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

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

How we are all affected by the trauma of terrorism and what we can do to heal it.

“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

When I first started writing my book on trauma and then this blog, I thought I would be writing for a very particular group of people who had experienced a particular trauma: those who had experienced repeated trauma—survivors of child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, gang violence and those who had fought in or lived through war.

But over the last few years there has been such a consistent stream violence from global or homegrown terrorism and shootings that it feels now like I am writing for everyone. People who might have said ‘I don’t need to know about trauma,’ now really do need to understand it. They want to understand it for themselves or people they love or work with.

Why is understanding trauma helpful? Understanding trauma helps you cope and helps you heal. It helps you to keep your brain and heart working in a way that supports growth and healing rather than perpetuating trauma.

But if I wasn’t actually there, can it really affect me? The short answer is yes. The people who were actually near the trade towers, or on the finish line of the Boston Marathon, or in a Paris café , Brussel’s airport or the concert in Las Vegas will be coping with more severe experiences of trauma. But thanks to a never ending barrage of media –everyone is subject to a lot of incoming violent information. As it turns out, seeing, visually taking in the event, dominates in trauma. Seeing is so powerful that even if you didn’t see it, even if it were described to you, you would register a visual tape of the event.  Your brain creates a memory of seeing it, being there—even if you weren’t. Whether it was television and the internet, whether you actually lived through the mass shooting or bombing, or just watched it on television, your memory absorbed it as traumatic. Yes, the people who lived through it have more to deal with, but everyone who has watched it repeatedly has now been exposed to days of trauma. And this has now happened repeatedly. This is why I recommend turning off your television during these events. You don’t need more and more memories of a terrifying event.

When you are hit with the images—the hours of CNN replaying the same footage over and over, your body responds in a predictable way: your body releases adrenalin, the stress hormone, to prepare your body for fight or flight. This cascade of stress hormones has an intended job: It raises your blood pressure so that your muscles can get more oxygen to work harder—to run away or fight, and it tells your brain to narrow your focus. It instills fear and vigilance so that you are more likely to pay attention to what might hurt you. Essentially, adrenaline is your emergency response system. And by and large your system doesn’t care whether the threat is real or imagined. Real or on TV. Your body and brain are designed to over-anticipate threats.

And this can be a good thing in an actual crisis. You want to be able to react in a way that helps you survive. Survivors from today’s subway bombing talked about being focused on getting out of the train and finding an exit. This focus helped them get out. They weren’t distracted by anything else and they didn’t get overwhelmed by emotion.

But when we aren’t actually, physically under threat, but behave as if we were—this is where the impact of vicarious trauma is seen. Trauma is a stressor and high levels of stress make us behave in certain predictable ways: our cognitive focus narrows: we take in less information and we don’t think using our whole expansive brains. We get more biased towards others: we are more likely to want to be with people ‘like us’ and less likely to be inclusive. We get more rigid and less flexible. Trauma makes you want predictability—so instead of the best answer and outcomes, we are more likely to choose whatever feels familiar. And it can even take away our sense of a future—either we lose our sense of an expanded future, or we spend extra energy in our minds protecting ourselves from the trauma we just witnessed so we begin to live in an ever-present-past.

I watched some of this dynamic again after the Boston Marathon bombing, after Charleston, after Paris. After Colorado Springs and San Bernadino. And now after Las Vegas.

A traumatic event triggers fears: 1) fear of helplessness, 2) fear of another, more fearful event (fear of fear), 3) fear of separation from loved ones, and 4) fear of death.

When we talk about Post-traumatic Stress Disorder we are talking about a specific set of criteria for a psychological diagnosis. And the criteria specifically rules out exposure to trauma through the media, pictures, television or movies.

So I am not talking about diagnosis: I am talking about impact. There are a lot of things that can affect us sub-clinically and have an effect on our health and well-being. I am thinking of our diets: how eating too much sugar in our diet can begin to cause insulin resistance but not outright diabetes. Or how a lack of sleep impacts our ability to function. You don’t have to have an insomnia diagnosis to be affected by a lack of sleep.

During the era of the Virginia Tech shooting I was an adjunct professor at Northeastern. And the shooting changed my experience as I went to class each day that semester. I found myself noticing where the emergency exits were and the fire alarms. I looked for ways out of the building and out of my room. I wondered whether I would move the table or the desk in front of the door and how many of us it would take to move it, and then hold it there. I wondered whether I was brave enough to save my students. And then I would catch myself, and try to remind myself that it probably wasn’t going to happen and that I needed to concentrate on my work. I needed to come back to the present. 

The problem with the trauma response is that it is actually such a well-designed system for survival—and can run in the background as your operating system so well that you may not even notice it or notice how it is changing your behavior. But it is changing the way you take in information, it is changing the way you feel and express emotion, it is changing the way you experience relationships and communities. A trauma response is designed to help you survive: it is not the best way for anyone to grow or thrive—in fact it will get in the way of growth and health.

So what can you do to support yourself and others through this and get back to a place of health and growth?

1.    Turn off the T.V.

2.     Take Care of Your Body: Trauma’s first impact is always our body—our physiological systems. So the first thing you need to do is to bring your stress level back down. Shake it off, dance it off, walk it off. Get moving, eat well, drink water, get sleep. Your body was hit with a big stressor and needs recovery. Do whatever you do to feel better, to soothe, to relax. By bringing your physiology back to a better state, your brain will shift gears too.

3.     Reconnect with Gratitude. Trauma is a world where you feel helpless and hopeless. Where there is never enough to cope. The antidote to this is the reminder of what we do have, and what we love. Say a round of gratitude at dinner or your staff meeting: just saying something you are grateful for, no matter how small or large.  Write down what you are grateful for each evening. Think of all the people you love and all the people who love you.

4.     Connect with Others, especially Across Groups. Trauma makes us want to pull inwards towards our clans, however we define them. In order to heal and in order to keep our communities healthy we need to counter this survival behavior with growth behavior—we need to reach out instead of pulling back. Do something kind for someone. Smile at a stranger. Ask if you can help. Inspire your families, workplaces and communities of faith to engage and heal the larger community. Help others be their best self.

© 2016 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Journey Through Trauma -- The Galleys Are In!!!!

The galleys of the book are here!! My book, Journey Through Trauma will be released February of 2018 and I wanted to share with you my excitement about it’s coming debut and a bit about how it came to be.

For all the years that I knew her, my grandmother had a yellowed sheet of paper hanging on her refrigerator with the famous quote from Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” And this book is a result of many groups that I have been a part of—and you, my readers are part of an important group that brought this book to life.

Writing a book about healing from trauma and actually healing from trauma share a very important mantra: never give up. And my motivation for writing this book about healing from trauma was above all—that I had watched people who were very hurt, who had lived through trauma give up. Give up on treatment, give up on relationships, give up on work—and most of all, give up on themselves. For most of my early career I worked with kids and families in the communities in and around Boston—and I watched trauma be passed on from generation to generation. Grandparents who passed it on to the parents who passed it on to their kids. This intergenerational trauma could feel endless and hopeless. I wished that I could find a way to stop all of this trauma--stop it from impacting future generations, and stop it from robbing families and communities of the healthy people they needed. After 15 years, I expanded my work from psychotherapy to consulting and had the opportunity to work on a leadership program in Cambodia with men and women who had lived through the Khmer Rouge and who were working to heal from it—and rebuild their communities and their country. And once again I saw how hard it was to heal from trauma and yet how important it is to understand how trauma impacts your current behavior so that you have an opportunity to work with it and you can understand why healing from it is so difficult and so important.

And at some point the work I was doing as a therapist, and the work I was doing as a consultant in post-conflict countries began to combine with the work I was doing in healing from my own trauma and I began to look at what the process of healing entailed—I began to observe common patterns, stages, processes in all the places where I was working with trauma.

In 2005 on a consulting trip to Italy, I walked around Venice which has shops with beautiful marbled paper—and I bought a small, marbled notebook and took it back to the hotel—and sitting at the bar eating dinner I began to try to make some notes about what I thought the pieces of the trauma puzzle were. I boldly titled the notebook “On Integration” and once I began to make notes, there was really no going back. I had started a book. The book began the way healing begins—you have an inkling of something bigger and you start—and you start with small, fragmented pieces. The early years of the book were about writing notes and observations. Trying to translate the experiences I was having as a therapist, consultant and therapy client. Trying to map the trail I was traveling in all of the domains. The later years of writing were trying to craft these fragments into chapters.

There were many years of writing where it didn’t look like anything at all, let alone a book. And despite its slow progress and the difficulty of weaving it all together, I never gave up. And I never stopped believing that it could become a book.  I never gave up because I believed that having a trail guide to trauma would help more people stay on the trail so they heal their trauma and get their lives back, and giving up on the book would be giving up on them. And, I never gave up because I believed that this trail guide would help people NOT pass their trauma on to their kids. But working only during my breaks wasn’t allowing me to finish, so in 2013 I took four months from my work schedule and dedicated it to finishing the manuscript.

But a finished manuscript is not the end of the journey for a book. It’s barely a beginning.  Because in order to get published you need to find an agent and a publisher—and that’s where all of you become part of the story of this book. I did what I was told to do—I wrote letters to agents, and waited patiently for their replies, but that is a slow and difficult process with many moments of both hope and rejection. So while I was patiently waiting I did the next thing that everyone tells you to do: write a blog. I didn’t believe writing a blog would actually do anything, but I loved to write and it was a way to begin getting my trauma information and parenting information out to people. And In June of 2015 I wrote a post entitled “The Letter Your Teenager Can’t Write You” which went wildly viral—over 2 million hits as of this writing and it continues to circle the globe (and has been translated into French, Spanish, Greek, Russian and Italian).  There was one week in July of 2015 where my blog post was getting shared 48,000 times a day. And from that sharing an editor found the blog piece on her FaceBook page, passed my work on to agent, Ellen Geiger—who happily took me on, and she worked with me to find an editor, Caroline Sutton at Penguin Random House—and my book had found a home! Thanks to all of you—and many more who supported me on this long and wonderful journey.

Preorders for the book are available by clicking HERE. As a pre-order offer, for the first 150 people--if you take a screen shot of your completed order and email your screenshot to me (gretchen@gretchenschmelzer.com) along with a mailing address, I will send you a handwritten note to put in your book when you get it.