A Healing Cartography of Lost

“The Catalan Atlas was the definitive mappomondo of its time. It included the latest information brought back by Arabic and European travelers. But perhaps the atlas’s most important contribution was what it left out. On other maps, unknown northern and southern regions were included as places of myth, of monsters, anthropaphagy, and sea serpents. But the truth-seeking, fact faithful Catalan Atlas instead left unknown parts of the earth blank. This blankness was labeled simply and frighteningly Terra Incognita, challenging every mariner who unfurled the chart. Maps of history have always been less honest. Terra Cognita and Terra Incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain as transparent as rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory. ”

— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

I am not sure of where to start, but even in this statement, I am revealing the truth about the problem: it is hard to describe lost.  The very nature of feeling lost can make your words scramble in your brain and crumble in your mouth. It can make your thoughts dissipate like clouds. Lost keeps you lost by making it feel nearly impossible to give directions to anyone else of where you are when you are lost.

Lost is the exile of survival. It is where you escape to and then can’t find a way out of. Lost feels like it follows the rules of old legends and tales—you cross a threshold, and you are in. But once in, you can no longer find the entry.

Lost is sort of a double edged landscape. It can feel awful to feel so isolated, so abandoned, so left behind. And yet, lost can be the best protection you may have known. It may have been the perfect hiding places for parts of a self that you wanted to save, wanted to protect from whatever war or grief or terror you have experienced. Being lost may have felt safe. May sometimes still feel safe.

But I have learned something important this week, or learned something again, as if for the first time.  Lost is on the map. Lost is a place. It has edges, it has boundaries, it can be found. Which means you can be found. Depending on your history and how you protected yourself, lost can be vast and occupy entire regions—or it can be just a very deep valley somewhere.

I have always found that lost is the place I run from—desperately running toward anything else.  Lost is the terra incognita of your particular map. It is what remains unknown, but not entirely. As Anne Michaels states, “Terra Cognita and Terra Incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space.” The problem with lost is not that it is entirely unknown, nor is it that it is known. The problem is that lost is unexperienced, undigested, unintegrated—it is a series of feelings, events, fears, frozen in time. It is a museum of protections. The landscape of every way you tried to survive.

When you can feel in your heart, in your bones, on the soles of your feet that lost is a place everything changes. If lost is place you can know it, explore it, map it. You can name the swamps and forests that have trapped you. When you can know the edges and fences of lost, then you can find how to enter and exit. You can leave the gate open and realize that entry is a choice, and exit is a choice.

You realize that the only way to explore lost is to stand still. To sit. To stay with yourself. To not run. The best way to explore lost is with someone else. A guide, a fellow explorer, someone who has mapped their own territory of lost. It’s not easy to let yourself be seen in lost, to let yourself lean on help in lost. But it is the way out. It is the way through.

When you can feel that lost is a place then you realize that it is a place in need. This feeling you have run from for years, feelings you have hated, or scorned. This feeling is something that needs your care—not just any care, yours. When lost is a place you can stop running towards something because you are already there. You can stop running away from something because you will still be there no matter how far you run. When lost is a place you can finally stop and rest. You can make camp. You can look around.  You have been found.

© 2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Hanging on to the Good and Bad to Heal from Trauma

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Last year in an article in Vanity Fair on PTSD in the military, Sebastian Junger highlighted an important problem with recovering from the trauma of war: there are parts of war, or parts of ourselves we found in war, that we don’t necessarily want to give up. Yes, soldiers experience trauma, but they also experience camaraderie and courage. As one soldier described it, "There was horror, there was beauty, both co-existed." And they can experience closeness with their fellow soldiers that is hard to find anywhere else. With the trauma of war, your identity and your survival become intertwined. The trauma can have you experience the best of yourself and the worst of yourself. And healing from it can be tricky because it’s not so easy to untangle them from each other. Fear of losing the good can make you not want to let go of the bad.

Trauma can make experiences feel more real than any ‘normal’ life. It washes the experience in an intensity that can be harder to recover from than any violence that was experienced. And when that experience was shared with comrades as can be in war, or family violence or gang violence, it can be especially hard to let go of. Not because you want the war back, but because you miss the closeness. You miss mattering that much. You miss having someone’s back and you miss someone having yours.

I don’t think this dilemma of the good and bad of trauma being intertwined is limited to war veterans. In any long term or repeated experience of trauma, your life was rarely a single experience. Even with repeated trauma there were good moments and beautiful moments and funny moments. There were brave moments and strong moments. And all of it belonged to you. It is always a mix of experiences.

And it’s not only the trauma that has these mixed experiences. So does healing from it. The good with the bad cuts both ways. Sometimes in healing you have to hold the bad experiences to keep the good ones. You have to be able to hold the memories of war to hold on to the memory of yourself as a loyal friend. Holding both aspects of the memory allows you to be whole.

And sometimes you have to hold the difficult emotions, like grief, when the good parts of healing happen. Healing doesn’t happen in simple sound bites where the experience is just one thing or another. It barely happens in sentences or paragraphs, where there is one line of thought. Healing really happens in poetry—where the paradoxes are written in emotion and contradiction and metaphor. Where all things can exist. As Rilke says, “Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.”

As I have said before, repeated trauma is really three kinds of trauma, 1) what did happen, 2) the protections you created to survive the trauma, and 3) what didn’t happen.  And these two opposing poles that Rilke describes can be seen as what did happen and what didn’t happen. And it is my experience as both a therapist and a client—that when you finally get some of what didn’t happen—that grief can crash down on you. Not a painful keening grief, but a heavy weight that sits on your chest. It catches you off guard because for a moment you are happy, you are relaxed, you have settled into a brand new feeling. And then suddenly the grief crashes down.  

With the new good feeling, you have to take, for a while, the grief that held its place for a long time. And with the scary things you experienced, you also have to hold the good days you had. This is complicated work—this holding both, this holding all. I think we all hope for something more simple—and so do the people who love us and try to console us. We wish for a world where good and bad reside on opposite ends of the town, not in the same house, let alone the same body. We wish for the ability to live in a simple uncomplicated world. But with the experience of trauma comes of life of complexity. You didn’t choose it, but its yours. Both in the experience of trauma and the healing from it. Between those two opposing poles, where God learns, you will heal.

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Training Wheels for Mindfulness: The Quiet Place

The first practice for your work ahead with mindfulness is to practice sitting quietly. This is the step before meditation—before mindfulness. This is a practice of learning to simply sit and not do anything in particular, and to do in such a way that you feel comfortable and soothed.

The quiet place is not a new concept. Almost every organized religion has some concept of this stillness. Prayer and meditation are common examples. These have existed for thousands of years because stillness was useful to the practice of the religion. But how is stillness useful to us? Why be still? From my perspective stillness, regardless of how you choose to use it, is like letting the water settle in a tidal pool. Suddenly all of the life that lives below the surface, which feeds the health of the whole sea, can be seen clearly. When the water is churned up, the life below the surface can’t be seen it. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there, it just means that you can’t see it.  When the water is still, you can see it, and appreciate it, and get a better sense of what lives beneath. And, we all know that the water will get choppy again. No seas on earth remains at the same level all of the time. Tides rise and fall, winds pick up. It is all part of it.  But learning to create stillness is an important balance to the choppiness we have all learned to create. All of our “addictions” and busyness keep us away from the rich life below the surface.

In this spirit, perhaps you need to find a comfy chair and wrap yourself in a blanket. Or maybe you will choose to sit on the porch, or on the patio. There is no right place. If you need music to keep yourself soothed and comfortable, that is OK too. (Wordless music would probably be best so that you may be more aware of your own words, but remember that the“music police” will not show up at your door—do what works for you). The advice I give the adolescents in my meditation groups is to “Get into any position that is comfortable to you.”  For now you are just going to practice the experience of quiet and stillness. Later on you can experiment with more formalized sitting/meditation practices. But right now the goal is not the posture. The goal is the state: letting yourself just be in the water, still or choppy, high or low tide.

OK. You have you comfortable position. Now what? There is the old joke about the young monk staring at an old monk who says, “Nothing happens next, this is it.” And on some level that is true. And on some level it is not. There are many texts about mindfulness and many people who have studied longer than I have. And I highly recommend their work. But I have found in my work with adolescents and adults who have had either trauma in their childhood or grief work of any kind, that learning to sit still is a difficult task and should be broken up into smaller steps. I like to think of it like training wheels for meditation.

If sitting in stillness is difficult for you because your thoughts race or you find your anxiety level rising, it may be important for you to start with a more structured road into the stillness world. I would recommend using guided meditation tapes, attending yoga classes, or using guided imagery techniques that helps you feel held and safe. We can go back to the swimming metaphor. If you are just learning to swim, you don’t just dive into the deep end. You are allowed (even encouraged) to dangle your legs in the water. Use a kickboard. Or even water wings. You may want an instructor or lifeguard nearby. I may be dragging out the metaphor too much, but I can’t emphasize enough that this is a very personal process, and you need to do what helps you feel safe. If you terrify yourself, or are too uncomfortable, it is unlikely that you will choose to go back into the water.

“What do I do?” You ask. Just sit. Just notice what it is like to sit. What happens for you? Does your mind wander? What does it wander to? No judgments. Just explorations.  Just like the tidal pool. What is below the surface? What do you see? Starfish? Seaweed? Nothing? What if I get distracted? Just notice it and go back and look into the tidal pool. What if I get bored? Be bored and look at the tidal pool. How long should I stay in this quiet place? And here I go back to the swimming metaphor. Stay in the water long enough to stretch your new skills, but not so long that you get overwhelmed or your lips turn blue.

Learning to be quiet with yourself takes time. I know it sounds simple. It is not. You need to build your stillness muscles slowly and carefully. Choose times which are most conducive to learning. Not your most miserable moments. Learn to swim in a safe, calm atmosphere. Not as your ship is sinking into the Arctic Ocean.

Let’s give you a realistic range of stillness muscle building. I have worked with some teens who can only tolerate 30 seconds of complete quiet (without some guiding instruction) when they begin to learn how to be still with themselves. But even kids with horrendous trauma (kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a car, e.g.) are able to eventually work up to 10 minutes of quiet over the course of months. Quiet muscles that never have been used are like atrophied legs that have never been walked on. You will need to rehab them slowly and carefully. But what a sense of reward when you can use them!

“Nothing is happening.” This is a common statement. Quiet time is not about making something happen. It is not about becoming someone else. Or becoming better, or more enlightened, or anything in particular. It is about knowing what is there. It is very basic, and sometimes may even seem boring. That is OK. Have you ever heard a little kid talk about their day at school? They go on and on, often repeating themselves and as hard as you listen you really can’t discern a plot or even really understand what happened. This is like sitting with yourself in the quiet place. The point isn’t the content of the story. The point is to be present to listen to the story. To hold the experience for the child. What I am asking you to do is hold your own experience. No matter what it is. There is no right way. There is no performance.  Over time this will shift. A child who is able to tell her stories gradually gains confidence in her own voice and it gets clearer and makes more sense over time. This will happen for you as well.

The quiet place is about sitting within a safe, trusted space. It is about building a relationship with yourself. Over the years I have noticed in my work as a therapist, especially with my child clients who live in precarious situations (foster care, etc.), that relationships, like the quiet place, are very basic, but not easy. Trustworthy relationships are really about consistent, benign, attendance over time.  Even the most severe mistrust gives way to this powerful force. Like water or wind wearing away rock. Attendance over time is almost invisible, but it is transformative. This is where the word “practice” comes in. You must find time daily to go to your quiet place. Maybe it is one minute a day. Maybe it is forty minutes a day. There are monks that do this for three years straight –but even they had to start somewhere.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016

Finding Light Inside Your Darkness

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work.”

— Wendell Berry

Have you ever been knocked down by something in your life? Completely and utterly brought low to a place you hadn’t known? Vulnerable in a way that you never had been before? If so, you will know where I am coming from. And if not, you may understand someone else in your life better. Or someone in your community better.

I am getting over a bad bout of illness. The details are unimportant. There are always people who are more sick or less sick than you. Not unlike grief or trauma where somebody has always had it much worse or much easier than you did. Comparisons are really pointless. What matters is the impact. It doesn’t matter if it was a small tornado or a large tornado that tore down your house. What matters most in that moment is that you lost your house. What matters is how you feel looking at the wreckage. What matters is how you can come back from it.

The nature of this particular bout of illness shattered my illusion of resilience. I lost the innocence of believing I could gut through anything. It’s not that I have never been sick, in fact, I have been sicker. But this small tornado of illness tore down my house –the house I had built, had worked so hard to rebuild, the house I thought I belonged to. A house of energy and can-do-it-ness. A house with rose colored windows that determined how I saw the world. A house that never thought it could get knocked down.

I have tried to explain this new place, post-sickness, and the first description would would be ‘not-me.’ But that’s not accurate. It is me. It’s just a side of me that I have never gotten to know. It’s just a side of me that I have been terrified of, have denied was there, even when it was there. Other times of being hit by life I was able to dodge this side, I had enough energy or something, to slip through some door and leave this darker, slower side behind. But not this time. This time, slow and dark  was all I had.

This period of time is marked by absence—and not surprisingly, feels negative; the very definition of something that is marked by absence rather than presence. But it is really both. It is the absence of the familiar side of the self; and the presence of the unfamiliar. With the slow, dark side of myself that has every right to feel and act negatively—at best, I have flat out ignored this side, and at worst I have been mean and disdainful. And now, after all these years—this dark side and I are roommates.

As Wendell Berry said, when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. And that’s exactly where I am. In this unfamiliar place, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t have my familiar ways of marshaling myself and the world. I no longer know what to do, and I find myself in my real work: learning to belong to this side too. Learning that belonging to our dark side, or our slow side, or our exhausted side means that we belong to something bigger, not smaller.  I had no idea that I would learn this: there is an odd reassurance in sitting so close to the thing that used to scare you away. I wouldn’t say that my slow, dark roommate and I are best friends, but I wouldn’t say we are enemies any longer. She, the slow, darker side, is now a part of the mix; will be a part of the familiar, will be built in to the new house as it is built again. I know this is true, and I have no real idea of what it means. But not knowing, yes, that is where the work is.

© 2016 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD