Go ahead risk it--meet your own voice and be brave, let your light shine.

For many years, there was a theory that play was an effective tool for learning for mammals because it was merely practice. The theory was that kittens practice play fighting because they are preparing for actual fighting or learning to catch prey. Or that young primates practiced caring for younger siblings as a way to learn child-rearing. But the people who researched play discovered that there was something bigger going on besides mere practice. Play fighting, as it turned out, was entirely different than actual fighting. Play fighting is reciprocal, and mammals that play fight go for different parts of the body than an animal would in actual attack. The researchers discovered that when juvenile animals were prohibited from playing—they were fearful and anxious of everyday activities. They were even fearful and anxious of social interactions. It turns out that play is about coming in to contact with the unknown. Play is not the practice of activity—play is the practice of being brave—of mastering the fear of whatever you are practicing. If play is a practice for anything—play is a practice of courage, of meeting what is unexplored, and learning to dance with it.

A few weeks ago I headed out to my alma mater to do some writing for the weekend. I was struggling with a section of a book, and decided some space away, in the company of students might inspire me to work through the challenge. But I didn’t get my best lesson that weekend in that beautiful library. Instead, my real learning came in the student center.

This past fall I had met a group of current students at a crew reunion, and they walked in to the student center the first night I was eating dinner and we greeted each other again—and then they joined me for dinner. When I asked what they were up to for the weekend, two of them offered that they were in an Acapella performance the next night and encouraged me to come, “We’ll save you a seat!” And so I showed up the next night, glad of something to look forward to, but thinking it was just going to be a lovely evening of entertainment—and not the education—and gift-- it turned out to be.

Their performance had a rhythm. One of the group members would come forward and introduce a fellow singer, and then that singer would sing a solo. And as they each began their solo, they would begin tentatively, their voice a bit softer, a bit timid. They looked somewhat surprised by their own voices, and as they kept singing they would soon hit a place in the song that seemed to feel like home, where they suddenly became bigger than themselves---where it seemed that light literally shined out of them.

And the moment they found their voice, the voice that was unmistakably theirs—they not only shined—the entire audience shined too. That moment was electric. And it happened in every single performance. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later—but in each song, the performer would find her voice—find that part of herself that was connected to everything—the song, herself, the audience.

It was a reminder that finding your voice isn’t a matter, really, as I had always thought—of knowing what you believe or knowing what you want. Though there is an element of that at times. Marianne Williamson famously said that “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”  And in watching each of these performers, this dynamic was perfectly visible. It wasn’t that they couldn’t find their voice, it’s that when it first showed up, they were frightened by it. They kept their distance from it—inching toward it slowly. And somewhere along the way, they found their courage, they lost their fear and connected with the voice that was truly theirs.

The beauty of this particular concert was that I got a chance to watch, and learn, this lesson over 20 times. It was true of every performer, and it never got less beautiful, and their connection with their voice, less perfect. And it was perhaps the richest reminder of what is missing when we are trying to do anything new, or anything that is important to us.

I sat stunned during the concert at the beautiful simplicity of being brave in the face of fear and awkwardness. Of trusting yourself to lean on your own passion and the group of people singing with you, and to keep going. Stepping off some wonderful edge and finding that your wings not only held—they were amazing. I sat there wishing that I could hold on to the sense of wonder, and goosebumps and awe that I had each time these women did it—became the biggest and most beautiful versions of themselves. It’s so hard to hard to remember that you have to risk it—risk meeting your voice, yourself, your light. It’s not so much about finding your voice—it’s more about being able to stay brave when you meet it.

And now it’s the season of New Year’s resolutions and year-plans and plans to change our behavior or goals—most often based on what we perceive to be our flaws or the things that we don’t like. But after watching this concert, I am convinced that Williamson was right—it’s our light where our biggest challenge is—not our flaws. So instead of a long list of goals and resolutions—let’s all step off the edge of our nests, with our voice, with our practices. Be brave with your off-key notes, and messy drafts and bumpy meetings. Speak up, speak out and leap from the nest that you know as familiar. Meet your voice, meet your light and stay. Stay and ride the waves. Let the wind push you, grab you and trust your wings. You will fly, you will shine, and because of it, we all shine.

© 2017 Gretchen l. Schmelzer, PhD

 

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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