Rerun: Become Sea Glass--Brave the Waves!

Many years ago in my psychology training I had the idea that as the years went by I would get better at what I did and it would all feel more polished, more perfect, more decisive. I had a picture of me finishing my training all bright and shiny. But what happened was that instead of bright and shiny I became more and more like sea glass.

Sea glass is beautiful. Everyone loves sea glass, and everyone wants to find sea glass, but no one wants to become sea glass. It is worn and shaped by the forces around it. It is beautiful because of what it has endured. The original colors change, but become something even more beautiful. But sea glass is never bright and shiny. It is not perfect glass. In fact, it is broken glass—the furthest thing from perfect.

In my training I had my rough edges worn away from the hours and people and experience. And mostly my mistakes. Hundreds and hundreds of mistakes. Things I should have said and things I shouldn’t have said. Thousands of hours of good intentions and hundreds and hundreds of misses and repairs. Years of training had my heart become softer and my thinking less definitive. It was nothing I could have imagined when I began, and yet as I headed out into my career I was grateful.

Sea glass isn’t like regular glass. It is sturdy. It no longer breaks easily. The only way to become sea glass is to put yourself out into the surf and let yourself get hit by wave after wave. Through all seasons and all storms. You need to get buried by the beach pebbles and rolled around in the stones. You need to get pounded by the surf, and hit by the wind, and scorched by the sun.

I have been thinking about sea glass as I head into my goals for 2015 and with all the discussions of change this past week. So much of what can get accomplished in terms of change or healing or growth is our willingness to put ourselves out into the surf and let the waves crash over us. Healing requires this courage—to keep putting yourself in the space of healing, keep risking the conversation, keep tolerating the emotions, keep learning new behaviors.

And all growth means letting yourself make mistakes. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Letting yourself roll around and crash on the stones. Letting your courage help you wear those rough edges off, help you reveal your deep colors, help you become sturdy.

Beach glass takes time. On the beach in Maine in the summer, when you find a piece of glass that is still shiny, you throw it back in. You give it more time. And thinking about this reminds me that maybe the goals that I have been struggling with are just pieces of glass that need more time. I need to throw those goals back in this year. Let the surf hit them again. Let myself struggle and make mistakes and run up against hard edges—and let those mistakes and hard edges soften me, and help me bring out my beauty. I encourage you to do the same.

This post originally ran on December 30 to inspire change in the New Year. As I head back to Maine, and wrestle with some big changes, I thought I could use the reminder, and that maybe you could too. Brave the Waves!

Parent's Corner: The Letter Your Teenager Can't Write You

Dear Parent:

This is the letter that I wish I could write. 

This fight we are in right now. I need it. I need this fight. I can’t tell you this because I don’t have the language for it and it wouldn’t make sense anyway. But I need this fight. Badly. I need to hate you right now and I need you to survive it. I need you to survive my hating you and you hating me. I need this fight even though I hate it too. It doesn’t matter what this fight is even about: curfew, homework, laundry, my messy room, going out, staying in, leaving, not leaving, boyfriend, girlfriend, no friends, bad friends. It doesn’t matter. I need to fight you on it and I need you to fight me back.

I desperately need you to hold the other end of the rope. To hang on tightly while I thrash on the other end—while I find the handholds and footholds in this new world I feel like I am in. I used to know who I was, who you were, who we were. But right now I don’t. Right now I am looking for my edges and I can sometimes only find them when I am pulling on you. When I push everything I used to know to its edge. Then I feel like I exist and for a minute I can breathe. I know you long for the sweeter kid that I was. I know this because I long for that kid too, and some of that longing is what is so painful for me right now.

I need this fight and I need to see that no matter how bad or big my feelings are—they won’t destroy you or me. I need you to love me even at my worst, even when it looks like I don’t love you. I need you to love yourself and me for the both of us right now. I know it sucks to be disliked and labeled the bad guy. I feel the same way on the inside, but I need you to tolerate it and get other grownups to help you. Because I can’t right now. If you want to get all of your grown up friends together and have a ‘surviving-your-teenager-support-group-rage-fest’ that’s fine with me. Or talk about me behind my back--I don’t care. Just don’t give up on me. Don’t give up on this fight. I need it.

This is the fight that will teach me that my shadow is not bigger than my light. This is the fight that will teach me that bad feelings don’t mean the end of a relationship. This is the fight that will teach me how to listen to myself, even when it might disappoint others. 

And this particular fight will end. Like any storm, it will blow over. And I will forget and you will forget. And then it will come back. And I will need you to hang on to the rope again. I will need this over and over for years.

I know there is nothing inherently satisfying in this job for you. I know I will likely never thank you for it or even acknowledge your side of it. In fact I will probably criticize you for all this hard work. It will seem like nothing you do will be enough. And yet, I am relying entirely on your ability to stay in this fight. No matter how much I argue. No matter how much I sulk. No matter how silent I get.

Please hang on to the other end of the rope. And know that you are doing the most important job that anyone could possibly be doing for me right now.

Love, Your Teenager

What if we believed that shame is actually the compass?

“You know, I once read an interesting book, which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. ‘What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?’ And so they sit there and they... die.”

— David Mamet

In healing from trauma, shame should be one of the biggest indicators of healing, of being on the right track. When shame hits, we should all feel good—that things are moving, shifting, healing. Like when a wound heals over and it gets itchy because the skin is growing back.

But I have found that we rarely see shame as the harbinger of good news. The sign that we are actually on the right path. When we are lost in our own wilds of healing, we often also risk, as Mamet reports, dying of shame: we hit the places in our healing that are uncomfortable, that feel like a backwards slide, that are vulnerable. These experiences catapult us into shame and we freeze, we stop reaching out, we spiral down and feel more and more lost. Instead of looking up and out and calling for help, we berate ourselves for being “back here again” “feeling this way again.” We say things like “I thought I was done with this.”

Shame is almost always secondary. It is a judgment about where we are. Shame isn’t being lost. It is the feeling we put on our experience of lost. Shame isn’t the feeling of grief or rage or desire. It is the feeling we put on top of those feelings so we don’t have to feel them. People die of shame in the wilds because they can’t stop the judgment about how they got lost. And instead of sitting still and being mindful of where they actually are and where they have been: shame spins them in a circle of where they wish they were. Shame keeps them from finding the way out.

And in healing from trauma it is absolutely no different. This spring I have had a lot of work and travel. And I also took on moving. I anticipated a number of stressors that went with all of this, but didn’t anticipate the healing work it would generate: when you shift every system in your life, things will get unearthed. I think this happens to a lot of trauma survivors: you plan some big changes in your life, good changes, growth changes—and then this growth shifts you enough to heal. What needed to be healed was waiting for exactly this series of changes to happen. But it doesn’t make you feel good, or happy because what needs to be healed makes you feel lost: and then you end up feeling betrayed by your own feelings, “What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?” And you risk, as Mamet, says, dying of shame. Or at least, being stuck in the woods forever.

But the thing is--I know the way out. I have been here before. But I never, ever, remember at first. At first I panic and run in circles desperating doing everything I can do NOT to feel whatever it is I am feeling. I rant and complain about what I WANT to be feeling instead of accepting and talking about how I am actually feeling. I run through an entire argument in my head and end up back exactly where I started--only more exhausted and full of despair. 

But there is always a way out. In fact, the only way out of this lost place, and the shame that can come with it is to stop. Look around. Be willing to say exactly where you are. Give that place words. Is it angry? Furious? Desperate? Exhausted? You will know you hit the right words when your body lets go: you cry, you can breathe, you relax. When you slow down and name the place where you actually are -- you are no longer lost. You have been found.

In the forest of healing, shame is almost always a sign that you are standing at the point of rescue. Shame is the sign pointing exactly to what needs to be said –out loud—if possible. Instead of it being the thing that spins us around, shame might actually be the compass. It always seems impossible that you can be found as you are, wherever you are. But really, it is the only place that you can be. I don't know why I can never remember this when I feel lost. When I feel shame. I don't know why I need to learn this lesson over and over again. But I am fairly certain I am not alone in this. So join me. Stop. Breathe. Name where you are—no matter how much you have to fight shame to say it. Name where you are. Create your map. Let yourself be found.

© 2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

The Healing Power of Hide and Seek

Back in March, I wrote about the experience of being lost and found—how a cardinal had reminded me of the hope it can take to tolerate the experience of being lost and found.  And over the past few weeks I have found myself thinking again about the phrase—lost and found--partly because I have been struggling with ‘lost’ but also because I realized that it was something I had actually been playing with for a long time. For all of these many years I had had the perfect teacher.

I first met Katrina as a client. She was 10 and came to see me at the clinic I worked in when I was an intern. Lost and Found. Hide and Seek. This is where we started. There weren’t a lot of toys in the clinic, but I had two hand puppets: one was a salmon, and the other was a rooster. Katrina created the game. She would hide the puppets and I would have to find them. And then I would hide the puppets and she would find them. This was the only game we really played.

Eventually I expanded on this and created a sand tray out of a giant plastic storage bin. It held sand and a bag of plastic toys. Katrina created a similar game. She would hide the toys and I would find them. Then I would hide the toys and she would find them.

There was always a lot of anticipation: Would I be found? And always a bit of squealing or smiling and a look of triumph when it happened. Found!

There are many reasons that this game got created, but one I have grown to appreciate most over the years was that she was training me to be really good at hide and seek—to have the relational endurance I was going to need, with her. She couldn’t have known the future, and neither could I, but this game that we played for nearly a year was exactly the training that we both needed: we would play hide and seek with each other for another decade.

The first time I lost her she was hit by a van. It was a year after we started meeting and she had just turned 11. The trauma of the accident caused her to be in a coma. Visiting her in the hospital ICU, the energetic girl I knew had disappeared. I sat with her and talked and hoped she would come back. Eventually after many weeks she woke, and she was stepped down to another hospital for rehab. I found her room, and she was up and walking around –it was such a relief. But would Katrina be there? Would the head injury have taken her memory? Would she remember me?

I had made a small ‘travel version’ of her favorite sand tray: I used a Tupperware container and she recognized it instantly, “You know the rules!” She said. Which meant I had to turn around when she hid the toys in the sand. And I found them, as I had found her, this time.

Most people think of helping relationships as being helpful to the client. And they are. But they aren’t just healing for the client, they are also often healing for the helper. I have found that in order to help someone heal or grow, I usually have to heal or grow something in myself—and each client brings whatever that it is-- out of me. Katrina needed to learn that people stayed—and so did I. From the very beginning she asked me to play with this experience—and stretch the muscles that this kind of trust requires.

The next time that I lost her was about six months later when she was placed in foster care. Her placement was far away from the town where she lived and came to the clinic, so technically I would have to close her case and she would get another therapist. But I knew that she had just had such a tragic accident and the loss of her family and I didn’t think it would be helpful to have her be lost in a system where she was alone. I spent the early years of my career in residential treatment and so often in reading a kid’s chronology of events—they went into foster care and then it was years and years of moving around. I wanted to spare her that. I wouldn’t be able to.

I tried calling clinics nearby to see her there, but that didn’t work, so I convinced DSS to let me become a visiting resource. They said sure. So, my role permanently shifted, I drove to her foster home that Saturday and found her there.

She was sad, crying and lost. She had started school there, but was struggling. As she hid underneath a Tigger blanket she talked about how after the accident she had lost the ability to read. She felt stupid and she wasn’t sure what to do. I’ll never forget how bravely she was able to talk about the things that scared her most. How hard it must have been for her. We got her workbooks starting all the way back in first grade and she dutifully did them all. She hid in her closet and practiced reading—starting over with Harry Potter. She came all the way back to grade level. She lost her ability to be a student. And she found it again.

And then the lost, and found, continued. From foster home to foster home. I saw her in most foster homes and group homes she was in, but not all of them. She was moved from the DSS system into the DYS system and I lost her for a couple of years. Then I found her again. And then lost her again. And then much later, I looked for her on Facebook and found her. Shortly after that she actually moved in with me for a bit, with her daughter and then we went through another round of lost and found.

Recently it was my turn. I decided to move from my house and posted a picture of the ‘For Sale’ sign on Facebook. She called right away. “You’re moving!” she said. I reassured her that I wasn’t moving far away, but it wasn’t until this weekend I understood her concern. I had forgotten about our game, you see. I forgotten the rules—it was she who hid things first, not me.

We met for breakfast this weekend, Katrina, her daughter, and I. And she bravely told me, through tears, how hard it was that I was selling the house. That all these many years she knew where I lived, and knew if she could get to me, she would be safe. And now she didn’t know where I lived. After breakfast we drove out to the old house to say goodbye, and to the new house so she would know where it was. She had lost me and now she found me again.

You never know where healing is going to come from—and you never know when it will finally sink in. Some lessons take a really long time to understand and absorb.  All those many years ago with the salmon puppet and the sand tray, I didn’t know how much I would need to understand and really believe in the power of lost and found. I didn’t yet understand my lost parts—and I can’t say anymore whether I really understood them in others, but I recognized them.

When I first met Katrina, it was I who felt lost. My clinical internship had actually just ended tragically with a hospital closing down—I had to say goodbye to all thirty of my clients in three days. I had lost my colleagues, my clients and my sense of security, not to mention my paycheck. I had just started up in the clinic in the housing projects when Katrina first came in.  Her game of hide and seek was probably as healing for me as it was for her. She taught me how to hang on. Her situation demanded that I keep searching, keep finding. And it was helpful to her.

But it was also helpful to me. I learned that I was someone who didn’t give up, who will keep searching, keep waiting. I learned that lost was temporary. Maybe even necessary at times. I used all these muscles to learn how to find Katrina. But through this I believe she taught me to find myself. To not give up. To be patient through lost, all the way to found.

© 2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD