Refuge. Sanctuary. Love.

“That vague sweetness/ made my heart ache with longing/ and it seemed to me/ that is was the eager breath of the summer/ seeking for its completion./ I knew not then that it was so near,/ that it was mine,/ and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed/ in the depth of my own heart”
— Tagore

Refuge is the end of the trauma—a place where the active part of trauma is over. But it is not the end. It is a beginning. Refuge is the beginning of healing. It is a place where the possibility of healing exists.

Refuge is the minimal requisite environment for healing, but it is not the healing itself. Refuge is a place where you can rest. Often physically, but most importantly, emotionally. It isn’t the rest itself. I make this distinction because healing and mending can take a lot of work. A place of safety and refuge allow you to do this, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. Healing isn’t just being away from trauma or grief. Healing is the work of mending, repair, grieving. And once you have sufficiently healed there is the possibility of resurgence of growth—a place I would call sanctuary. In refuge you mend, in sanctuary you grow.

No one wants to be a refugee, but I believe that anyone who has lived through trauma or severe grief is a refugee--especially if you choose to heal. Trauma and traumatic grief mean that you are cast out of a land of innocence. Not just a world where you would believe that everything is okay—or that the world is just. It’s bigger than that—because trauma and severe loss mean that you lose an innocence of self—an innocence of believing that in a difficult situation you would rise to the occasion—you would do the right thing, not the human thing. You know that you have done whatever you needed to do to survive and you know what it means to feel truly helpless. You have seen yourself at your worst in a world that couldn’t help you at that moment: and you can’t ever go back. And never being able to go back is the working definition of refugee.

And the truth is, there is no going back. For those who had peace and safety before the trauma or loss, you long for the world as it was, and for yourself as you were. But you can’t unknow what you know, and you can’t unfeel what you feel. You are changed. This is a simple, but difficult fact. And for those who never experienced anything but trauma and loss—you long for safety, for a world you have only heard about, or read about, or seen from far away. And really, it is all a longing for refuge, for a safe space. For care. For a chance to repair what was torn apart. For the chance at a heart that can love again, and can be loved.

My host mother in Germany, a refugee during World War II, recounted a story on my last visit. Her family had fled the East as the Russians approached. They had travelled terrible miles in trains meant for animals—they were exhausted and hungry and frightened. And when they got to the West, host families took in the refuges from the East. The family who took in her family gave them dinner, and clean clothes and warm beds. The host-wife took the youngest sister, a baby, and let my host mother’s mother go to sleep. The first sleep she had had in days. The host family did everything in their worldly power they could to allow that tired refugee family to rest.

That is refuge. The space to rest. To breathe. To look around, not out of fear, but curiosity. Refuge allows you to notice and see. All through the trauma you had to be nothing but vigilant. And refuge allows you the chance, the beginning, a place to practice, just being again.

Everyone needs different amounts of time in refuge. Some people need days or weeks. Some people need years. Some people need decades. In refuge the walls that helped you survive begin to come down—some you actively take down and some just fade away over time. But the walls only come down if you are in a state of refuge, if your brain and heart have an environment to rest in.

No words can capture the heart-wrenching longing that binds you to refuge like a mother to a sick child. A longing that seems to break your heart—because that is exactly what it is doing: breaking down the walls that surrounded your heart during the trauma. This longing is excruciating, intense, and ever-present. And it if you are lucky enough to feel it, to work with it, to lean in to it—it is your lifeline through refuge to healing.

And no words can capture the devotion and gratitude you have for the people who provide this refuge and the fear you can carry that they might leave or disappear. People who live through famine stockpile food. And people who have lived through terror want to stockpile safety—but it's intangible, it always feels as if it could slip through your fingers. It always feels like you could lose this place you have worked so hard to find and keep. That you might be exiled back to trauma at any moment. Refuge is to healing trauma as a cast and crutches are to a broken bone: you must rely on refuge and the people who provide it utterly—you must put all your weight on refuge and your helpers so that the bones of your heart and your life might mend. This is fierce and powerful. And takes more courage than most people recognize. 

And then one day, unexplainably, you feel a fleeting sense that you can’t lose it—lose refuge, lose the people, or even abandon yourself.  This is sanctuary. That the days, weeks, years of refuge have woven themselves in to your being. That the people who helped you are with you even when you can’t see them. In this fleeting moment you are not standing in refuge, you are standing in sanctuary.

Sanctuary is an open space. Your heart is open. Your mind is open. The future is wide open. In trauma the future is known: you are always anticipating the trauma you lived through. In sanctuary, you really don’t know what might happen next. It is lovely. And it can be scary. Like any big developmental milestone. You have arrived in a place where you can’t return. The way a toddler can’t turn back in to a baby—the way a tree can’t turn back in to a sapling.

Both as a therapist and as a client I have found that healing defies language—and this can get in the way of helping people find and tolerate healing. It’s so hard to find the language of refuge, of sanctuary, of healing. It’s so hard to tolerate the feelings of longing, of leaning, of needing that healing requires. But from my many expeditions I am here to tell you, to report back that these amazing views exist if you stay faithful to your trail. If you trust in your own hard work and the hearts of others.

A few years ago, I was in my own struggle in refuge—tangled in longing, in reaching, in the fear of letting go of the ‘known’ shores of the old story. I was walking up the stairs to my office and caught the sight of sunlight on the wall and decided to just turn around and sit on the stairs, half-way up. Sit there and lean on the wall and be in that space—neither here, nor there. Instead of running from the feelings, I would just sit in them. And I did. I sat there for nearly an hour. I sat there long enough to literally lean on refuge, on the walls of my home to hold me up, and find that solid place inside. Find the sanctuary of not abandoning yourself. Find that years of refuge had woven a rope for me to affix myself. To feel solid in a moment I had thought one of my worst. Find that you can lean on your own heart and it holds again. The way to sanctuary is through refuge. You must lean on it with all of your heart, and you will find that the center, your heart, holds.

“I knew not then that it was so near,/ that it was mine,/ and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed/ in the depth of my own heart.”

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

 

The Whispered Prayer of Enough

“We have forgotten the virtue of sitting, watching, observing. Nothing much happens. This is the way of nature. We breathe together. Simply this. For long periods of time, the meadow is still. We watch. We wait. We wonder. Our eyes find a resting place. And then the slightest of breezes move the grass. It can be heard as a whispered prayer. ”
— Terry Tempest Williams

For most of my life, the word enough had no meaning at all. I know it had a meaning in an academic sense. For me it was an abstraction—an idea. I had no actual idea of what the word enough felt like.

To understand the word enough you have to be observant: you have to be aware of your sensations—you have to really feel the space that needs filling. You have to feel every contour of that space: that space in your body, that space in your emotions, that space in your heart. Feel all of those delicate and tender edges to know when the rim of that particular reservoir has been filled. At least in theory that’s what you have to do, because for most of my adult life I wasn’t going anywhere near those tender edges. It was too terrifying. It was too painful. Like most trauma survivors I was in long-distance relationship with myself—and especially my emotions and body.

It is actually hard to even describe how far away that capacity of observance and the connection to that inner landscape of feeling and emotion is if you are a trauma survivor. Surviving trauma means cutting off any possible communication with those spaces of emotions and needs and hungers. It means cutting connections between your brains and any feelings or sensations in your body. It means exiling those parts and banishing them from your consciousness.

But you need to function somehow in the give and take of life. Relationships require you to make requests and say ‘Yes’ and “No.” Your body needs to be fed every day. So in order to function with all of those needs and wants and hungers that would require you to be aware of feelings and sensations, you replace them instead with shoulds and rules. What enough should look like or feel like. How much I should want. Or should need. How much I should eat. These rules and shoulds are not connected to your body. They are not connected to your emotions. They are not connected to the here and now. They are connected to your history. They are connected to your head—to your fears—to your trauma—and mostly to how you managed to survive it.

So you learn to orient to the world through an outside-in approach paying attention to the shoulds and the rules. You never build the muscles or fluency or awareness of enough.  

And while this is hard, the truth is—being numb, and starving for love and care is almost easier than the experience of healing—when hunger, need or want is woken up. When you begin to invite in the wanting, needing and hunger, they come back with a blinding intensity –an intensity that feels bottomless, endless. They come back with an intensity that can border on panic, impatience and rage.

And so for a very long time you can find yourself swinging between two poles—staying numb and not needing—so you don’t have to feel and see the empty reservoir; and feeling out of control and overwhelmed by an intensity of wanting and longing and hunger that feels insatiable. And both of these poles make you believe you are incapable of enough. You come to believe that you are either unfeeling and cold or you are a bottomless pit. That you will never understand that elusive, contented, satisfied state of enough.

Which brings me to my current experiment. I realized a few weeks ago that I had conflated resting and eating by always eating and watching something on TV. Lunch and dinner were my break from work, so I looked forward to what I would watch. But I realized this habit that was meant to be relaxing was keeping me from being able to pay attention to my eating—to notice what enough was. To notice what I actually needed. So I embarked on an experiment to split food and rest—I would eat at a table, with no distractions, much like Geneen Roth always recommended. I would journal about the eating experiment and then I would do something restful afterwards.

It turns out learning enough is a lot like bird watching. Except at first you are the bird, and not the watcher. You feel observed, scrutinized. A bit fearful and anxious. You perch nervously on your chair. You aren’t used to anyone, including yourself, watching you eat. You feel vulnerable and seen. It’s unnerving.

And you start with the should and rules, but because you are bird watching—and there are no other things to pay attention to but your own sensations of fullness or hunger—you try to feel what enough feels like. And the biggest surprise of all is that you can. And the craziest thing, after decades of fearing your wants and needs and hungers is to find out how small they are. Find out how quickly they are met.

Enough is so much smaller than you think it will be. When you have spent a long time in your life enduring abuse—you come to believe that enough is something that is shouted. That it is something that is obvious or loud. But it’s not. Enough is a small voice. Enough is quiet. Enough is a whisper.

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

In Praise of Distraction

Distraction has gotten a bad rap. Dealing with your problems head on, figuring out why you feel that way, changing your thoughts. These are the strategies most employed by self-help books. But sometimes when you are stuck or overwhelmed or just need a break from the hard work of healing, distraction can be the best medicine.

There is a Calvinist thread that runs through the fabric of all healing and development: work harder. And if you knew me, you would know I am not against hard work. But as I have mentioned before, healing isn’t always about effort. When you break a bone, you don’t work harder for it to heal. You set it, you create the right conditions. You splint it so it can’t move. You do other things because you can’t do all of your usual things. And without your active intervention the bone knits back together.

And sometimes this is what the psyche needs too. Sometimes when your emotions are too irritated, when everything is setting them off, when you feel yourself constantly triggered—it's better not to engage the emotion at all. It’s better not to have that part of your brain work. The neuroscience adage is that what fires together-- wires together and when you get yourself in an endless loop of emotions or flashbacks you need to stop those neurons from firing together and ironically the best way to do that is to not do something, or do something else. When the emotion or flashback comes on, change your activity, change your location, put on music, watch a stupid TV show. Drown out, distract out, do whatever you have to do to shift your mind away.

A brain that has lost control is just like a toddler brain. I’m not insulting you. It happens to everyone, you, me, people who have experienced trauma and people who haven’t. And when a toddler loses it—nothing is going to get ‘talked’ away. Your best hope is distraction and jollying them into paying attention to something else.

For anyone whose brain has just had too much stress or emotion—distraction—rest from the stress and emotion can be very healing. It’s the emotional equivalent of putting your brain in a sling. It’s actually not easy to get brains to slow down and relax. In fact, mindfulness and relaxation, are paradoxically difficult practices. The more we sit in quiet, the more we see just how active and spinning our minds actually are. Doing absolutely nothing can actually be too hard, which is why distraction can be better rest. Just something for your brain to pay attention to instead. 

There are times to work hard at healing and figuring out what is working for you and what isn’t. But when the brain’s ‘check engine light’ goes on because everything feels like it’s on fire, this is the time to switch the engine off, and let it cool down.

There isn’t one thing that will work for everyone. What you need will match your temperament, your mood, your physiology, and your level of distress. Some things work better for emotional pain and some things work better for the endless loop thinking that can be so difficult. Sometimes being out and about among people helps and sometimes it’s an afternoon in your pajamas and a whole season of something on Netflix. Sometimes it’s tackling some project you have long ignored and sometimes it’s reading to your kids all afternoon. It merely needs to be something that when you do it, you notice that the pressure gauge in your system starts to go down. Or you notice that you can breathe better. Or you notice that for these moments you aren’t in pain.

Distraction allows for some of the rest and rejuvenation you will need to head back in to the harder pieces of work. It allows you, sometimes for the first time, to realize that you can switch your emotional or thinking state from one state to another.

I’ve found it helpful as both a therapist and a client to have a list of helpful distractions written on a piece of paper or notecard placed where it can easily be found. The reason this is helpful is that you can make the list with the resources of your whole brain.  When you are in a bad emotional place, you only have your small, toddler brain—so having the list allows you to tap in to your whole brain by looking at it. 

It’s a trial and error process. Some days some things work and some days things don’t. If you have ever met a 3 year old this will make total sense to you. Some days grilled cheese sandwiches are their favorite food ever. And some days they push it away as soon as you serve it saying they have always hated grilled cheese. Don’t expect yourself to like everything you do all the time. If it doesn’t work, move on to something else on the list. And it can even be helpful if it isn't perfect. If it lowers the volume in your head--if the feelings are less loud or less irritating--that can be a good start. Sometimes you will watch TV and the flashbacks will still be there, but more in the background. Sometimes that is the best you can do.

Just keep adding to the list. And use the distractions to give your emotions or thinking a rest. And don’t worry. You won’t spend the rest of your life watching re-runs or Youtube. That’s the beauty of healing and growth. When the brain is rested it will want to get busy again and you will head back to doing what you need to do. And, you will have learned how to give your brain a rest.

©Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD 2023


Having new conversations with our old demons

I have spent the last decade or so trying to help people understand the cyclic nature of healing. To understand that healing happens in cycles and not a straight line—that you heal in layers and not some made-for-tv movie version of ‘before’ and ‘after.’ But there is such pull to the fantasy of ‘cure. ’ And there is such power in the belief that once we understand something or talk about something we are ‘done.’ So many of my clients have come in to therapy or coaching and said, ‘But I’ve already dealt with that—I shouldn’t need to talk about it again...’ And I’ve complained to my therapist,” But I’ve written articles on that, and led therapy groups about that—how can this still be hard for me?”

But the problem isn’t our demons as much as it is our understanding of them and our relationship to them. We often think of our demons—the things we say to ourselves or the things we do that we don’t like—as the problem. And it’s true that in your current life they may have actually become the problem. The negative self-talk, the perfectionism, the overeating or drinking, the avoidance or aggression. But here’s the thing: every one of our demons initially showed up to help us solve problems. Our demons were not the problems—they were our problem-solvers. And our most successful problem-solver demons stuck around.

So, if you want to live without those particular demons—you need to understand the problem that they are always working to solve. You don’t solve the demon—you take over the burden it has been carrying for you.

But here’s the catch: our demons—our protections—lower our anxiety. They help us not feel the hurts or traumas of the past. They help us not feel anxious, or angry, or helpless, or depressed. So, when you attempt to get rid of them—when you try to eat differently, or stop drinking, or organize your finances—you suddenly feel all the feelings that the demons were holding. You don’t feel better. You actually feel worse. This is why there is such a high relapse rate in behavior change (almost all health behavior change has an 80% relapse rate.) Instead of feeling better and getting rewarded for the change –we feel worse—and we find ourselves in a wrestling match with ourselves. Soon it’s just easier to go back to our old habits and let our demons have their old jobs back. It’s division of labor we are used to: I’ll run my life—and you, demons, will manage my fears.

The problem isn’t our attempts at change. The problem is how we are doing it. Most of us try to change by exiling our demons. By denying them or trying to get rid of them. Instead, get to know them. Get to know what they have been doing for you. Get to know the feelings they are holding and the feelings that they are protecting you from. If you don’t want your demons to run your life—you don’t send them away—you invite them in closer. You need to partner with them. And in many cases, you will need to parent them. Our demons are much younger versions of ourselves—of our attempts to solve really hard problems that happened long ago. Our demons aren’t trying to ruin our lives—they are just in over their heads.

The answer to our problems with demons—with old protections—is conversation.

 Are you asking me to talk to myself?”

Actually, yes, I am. Working with our demons is essentially couples therapy for a self—for the parts of ourselves that wants to change—and the parts of ourselves that have been protecting ourselves from the feelings that will arise if we make that change. We need to sit next to them—and not in opposition to them. We need a conversation—we need to understand. And maybe even more than that—we need to express our gratitude for all the hard work that they have done.

Practically speaking I recommend journaling. Writing about the demon—when you think it showed up and why. All the ways it has helped and has gotten in the way. What you fear would happen if you were to live without it. What do you think it is protecting you from. This sort of journaling is helping you know what you know—and put your knowledge in one place. It gets at the awareness you have built over time. And then, if you are up for the experiment: ask your demon a question. Ask your demon what it is thinking, what is hard for it, what it needs. And sit and breathe and wait for an answer. The answer might be a word or an image or a feeling. This isn’t an outside voice. It’s yours. It’s just one that’s been outside your awareness.

I can hear you saying, “but this is too much time” or “this is too much work.” And I hear you. I get it. I wish there were a quicker and easier way—but relationships take time, effort and conversation. If you want your demons to trust you enough to let go of their problems and hand them over to you to solve differently—you need to be a trustworthy partner. You need to show up patiently and consistently, and you need to stay in contact and connect. You need to turn towards them, as the couples therapist Dr. John Gottman would say, by responding to their quiet requests. And perhaps most of all, you need to say, “Thank you.”

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD