Understanding Rigidity, Elasticity and Trauma

“A capacity to accommodate fragility, he says, is a fundament of vital, evolving systems, whether geological or human. At the right temperatures, geologic faults allow for movement, ductility, flow. Earthquakes happen when weaknesses cannot be expressed. “And communities which are rigid, which do not take into account the weak points of the community— people who are in difficulty — tend to be communities who do not evolve.””
— Xavier Le Pichon

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the polarity of rigidity and flexibility. And I have been actively living the question of this polarity in my body. Which is allowing me to experience rigidity and flexibility in a tangible moment-by-moment way. I get to kind of be an explorer of it—or an observer of it—which is different than my usual stance of frustration or disdain. For six weeks I couldn’t put any real weight on my legs, and now for the last 10 days I have begun the process of exercises and walking. Familiar actions I have done all of my life –like walking or stepping to the side—or balancing on a leg—all are now an active challenge with muscles that have completely forgotten how to talk to each other and my brain.

When I begin to walk there are brief moments of flexibility and fluidity—and then within minutes of walking, moving becomes something I have to actively concentrate on. My feet feel far away, and my muscles don’t bend or flow—they kind of stick, and stutter—they stiffen. The muscles tighten around what was hurt. They seem to think I still need the protection—and they go to the default that they know of as safety—tightly bracing what was broken-- and I finish my walk with legs that feel heavy and wooden.

While it isn’t easy to learn to walk again, I am appreciating this lesson about rigidity and fluidity in a domain where I can see it and feel it in real time. Where I don’t have even more protections and narratives to distract me. Where I can work with it in small, manageable increments that are easy to sort out. Where they make aides for the problem: crutches, braces, ice packs. Where I can easily see the fix: lean on something, stretch, rest, take a break for now.

Psychological healing is really no different than physical healing—you begin to use something that you haven’t used, or haven’t used in a long time—and in short order—you can feel yourself tighten up. You share your feelings. You let your guard down. You ask for help. You say no, or you say yes. Your chest tightens. It’s hard to breathe. Or your heart tightens—and you want to pull away. Or you can feel your whole self move behind a wall—where it feels like you are watching yourself from outside. You’ve lost any flexibility. You can feel like you just can’t bend—on that request, or on the change of plans, or on a different point of view.

Rigidity is defense, and it is also almost always protection. When my legs get rigid I lfeel like I lose my my way of moving and my feeling of being connected—interconnected with myself. And when I get rigid because of fear, anxiety or anger—I lose connection to the part of myself that trusts and knows what enough is. That part of myself that knows that everything will likely be ok, and that I have the ability to work through whatever is hard for me right then.

And rigidity makes it hard for me to feel connected to others. When I feel rigid, when I harden against what I don’t want to feel or don’t want to be happening—I lose the ability to feel connected. Relationships feel breakable, because hard things, rigid things can shatter. And because I feel less connected and the relationship feels fragile, I can feel myself tighten even more.

The hardest thing about healing in the psychological domain is that our rigidity often feels more normal—it feels familiar and safe—and it can be hard to see it for what it is. It can be hard to catch yourself in the act of pulling away, shutting down, putting up the wall. When you are finally able to feel it-- when rigidity feels uncomfortable —it’s actually a sign of healing—it means you know what some fluidity feels like. It means that you are longing for movement and the feeling of being connected. It means the old protections are probably no longer needed –and it’s time to work with them so they can loosen and you can move in the world differently.

It's harder to work on rigidity and elasticity with our emotions and relationships than it is for me to work on the flexibility with my legs. But it’s not impossible. And it requires a lot of the same elements. First, start small—stretching in the smallest way possible. Maybe writing your feelings down for yourself first, before you share them with someone else. Second, do it in short sessions so you build up the strength, tolerance and confidence in your emotional and relational muscles to hold you up. And last, figure out what you can use to support you—what you can lean on—and what you can use to soothe yourself afterwards—as you use these new muscles.

It’s obvious as I learn to walk again—that elasticity is the state of health for my muscles. But in healing from trauma, the feeling of elasticity came as a big surprise to me. I thought that feeling connected would feel like a taut rope that was always there—something that was tight—that had tension. Perhaps tension is all I knew, and I while I didn’t like ‘bad’ tension, I supposed I thought health was something more akin to ‘good’ tension. What I couldn’t anticipate was that the experience of healing my connection to myself, and my relationships to other felt like something that was a mix of space and elasticity.

There was room to move. And what took a really long time was understanding that healing was ‘the capacity to accommodate fragility’—not by protecting myself—or allowing myself to return to rigidity—but rather by staying right on the edge of that rigidity and allowing myself to stretch in the smallest possible way towards the new thing—letting myself ‘express my weakness’ and not protect myself from it.

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Xavier Le Pichon in Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise: An inquiry into the mystery and art of living


Word.

Many years ago I worked with a young client on an inpatient unit for about six weeks. When she first came in, for about the first hour, she was able to tell us a little bit about herself, her history, the people in her family, her friends and her favorite foods. She then fell silent for the rest of her time on the unit. I met with her every day and she maintained this amazing vigil of silence. I sometimes wove a narrative that she would either ignore or nod to. Sometimes I brought things for us to do together. But over the course of the six weeks she said nothing. On her last day, as sort of a goodbye present, I decided to bring in the favorite snack she said she liked on the first day I met her. I said goodbye and handed her the candy, and she looked at me and smiled, and said, “word.”

Yes. The only word she said to me was ‘word.’ Which was both poetic and perfect. I came to know some more about her and her history a year later when I crossed paths again, and she had every reason in the world for her silence. Her foray into speaking, even just a word, was big.

When people who haven’t been badly hurt think of therapy, they imagine it’s just one giant problem solving conversation. You just say what is wrong and someone tells you what to do, and then its done. Part of this is any TV portrayal of therapy which has to include dialogue, or the TV therapist, like Dr. Phil, who has to solve the problem in a network segment. What is completely misunderstood is that talking about pain, trauma, loss, terror—whatever has badly hurt you—is often an experience absent of language at first. You don't have words, you don't even have Scrabble letters. You spend the first part of healing simply searching for language. Searching for anything that matches what is going on inside your head and your body. 

As I have mentioned before—when trauma occurs, blood flow to our language centers is hindered so that the experience is often not even encoded in language. The experience is often encoded to our amygdala, the fight and flight fear center of our brains. Great for survival, lousy for story telling. Our brains during trauma are focused on keeping you alive and prepared for the next bad thing. That is it.

Trauma stories, stories of pain and loss get told in so many ways, and often there are no words to start. Not even the word, ‘word.’ We all know this even from the tragedies and losses that can befall any of us. The fact that when someone dies it often feels like there is nothing you can say. And in those times your presence, more than anything else is the healing factor.

Acts of trauma can literally feel unspeakable. I have had clients say that they were afraid to say it out loud because they didn’t want to hurt me. For many it can seem like speaking about the trauma would be as harmful as repeating the trauma itself. As the first victim of apartheid at South Africa’s Truth Commission hearings stated, “This inside me….fights my tongue. It is…unshareable. It destroys…words.”  The list of fears of finding the words to your story is often long—fear of betrayal, fear of retribution, fear of not being believed, fear of being seen in your worst moment, fear of having to believe your own story, fear that you won’t survive telling it, fear that you will be rejected for telling it. And I could go on and on.

Of all of the fears I have had myself and worked with in others the biggest one seems to be this: If you tell your story, you have to know it is true, and you have to know that you live in a world where those things happen. It can all feel too big. Which is why my brave client taught me so much. You can do it at your pace. You can decide who you can talk to and how much or how little you can say. You can even do it just one word at a time.  It is okay to take time to find your words. Or, word. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 20213/2016

The apartheid quote from Antjie Krog's book below. A heartbreakingly poetic description of the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings written by a journalist who covered them.

No one heals alone: Finding a therapist

One of the biggest roadblocks in healing from trauma is this idea, “I don’t need help, I can do it myself.” Here is the common refrain: “I don’t need a therapist or a group—I have my friend (wife, husband, children…)”

Why? Seems like they could, right? They love us. We feel good with them, safe with them. In fact, it feels like they should be the ones to heal us. They can listen to our problems, and often do. They often listen non-judgmentally as we recount our stories. They often have advice for us, and certainly tell us they love us. They can hold us tightly and kiss us good night. Why isn’t it enough?

We expect our friends and our spouses to be on ‘our’ side. When we feel bad, we want them to help us feel better, not hold us accountable to change. We want them to say the right thing, not the ‘growth promoting’ thing, or worst of all, nothing, and let us sit there with our thoughts. It’s funny, people automatically understand the need for a couple’s therapist when a couple is having a problem. Friends know that they can’t say what they need to both parties and still be ‘loyal’ to their friend, or not be seen as ‘taking sides.’ They know that there are truths to both sides and that they are in over their heads to try and help. Most often you hear, “I’m not going to get in the middle of that.”

A healing relationship is like a couple’s therapist for both sides of the self: the self that wants to change, grow or heal—and the part of the self that wants to stay the same, the part that is afraid of, or unable to change. A therapist’s role is to hold both of these realities—to not take sides, but rather to support both sides by creating an environment in which both sides can grow and integrate.

Healing from trauma is perhaps the most complicated form of therapy. As I mentioned earlier, most trauma is really three interrelated traumas: the experience of repeated trauma, the defensive structure built to survive the trauma, and the loss of healthy growth and development during the period of trauma. While your friends and loved ones may be able to listen and help you with your experiences of trauma, often, it feels impossible to talk with them about it: often these experiences are described as unspeakable. And, often, we don’t want anyone to see us at our worst moments of helplessness. There is simply too much shame. Even if you could share this with them, and you could tell your loved ones how much you are hurting, in some fundamental way they really can’t hear or take in how broken you feel. Not because they aren’t listening, or because they are bad, or they don’t love you—but because they either can’t truly understand, because their experience is too far away from yours, or because it would simply be too hard for them if they did. They need you. They need the relationship with you. You are important for them and they know on some level they can’t fix it and they don’t know how to hold this piece of information with all of the other aspects of you.

How do I find help? What kind of help is best? This is an important question with a lot of answers. There is no ‘perfect’ guide or therapist. When friends and family ask me what to look for, I give a pretty basic answer—what you want in a good therapist or guide or consultant is what you would look for in a good parent. You want someone who can be consistent, patient, hopeful, and who knows that this journey is about you and your growth, not their needs or success. You want someone who knows about trauma or is willing to learn. You want someone who can laugh at herself and who can tolerate her emotions and yours. You want someone who is willing to let both of you make mistakes and who can have a conversation about it when it happens. You want someone you can respect. You want someone whose basic premise is: whatever it is, we can talk about it. And, you want someone who is a good match for you—where you feel safe, and where you feel like you will be understood and heard.

Finding the right person or group is mostly a matter of trial and error. You have to ‘try them on for size.’ You have to see if they are a good match and the only real way to know that is to meet with them and talk with them. That being said, sometimes you don’t get a lot of choice. Depending upon your healthcare coverage, and where you can obtain help—sometimes there are limited options.

But limited options doesn’t necessarily mean poor care. I, and lmost all therapists I know have spent part of our careers in system where we were the only option for people getting help. And this situation is not much different than other aspects of your healthcare. If you go to the emergency room, you don’t generally get to interview doctors.

All therapists are trained to work with a wide range of clients and a wide range of issues. The most important thing you can do is have a conversation about what you want and need—to the best of your ability. What you need to do is to see if the person or group you seek out will be a good match for your healing journey. Can I work with this person? If I have differences of opinions or have doubts about their capacity—can I ask about them?

Here are some questions for you to consider:

  • What do you hope to get out of treatment?

  • What symptoms are bothering you the most right now?

  • What is the most difficult thing about going to see a therapist or being in a group?

  • What would help you to talk?

  • What gets in the way of talking?

  • What gets in the way of taking care of yourself?

And here are some questions for you to ask your potential therapist, guide or consultant:

  • How long have you been working in this field?

  • What do you enjoy about it?

  •  How do you typically work with clients?

  • What happens if we disagree?

  • What are your expectations of clients?

  • Have you worked with clients who have a trauma history before?

  • These questions are just a start, and you are free to ask them anything that would help you feel more comfortable working with them. Some people find help on the first try and some on the second. I found it on the sixth. Remember that it is the combination of you and your therapist or your group that is the ‘healing relationship.’   You each hold an end of the rope. Contrary to rumors, your therapist cannot read your mind. The healing relationship relies on both of you—so you need to trust yourself and your experience, and you need to communicate what you want and need so that the relationship can support your work.

If you are in the US and looking for a therapist I recommend Psychology Today’s Find a Therapist link. You can put in parameters you are looking for: insurance, gender, social identity, specialty, location etc. It’s widely used by a range of therapists with many licenses and specialties.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2023/2014

Helping women hold both joy and sorrow on Mother’s Day.

“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration. ”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

The Mother’s Day we have is not big enough to hold all of a woman’s heart on Mother’s Day. Women need a different celebration. The Mother’s Day we have is a holiday of marketing and hype. It doesn’t represent women’s experience. It represents profit. In The US alone it is a 21 billion dollar industry. You can’t open your email, go in to a CVS or grocery store, or the mall without being bombarded by messages about Mother’s Day. You literally can’t get away from it for weeks. It is most telling that the founder of Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis was so troubled by how the holiday became a marketing holiday rather than the sacred holiday she had intended, that she spent most of her life trying to remove the holiday from the calendar.

Women need a different celebration because the current celebration is one-sided. The current celebration is entirely too small to hold the experience that women have with the word mother, with the role of mother, with the relationship as a mother, and a relationship to a mother. I don’t want to take any of the joy out of the holiday for the women who feel joy. Joy belongs there. Celebration belongs there. Satisfaction and appreciation belong there. But our current cultural stranglehold on Mother’s Day keeps out the other very real parts of women’s lives. It forces women to put on only a happy face when they are often holding so much more. Yes, there is joy on Mother’s Day, but there is also much sorrow and loss—often invisible losses. And because of the mandate on happiness and flowers and all things wrapped in bows—women are asked to smile and hold their losses alone.  On a day when they are being ‘celebrated’ women are often left entirely isolated in their own experience—especially with regards to loss.

And the losses are many. Remember that women count all of their children on Mother’s Day—the born, the unborn, the living, the dead. It is a day of mourning for women who lost children to miscarriage or to death, as much as it is a celebration of the children they love and cherish. It can be a day of mourning for the women who gave their babies up for adoption and for some women who chose to have abortions—for the difficult decisions that they had to make. It can be a day of mourning or loss for the women who weren’t able to have children or who chose not to. A reminder of what was not and what will never be. There are also the children who are lost to addiction, to jail, to mental illness, to estrangement. Women count all of their babies—the ones who are here and not here, the ones they can hold, and the ones they can’t.

And on this day women are asked to hold the relationship to their own mothers in whatever form that holds. So many women who loved their mothers dearly and whose mothers have died are acutely aware of the woman they can no longer celebrate in the way they want, can no longer hold, and talk to on this day. Or maybe their mothers are sick, or have Alzheimers—still living, but no longer the person they were.  For these women, no matter how joyous the relationship with their own children, families, relationships—Mother’s Day can make them feel raw, and sore, with a deep, deep sense of sorrow or longing.  The absence of mother is felt as a gaping hole.

And sometimes this gaping hole isn’t from the loss of something wonderful, it is from the loss of what never was: for the women who were unmothered—hurt, abused, neglected by the very person who was supposed to fill their lives with safety and care. For the women who have spent many years learning to mother themselves. Mother’s Day, and the Hallmark cards that mark the occasion, is a reminder of the childhood that never was and never can be—of things they could never say about their mother because we live in a world that believes that all mothers are good. It is a reminder of what they didn’t get and all the hard work of healing that they had to do to become who they are now.

So let’s work to create a different celebration that would support a woman to hold her joy and her sorrows. Her joys as a mother and her losses as a mother. Her joys of her mother and her losses of a mother. Let’s work to support a woman to hold the love she has of her children with the sorrows of the children that couldn’t be. Let’s create a different celebration that doesn’t ask a woman to hold only one side of her story about mothers and motherhood on Mother’s Day. Let’s create a different celebration that allows her to hold all of her experience so that she may weave them gratefully into a single cloth. Let’s make the celebrations and conversations as big as the hearts of the women we are celebrating.

© 2016/2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD