Patience with what you can't yet see

My life’s motto ‘How hard could it be?’ means that I tend to be driven in the things that I do—whether it’s a writing project, a work project or my own healing. This tendency helps me persevere which has its benefits. But the downside is that I can get a kind-of ‘missile lock’ on productivity and getting things done where I get more and more rigid about time and expectations. There’s probably some perfect tipping point where the right amount of effort yields continuous effectiveness, but I often blow right past that imagined point to a place where the rigidity and expectations either exhausts me or paralyzes me.

The good news is that I recognize this place much faster than I used to. I woke up this morning, and even before getting out of bed, I was already fighting the despair of what I was not going to complete today. When I find that I have fallen behind before my feet have even hit the floor, I know something is wrong. I took it as a sign that I what I actually needed was a break – so after lunch I headed to a nearby mountain range.

It was a rainy day, and I figured it would be a good day to go for a walk and have the woods to myself. I walked through a sea of greens, and mist and moss. It was a steep climb for about an hour and eventually I got to a summit lookout. There was a bench, an opening in the trees, and no visibility whatsoever. Fog, whiteness, nothing.

A mountain summit in the fog is a funny mix of knowing that you’ve made progress because of the tiring effort you felt on the way up—breathing hard, tired legs, heart pounding. You know because your watch tracks the miles and the hour it took to get there. But there is no confirming visual, no ‘proof’ of being at the top.

The metaphor feels all too real for me this week. I am at a point in my writing project that feels a lot like this hike. Where I have a sense of the work that has gotten me to the place I am standing. I have a big pile of research articles I’ve read—all with yellow legal pad notes stapled to the front. A strategy I’ve been using since grad school to digest what I’ve read and have clarity about what I can use from that research. And I have folders with all of the writing I’ve done for the past four years organized into rough chapters. But like the hike, I am able to see what’s close up: the trees, the rocks, the lichen. The pile of research, the books, the manilla folders. But the larger whole. The view. That remains hidden right now.

And in my own healing, it was a foggy week. I can feel the long trail I have walked, and I can feel my footfalls, and I can appreciate the strength I’ve gained, but I’m not sure of my bearings.

The thing about fog and mist and the lack of certainty that gets created is that other things can become clearer. A walk in the fog is more of an interior experience—a sensory experience—feeling the rain, seeing the bright lichen, smelling the wet leaves. Fog and mist—a bit of healthy disorientation—helps you be open to something new. Helps you see something old in a new way. This is the heart of learning.

In my writing, all of the new research  and re-reading of old books helps me let go for a moment to what I think I know so that I can understand what I know in a new way. So that I can integrate what I have learned this year from my work, and let those new experiences collide with the reading I am doing so that I can see my old frameworks differently. So that maybe I can see some new solutions to old problems.

And when you are healing, fog takes away the sharp edges of things you thought you knew about yourself or how you thought you needed to figure things out. There may be something protective about fog—about not yet having to see or know something you aren’t ready to take in. Something that keeps you from being certain before you’ve learned all that you need to know yet. Protected from taking in too much at once—forced to take in what’s close in—what you can see or understand that is within arm’s reach.

And both walking in the fog, and healing in the fog require the same action: paying attention to the moment—where your feet are. Putting one foot in front of the other. One sentence after the other. To noticing what you are thinking in the moment. To beings able to say one true thing—even if it contradicts the one true thing you just said. To embracing the feeling of lost so that the new thing might be found.

© 2024 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD 

Healing from trauma requires holding two tracks

Early in my own work of healing from trauma I watched the movie 28 Days with Sandra Bullock and had such a longing to go away from my regular life so that I could focus on healing and come back ‘fixed.’ It can be hard to feel so bad and have to go about your life as if you weren’t feeling that way. It can be hard to feel what you feel on the inside and feel like you have to walk around ‘acting normal’ and not be able to share it on the outside.

And sometimes, especially depending on what you are dealing with, going away might be necessary for your healing. But for most people healing from trauma, it’s not about going away to get better, it is about learning to stay. Stay with the part of you that is healing. And stay with the part of you doing your day-to-day life. Healing from trauma is about learning to hold both: your life in the present and your trauma history--all at the same time.

Holding both is rarely stated directly. This explicit instruction –that you have to hold two tracks of your life running simultaneously—is often unsaid and left entirely implicit. Yet I have found it to be one of the more important skills required for healing. Letting your life run on two tracks at the same time is actually what allows for healing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a single person or an entire country—you have to be able to do both at the same time—manage the pace of life of you are living in the present and manage the pace of trauma work—so that both exist in a balance that allows you to both function in your life and continue to heal. There will be days you have to focus more on the present, and there will be days you will focus more on your trauma history—where you need to take extra time to recover.

There is an illusion, once you start working with your trauma history, that you can muscle through it. That once you start taking on your trauma history—that is all you are going to do, in sort of a linear all out effort. But the pace of healing—allowing yourself time to digest what you are healing from, to rest, to gather your feet under you, and then to head back in, is what allows for real mending of what had been torn.

The two tracks, present and past—are what weave you together into a whole—and allow a new future to begin to emerge. I have found in my work that when people are working through a difficult trauma history that the present can get ignored—both in treatment and in their attention to what else is going on outside of treatment. But the present is what keeps you connected to your center. The present acts a set of belay ropes connecting you to a sense of stability and safety. The present is where you can feel the solidity of your feet. The present is where you look around and feel that whatever your history was, you have survived it. The present is where you recognize that the trauma is over and you are currently in an entirely different chapter in the book of your life. Your ability to find an anchor in the present will give you a much greater capacity to heal your past.

Sometimes the metaphor I like to use is someone who is working two jobs—or really one full time job and one job they are trying to do on their own time. Like the person who is working full time and then comes home every day to work on renovating their house. Both are true: they are doing the work they need to at their job AND they are doing the work in the evening to renovate their house. It isn’t easy.  It can feel tiring and overwhelming. Sometimes things go wrong in one place or the other. Or both. But you stay aware of both tasks. You hold both tasks as important.

Whenever you feel yourself getting too overwhelmed with your trauma history—you can reground yourself in the present. You can focus more on the everyday and mundane: clean a closet, get the oil changed in your car, meet a friend for coffee. Do something in the present that you can see, feel, hear.  And only when you feel solid again in the present, can you return to your work in the past. It can be really difficult to have both tracks playing in your head at the same time. It can be really difficult to hold the aspects of yourself—the ‘you’ you were then, and the ‘you’ you are now. But it is a skill worth working on, a muscle worth strengthening. And the more you practice holding both tracks, the more solid your healing journey will be.  

© 2024/2014 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD 

Gurus in Life Preservers

It’s the height of summer and my mind keeps going back to the lake at a camp where I was one of the waterfront directors and got to teach swimming lessons. And mostly I want to tell you about four girls who have been my gurus of learning what is hard to do. It was a wonderful summer for so many reasons, but nearly forty years later, I hang on to the lessons that those girls taught me about courage and trust and perseverance.

I had one group of four African-American teenage girls from Newark who had never been swimming before. And certainly never swam in a lake. “EEEEW,” they said , “there are fish in there! They are going to bite me!” And they weren’t wrong—the fish did kind-of bite. They stated from the outset that they were NEVER going to go in the lake, but swim lessons were basically mandatory, so the four of them humored me and came to the lake, but refused to wear suits and refused to get in.

So I called their bluff and brought down a giant stainless steel mixing bowl from the kitchen and I filled it with lake water. And using the mixing bowl instead of the lake we had our lesson right there on the dock so they could learn to blow bubbles and do the rhythmic breathing required of the crawl stroke. They thought it was hilarious and played along. Then they practiced just dangling their legs in the lake.

Gradually the mixing bowl became too easy and boring and they decided to brave the water. But they said they weren’t getting in the water unless they could do something specific. They ran off toward the boathouse where the life preservers were stored. And they each came back to the dock carrying two life preservers, and they put both of them on. And they picked up two two kickboards and carried them into the water. And for the next couple of days they just stood in the water, brave enough to stand waist deep, wearing their life preservers and holding their kickboards.

They didn’t care what they looked like. They didn’t care that they were the only ones with that much equipment at the waterfront. They just did what they needed to do. They branched out from their lessons, which were just the four of them, to practicing during free swim with all of the unit. Their progress was slow and incremental over the two weeks of camp. Being brave enough to dunk their whole body in. Brave enough to pick their feet off the ground. And brave enough, eventually, to take the life preservers off and try swimming. And they did it. They learned the crawl and the backstroke. All of them passed the Red Cross Beginner’s test that session.

I have never forgotten this because I am still in awe about how brave they were to try something that they were so frightened of, and how smart they were to ask for what would allow them to feel safe enough to try. I have never forgotten their willingness to learn something that was so difficult for them and to keep at it. To be willing to be a beginner at something that all of their peers could already do. To decide that learning was more important than saving face.  And their genius at knowing themselves well enough and listening to themselves about their own incremental steps.

Maya Angelou used to say that we are never alone. That wherever we go and whatever we do we can bring others with us. We can bring ancestors, teachers, loved ones with us. Of my many inner teachers and gurus I lean on, these girls hold a particularly revered spot. I pull on them whenever I need compassion for myself or someone else who is up against a big fear. Up against something they wish they could do, but can’t. When it seems everyone can do something, but you can’t. These girls in their life preservers, holding kickboards are the perfect visual reminder of what it takes to bravely overcome your fears: you become interested in taking on the challenge, you start as small as you possibly can, you oversupport yourself with whatever helps you, and you stay with it day in and day out.

And this wisdom from them is especially useful when you are learning to dive in to emotions you find frightening. Almost everyone has an emotion that is more difficult for them than the others and if you have experienced trauma, the emotions can feel louder and more extreme. They can have an all-or-nothing quality not unlike how my camper girls saw the lake water: either I am safe on the dock or I will drown in the water. There is no middle ground.

The lake and swimming in it are intertwined. The girls were afraid of the lake and they hadn’t learned to swim. And I could say the same about my experience. My emotion and the way I protect myself from my emotions are also intertwined. It’s a big lake of emotion and I am still learning how to swim in them.

The key to stretching your capacity with difficult emotions is to do exactly what those girls did: Find the smallest possible increment to feel it. And stay with that until you are ready to move on.

What I have found helpful is the sheer repetition of talking about it: Sometimes even just saying the same sentence again. Even if it feels silly. Even if it is the emotional equivalent of blowing bubbles in a big bowl. Or sometimes if it gets to be too much. Stopping the conversation. Getting out of the water for a moment. And then dangling my feet in the water, heading back in to the conversation slowly. This practice of feeling something, pulling away from it, and heading back to it helps you reestablish a sense of control again.

Keeping those girls in mind helped me see what I needed to do. I can recall a time not too long ago where I struggled with disappointment—an emotion I detest. I had the mistaken notion that ‘good disappointment’ looked like “Oh well.” As in, “Oh well, it didn’t work out.” But, in fact, this wasn’t good disappointment, it was indifference. This wasn’t swimming with the emotion. This was staying on shore. What I needed to do was figure out what my life preservers were and stand knee deep in the emotion. Not drown in it. But just stand in it. Bravely. Knowing I had what I needed to be safe. And having the hope one day of freely splashing around.

The thing is you don’t have to swim perfectly to have a sense of accomplishment. The whole experience gives you glimmers of that feeling. Every day those girls came to the waterfront—they tried something new, and they laughed, and they met a part of themselves they hadn’t met before. This is really what it is all about. You become bigger each time you meet a new part of yourself. You don’t make the difficult emotion smaller. You make yourself bigger. You meet parts of yourself you haven’t met before.  The lake didn’t change. The girls did. I didn’t master disappointment that week. But I ventured into deeper water than I had before without going under. I met parts of myself I hadn’t met before. And so what if I am still holding a kickboard as I stand in the water. It means I am closer to swimming than I was before.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2018/2024

A thousand words for healing

“Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.”

— Wade Davis

“What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world”

— Ada Limón

On every walk, at some point, I notice that the conversation in my head is simply me  naming the plants and the trees I am walking past. Echinacea. Oakleaf hydrangea. Rugosa rose. White pine. Hibiscus. Kousa dogwood. Sycamore. Copper beech. One of my neighbors has a Dawn redwood tucked into a city backyard that brings me joy.

I don’t notice the naming at first. It’s automatic, and I probably notice when the naming doesn’t come automatically. When I have to think about the name of the plant or decide between two options. Once I notice, I am aware that it’s hard to stop. My mind wants to put words to things. Wants language for what I am seeing and hearing. But the language that seems most comforting are the names. Some of the names I have are the common names: Daisy. And some of the names I have are the Latin names—like the Latin for lady’s mantle-- Alchemilla mollis.

I notice the naming too when I am in a different country. Walking around the fields in Germany where I lived as an exchange student—looking at the same wildflowers and naming them in English, while my brain searches for their name in German because I know that these plants and trees are connected to their place, and their language. And learning their names in German, and then, when I come home, finding myself sad that some of the German names are prettier, and the flowers and trees should know their other beautiful names, which is what I think when I pass a Chestnut in bloom and think it would like to be called Kastania instead. And when I was hiking in Alaska I took pictures of the flowers I didn’t know to look up later—unable to imagine knowing a place, if I don’t know the names of what is blooming.

I think I find the act of naming comforting. It’s a small act ordering of the world and ordering of my thoughts that I can control: I can know in that moment that the thing I am looking at is a hardy geranium. Or a lemon lilly. Or a cornflower. In a world that is complicated, and with so many problems I can barely understand, and even fewer that I can fix, I can know something and feel a small, fleeting sense of certainty.

It mirrors my fascination with maps-with being able to see clearly where you are located in space. What is near something else. With the ability to try to understand a place that is new or a place you’ve never even seen.

And maybe I find the naming comforting because there is actually a word, or language to describe what I am looking at with some specificity—which isn’t always the case for other things, like processes. When you are trying to describe internal feelings or internal places or experiences—or areas of grief, or healing or growth—there are simply not words that are exact: that map to the place, or the specific nature of that experience.

For example, when you are trying to learn attachment in adulthood and you experience the feeling of rage that goes with toddlerhood, but which your adult brain knows is out-of-proportion to the situation—you aren’t experiencing true rage, nor, are you distant from it. You can try metaphor: I feel like a toddler. But that doesn’t really capture it. And without language, without map coordinates of where you are, it’s hard to feel found. It’s hard to feel like anyone else can actually understand.

And sometimes this lack of exact words or language can make it hard for us to even understand or have compassion for ourselves—especially in the areas of growth and healing. The language for the space between two states is so limited—yet the experience of being between two states takes up much of our lives. We have language, perhaps, for deep grief, for sorrow, for heartache. But what of those moments when you momentarily forget your grief—you begin to feel the world again—only to fall back in more deeply for the forgetting. Certainly, that space should have its own word?

Or what about the in-between spaces of growth—not where you are forging ahead, or mastering something new, but where you are learning to inhabit an old place you worked hard to get to, or slowing down and gaining strength in a place that is allowing you to grow. If there were actual names for these places we might rejoice when we arrived there, and we might feel proud of the work that we are doing there and be able to describe it better for people who are wondering how to get there.

But silence—not having words—is also protective. You can be safer if you are not found. You can navigate your own experience without interference or judgement. Too often human experience has been described only as a means to diagnose or create distance—such as depression or complicated grief. Or diagnose so that it fits into an insurance based system such as post-traumatic stress disorder.   

But I still believe that more words and language for these spaces and experiences would give us power and agency and hope. They would give us the ability to connect. But the words and language I am looking for aren’t clinical, or scientific, per se—but rather art. They are sketches and color studies. Lines of music.  Movements of dance. Fragments of poems. Like the murmurations of birds, flowing and beautiful, and ever on the move. You know what it exactly is, but it is never the same.

 © 2024 Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD