Beauty and Terror.

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

This week as I was flying across country for work we flew past the most amazing storm. We were up above 30,000 feet and the thunderhead clouds loomed above us. Giant oval domes of clouds. Dozens of them. And for the better part of 15 minutes as we flew past them they were lit up with lightening in an array of patterns and flashes. It was breathtaking.

It really was a moment of beauty and terror. I couldn’t stop watching. And I couldn’t stop wondering what the line was between beauty and terror.

As we passed the storm we came to the edge of the front. A wall of clouds. And here at the edge of the front the wind picked up so that it seemed we were in a wind tunnel—though we were approaching the edge of the clouds, we seemed to stand still.  And once again I was riveted to the scene. Watching the wall of clouds and feeling the strain of forward motion against the power of nature.

I think what was so powerful about the experience was how familiar it was. That feeling of being right at the edge of something huge. The feeling of standing still, no matter how hard you work. The feeling of the powerful forces working against you and the excitement and longing to move forward. It was the experience of transformation all sped up. I know the experience so much slower.

It’s hard to hold both when you are healing—both the beauty and the terror. There are some moments of healing that are so difficult. So massive. Those giant cloud domes filled with lightening. All the pain you experience lighting up as you bring your attention to it.

My dog hated lightening and thunder. When there was a storm, he freaked out and jumped on top of me: he wanted to tuck himself inside my ribs and press himself on my spine. He couldn’t get close enough. And I know this feeling too. It can take such strength and patience and discipline to stay and breathe when the lightening and thunder hits. It can be really tough not to run and hide. You just want to melt into a bigger being—something that can hold you and the pain of it all.

But as soon as you can really pay attention to it. Breathe with it. Sit with it. And be safe in the witnessing of it: you can also take in the power of it. The beauty in the tenderness of it. Healing, like lightning, is magic. It comes in flashes. If you can actually stay with it, it doesn’t last long and you realize that in seeing the hard part you get access to the bigger part of yourself. You can see all of the edges. Let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just keep going/No feeling is final.

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Imagine being loved anyway

“The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

I am so tired of people lecturing about trust. About how it is the basis of relationships and what ‘3 things’ lead to trust. I’m tired of it because it is all too simplistic. I am tired of it because they try to make it sound neat and clean and easy. Something you can accomplish in a workshop or in some online class. They give you catchy slogans. Inspiring picture quotes. They make it sound logical and linear and they support this with symbolic equations such as Trust = relationship X time—even though obviously neither relationships nor time is completely linear so how could the product of these two things end up tidy or logical?

When you learn about the psychology of attachment you learn that trust is built from the survivability of the parent. Parents create attachment because they just keep showing up and trying to make things a little better for the infant—they feed it, change it, rock it and help it get to sleep. They make mistakes and they repair them. They are there. Over and over endlessly, they are there. And this endless thereness. This endless thereness with repair after repair—this is what creates basic trust.

And this week after a difficult conversation in my own life I am convinced more than ever that trust is built not because you are loved, but because someone loved you anyway. They loved you when you were angry, or messy, or cranky or a total and complete pain in the ass. They loved you when you forgot, or remembered—when you said it or when you didn’t say it. They didn’t love you because you could do it—they loved you anyway, even when you couldn’t.

It’s hard to describe how fully you lean in to someone in this moment—the moment when you can’t or you didn’t or you won’t. The moment that you feel so badly about yourself, the moment that you think all is lost and you think you are falling off a cliff into some abyss where you will be all alone.  The moment that you don’t believe in love at all, the moment you don’t for a second think you could be loved as you are—that moment: you lean all your weight in to the hope that it exists. That moment you let go and jump with no real belief that anything will catch you but with the prayer that it will. You think you are falling forever and then the rope holds and there’s something that catches you. You find out that you are tied in to something--that you are held.

This is what infants do every day. They can’t live on their own, so they place their entire lives in the hands of their caretakers. They cannot do anything without the help of the adults around them. They cannot express themselves except to cry or protest when they need something else. Infants make this trust fall every single day. And, lucky for them, they don’t know anything else—so they just do it.

But if you didn’t get to learn this lesson in trust and attachment when you were young, then you know too much fear to treat these kind of trust falls as anything other than danger. You organize your whole life so you never have to rely on anyone. You make sure that you never get caught off guard--you never get disappointed.

But if you are lucky, at some point your long practiced strategy will fail you. The chess pieces will align on your board in such a way that you can’t use your old moves. There’s no other square to move to. You can’t use any of your old tricks. You will run in to a situation that you just can’t control and your guard will come down. You won’t be able to do it yourself. You won’t be able to fix it so you don’t feel anything.  You will be disappointed. You will be disappointing. You won’t be able to hold yourself together. You will fall apart, and you will lean on the support of something other than yourself.

And remarkably, the world doesn’t actually end. In fact, it sort of begins.

You find yourself in a world where you no longer have a fear of falling because you have hit the ground and despite the loud ‘thud’—you are actually fine. You are cranky, you are messy. But you are fine. You find yourself in a world where there is space enough for all of you, even, or especially, the parts you don’t like.  Being loved anyway means that suddenly, there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nothing else to do. There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to get right and there’s no one else to be, but yourself.

And that’s enough.

© 2023/2017 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 

For Trauma Survivors, Quiet Moments Can Be Challenging

“I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously.”

— Yann Martel, Life of Pi

The quieter moments of healing can be oddly disconcerting. Healing in general isn’t quiet: maybe loud is the wrong word, but intense would be accurate. The feelings that go with healing from trauma loom large. The grief, sadness, sorrow, rage, anger, terror. These feelings take over your mind and your life. I have often compared them to a wild cat: a tiger pacing back and forth in front of you. And while I have found this frightening, I have found it almost more frightening when those feelings go away: where did that tiger go? A tiger you can see is awful. The tiger you can’t see is terrifying. It feels like you can’t protect yourself because you can’t see it anymore: it feels like it is laying in wait to attack out of the blue.

That is where the problem of trauma is the problem. When you live through trauma you get used to it. You are resilient to bad times. You know how to cope. But actually what can be difficult are moments of calm, quiet or contentment. These are unfamiliar. The growing edge for trauma survivors isn’t toughness –it is softness. It isn’t hard work, it is allowing for rest.

Keeping in mind that for trauma that has been repeated, and that is most of what we know as trauma: war, child abuse, domestic violence, community violence, the trauma is really three forms of trauma. What did happen, the violence you experienced. The protections you created to survive the trauma, the way you shielded yourself from its full impact. And what didn’t happen, the growth and development you missed because the trauma was occurring. In order to heal from trauma you need to work with all three aspects of the trauma—and the last one, what didn’t happen, often gets missed.

The quiet moments of healing are moments that often didn’t happen in the lives of trauma survivors—either there was always something to fear, or you could never let your guard down enough to even notice or take in moments of quiet. You have no practice with them, they are unfamiliar. It is this lack of familiarity that you experience when you are healing. Trauma you know. The tiger pacing back and forth in your life has been a constant presence both during the trauma and often during the healing process. But then one day he disappears. You should be happy and relieved. Finally calm. Finally quiet. Finally rest.

But instead you look around and oddly miss the fearful presence you had become accustomed to. This is the growing edge of healing. It is counterintuitive because you are used to hard work. You are used to toughing it out. You are not used to quiet and rest. And you are not used to seeing yourself in all of that quiet: a quiet pond is the one you can see your reflection in.

And I think that this is one of the hardest parts. You formed your identity around trauma and through trauma—and then you work hard to heal from it and suddenly you find yourself in a world that is quiet and you wonder who you are without all that noise. Who am I now? It is a little like being an infant—blinking out at the world with a mixture of wonder and concerned interest. It all seems new and unfamiliar. But the truth is, in that moment, I feel new and unfamiliar. And it is so hard to remember that this was the goal of all that hard work. It is a quiet and invisible peak that you get to with all that climbing and sustained effort. And it is by no means the end, but really a beginning of growth that is long overdue.

Often when I find myself in this place of quiet I notice I feel ‘lost.’ And maybe I need to see that lost really does describe the situation. I have lost my familiar companion of trauma and fear and the other emotions that come with trauma and healing from trauma. I have lost a part of my identity I needed to survive, but have now grown past—no longer needing all of those protections. And this land of calm is all unfamiliar territory—I haven’t explored it yet, and I don’t know who I am in relation to it.

Surviving trauma doesn’t prepare you for these moments of lost. Because lost requires a different set of skills: the ability to sit still, to be quiet, to wonder, to reflect. These feel like ‘nothing’ in the beginning; they can even feel like you are doing something wrong. You can mistake quiet for detachment or dissociation. You can mistake lost for sliding all the way back to the beginning of healing. But this is the work of quiet. This is the work of calm. This is the new environment inside you and outside you that will allow you to grow. Use all of your patience and compassion. Hold yourself in this new space the way you would an infant or small child who needed reassurance. Let yourself be in this new place. Let yourself grow in it.

For more on Lost 

© 2023/2016 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Life of Pi

By Yann Martel

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Learning to love (and share) your violets

Willfried Wende for Pixabay

When I was training to become a psychologist I often felt lost trying to figure out how to be helpful—and how to channel the love and care I had for my clients in a useful way. One of the stories that I heard during that time that had the biggest impact on me was the “Violet Queen” story from the psychiatrist Milton Erikson. The story may be more legend than truth, but as I heard the story-- a client of his was very concerned about his aunt who was very depressed. The client heard that Erikson was traveling to the same town as the aunt for a lecture and the asked if Erikson would check in on her—visit—see if something more couldn’t be done.

As I was told the story—Erikson took a psychiatry resident with him on this visit. The aunt was wheelchair bound. She had once been involved in her church and community, but now she rarely left the house. The house was cluttered and dark—except for one corner: there was a shelf of African Violets. Erickson and the student sat with this woman in the dark and Erickson talked with the woman about her experience but didn’t really do a typical visit and didn’t probe her symptoms that much. But as he was leaving, he turned around and gave the woman one prescription—that she should get the dates or information of all of the births, deaths, engagements—and other life events from her church community and on those occasions, she should give them one of her African violets. She should share her love of violets with other people and not keep them all to herself.

The student Erikson brought with him on the visit was completely baffled by how he handled the meeting with the old woman. Walking away from the house, the student said, “She was completely depressed—but you didn’t ask her anything about that. You only talked to her about her plants, I don’t understand.” He had expected a lot more from the famous psychiatrist. He was waiting for the lesson for how to treat depression.

To which Erikson is said to have replied: Sometimes you just have to grow the violets.

Years later Erikson received a newspaper obituary sent by the client about his aunt— a beloved woman who graced every occasion at her church with African violets and how dearly she would be missed.

The relief I felt as I heard this story for the first time was immense. There was something so powerful and so simple about looking for the tiny seedling of love –and figuring out how to help your client grow it. How to look for the tiny seedlings in my own life—and grow them. It took problems that were so big, and seemed so insurmountable—and made them small, manageable, tangible. Rather than try to ‘fix’ what was wrong—I worked with clients to look for the violets: what could we grow? Where could they connect to something that mattered? Where could they share love?

And I think in this era of emerging from Covid—that it’s an especially important time to look for those tiny seedlings of love—to learn to grow our violets –and share our violets—and help others find and grow theirs. Look for what is small, but lovely. Look for what is seemingly insignificant in the midst of what seems messy or dark. Look for what brings a spark to someone’s eyes or energy to their conversation. You know love when you see it. It’s suddenly brighter than it was before. It’s lighter.

There’s a lot we can’t fix right now, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be working to help ourselves and the world heal. That doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference. Sometimes we just need to connect with and share what we love. Sometimes you just have to grow the violets.

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD