Healing: One twig at a time

The outside world often makes healing from trauma seem like a linear path. You find someone to talk to and you just tell your story. But talking about trauma isn’t easy, and telling your story is almost never linear. Traumatic memory, as I have written about before, is fragmented—and the experience of trauma fragments the actual experience—the feelings, the thoughts, the images. So in retelling it, it often comes back in pieces, not paragraphs.

When you start getting words out it can feel precarious. Last summer I sat by the water where I am spent some time writing on the coast of Maine. That morning it was a fairly calm and the water was sparkling from the sun. An osprey glided by and circled over the cove, and then —splash— it went down and came up with a fish. It’s movements before the fish were elegant and smooth, practically weightless. But the movements after the fish were breathtakingly suspenseful. For what felt like a long time the bird flapped its wings powerfully, trying to remain above the water while trying to keep the fish in its talons. It gained height, lost height. Then it gradually rose higher, but not in one move. With each bit of ascent, the bird flapped hard again, trying to find its balance with the weight of the fish. The new weight and the movement of the fish were a constant struggle for the bird.  Finally getting height and balance, the bird flew towards its nest.

Finding bits of your story has an equally unsettling feeling. You dive in for that bit of memory—it seems shiny and solid like the mackerel— and then you find it’s not so easy to stay above water as you talk about it. You flap madly with your wings trying to hold onto balance. You gain ground, you lose ground. But the work of trying to stay above water, to keep flapping. That is the work. One piece at a time.

Pieces of your story come back one word or fragment at a time. More like line of poetry than like prose. Early on in my work of healing I wrote this poem. It speaks both to the nature of finding one word at a time, and of building your own future with each piece of work that you do. Everything you do in your healing is one twig, and slowly, you are building your own nest you will call home. 

The Osprey ~ Gretchen Schmelzer

Talons gripping the edge of the nest

wings spread, gauging the wind

the young osprey pushes off,

soaring.

With each practice flight,

the young bird returns to the nest

and places at his mother’s feet,

one twig.

Every evening

in the dark, bright, quiet

of the moonlight the young bird

sleeps.

While his mother,

taking his twig,

builds a nest in

his heart.

So when he flies away

wherever he lands

the young bird

is home.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014/2024   

The Healing Power of Poetry

If you have healing to do—and after the last few years, I’d say we all have some healing to do—help your healing along by adding a daily dose of poetry. I don’t want to take anything away from poetry as an art form, but poetry is also powerful medicine.

So much of trauma and grief can feel wordless. Indeed, trauma can actually keep the words away from memory. The impact of trauma can divert blood flow from the parts of our brain that processes language rendering our traumatic experiences into a silent, foggy story that has no edges or anything to grab on to. And traumas can lack language because they simply feel unspeakable. And yet the ability to attach words and a story to our traumatic experiences allow us to take in and integrate our own history—and it allows us to share our story and have it witnessed.

As the poet Adrienne Rich[i] says, “…words are purposes./The words are maps.” But words aren’t so easy to come by when you are healing. There are so many moments of healing where what you are trying to convey doesn’t feel like it matches the words you are trying to use. You get coached to use ‘feeling words’ as you try to talk about your history but the feeling words just don’t feel right—they don’t fit—traumatic emotions are so big. They are filled with electricity. And feeling words can feel too small to hold those big emotions. Sadness. Anger. Even rage and terror. You can say the words and try to connect them to your story but something falls flat inside you. If you can’t feel connected to your story with words, it can be hard to imagine that someone else can either.

But poetry isn’t just words. It’s strings of words that have a melody and meaning that are deeper and wider than the words themselves. Poetry forms its own language of interconnections and constellations. Poetry can somehow act as a sort of gossamer skein of threads or sutures that can knit connections between head, heart and history. Poetry can weave whole new cloth or pick up old dropped stitches.

I was lucky enough to be given poems by my therapist when I couldn’t find words of my own. The poems were like echoes of the language I needed, glimpses of a story, and a reminder that when our heart hurts, there can be real beauty. These gifts of poems served as language tapes, as a rope of connection and handholds and footholds as I found my way forward. Hundreds of poems over years formed the soil I came to plant my future in. Books of poems. Whole poems. Tapes of poetry read aloud.

But really, you don’t even need the whole poem. You can just pick one line. One good line of poetry has the power to take you from feeling you don’t have what it takes to heal, to believing, as Wendell Berry[ii] says, ‘what we need is here.’ To giving you the freedom to find language, to tell your story as best you can, or to ‘tell it slant’ as Emily Dickinson[iii] encourages. And lest you think it is all dark, and depth and seriousness—I relied heavily on Billy Collins[iv] instructions about poetry ‘to waterski on the surface’ and to remember not to beat a confession out of it to ‘find out what it really means.’ The healing from poetry is a tender green shoot. You have to hold it lightly.

I believe one day we will come to understand poetry the way we now understand the science of how trees connect and communicate with each other through fungi in the soil using a ‘mycorrhizal network’ that connects the roots of trees to each other to form communities of forests and mountainsides. There is something bigger in poetry than meets the eye or ear.

Which makes me wish there was a prescription pad for poetry. A daily dose that a friend could read you out loud or send you in a text. It’s a medicine that has no negative side effects, except, perhaps, for heartache. The good kind of heartache-- where you feel the grief of feeling yourself whole--feeling yourself connected to a larger humanity who has endured. Finally being able to say out loud—'this is what it felt like to be me at that moment.’

Poems belong to the poet, but I believe you are free to borrow their words until you can grow words of your own. You can weave their words to mend the holes in your heart. You can clip yourself on to the fixed ropes of their imagery while you make your way across the deep chasms of your history, balancing precariously on rickety ladder bridges. And in this era where so many of us have experienced isolation for so many reasons, you can sit in the company of another soul who allows you to be present to yourself—so that at some future time, you can be present for others.

© 2021 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Support Poets:

Poetry Foundation

American Academy of Poets

Poetry 180

Poets and Writers

100 Best Poetry Websites

[i] Rich, A. (1973), Diving into the Wreck, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. NY: Norton

[ii] Berry, W. (1987). The Wild Geese From Collected Poems, 1957-1982, North Point Press,

[iii] Dickenson, E. (1999). The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

[iv] Collins, B. (2001). Introduction to Poetry. Sailing Alone Around the Room. NY: Random House.

The unseen sweetness in healing

From my desk I can look out onto the roof of my porch. It’s an old house, and there’s big divot in the porch roof—which fills with water each time it rains. And this spring there’s been a lot of rain. The landlord knows about it and it’s on his list, but for now, it may be the best and biggest rooftop birdbath in town. There are a constant stream of birds perching and bathing –which routinely distracts me during my Zoom meetings. And this morning as I sit at my desk and gather my materials for a work trip there are a pair of goldfinches sipping and bathing in equal measure. The sunlight makes their yellow even brighter. A mourning dove takes up the opposite corner.

In something that is considered broken, so much beauty can happen. The porch roof is something that will need to get fixed and mended—and when this happens it will be considered ‘better’ than it is now. But when the roof is eventually fixed, and no longer holds water, I will miss the birds.  

There were many years when all I could see or feel were my flaws. I can remember painful moments of despair during stretches of healing.  I felt hurt or broken. Awkward. And I was really aware of thing things I couldn’t yet do. Aware of the things that still felt too hard.

I felt raw. Sore. Like every one of my nerve endings was exposed. I used to say that I felt like I wasn’t wearing skin. I sometimes felt like my arms and legs weren’t attached.

It was hard to feel so much at once. But at the time, all that feeling was also a superpower. When I could hang on to it, it helped me listen to others—listen to the words and listen to their hearts.  As a psychologist-in-training it motivated me to learn—to understand how to build and re-build a self. How to build and re-build attachment. How to heal. How to grow. I worked as many shifts as I could. I read as many books and studies as I could. If I was adrift in a sea of hurt, I was going to learn how to swim so that I might get out—so that I might help others get out too.

But I didn’t heal in a big ocean. I healed in the equivalence of a birdbath—which is what therapy can feel like. You perch precariously on the edge—frightened. And you start by sticking a toe in tentatively. You dip your beak in. You brave ruffling your feathers. And when it’s all too much, you take shelter nearby, only to return and try again.

The thing about being really hurt is that the smallest acts can feel like such a big success. The moment you ask for tea. The moment you say the thing you want to say and not what you think someone wants to hear. The moments you are brave enough to listen to your own silence or tolerate another’s. And the fabulous moments of surprise when you can let yourself play, just a bit, with the part of yourself you have been working so hard to hide.

Healing is a process, and not an event. I am still working to heal, but much of the early pain and despair has been replaced with a mixture of sturdiness and elasticity—two things I couldn’t have imagined at that time. But with this gain has come some loss. My superpowers have shifted.  I can’t hear all of the frequencies of hurt the same way I did then—and I know that for better or worse my empathy isn’t the same as it was. And in my healing, the small moments of delight in being able to do things for the first time have changed. The work is challenging in different ways. I now take so much for granted that I can miss the actions that would have seemed impossible then.

It's easy to think of repair—of healing—as universally positive. And so much of it is. But healing also comes with loss. A bittersweet loss. It’s easy to confuse the healing of trauma with the trauma itself because you are untangling yourself from the trauma while you are healing from it. But healing isn’t trauma. And when it is done well, it has a sweetness and a tenderness that it hard to see when you are in it.

I don’t miss the painful aspects of those days. But sometimes I do miss how much I could feel the edge of my bravery—and how much I could feel and hold that in others. How acutely I could hear emotion and how attentive I was to the layers of healing. Like the two sparrows now bathing in the sun. Feeling the sun and the wind on their feathers—completely unaware that the beauty they are enjoying comes directly from brokenness.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

The Beauty isn't Separate from the Mess

A mourning dove perches low

sunlight gold on cold stone,

while rock sleeps, the faithful wait

for a sign of life below.

Hide and seek, lost and found--

spring’s miracles are waiting games

—but really, who has forty days

to pray to the frozen ground?

I now move too slow,

like everything, I am learning to walk

again, or is it the first time?  

Quietly growing new bones.

The old gods never had patience-- but I

learned to wrap myself in persistence—

my grandmothers called it love—

and on this cold morning on my

walk at the edge of the path, I was blessed--

through scattered leaves and winter flotsam

with a purple crocus—reminding me that

the beauty isn’t separate from the mess.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD