Trauma makes you live in 'backwards world.'

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Trauma makes you live in a backwards world. My great uncle was test pilot during World War II. I remember one story about him taking off and finding that the controls had been put in backwards. In order to land the plane he had to do everything in reverse. He figured it out and lived to tell about it.

Trauma creates a backwards world. Especially repeated trauma. In trauma the ordinary and the extraordinary change places. What seems mundane becomes the warning sign of impending danger. What is dangerous becomes normal. What seems small becomes big, what is big, seems small. If you spend years with this backwards view of the world it can become habit.

In this backwards view of the world—the mundane is dangerous, and the dangerous is safe. Small is big, big is small. This backwards view is one of the invisible wounds of trauma. It isn’t listed anywhere on a symptom checklist. There are no medications to change your thinking. But this backwards view impacts your life, your decisions, your work, your relationships.

Being in a plane like my great uncle and getting immediate feedback that everything you know is backwards is a massive wake up call—you know immediately that you are looking at the situation from a vantage point that will impact your life. But when you have lived long enough with the view that the mundane will kill you, and believed that danger is safe — you don’t even notice that you are living on the other side of the looking glass. Your backwards world is the way the world is—at least for you.

The only way to truly see it is to break one of the backwards rules. You need to do the opposite. It is the only way to check to see if your assumptions are true.

Many years ago I had to get electricians in to take care of some wiring issues. I lived in very old house and I'd known that the house had wiring issues all along. I took care of it at that time because I had to, it was a requirement of sale. I had never done it before because a mundane issue like wiring was a huge issue in my mind. In my imagination they would check one outlet and would have to tear out every wall to rewire the house. Mundane problems trigger the end of the world as you know it. Let sleeping dogs lie. Let old outlets work poorly.

Of course, as those of you who don’t live in a backwards world know, it turned out to be no big deal. Two young guys finished in a half day. They fixed everything and it wasn’t even a massive setback financially. It was a half day problem and no walls came down.

But I stayed away from that problem for a decade because the operating system of my brain still believes that small problems are always big problems. The problem with operating systems is that they aren’t as obvious as the airplane controls. You don’t see how they work until you put yourself in a totally new situation, and then rapidly see that the controls are in backwards.

Trauma makes you pay attention to the smallest signs: the snapped twig, the sound of the door shutting, the music that was playing on the radio, the mail on the dining room table. Once trauma learns the first small signal it goes looking for the next small signal. It creates an entire data-base-dictionary of what every small thing could mean.

Meanwhile, used to terror or violence, no big challenge ever seems big enough. You miss the warning signs of the big problems because you are focused on avoiding the small ones. Cause and effect in backwards world get disconnected from reality. Even when there is proof around you, you don’t see it, you don’t believe it.

I worked for years with teenagers who had lived through trauma and followed the rules of backwards world. They avoided the small tasks that might have helped them—the paperwork they needed to hand in, the homework they needed to do, and instead dove headlong into situations they should have gotten help with—like staying up all night with a suicidal friend. This particular impact of trauma is usually perceived as ‘laziness’ or ‘defiance’ or ‘stupidity.’ But this behavior is a problem of perspective. The teenagers saw a meadow that was studded with landmines and a minefield as something safe and familiar. They couldn’t see it any other way.

This is why we need to change the conversation about trauma. The impact of trauma reaches long into your everyday life—and it’s the things you can’t see, that feel familiar, and the small things, that feel huge, that can be the biggest handicaps in your life as you move forward. And it’s why as we try to help ourselves and others heal that we have to help them see the world from different vantage points, and especially to try and break the rule of backwards world. With help and kindness from you. And me. And all of us. 

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

 

The Courage to Be New

“There’s nothing in a caterpillar that tells you that it’s going to be a butterfly.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller

When I was writing my book many years ago I asked my friends for advice on how to begin a project and one favorite piece of advice I got from my friend Cheryl was to ‘have the courage to be new.’  This was especially good advice at the time because the project itself wasn’t new at all. I had been working on the book for years. So when I took some time out to work on it in earnest it would have been easy to stay entrenched in the vision I had, rather than being open to what might emerge.

The courage to be new is like all good advice. You forget it. And then you need to be reminded again. And again. And so I am reminding myself (and you too) at the start of this week: Have the courage to be new.

This is also, like all good advice, easier said than done. Which is funny because we do all sorts of things to try and be new--- we try to make change, or we actually make change. We buy new clothes, we seek out new relationships, new jobs, new roles, new experiences. And then we freak out when things feel different.

Old habits don’t just feel familiar, they feel like solidity. They feel like the very thing you can count on. Old habits are the laws of nature that you know. And when you have the courage to be new, often it can feel like you are living in a world without gravity. You can feel wobbly, you can feel uncertain. It can feel like you now live in a world that you can’t predict. In fact, if you know exactly what is going to happen next, you are probably not in a new place.

How do you have the courage to be new? How do you even head into the ‘new?’ How can you learn to tolerate wings when all you knew were legs?

I think the first step is actually quite simple. It is to remember to have the courage to be new. To remember that ‘new’ is part of the growth process, part of the healing process. Then you need to look out for it—notice when you feel off, feel wobbly, feel uncertain—and then protect space around that. Our ‘new’ needs space and time to get more settled. Our ‘new’ needs to be repeated over and over until it no longer feels new. Our ‘new’ needs to be acknowledged and honored because in order for you to experience new, you had to be brave enough to give up the old habit, give up the old protections. You had to be brave enough to let go of all you knew, and let the new thing grow in you.

New has different rhythms than the old. New shows up more often in a slowness or in a pause. There’s suddenly space around you or around the things that felt so stressful. It’s like you get to slow down and look around. You get to think. There’s an openness. Or an expansiveness. And you can find yourself wanting to be quiet for a moment. Quiet and still the way you are when you see a hawk land in a tree near you. You pause and watch and feel grateful to see it.

It’s important, even in the disorientation, to enjoy it. When you have the courage to be new, you get moments of surprise, of the unknown. You can get caught off guard which can actually be really, really fun. As you heal and grow, try tracking the things that feel new. The moments of surprise. Your sudden smiles when something happened you weren’t expecting. Write them down at the end of the day. Train you brain to see the new—train your heart to hold the new. Be bold, be brave, be new.

© 2023 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

There is Power in Despair

GLS 1997

GLS 1997

This morning I had to get out for a walk in the woods. It was a grey morning, but the leaves were bright. I wanted the fresh air and the colors to wash the despair out of my brain and out of my heart. The despair from another terrible mass shooting. The despair from a war with so much violence and so much sorrow. The despair that it happened again. And that it has been happening for a long time. Beirut, Boston, London, Madrid, Mumbai. Newtown, Virginia Tech, Charleston, Chattanooga, Roseburg, Parkland, Ulvade, Pulse Nightclub and now Lewiston.

Despair is defined as the complete loss or absence of hope and it is one of the human emotions that can feel the most painful and dark because despair knocks the light right out of you. It leaves you without a compass, without the energy to get up, without a reason to. Despair begins to tell you that there is no point to anything, that you might as well lay there, not get up. Nothing matters.

As someone who is wired as an optimist I find despair one of the most intolerable emotions. I am not just a glass is half-full person, I usually imagine an additional glass entirely. I have wielded hope as a massive source of energy and protection against despair. But eventually it doesn’t work: you find yourself face to face with the endless fight against violence or injustice—against something so very wrong—and whether that injustice or wrong happened just to you, or someone you love, to a group you belong to or all of humanity—you see it for what it is and you can’t imagine how you are going to live in a world and know, really take in, that injustice. That wrong. That level of sorrow for knowing that you can’t change it. The helplessness of seeing just how big it is and not having any idea of how it can be changed. You believe it is impossible. You are brought to your knees.

And paradoxically that is often the turning point of despair. At my most despairing I have gone in to talk to my therapist and chosen to sit on the floor, instead of the chair. I wanted to sit on the floor because I wanted to be where I was—at the very bottom—the place ‘you can’t fall below.’  And in admitting I was at the lowest place possible, I found the ground. I found something that felt real and solid. The healing part of despair is that it can actually be incredibly grounding: you know where you are, you see the world as it is, and you can get some clarity about what is wrong—what is really wrong at the root of it all.

In despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of ourselves. And in despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of our communities. In finding our darker sides we can be, ironically, more whole.

John Lederach who has worked with communities post-conflict on peacebuilding talks about the fact that the pessimism of the people who have lived through the worst cycles of violence may be one the biggest sources of true change. He calls their pessimism a gift, not an obstacle. Lederach calls pessimism grounded realism: “grounded realism constantly explores and questions what constitutes genuine change. For people who have lived for long periods in settings of violence, change poses this challenge: How do we create something that does not yet exist in a context where our legacy and lived history are alive and live before us?”

Despair brings us in contact with our most authentic selves and it compels us to demand that authenticity from the relationships around us. When we are feeling despair we cannot in any way tolerate fakeness, clichés or bullshit. When we are despairing we need authentic, we need real. We need it from ourselves and we need it from others. Hope is the fuel that helps us keep moving toward healing, toward the better imagined state. But hope often keeps us from being able to see and take in the trauma that has occurred- and it keeps us from seeing how we protect ourselves from knowing this—hope can keep us from becoming whole. You can’t do surgery in rose-colored glasses.

Despair is a turning point. In a state of despair you see the bigness of it all—and because of that you are freed from a world of simplistic duality—of there being an easy answer, of it being this-or-that. Despair helps you hold the complexity, which is the only real hope of healing. So we need to sit with our despair, sit on the ground if necessary, and we need to be able to sit with other’s despair as well. We need to trust that the ground that has been burned by despair is preparing for the seeds of change, the seeds of growth. And we must be the faithful gardeners of this growth by holding our pessimism and distrust and risking our hope again. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

The power of a little kindness

“My religion is kindness”
— The Dalai Lama

We tend to think of kindness as being nice, but it is so much bigger than that. Kindness is being what it is needed. Sometimes nice is needed and sometimes firmness is needed—and being firm or holding a hard line can actually be the kindest thing. Kindness can just come in all sorts of shapes and sizes—and it’s one of those things—you often know it when you feel it—not because it always feels comfortable, but because it feels like something you can lean on, like you are being held.

Last summer I visited my German Host Parents. I was an exchange student in high school and it was wonderful to go back and visit my German Host Family and experience a range of kindnesses in the present—from being picked up at the airport with warm hellos to wonderful meals, beds made up for you, and train tickets gotten ahead of time, early in the morning. And it was also wonderful to remember the kindness I had experienced as a high school student. I am sure there are things they would remember as kind: the actions they intended as kind—the help with my homework, the vase of sweet peas by my bed, the snacks brought to me as I studied or worked.

On this trip I was also remembering something I felt as such a strong kindness that they might not remember. In April of that year I had a hard time—and had neither the language nor the skill to talk about it, nor did I really believe in asking for help. I’m pretty sure they knew that I was struggling, but it's also likely that they didn't have the language or the skill to go directly at it either. Instead, I came home from school every day and picked up my paper and watercolors and headed into their garden. They had a beautiful garden and were often in there working, but they left me in peace—neither fussing over my paintings or trying to jolly me out of it. They gave me the space to do what I needed and that was the kindest thing they could do.

We often think of kindness as something that we do for other people or other people do for us, but it is also essential to healing and growing to be able to be kind to yourself. And once again, its not so much about being nice—it’s not retail therapy (though I am not opposed to that)—it’s being what you need—it’s giving yourself what you need. Do you need to go to bed early because you are tired? Do you need to order take-out because you just can’t manage cooking dinner AND everything else? Do you need to take time away from your family to re-group and get your brain back—run errands? Play golf? Or do you need to cancel a meeting so that you can spend time with your family?

Kindness creates an environment for mending and growing. The things that were broken can come together and mend. The parts that are tired can let go and relax. The parts that need nourishment can breathe and look for what they need. That April in the garden had a timing of its own. I don’t remember how I started and I don’t remember how I knew I was finished—but I left the time in the garden more whole. Never underestimate the power of a little kindness—intended or unintended. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016/2023