardness has become an American tradition, right along with the pumpkin pie.

But not this election. This election has been different than most elections in my lifetime. This election has been driven not just by the issues, but also by a powerful narrative of trauma. By the things that were said that are making people feel unsafe and afraid—for themselves, for their families. Mothers and fathers fearing for their disabled children, or for their gay and lesbian children, or their African-American children, or Latino children or Muslim children. Children fearing for themselves and their friends. And thousands and thousands of women who began to relive their sexual traumas. The numbers are staggering. When Kelly Oxford tweeted in response to the Trump tapes, “Tweet me your first assault,”  27 million women responded. 27 million! It is simply staggering. It seems that anyone with a trauma history was triggered during this election. And trauma survivors have begun to speak up in droves. 

In this election the political and the personal have collided with trauma. There have been so many women telling friends, FaceBook pages, and their husbands, boyfriends, wives and significant others the stories that had remained hidden for years. And while each individual will be on a different journey of healing for her or his story, this much is true: action heals. The very nature of trauma is helplessness. At the moment of trauma, a victim is rendered helpless—and this inability to act on your own behalf becomes part of the trauma. But this reawakening of trauma on such a large scale, and as a community brings with it a possibility that may have eluded most of us. While trauma can make us feel helpless and alone: that situation is no longer true. It all already happened: you are here now, and can heal, act and impact your world. You are not alone---you are a part of a community of survivors and warriors. And you can take action, you can vote.

Citizenship, it turns out, may be one of the greatest healing interventions. As a consultant, I have worked in communities from Cambodia to Alaska with leaders who confront social issues through engaging their own leadership and using this leadership in their communities. They have confronted the trauma in their communities by doing action projects that get at the root cause of the social problems they most struggle with—whether that is HIV/AIDS or domestic violence and sexual assault. I have watched leaders and communities begin to heal their trauma through action—through the experience of using their own agency and power to take on the problem. They heal by taking action, and they heal by being part of a community who supports each other through the work of healing through action. They are not helpless, because they can take action. And they are not alone, because they can do it together. 

And this is what available to us now. Vote. Volunteer. Help. Support. Canvass. Call. Donate. Drive. Act. Lead. Healing is possible because you can take action. And no one heals alone.  We can do this together. 

© 2016 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, Ph

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Have an Awkward Day!

“Have a great day.” “Have a good day.” There’s just too much pressure on good and great. I’m all for results and achievement but I have watched the whole ‘good’ and ‘great’ thing kill any possibility of learning and growth. Why? Because learning is messy, learning can be ugly, learning is downright awkward.

I’ll put it simply. Without letting yourself be awkward you won’t learn anything worth learning. When babies learn to walk they totter and wobble and fall and get up and for some reason we don’t call this awkward—we call it adorable. But this is the blueprint for learning everything. We totter and wobble and fall down and get up. And we need to see it as just as adore-able. We need to adore that awkward part of ourselves. We need to adore it more, or adore it at all. Awkwardness is the sign that you are actually doing something different. If everything is going smoothly, it’s a good bet that you aren’t changing anything or learning anything new.

This is true for new skills, but especially new behaviors—and adults hate being awkward in front of others. And this dislike of awkwardness is especially difficult when the very thing you need to learn has to do with interacting with others differently. You can’t learn to have a different way of talking to others without doing it in front of other people. Bummer, huh?

If you want to learn to be more honest, or to ask for help, or to assert yourself more you have to really, really, get in to the whole awkward thing. I mean you have to jump in with both feet and wiggle around in it. You have to love awkward.

The good news about human interactions is that perfection isn’t actually the pinnacle. Repair is. In studies of securely versus insecurely attached infants the differences in caretaking wasn’t that the caretakers of securely attached infants were doing a perfect job connecting with their infants: they made as many mistakes or misses as the caretakers of insecurely attached infants. The difference was that the caretakers of securely attached infants went in for repair after the miss. They sought to reconnect—to soothe—to figure out what went amiss. The caretakers of insecurely attached infants did not. Being in connection with others isn’t about saying it right all the time. It is about miss and repair. Miss and repair. Miss and repair.

But tolerating miss and repair is about tolerating awkwardness and staying in the moment long enough to say it again, to ask a question, to admit your confusion. To stumble in another’s presence and survive it. Give yourself permission today to stretch and do something new. You have to tolerate the miss and repair with others--and you have to do it with yourself too. Let yourself off the hook--be kinder to yourself when you get frustrated. Totter and wobble and fall down and get up. Remember that you are adorable. Have an awkward day!

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016

 

This Change Thing Sure is Wobbly

“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

For someone who teaches about change for a living, I certainly can get wobbly during big transitions. Change is all well and good when it is happening to other people, but hey, when it’s mine, I just want to slow it down or stop it altogether.

It doesn’t matter whether it is change that I have worked hard for or sought out—at the moment of shifting plate tectonics I look around for the nearest thing to grab on to—the oldest habit, the most familiar protection, the fastest way back.  I want solid ground—even if it is exactly the solid ground that I have been diligently working to move away from. Why does the new place always seem like it’s less solid than the old place?

Part of it is just the way the brain works—the familiar is easier because it requires less attention from us. Even ‘bad’ familiar. We know it, we can use autopilot and we don’t have to pay attention or use extra energy.

And if you add trauma to the mix: the new is the unknown and if there is anything a trauma survivor is more against, it is this: being caught off guard. And the unknown is entirely a world where you can get caught off guard. So once we are on the road to the ‘new’ we begin looking for the exit.

The problem is that the anticipation of change is never actually the same as the actual change. The anticipation of it is usually way worse—the anticipation is what has you turning around mentally in your mind the way I did on the high dive when I was five. You imagine the change, the long trip, the new job, the loss of the relationship, and you panic that there is no solid ground, and you believe that you are up in the air with no where to go.

But actual change is different. If being caught off guard is the kryptonite for trauma survivors, the feeling of surprise and new beginning that can come with change are actually one of the strongest medicines for healing. Those moments that you can’t predict, where you get to experience a new part of yourself, often an untraumatized, unpracticed part of yourself—these are transformational. They shift parts of your being. They help you knit back together, and become sturdy in ways you can’t imagine.

These moments of new beginning can only happen when you let go of an old way, an old habit, and old belief. You have to let go, and trust the fall. You have to let go and feel wobbly. You have to let go and not know for a while. Oh, I wish I could tell you this were easy—but I can’t. The letting go is quick—the wobbly-ness—well, that can last a while.

But the truth is almost all of us have witnessed these moments in others and cheered: the moments of first steps—whether children or foals, the moments of taking the training wheels off of the bicycle and watching them go, the moments of your teenagers confident grin as they head in to a big event. All of those are wobbly moments, but they are also beautiful moments, strength gaining moments.

The problem with the metaphor of the caterpillar is that in the metaphor, it happens all at once—you go from caterpillar to butterfly and the change is complete. And I think secretly, we all believe that if we were doing this change thing right, that this is exactly how it would go. I’d go from flawed and awkward to a beautiful creature with wings.

But really, we are all made up of hundreds of these metaphorical creatures who are all at different stages of change. Some parts of us do have wings, which we often forget. Some parts of us are wrapped up tight, transforming on our own time. And some parts of us are still poking around looking for the right twig to attach ourselves to. We are all of it, and it’s so hard to love all of it. To hold that if we want to feel our wings, we are going to have to let go of the old branch.

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD