A letter of love to trauma survivors

For those of you who have been hurt or who grew up with trauma you may know the word love, but you may not understand what it means. Or maybe you understand what it means in fiction, or movies, or other people, but you don’t know what it feels like. When people say they love you—you can think about the word love, you have an idea of what they are trying to say, you know they are trying to be nice, but your body feels numb, or you feel like you are watching the whole conversation from the outside. Love is something other people understand. Love is an abstraction.

Survival mode makes it hard to experience and understand love. Where survival is an experience of tension or tightness, love is an experience of openness and expansiveness. Where survival is an experience of longing, grasping, clinging, or vigilance—love is an experience of patience, of being able to breathe and look around. There is a brittleness and stiffness with survival. There is an elasticity to love.

It can be so hard to feel alone with your experience. You are a stranger in a land that expects you to understand love.

The people who love you and the people who are trying to help you often can’t understand why their acts of love and kindness aren’t taken in, absorbed—why you can’t hang on to the experience. They can’t understand why it’s so hard for you to trust them, believe in them or lean on them. Or why it seems like they are always starting from the beginning again. And it can be hard for you to feel like you are hurting them or disappointing them when you doubt them or don’t understand.

Here’s the thing: trying to understand love when it hasn’t been your experience is like trying to understand gravity when all you have ever experienced is weightlessness.

You can see that people trust gravity. You can see them effortlessly putting one foot in front of the other onto solid ground. But you have no idea what that might feel like—that kind of solidity. That kind of pull or connection.

You pretend that you do. You stuff every pocket and bag with as much weight as you can: hope, expectation, want. You can kind of look like you are walking like the others. Trying to make your feet touch the ground like the others. Trying to sit solidly on the couch, instead of floating away. But it’s all such hard work and effort. While they are talking to you, you are trying to look like you are tethered to the earth. They are frustrated with you. And you are exhausted.

If you have been hurt, I want to offer you the hope that love is possible to learn and experience. You will need to find someone trustworthy and patient. Not perfect. Constant and consistent. Perhaps boringly so. And you will need to build these capacities in yourself: patience, trustworthiness, constancy, consistency.

You learn love by showing up again and again: to your healing, to your learning, to your relationships, and to the simple daily caring of yourself. You do this by appreciating and celebrating the smallest acts of trust and kindness. You do this in the smallest and most incremental ways.

The problem is that movies make love look exciting. But learning love when you are an adult is quiet, tedious, and repetitive. Love is reflexive. Love is practice. Love is a motor skill. Learning love in adulthood is like learning to swim in adulthood: you are surrounded by a substance you don’t trust or understand and the only way you get good at it is jumping in over and over. The only way you learn is to surrender to it a thousand times over: lap by lap.

The thing about quiet repetition is that it kind of sneaks up on you. Many days of practice feel like nothing at all and then one day you suddenly feel space and openness where you had previously been curled up tightly. You suddenly feel like you can lean back and relax, where previously you sat rigidly on the edge of your seat. You suddenly notice you forgot to pay attention and had let your mind wander for minutes or days.

Remember that in the best of circumstances, infants learn unconditional love in an endless repetition of care over days, nights, and years. And yet somehow the message that is given to you is that you should be able to weave a new capacity to love in days, or weeks or months. And that’s not the way it happens. Love is the most powerful element in the world and it’s meant to be built over time. No one learns love fast. It’s meant to be a strength we build over years, one small act at a time, with patience, repair and kindness.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what you do.

We often think that when we have messed up or have made a mistake (again), and tell someone, we think what we want is reassurance. “Oh, it's OK” or “I’m sure it wasn't that bad” or “I’ll bet no one even noticed.”  Something to take the sting, or embarrassment or shame out of that experience. Something to make that bad feeling go away.

But I found that there is a different response that is actually bigger than reassurance, and it’s even bigger than making that bad feeling go away.

Many years ago, I offered to make dinner for what turned out to be a dinner party at a friend's house. I had wanted to make a favorite beef short rib recipe I really loved. I’d made it once before, it’s kind of an all weekend affair, but on this particular occasion I was pressed for time so rather than make it the day ahead which is what’s recommended so that you can chill it and remove the fat, I made it the same day, taking it out of the oven before I left.  I tried to skim the fat off the top but couldn't because the sauce was so thick with short ribs and when I got to my friend's house and heated it up there a slick pool of fat in the sauce. Panicked and embarrassed I considered my options and decided it would be too messy in someone else’s kitchen to try and drain the fat, and so I decided to take a spoon and stir the fat into the sauce to disguise it. At first it seemed to work, but as the sauce was passed around the table it began to separate again. The sauce did taste good, but it was very greasy, and made the meal heavy and rich.  I left disappointed in a meal I had worked hard on, embarrassed by the sauce, and disoriented by my panic and wish to hide the problem.

Later that week I told this story to my therapist somewhat expecting some version of the expected reassurances.  But she didn’t do that. Instead, she said:

This is what you do.

I looked at her puzzled.

She said when you run into something that you are embarrassed about you don't ask for help, you try to fix it yourself, and most often you try to hide it. This is what you do.

I sat and blinked and was kind of surprised that rather than feeling caught for doing something wrong, or disappointed that she wasn't taking my side in the typical feel-good fashion, I noticed that what I felt was relaxed.  I felt grounded. I felt seen.

She wasn't the least bit accusatory. There was no drama. No lectures. No hint of disappointment or ‘shoulds.’  She was matter-of-fact. She was non-judgmental.

This is what you do.

I once had a tree fall in a storm, clipping the back corner of my house. When the insurance adjuster came to survey the damage, we stood outside the house and he pointed to the things that had broken as a result of the fallen tree, and what would need to be replaced. He was equally matter-of-fact. This is the current state of your roof. This is what needs to get repaired. We both stood there in the bright sunshine staring at the roof.

And in much the same way, my therapist and I stood staring, objectively, at my typical response to making a mistake by avoiding help, and attempting to hide the problem. We could have been looking at the roof, but instead, we were looking at my behavior.

Being able to stop and acknowledge it-- and having somebody else acknowledge it, allowed me to stop and breathe and kind of look around.

This is what you do is the stance of acceptance. It is the stance of having flaws and being loved anyway. This stance stops you from talking about what you wished you did, or what you wished you hadn’t done. It helps you sit still and look at what you do so you can start to ask yourself some questions:

Is this what I want to do? What do I want to be able to do? What would it take for me not to do the old thing? What are my options? What would it take for me to do something else?

A lot of my work in the world involves helping people and teams with behavior change.  And by far the hardest element of behavior change is cultivating a non-judgmental stance which allows you to see the behavior you want to change clearly and allows you to hold it (and yourself) with kindness and acceptance so that you can sit with it long enough to sort out a solution.  So, whether you are working to support your own growth, or the growth of others as a parent, a leader, or a therapist—see if you can’t play with the idea of ‘this is what you do.’

Many years later now I can catch myself in the act of my thoughts or actions and say to myself: this is what you do. I find that the magic of ‘this is what you do’ is that it shines the light on the actual path instead of getting lost in the feeling of embarrassment or the wish of that something hadn't gone wrong. This is what you do is spiritual practice of acceptance and love.

© 2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

If you want the short rib recipe it’s here, and I do recommend making it a day ahead :)

Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon

I sit at the edge

of the canyon

looking out.

So vast,

incomprehensible,

its farthest reaches

beyond my ability to see

from where I sit.

With reluctance and passion,

fear and hope,

I go into the

worlds

of light and shadow.

 

Immeasurable abyss

(of wants and needs)

yet I don’t want to fill it in.

Beautiful,

layers of years

wearing away, revealing.

In fact,

it is what it is,

only

because rough water,

carving,

left in its path,

a wonder.

Gretchen Schmelzer

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

The bitter and the sweet in transitions

“They don’t even know they have wings.”
— Mary Oliver, This Morning, Felicity

I have a hard time with transitions—the day or days before a big trip—the shift from one big project to the next—basically any time I leave or arrive. I used to think it was a character flaw but over time I have come to understand it more as a part of how I am built. And I’m endeavoring to write about it because I know I am not alone. Some of you who are reading also struggle with transitions—and some of you who are reading this have children or loved ones who do.

I get irritable and anxious. I perseverate about stupid details of my trip. I want to cling to my present situation as if you asked me to leap from one tall building to the next.  

I have come to understand my struggle of transitions as the flip side of one of my strengths: I get very attached. I get intensely involved in what I am doing—whether that is being home with friends, working in my garden or far away working with a group of people. Once I am ‘in’ I am ‘in.’ I don’t just show up: I send down roots. And so there’s a part of me that always experiences leaving or shifting from one thing or another as tearing or ripping. It feels painful. It feels permanent. It feels too big and too hard.

For a long time I didn’t connect my moods and feelings of meltdown with transition—I thought it was more connected to what was happening in the moment. I blamed myself. I blamed whatever was bugging me. But over time I can now catch myself in the act—and if I pull back and can see it from a distance—see the shift that is coming around the bend—then I can name the struggle as one of transition.

I’m newly reacquainting myself with it because for the three years of the pandemic I didn’t run in to it in quite the same way. And because I hadn’t seen it in a while I mistakenly thought the problem had faded. But it hadn’t. It’s just that I hadn’t used that muscle in a long time. And then 2023 arrived with all of its 2019 energy—with in-person work, and business travel back and there it was in full color again.

Because I worked with kids who struggled with this I have tried some of the things that work with kids: have your schedule in black and white so you can see when things are happening, break tasks into small chunks, remind yourself of what you are excited about for the thing you are going to, remind yourself that transitions feel hard but you always make it to the other side fine, make the process as a easy as you can, give yourself plenty of time so you don’t add more anxiety to the situation.

All of those things are good for mood management. They are good to help you have as much resilience as you can. But they don’t change the fundamental experience. For that, I am trying to learn acceptance. Learning to remind myself that this is how it feels and that’s ok. Asking myself what I need to feel better, or get through it as best I can. Letting myself feel the loss of what I am leaving—and letting my feelings of loss be ok.

For so many years I thought that successfully managing transitions would look like feeling fine, or maybe even feeling nothing at all. And when I couldn’t make that happen I thought I was doing it wrong. And more recently I have come to see changing my feelings isn’t the goal—but instead letting myself go through them—which is a different goal altogether.

We are all more sensitive to some things than others—and mine is connection and separation. Some from temperament and some from history—but the combination makes me who I am. And now I have to figure out how to befriend my reluctant self and not be angry at her or frustrated with her.

Many years ago when I was studying mindfulness meditation I read a piece that talked about using the breath as a way to learn to say hello and goodbye. How you take in breath and say hello, and you breathe out and say good-bye. I haven’t thought about that in a long time, but it came back to me this week because I have been thinking about the smaller transitions—the micro-transitions we have to make all the time. Getting up, going to sleep, arriving home or leaving home for small errands, going to a different room. Even small transitions can throw me off and I can lose focus—looking for something to read on my phone or computer. Looking for a snack or a cup of tea. Looking, I think, for certainty when the transition has made me feel wobbly.

And that’s when an old line from Mary Oliver floated back to me. “They don’t even know they have wings.” The line is from a poem called ‘This Morning’ where she is describing baby birds in a nest. They haven’t opened their eyes yet and their mouths are wide open chirping for food— “more, more, more.” The baby birds are made up of intense need and they can’t meet that need for themselves—so the only thing they know how to do is cling to the nest.

And yet, they don’t even know they have wings.

And what I can’t feel in those moments right before or during the beginning of transitions is that I have wings. Wings I have built. Wings I can trust. I can make the shift and my wings will indeed carry me. And, then the challenge is realizing that having wings is bittersweet. Because those wings can carry you forward. And they will.

© 2024 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD