It's never too late: Old dogs can heal

I have heard so many people say things like, “It’s too late for me to heal what happened” and “There’s no one who could help me” or “I’m too old to get help for this.” These statements are some of what has motivated to write about trauma and to create a better understanding about healing from trauma.

I believe it is harder to heal from trauma the older you are—but not because you are old. As I have described in an earlier blog, repeated trauma or long term trauma is not one trauma. It is really 3 forms of trauma. The first form of trauma is the trauma that you experienced—the ‘what did happen.’ The second form of trauma are the protections –the defenses—the way of being that you created to survive the trauma. These protections become a part of your personality, your way of being, your habits and routines. And the third form of trauma, the unseen impact of trauma, is what didn’t happen- it is all the things you didn’t or couldn’t do or learn because you were living in trauma. It is the experience of peace and calm, it is where your attention could have gone if it weren’t focused on survival.

It is harder to heal from trauma when you are older not because you are old, and an old dog can’t learn new tricks, or there aren’t good people to work with you and your trauma, it is harder because you have lived for so much longer with the protections and defenses. You have lived so much longer behind your wall—and it feels impossible to imagine any other way of being. It feels impossible to imagine being outside of the prison with the wind on your face—in a world where you don’t know the rules. Healing from trauma means letting go of these protections—living without them—for moments at first, and then gradually for hours, days, months. And it means risking new behavior, risking experiencing the ‘what didn’t happen.’

And I describe it as a risk on purpose. Living with your old protections, living as if the trauma could happen at any time again—that feels safe.  There was Japanese Lieutenant Hiroo Onada who held out fighting on a Philippine Island from 1944 until he was finally found and relieved of his duties in 1974. 1974. The war had been over for decades. But continuing to fight the war sometimes feels more sane. It makes the war more worthwhile. It provides hope for a different outcome. It can be so hard to let go of the war knowing that when you do, it is really over. It happened and you can’t change the outcome. Surrender really is surrendering the hope for an outcome that can’t happen.

Leaving the world of trauma, of your protections, where you are always ready to go back, is a big move. And anyone’s hesitation about healing, about wondering whether it’s worth it, or whether they can handle it, is a valid worry. It isn’t easy. It involves a lot of hard work, and it involves a lot of grief. Only in the quiet after the war can you begin to remember and feel what it felt like during the war. When you finally start living without your protections, when you finally start risking the new experiences—really, only then, can you fully feel what it felt like to live through the trauma at all. And many people catch glimpses of this grief and think it would be impossible, think that they wouldn’t survive it, they catch a glimpse and they say, “No way.”. But they forget the most important thing: they already have survived it. The grief is old. It is painful, but it will go.

There’s no magic in healing. You won’t become someone else. But you will get to experience yourself without the emotions of survival running your life. You will get to see your life not just in a past-perfect tense of what happened and what might have been, but also in the present, and the future- of what might be. No, it’s not easy to surrender your island of trauma, the safety that you know, to risk a different safety, a peaceful safety decades later. No it’s not easy, but you were strong enough to survive—which means you are more than strong enough to heal.

  © Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD 2014

 

 

The Power of Despair

GLS, 1997

GLS, 1997

“There comes a time my friends when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There….We are here—we are here because we are tired now.”
— Martin Luth King, Jr, Montgomery, December 1955

Nearly two Score and Nineteen Years ago on December 1, 1955,  Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus. She didn’t die during her arrest unlike many of the recent events we have been witness to, but many others during that era did. Some died during the arrest, and many, many died after they were taken to jail awaiting trial. Sheriffs simply opened jail cells and let lynch mobs take them. Juries acquitted anyone who was white. This was a long, violent, and tiring story in 1955. It is an unconscionable and exhausting story now. There was reason for despair then, and there is certainly reason for despair now.

Despair is defined as the complete loss or absence of hope and it is one of the human emotions that can feel the most painful and dark because despair knocks the light right out of you. It leaves you without a compass, without the energy to get up, without a reason to. Despair begins to tell you that there is no point to anything, that you might as well lay there, not get up. Nothing matters.

As someone who is wired as an optimist I find despair one of the most intolerable emotions. I am usually not just a glass is half-full person, I usually imagine an additional glass entirely. I have wielded hope as a massive source of energy and protection against despair. But eventually it doesn’t work: you find yourself face to face with the endless of fight against injustice—against something so very wrong—and whether that injustice or wrong happened just to you, or someone you love, to a group you belong to or all of humanity—you see it for what it is and you can’t imagine how you are going to live in a world and know, really take in, that injustice. That wrong. That level of sorrow for knowing that you couldn’t change it and knowing the size of it now, not knowing how it can be changed. You believe it is impossible. You are brought to your knees.

And paradoxically that is often the turning point of despair. At my most despairing I have gone in to talk to my therapist and chosen to sit on the floor, instead of the chair. I wanted to sit on the floor because I wanted to be where I was—the bottom—the place ‘you can’t fall below.’  And in admitting I was at the lowest place possible, I found the ground. I found something that felt real and solid. The healing part of despair is that it can actually be incredibly grounding: you know where you are, you see the world as it is, and you can get some clarity about what is wrong—what is really wrong at the root of it all.

In despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of ourselves. And in despair we find the most pessimistic and hardened parts of our communities. In finding our darker sides we are, ironically, more whole.

John Lederach who has worked with communities post-conflict on peacebuilding talks about the fact that the pessimism of the people who have lived through the worst cycles of violence may be one the biggest sources of true change. He calls their pessimism a gift, not an obstacle. Lederach calls pessimism grounded realism: “grounded realism constantly explores and questions what constitutes genuine change. For people who have lived for long periods in settings of violence, change poses this challenge: How do we create something that does not yet exist in a context where our legacy and lived history are alive and live before us?”

Despair brings us in contact with our most authentic selves and it compels us to demand that authenticity from the relationships around us. When we are feeling despair we cannot in any way tolerate fakeness, clichés or bullshit. When we are despairing we need authentic, we need real. We need it from ourselves and we need it from others. Hope is the fuel that helps us keep moving toward healing, toward the better imagined state. But hope often keeps us from being able to see and take in the trauma that has occurred- and it keeps us from seeing how we protect ourselves from knowing this—hope can keep us from becoming whole. You can’t do surgery in rose-colored glasses.

Despair is a turning point. In a state of despair you see the bigness of it all—and because of that you are freed from a world of simplistic duality—of there being an easy answer, of it being this-or-that. Despair helps you hold the complexity, which is the only real hope of healing. So we need to sit with our despair, sit on the ground if necessary, and we need to be able to sit with other’s despair as well. We need to trust that the ground that has been burned by despair is preparing for the seeds of change, the seeds of growth. And we must be the faithful gardeners of this growth by holding our pessimism and distrust and risking our hope again. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2016


Want to Heal from Trauma? Go Vote!

This has not been a typical United States election. I come from a family that runs the gamut of political views and typically, as Americans, we disagree on issues, on how big the government will be, how the government will run and who will get what resources. These differences have always been challenging enough. It isn’t always pleasant, and many a Thanksgiving dinner has been awkward when politics gets brought up. But that holiday awkwardness has become an American tradition, right along with the pumpkin pie.

But not this election. This election has been different than most elections in my lifetime. This election has been driven not just by the issues, but also by a powerful narrative of trauma. By the things that were said that are making people feel unsafe and afraid—for themselves, for their families. Mothers and fathers fearing for their disabled children, or for their gay and lesbian children, or their African-American children, or Latino children or Muslim children. Children fearing for themselves and their friends. And thousands and thousands of women who began to relive their sexual traumas. The numbers are staggering. When Kelly Oxford tweeted in response to the Trump tapes, “Tweet me your first assault,”  27 million women responded. 27 million! It is simply staggering. It seems that anyone with a trauma history was triggered during this election. And trauma survivors have begun to speak up in droves. 

In this election the political and the personal have collided with trauma. There have been so many women telling friends, FaceBook pages, and their husbands, boyfriends, wives and significant others the stories that had remained hidden for years. And while each individual will be on a different journey of healing for her or his story, this much is true: action heals. The very nature of trauma is helplessness. At the moment of trauma, a victim is rendered helpless—and this inability to act on your own behalf becomes part of the trauma. But this reawakening of trauma on such a large scale, and as a community brings with it a possibility that may have eluded most of us. While trauma can make us feel helpless and alone: that situation is no longer true. It all already happened: you are here now, and can heal, act and impact your world. You are not alone---you are a part of a community of survivors and warriors. And you can take action, you can vote.

Citizenship, it turns out, may be one of the greatest healing interventions. As a consultant, I have worked in communities from Cambodia to Alaska with leaders who confront social issues through engaging their own leadership and using this leadership in their communities. They have confronted the trauma in their communities by doing action projects that get at the root cause of the social problems they most struggle with—whether that is HIV/AIDS or domestic violence and sexual assault. I have watched leaders and communities begin to heal their trauma through action—through the experience of using their own agency and power to take on the problem. They heal by taking action, and they heal by being part of a community who supports each other through the work of healing through action. They are not helpless, because they can take action. And they are not alone, because they can do it together. 

And this is what available to us now. Vote. Volunteer. Help. Support. Canvass. Call. Donate. Drive. Act. Lead. Healing is possible because you can take action. And no one heals alone.  We can do this together. 

© 2016 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, Ph

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Halloween: A Chance to Dance with your Shadow

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
— C.G. Jung

It was a sunny day yesterday and I took a short walk. At one point as I was looking down because the sun was so bright I saw the perfect shadow of a butterfly. The shadow was huge and flapping and caught me by surprise because you don’t expect to see a butterfly when you look down.

The shadow was this sign that there was something else, something beautiful if I could find it. I looked up and the sun was bright and at first I couldn’t see the actual butterfly, just the shadow, the sunlight obscured the butterfly as a silhouette. I stood patiently, and had to look away from the sun for a moment—and then I saw it. Bright orange and brown. Flapping toward the autumn trees, practically blending in.

I need to see my shadow, befriend it, and by doing so, find my own beauty.

Everyone has a shadow side, the side we don’t want to show the world. The things we don’t like about ourselves or others. Our shadow isn’t always bad, but it’s the part of us we don’t know, don’t want to know, are afraid to know, or don’t know how to handle.

And that brings me to this holiday: Halloween. It is the holiday of shadows—of bringing what most frightens us, what is hidden from us, what is unpracticed in us—out in the open. It is the opportunity to ‘come as you aren’t’—which children know instinctively. They dress as the most powerful beings they can: superheroes, princesses, ninja warriors—they dress in costumes that makes them feel all the power that they usually can’t as children and they revel in it. The bigger the cape, the longer the dress, the more weapons they carry—the better.

Halloween allows you to literally live and play inside your shadow—dress as your darker side, your lighter side, you more feminine side, your more powerful side. See if you notice an ability to do or say things that you can’t normally do. Ruth Reichl, in her book Garlic & Sapphires, talks about her experience as a NY Times food critic. She would dress in disguise as a variety of characters so that restaurants wouldn’t recognize her and she found that in certain disguises she had the power to do things she couldn’t as her ‘regular self.’ For example, in one disguise, she could assertively send food back to the kitchen –something she normally couldn’t do.

So let this Halloween be a beginning.: A new year’s celebration of your shadows. A chance to bring one of your shadow selves out for a dance—out in to the light for chance to see it’s beauty, it’s usefulness, it’s strength. You could bring it out playfully in costume, or simply in spirit.

And tomorrow when the holiday is over—you can still find ways to make friends with your shadows. Whatever you are working with right now. My experience is that something happens, some small piece of growth happens, some new view of the world occurs and something cracks. Something cracks enough for light to shine in on the hidden things and you can get a glimpse of the shadow. These cracks are permanent. And once light gets in, the shadow is seen, it’s attached, it’s connected to who you are.

Our shadows, the things we don’t like, can’t do, do too much of, can’t feel, feel too much, feel shame about, can’t tolerate—all these things over the years are hidden—they are our shadows. But they are also what makes us whole. Hidden in our shadows are also our butterfly wings, our superhero capes, and our dancing shoes. Take them out, get to know them, and twirl around. 

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD