Beautiful Defenses

I spent the morning walking in the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. It’s a museum of spiky spiny plants of all shapes and sizes: Saguaro, Prickly Pear, Organ Pipe, Golden Barrel. These are plants you would think twice about touching. These aren’t plants you want to hug, or you want to hold. They scream: Survival! Back away! Not too close!

These are plants that guard their limited resources with all they have. They are the poster children for protection—for defenses. These particular plants developed to survive in this particular environment over the course of time. Their protections are called ‘adaptations.’ Most cacti gave up true leaves, trading soft leaves for hard spikes—the better to protect themselves from water loss and protect themselves from being eaten. And while the 104-degree heat had me searching for shade and water—these plants are succulents—able to hold water inside their flesh, bracing at drought. Cacti are beautiful, sculptural—they are protection or defense made art—made beauty.

And then I begin to think of our human protections: isolation, shutting down, aggression, cynicism, avoidance, mistrust—I think about all the ways people who have been hurt try to keep themselves safe—especially safe from the intrusions or judgments or disappointments of other people.  I’ve worked with and known plenty of people who also grew up in deserts—emotional deserts—and they too had prickly, spiky personalities—designed to conserve any resource they had—and keep anyone from getting too close. Their words and behavior had sharp edges to them—and these sharp edges gave them protected space. These protections were also created in particular environments over the course of time. These protections were also ‘adaptations.’

Until today I had never pondered protections as beauty: maybe it takes seeing cacti in their natural habitat—and not in some airless cacti room in a greenhouse. Seeing them against the bright blue sky. Maybe it takes seeing them in bloom in great numbers—all prickly and beautiful near one another. But mostly I think it takes slowing down and getting to look at them over the course of hours. Getting to notice the shapes, sizes, colors and differences among them. Being in their elements of dry land and oppressive heat where they looked happy and I doubted my ability to last long. Being in their element allowed me to appreciate their protections—protections for the environment we were in—protections I didn’t share.

The problem with most human defenses is that we don’t see them in the environment that created them. We see them in different contexts—often years later—where the old defense no longer makes sense. We see the Golden Barrel cactus trying to make it in an English perennial border. It’s spikes looking unnecessary in the temperate weather—and awfully aggressive compared to the geranium or petunia next to it.

Where are your soft easy leaves? Why are you turning pale with all that water and nourishment?

I’ve often explained that the trauma that most people experience is repeated relational trauma: the trauma of child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, racial violence, war. These are the harsh, desert conditions that have people develop their protections and defenses. And repeated trauma is really three forms of trauma: what did happen (the traumatic events that happened); what aided survival (the protections and defenses you use to survive trauma) and what didn’t happen (the growth and development that doesn’t happen while trauma is occurring.

And the reason that healing from trauma is so difficult—is that our culture loves to focus on the first form of trauma—what did happen. We are a culture obsessed with trauma stories—believing that the story alone is the cure.

And the story of your trauma is necessary for healing, but it is not sufficient. Because you also have to sort through the protections you created to survive and decide what is still serving you and what is getting in your way. And once your protections are more adaptive to the present—you can begin to work on the growth and development you missed while the trauma was happening.

Working with your protections is the core of healing and working with your protections is really hard. It’s hard to give up your spikes. It’s hard to stop seeing the world through the lens of deprivation. Working with your protection is the slow, repetitive, tedious part of healing, It takes a long time. And it both wildly underestimated and under-celebrated.

In many ways shifting your protections to match the garden that you are in is exactly what healing from trauma is: gradually letting go of your spikes. Letting yourself grow leaves. It’s true that I have appreciated that defenses are useful. Indeed we can’t live without any—they are crucial for our mental health. But today I understood how much you have to appreciate the protections first. How much you need to see them in context —how much you also need to seen in them their beauty.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Getting to Know the Overgrown

In all the discussions of growth—the focus is most often on what needs to be grown. What is new, tender and needs encouragement and care. And this is as it should be—this is quiet, difficult , important work. Right now I have tiny foxglove seedlings in seed trays on lighted shelves in my living room. They were outside on my porch with other seedlings before the squirrels in my back yard enacted The Great Seedling Massacre of 2022 and dug up all but the foxgloves and the broccoli rabe. So despite it being warm enough outside to grow, I brought the tender helpless seedlings inside to get bigger before I can plant them out in the garden. New beginnings need protection.

But my August garden is reminding me of another side of growth that also needs attention and care, and that is when things become overgrown. Right now my perennials are five feet high: daisies, echinacea, black-eyed susans, butterfly bush—with some annuals tossed in—sunflowers, zinnias, fennel. So many flowers in a small place. Reaching up, reaching out, falling on each other, vying for space and sunlight. Collectively, if you like a bit of chaos, it’s beautiful. But it also needs tending. I need to prune back what has already bloomed which may allow the flowers to keep blooming. I need to cut back or pull out some flowers to give the rest some more air and space. I need to figure out which one may need to move to a location that better suits them.

While I have spent a lot of time learning and practicing beginnings, I am less practiced at the sorting that needs to happen in order for things to have their time and space. Mostly I have fostered the delusion in my garden, and in my life, that you can (and really, should) be able to do it all at once.

I think some of that is from the survival mode of trauma—you don’t learn to live in the now, so you are always protecting yourself from what already happened, and always hoping for and imagining a different future. You are never where you are standing. You overplant your garden because you don’t trust everything to grow. And you don’t deal with the current garden because you start planning the one for next Spring in your head. So-- the act of sorting, of prioritizing, which is such a necessary skill, remains unpracticed.

Working with what’s overgrown is working with what is.  And really, the kinder way to say that is acceptance. Or even, radically, seeing the overgrown as abundance. I want to sort through my life’s garden with the same questions that I use to sort through my flower garden: What am I growing that is important to me and what are the conditions that those things need in order to really grow and be effective? What needs more attention? What needs more space? What needs to come out? What needs to be moved?  

And what part of the chaos and messiness is just fine the way it is?

In the mornings, finches cling to my sunflowers and eat their breakfast. And all afternoon in the sun, bees of all sorts and sizes go from daisy to zinnia to echinacea. Swallowtails sit and flap their wings on my yellow fennel flowers. Sometimes, the overgrown can be nourishing. And sometimes it can be too much. The trick to knowing the difference is to really pay attention to what is getting nourished and what is getting crowded out or dying off. The trick is seeing what has grown.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Go Be

I’ve been thinking about hope lately, and where hope is helpful and helps you sustain effort or perseverance and where it might actually get in the way. Where having hope is more of a form of denial or numbing—where it might keep you from action rather than support you into action. I’m thinking about a conversation with my therapist many years ago where she talked about a more ‘mature hope’—a hope that could hold disappointment—a hope that took in the world the way it was, took in the losses that were there and kept putting one foot in front of the other anyway.

I have always been hopeful and optimistic, but as I was driving home today from a rejuvenating weekend in nature—I reflected on where I got to practice not just hope, but what I might call ‘hope-in-action.’ Where you don’t just imagine a brighter future, you simultaneously do something.

It was the summer of 1980. I was 15 and a Girl Scout Camper. There were maybe 30 of us on one side of the lake. We lived in two different tent units and there was a stone building where we ate our meals and hung out around a central fireplace. There was a bathroom in this building that had imperative, “Go Be!” written in 2 foot letter cut outs from wallpaper on the mirror so you couldn’t miss it. The ‘Go’ was in one print—kind of faded. And the ‘Be’ was in another print -bright and floral. The ‘Go’ had once been part of a different sentence, “Good Morning” and now had been repurposed into the directive for action.

The first night of camp the Camp Director Joan told us about the command written in the bathroom: that we were to imagine the summer we wanted to create and go do it, go be it. To become the best versions of ourselves. She directed us in a activity to brainstorm all the things we would love to do in our time there and be as bold as we could be. In our brainstorming a group of us wanted to go backpacking and canoeing on the same trip. We didn’t want to choose. She said, “if that’s what you want, then come to me with a plan.” And so we spent the next two days planning. We kept thinking of reasons why it might be too big of an ask. It meant a long time away from camp and a bunch of resources to pick us up and drop off equipment. She said, ‘keep planning.’ So we worked with counselors to pick a hiking trail that wasn’t too far away in the Western Catskills and we risked asking for the canoe trip we really wanted which included Skinner’s Falls. In the end, we had a plan, we had an equipment and food list, and we had a plan to get into canoeing and hiking shape. The Combination Trip had been born.

Of the actual 7 day trip I remember flashes: hiking under the canopy of trees—the Western Catskills being high on greenery and low on scenic views. I remember the excitement of Skinner’s Falls and life-jacketing down the Delaware where the Mongaup river flows in—trying to keep my feet up and my head above water. I remember putting up tents and making meals high above the river. But the details of the trip aren’t what stays with me.

What stays with me is the experience of starting with hope and living that hope into action. And living hope into action requires more than just a big idea or a feeling of optimism.  Often hope is so big and feels so out of reach that what hope actually needs is ballast. That summer of ’80, ballast came in the form of Joan’s supportive discipline to take our idea and put in the work of planning it. The supportive discipline not to do it for us, or even to tell us what would or wouldn’t work, but the request to keep planning and working with each other. The requirement to stay with the tedious parts of planning and preparing. To hold onto what we visioned and hoped for, but to slow down and create the structure that would hold it.

So maybe a mature hope is one where we can ‘go be.’ We can imagine a better future, and we can hold ourselves with patience as we work toward it. We can hold both the shiny picture we have in our heads and the mundane or dull work that’s required to bring that hope into action. We can hold all the parts of ourselves in one place long enough for our hopes and our abilities to link arms into action. Go be: be big, be tired, be helpful, be stubborn, be friendly, be scared, be experienced, be new, be bold, be angry, be brave. All of it. Go be.

 © 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

The Other Side of Fear

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. ”

— George Addair

I am on a train headed toward Boston and away from New York. Which has me thinking about the idea of moving towards and away and about how one chooses what they want—whether you are choosing to move toward something or away from something. And much of our ability to make those choices is impacted by our experience of trauma—whether you have a history of trauma or whether your trauma is the more recent effect of the pandemic. Are you moving toward what you want or away from fear?

I have often said that trauma shatters.  And the pandemic shattered many of our old routines and ways of doing things. And it has shattered many norms and structures that may or may not have served us before. And with all of the coming apart—we have an opportunity to choose how we put things back together.

Trauma makes decision making difficult—because the usual means of decision making—paying attention to wants, needs and preferences is short-circuited by survival mode.  I am not knocking survival mode. It’s a crucial capacity for resilience—and it’s the reason many of us are still here and able to heal and grow and enjoy our lives. But the problem with trauma is that survival mode becomes a gear that we forget to shift out of, or more accurately—we don’t even know we are in it—and therefore we don’t think to shift out of it.

Survival mode is about protecting yourself—and these protections don’t just protect you from trauma---they become part of the fabric of who you are. They become part of the way you see the world. They aren’t choice so much as habit. And the habit of survival mode is to move away from fear.

And the thing that keeps us from unlearning survival mode is believing that moving away from survival mode will mean an absence of fear. Believing that the new behavior or choice will feel good. That if you choose to do the new thing and not the survival thing you won’t feel fear or anxiety. In fact, doing the new thing or heading into a new set of behaviors will often increase your fear. The problem is that the feeling of fear isn’t a reliable source of information about the present. It is an old map being used in a new territory. You feel fear and move to protect yourself by doing the old habit. And if you want to unlearn survival mode this isn’t how it works.

If have protected myself by not relying on people or asking for help—the opposite behavior—asking for help —will actually increase my fear—it will increase anxiety. Not necessarily because of what is happening in the present, but because of what I have experienced in the past and now anticipate happening again. Survival mode is about protecting myself from the trauma that already happened. It is an insurance policy against terror, helplessness, or being caught off-guard. If I continue to do things by myself, I will remain in survival mode. If want to move away survival mode and towards health—then I have to risk fear and anxiety to try something new. I have to live through the fear.

The key to unlearning survival mode is getting to the other side of fear.  I don’t think there’s enough discussion of the other side of fear because it’s a totally unfamiliar place. The reason it’s hard to imagine is because it’s a place that’s actually brand new. And brand new places, especially in adulthood, often defy language. When you have lived inside fear for so long—you get really used to the constriction of living there. And on the other side of fear—after crossing the bridge or the tunnel that is filled with fear—there is an expansiveness that is new. An elasticity. And it is this new expansiveness that gives you the beginning of your freedom of movement towards something that you want rather than moving away from fear.

The other side of fear isn’t the end point—it’s the space that allows the shift. This is what I think is missing in the discussion of most transitions. We think of transitions as moving from one pole to the other. And the truth is that transitions require a middle space—a space between this or that. The middle space is the space where we get to experience something new—which means we actually get to experience the present—what’s happening now—and not what already happened. And in the present is where we actually get a choice. It is where we can actually feel what we want or what we need because the information is available, and it is relevant.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD