Combat the learned helplessness that comes from another mass shooting.

When a traumatic event happens once—humans are generally spurred into action by their biology—a huge release of adrenaline which makes you ready to fight, ready to act, and which sharpens memory of the event so you can remember it clearly to protect yourself from it in the future.

When traumatic acts are continually repeated, as they have become now for us with acts of domestic and international terrorism, mass shootings and violence, we have a different set of reactions. Our human physiology is built for efficiency. Traumatic events require a lot of energy from us and our brains and bodies tell us that we can’t afford that much energy and attention. So if trauma gets repeated-- instead of gearing up—we go numb. When a smoke alarm goes off in your house once, you pay attention—if it goes off every day, then you cut the wires so you can’t hear it anymore. 

Going numb serves the important purpose of allowing us to go on with our lives, it is what allows soldiers to keep fighting, and survivors in war zones to keep living. It is what allows abused children to keep going to school. It keeps you from taking in each new act of violence. It protects you from the extremes of emotion that could affect your memory, your health and your safety. It is the emergency response system that your body automatically employs when trauma gets repeated—hunkering down so you can conserve energy.

Survival is important. But surviving traumatic events without being able to control what is happening or what you are enduring can lead to another psychological phenomena: learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was a term coined by Maier and Seligman  (1967) about the impact of uncontrollable traumatic events. What they found in their research was that when you can’t control repeated traumatic events, you can become passive, and as Seligman describes, “come to believe that nothing you do will have any affect on the outcome, so why do anything?” Learned helplessness is the behavior of passively doing nothing, even when the possibility of action, escape or change in the traumatic experience is possible.

This is where we need to fight our biological autopilot that is telling us to just conserve our energy, sit tight, stay quiet and survive. This is an important biological gear that we have to save our lives, but it is also a gear that can keep us from changing what is broken, dangerous and actually within our control. Learned Helplessness comes from forgetting that we do actually have control. We can act, and not just passively accept the traumatic events.

The antidote to learned helplessness is action, it is taking control of what is in your control and working toward a safer and healthier situation. So rather than watching the news all day and lamenting another shooting. Do something to change the situation in any way that fits your values and integrity to create a safer more connected community and world. Learned helplessness is changed by starting to act. Small acts that can begin to remind all of us that we matter. That our actions can have an impact. That we don’t have to just sit passively by when bad things happen.

Turn off the television. 

Write a letter.

  • To an elected official about what you think needs to change in order to have a safer community. If you live in the US you live in a representative democracy and in order to make it work, you need to act: you need to vote and you need to let your elected officials know your viewpoints. Write or call the president, your governor,  your congressional representative. Contact information for all elected officials, national and local
  •  Write thank you cards to the Orlando Police Department (100 S Hughey Ave, Orlando, FL 32801) or the Orlando Regional Medical Center (52 W Underwood St, Orlando, FL 32806) thanking the first responders and the medical personnel for their hard work and care. 
  • Write a letter of gratitude to a member of the armed services who is working on your behalf to fight terrorism. You can use this resource to write.

Donate:

Build community.

  • Create a healthy dialogue in your community about creating safer and healthier communities. Kinder communities. More respectful communities. You can use this resource or this organization. 

Do something kind.

  • Do something kind for children, for the elderly, for first responders, for anyone: Do something. Bake a cake, mow a lawn, read a book out loud, donate clothing, volunteer with a troop, offer to make or bring dinner, no matter how big or small. Act with kindness. 

 

 

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