Purpose as a way to heal and grow

“It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river cannot go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.
”
— Kahlil Gibran

Our first vision of the future propels us through our youth and young adulthood. It’s our booster rocket. It launches us out into our stratosphere, and we are off. But over time we need to update this vision. We need to reassess our trajectory—not just where we want to go—but why we want to go. I call this purpose or noble purpose, but some others call this vision, or mission, or their why.

Purpose can feel both like a destination and the reason for a destination which makes it hard to describe. Purpose is something internal to you. You get to define your direction and the impact you want to have. Your purpose and the way you connect to it belongs entirely to you. And only you can know whether you are living your purpose the way that you want to.

Your purpose doesn’t have to align directly with your job, but it can. Sometimes it’s a 1:1 and sometimes it’s not. I have a dear friend who works as a therapist and her noble purpose is ‘love.’ She lives her purpose by bringing love to her work, supporting her clients to experience and bring love to their lives, and experience love in her own life. Her purpose clearly aligns with her work. But I also have a dear friend whose job is in biotech sales and you wouldn’t necessarily discern her purpose from her job title. Her purpose is ‘community.’ Her job is often technically challenging with a lot of financial pressure- and she excels at managing both—but she lives her purpose in the community she creates in her work teams, and in her volunteering at church. She is the person who is always looking out for the ones in the group or her extended family who are the ‘odd person out’—who need to be included and feel a sense of belonging.

My purpose is to help people who have been hurt to heal and grow, and to help those who work with them and love them. It’s a purpose perfectly aligned with being a therapist and a writer about trauma but can seem like a stretch for a leadership consultant. But learning that 69 of the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations and not countries—I understood that if I really wanted to impact the way adults lived their lives I needed to meet them in the workplace. I found that when I worked in organizations, I learned things about communication, emotional intelligence, systems, power and change that informed my work and understanding of trauma and made my work and writing stronger, regardless of context.

One of the biggest benefits of knowing your purpose at any given time is the clarity it gives you about priorities and decisions. It can help you decide what to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to. It can help you make a choice about priorities or how you are allocating your time. You can use your purpose as a north star.

For example, I was once asked to write a book chapter on a topic that I was not expert in and was not connected to my purpose. The request came from someone who was an authority in my organization and connected in the publishing world. It was offered as ‘an opportunity.’

This is one those requests that I call a ‘shiny object’—like those flashy lures anglers use to get fish.

I could have looked at the request as a way to please a boss. I could have looked at the request as an opportunity to learn a subject area. I could have looked at the request as a way to learn about writing a book chapter. Or I could have looked at the book chapter as an opportunity or stepping stone to bigger publication opportunities. All of these and more could have been options. And any of them might have fit for different reasons.

But I came to this decision with experience of writing a chapter on a topic that was adjacent to my expertise and it was still a lot of work. And I knew that pleasing someone and hoping for future gains were not guaranteed no matter how well I did.

Instead, I asked myself this clarifying question: Will writing this chapter support and connect me to my noble purpose? And the answer was a clear no. It was easier to see ‘publication’ and ‘pleasing someone’ as shiny objects, and easier to let them go.

Recently I heard the author Neil Gaiman talk about purpose: He imagines his purpose as a mountain, and asks himself with each request: Will this activity bring me closer to my mountain or farther from it? 

Purpose is something that needs continual revisiting. It needs tune-ups and alignments. Why? Because we grow and change. Because the systems we are in are growing and changing. Because we get more capable and we need to be able to use our new capacities differently. And because even if you choose your exact purpose again—you are choosing it now, with new energy, and connecting it to the life you have now.

And while I don’t usually give updates in my blogs, I am excited to share a new endeavor very much connected to my purpose that combines my trauma work with the leadership work I have been doing for the last 20 years.

This past week was the launch of the Center for Trauma and Leadership, a leadership development group I co-founded with my dear friend and colleague, Carolyn Murphy.

The Center for Trauma and Leadership partners with leaders and organizations that operate in a context of repeated trauma including first-responders, journalists, hospitals and mental health centers, nonprofits, and government agencies. We offer resources and learning programs that give leaders practical, useful, and supportive tools for leading in a trauma context. Our mission is to help leaders stay in their fields, love their jobs again, and lead through trauma with emotional intelligence and kindness.

You can visit our website to learn more about our work and our upcoming open-enrollment program Leading Through Trauma—as well as other resources over time.

But starting new things and refining your purpose doesn’t always mean the loss of the old. While I will be doing new things, I am very much committed to my writing about trauma, healing and growth, and committed to this blog and conversation with you. I thank you for your support of my work and writing these past 10 years and look forward to the collective healing that we can create together.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

For exercises to support your exploration of purpose you can read:

Healing Fault Lines/Finding Bedrock

“. …in geology and crystallography the word fault is used to describe a sudden irregularity which in normal circumstances might lie hidden but, if strains and stress occur may lead to a break profoundly disrupting the overall structure.”
— Michael Balint, The Basic Fault

The mountains in Joshua Tree National Park are ancient. Most mountains are ancient by human standards, but these mountains are ancient even by mountain standards.

How ancient? The hills and rocks at Joshua Tree are what remains from from a supercontinental landmass called Rodinia that stretched across the Baltic states, Europe, North America, Australia and Antarctica 2 billion years ago. An immeasurable time, before there was even evidence of life on earth.

The deserts of Joshua Tree have been formed by many forces—tectonic plates and numerous fault lines. The land itself has been mountains, ocean bottoms, lake bottoms and savannahs. Today it is desert.

We often think of trauma as a fault line—a place where there was a fracture. We imagine somehow that the healing of trauma is something that we are supposed to move past—or that the fault line disappears. But it doesn’t.

Fault lines are the edges. They are the places where growth and change causes something to emerge. Either something old, coming back up, or something new creating a new structure.

I have long appreciated the way the early psychologist Balint talked about old traumas in us as a ‘basic’ fault—a fault line in the self where something had broken or shattered in response to a trauma or extreme pressure. Balint described the basic fault as a place in the self that needs healing, and that, even when healed, would leave a scar—or some evidence of the fault line.

Balint, long before the research on attachment validated it, identified the landscape of safety and connection that allowed the basic fault to emerge. The area I came to describe as preparation. That if you give yourself enough support, or you experience enough support in a healing relationship, that growth and healing will put pressure on that fault line and you will feel the fault, the trauma, again. It will become visible enough to integrate. And most miraculously, you will not just heal-you will actually grow again. Balint called this place a new beginning. And in my work on the integration work of healing through trauma I have kept that term. In integrating trauma, you experience both mourning and new beginning.

As I describe in my book Journey Through Trauma, repeated trauma is really three forms of trauma: what did happen, the protections you used to survive, and what didn’t happen. Too often, the discussion of trauma focuses only on what happened. And healing from trauma requires a softening or relaxing of the protections you used to survive the trauma. This is the connection, the safety, the preparation that allows you to put aside your armor and feel and reveal the fault lines. And when softening happens, you can get to the third form of repeated trauma. You get to what didn’t happen. You get to experience new beginnings.

As I continue to heal and help others with healing I have come to really appreciate that healing is in the capacity to hold both the fault lines and the new beginnings. The ability to hold the ancient scars and wounds. Hold what has worn away and been revealed. And hold the new: the new peaks that have been formed by growth at the edge of our fault lines. And the new plains that have been formed by erosion and the runoff from the old peaks.

In Joshua Tree there are fields of massive boulders that look like sculptures—look like cairns made by giants. But we aren’t seeing peaks -no matter how big they are. What we are really seeing is bedrock. Bedrock beneath what were the old mountains and hills. Mountains and hills where the covering has been worn away over thousands of years so that all we see now are the bones. Wearing away so that we can see the bedrock that reaches to the core.

I have come to appreciate this wearing away. Trauma is a tectonic shift, a forced fault line, ahead of our capacity to hold it. It does break us at the time. I know that the helplessness I felt at the time of trauma felt like a breakdown. A breakdown that I sought to protect myself from for so many years so that I didn’t have to experience that feeling again. I wanted to feel in control to protect myself from that feeling of helplessness.

But I have also found that there is a piece of that helplessness—of not being entirely in control—that isn’t about trauma, but instead is about the reality of what it means to be human. We can’t know what is going to happen next. We can’t stop people we love from dying. The world is actually uncertain.

And so, I am beginning to hold my fault lines differently. I am beginning to appreciate my ancient structures—even as they be the result of massive upheaval at one time—because even as they are structures of trauma—they are also bedrock. There is something solid and true that I can rely on for my own healing, and for the healing work with others. There’s beauty at the edges. There’s beauty in the bones.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Joshua Tree National Park geology
By D. D. Trent, Richard W. Hazlett
Buy on Amazon

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 :)