The Work Before the Work: The Healing Phase of Stabilization

This past week I was reminded how little the world understands of healing. So many people are trying to forge their way forward from the pandemic –carrying so many burdens—up against so many obstacles. They are facing challenges that would have been hard anyway, but with the exhaustion of the last two years, there is a new level of overwhelm and frustration.

When Covid-19 first hit, I encouraged people to add the phrase, “…in a pandemic” to the end of every sentence: “I’m helping my kids with their schooling…..in a pandemic.” “I’m managing a virtual team….in a pandemic.” I wanted people to understand that the task they were trying to do was not as simple as it seemed because the context had changed. I wanted people to understand that they were doing something that they had never done before—so they could hold their challenges with compassion.

As the pandemic shifts into a more chronic and ongoing state, it seems we need another infusion of compassion. We need a way to hold our current context that has us understand the task of healing that is required of us.

This week I got the image in my head that recovery from the pandemic looks like everyone getting in their cars and trying to drive back home to ‘normal’ (whatever definition they have of that) but the roads have all been destroyed in the last two years: we are all driving on roads full of potholes and frost heaves. It’s hard to drive—and it’s hard on the car. People keep feeling like it should just be a simple drive from here to there. But it’s jarring and exhausting and it feels like because of the condition of the road, the ‘car’ is always on the verge of breaking down. The party line is that the pandemic is ‘over’ and things are ‘back-to-normal’ now. But that isn’t most people’s experience. That isn’t what it feels like.

Healing from trauma isn’t a simple here-to-there journey anyhow. Healing happens in cycles; it’s spiral. My method of healing from trauma—the Cycle of Healing Repeated Trauma-- is made up of five distinct phases—or areas. These five phases of the cycle of healing are: Preparation— or the area of getting ready, Unintegration—or the area of a controlled coming apart, Identification—or the area of sorting, naming and mapping, Integration—or the area of weaving the pieces back together, and Consolidation—or the area of solidifying and stabilizing. From an emotional, cognitive, spiritual, physical and relational perspective, each phase or area has its own focus and purpose, as well as its own set of needs to attend to.

The first stage of healing is often ignored. It is the Preparation phase and the goal of this stage is to strengthen all of your resources both internally and externally and build a relationship with your support network. In this stage you strengthen your self-awareness and emotional management skills. You work on your communication skills and relationship skills. You make sure that you have a safe place to live and meaningful work (whether paid or unpaid). This stage mirrors preparation for a safe high-altitude climb. A climber must be physically healthy and strong, must be knowledgeable about the climb and how to use the right equipment, acclimate to the altitude, and be part of a well-functioning team in order to manage a trek safely. It is not possible to skip the Preparation stage of a high altitude climb without risking failure or injury, and it isn’t possible to skip the Preparation stage in healing from trauma either.

But the problem is that this crisis of Covid has catapulted everyone into a feeling of falling apart—into what feels like the Unintegration phase –and everyone feels like they should be through the healing journey—when in fact, it hasn’t yet begun.

When a healing journey is started in a crisis—you don’t just start in the middle, you back up-- you don’t even start with preparation—you back WAY up to start with stabilization.

Stabilization is the work before the work. It is the work we need to do even before the Preparation phase. Stabilization acknowledges that there needs to be a pause. There needs to be some assessment: what will help me feel sturdy? What will help me feel solid? It acknowledges that there may be pieces missing. That you may need to put some things into place for a while.

Stabilization recognizes that we now need to stop and assess what was hurt. We need to assess what needs repair. We need to strengthen or build our routines and resources that will help us lean into our strengths and strengthen our relationships. We need to build the muscles we will bring into the preparation phase.

The tasks of stabilization are concrete tasks—they are the daily routines, rituals and reflections that can help you and your family feel more grounded. They are the meetings and conversations that can help your work teams feel more solid. They are the tasks and behaviors that help the world feel more predictable and help relationships feel connected and trustworthy. Unlike an x-ray of a broken bone that can be identified and set with a cast—your stabilization is an assessment only you can make. Below are some questions to support you in this work. And meanwhile I encourage you to add a new phrase to each statement you make, “….while I am (we are) healing from a pandemic.”

 Questions to Support the Work of Stabilization and Preparation:

 1.     Take time to reflect on your losses over the past two years. What needs the most attention in your life?

2.     What routines support me feeling more solid? Do I have routines that support my mental/emotional health, physical health, relational health, & spiritual health?

3.     What are my strengths? How can I lean into them more to support me at this time?

4.     Do I have routines to support my relationships and spend time with the people who are important to me?

5.     How will I know I feel sturdy?

6.     How do I know I need to ask for help?

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

For more on the 5 Phase Cycle of Healing from Trauma read: Journey Through Trauma

Learning stillness in a vibrant world

“Between every two pines is a door leading to a new life.”
— John Muir

I don’t have two pines in my backyard—I have one. It’s a white pine, an eastern white pine. And it’s not technically in my backyard as it belongs to the neighbor. The trunk is right up against the property line and half of its branches and canopy reach into my yard. That’s the funny thing about trees, they really don’t care about our silly property lines. They often outlast them. There was a giant Tulip Poplar that marked the back corner of the backyard where I grew up in. The house is long gone—an entire neighborhood built on the properties of five neighboring previous houses. But the Tulip Poplar remains—marking an important coordinate on the old map of that world.

The truth is that you don’t need two pines to reach a new life. One is plenty. I remember a Maya Angelou speech where she began with, “A single individual plus God constitutes a majority.” She was speaking to the Mormon Church as a Black woman with nearly an entirely White audience, and spoke those words powerfully as a source of support for herself and a reminder, it seems, that God saw the world, and its people in it, differently. And sitting on my porch it may also be that one individual plus a white pine also constitutes a majority, or a multiplicity, or an entirety. At the very least—you feel like you have all you need for the morning. The white pine is teeming with life. Initially as I look out, the world seems quiet, but then you notice a few of the needles of the white pine quivering. And as you look longer, you notice nearly all of the needles are in motion.

This giant entity that seemed quiet and still moments before is humming with life. Bees and small wasps moving in an out of the needles and cones. Birds landing on the upper branches. The birds out of sight, but the branches bouncing with their weight. Squirrels running up the trunk and in to the canopy chasing each other. The tree is so big it’s hard to take in all of the action at once. The tree is so big you no longer see it as a tree. It’s a whole universe—and I am only really talking about what I see above ground.

Like everyone else, it seems, this summer, I am reading Finding The Mother Tree and learning about the life of trees below the surface. How they are able to talk with each other and support each other with mycorrhizal fungi  --- the root fungus that allows nutrients to pass from tree to tree. Once you learn about these underground networks between trees you can’t look at a tree or a forest the same way. You see them all as friends holding hands. You see the whole world interconnected in a way that seemed abstract before, but which now feels authentic and true. Which has me look at my pine and wonder what are its connections to the others trees that are nearby? Who are its friends, cousins, children? What is its relationship to the weeping cherry in the yard next door? And to the white pine two backyards away that split from a lightning strike earlier this summer?  Did my pine feel the loss? Is it mourning?

Or is tree time so slow that the loss won’t be felt for a while—the way that we see starlight from stars that have since burned out? I don’t know how slow tree time is, but I think part of the reason that trees feel so healing to me is that they do hold an alternate view of time. They have the capacity to hold the busy-ness of life in their canopy and the stillness and depth in their trunk and roots. The busy part I am good at. But the stillness and depth are my learning edge, and right now my white pine is a good teacher.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

How To Begin Again

Cayetana Saiz with Scopio

“Beginning,” He Answered.

The blank look on their faces let
Sisyphus know
they didn’t understand
the hard part wasn’t
the work of pushing the rock uphill.

He almost enjoyed
the heaviness of the rock,
and the honest, exhausting labor
of those long days.

They couldn’t know
that momentum started,
even uphill,
carries its own weight.

They only saw the size of the rock,
and the angle of the hill,
and naturally assumed
the work they could witness
was the hard part.

No one was there
in the cool mornings
as he stared at his rock
in silence,
his feet still,
his hands gently resting
on its curved sides.

No one was there
to hear the unspoken words
shouted to the Gods, pleading
for the strength to bear,
not the rock,
but the desperate weight of wondering,
how to begin,
again.
”
— Gretchen Schmelzer

I have beginnings on the brain. Tomorrow I am giving the convocation speech at community college and I have been thinking a lot about the beginning of the academic school year—which has always felt like the true ‘New Year’s’ to me: where you celebrate with new notebooks – full of blank pages and possibility.

This year the act of beginning is different somehow. There was a break, a pause, a disruption in the way we got to do our work and our learning in the past two years. So, we are not just beginning—we are getting reacquainted with the territory we left—we are meeting ourselves in old places and new places again. We are starting, but in many ways, we are also picking up pieces we left behind as we move forward.

I have talked to many people who have returned to their offices recently and told stories about walking into their office or seeing their desks—as shrines of the day that they left in March of 2020. The cups still had coffee in them, the plants had died, their sweater was still on their chair. The papers on their desks were the projects that existed then. Their lives moved forward and yet some part of their old life stayed still—waiting for them. Returning to work is a beginning. But it is also time travel.

And now as we begin again—as the school year begins and as more and more companies are moving into a more rhythmic schedule—the term beginning feels too small. It feels too small because it’s not just a beginning—it’s a reunion. We aren’t just beginning—we are also assimilating—integrating—the past two years of experience. The past two years of adaptation. We are meeting the selves we were –even as we begin our year visioning who we want to be.

As we begin this year with more freedom of movement, we are confronted by the past two years of beginnings that didn’t happen the way we wanted—the school years that began and ended differently. And the beginnings of things we might not have imagined—beginning different habits—allowing yourself to live out different values.

You come to your beginnings this year with a heightened sense of what you want and what you may have lost. You have a heightened sense of what is important to you and what you are willing, or even eager, to let go of. And depending upon how the last two years have impacted you, you have more or less energy to bring to building new year.

But all of this – the integration, the re-emergence, the assimilation, the emotions—and even, perhaps, the exhaustion—may actually help us adults meet the beginning and be more open to growth and change than we usually are. I have observed adults to be impatient beginners. They run into areas of growth and development that are awkward or difficult – feeling the challenge of their learning edge and they misinterpret the feeling. They feel uncomfortable and think that signals that they are doing something wrong. When actually, that place of difficulty, of frustration, or awkwardness is precisely the place that growth is made of. A place of learning—of true beginning.

This summer, as folks have been heading back into their work and school lives, I keep getting the image of the child’s game Pin the Tail on the Donkey. On the wall is a picture of a donkey—the new year. In your hand is the tail, with tape on the top— hopes and plans you have for your beginning. And then you are blindfolded and spun around—a pretty apt metaphor for the past two years. You wobble in your best guess of the right direction to pin your tail on the donkey—where will you land?

The fun part of that game, of course, is that getting it wrong, and laughing about it, is exactly what makes it fun. When the tail is on the head, or even more hilariously, feet away on the lamp shade. So, you don’t win the game, but you actually do, by adding to the joy. The game points to an important way to hold lightly where we are starting.

So as we all take off our blindfolds this fall after being spun around, can we hold our beginnings lightly? Can we not take too seriously where we are beginning, but instead have joy that we can begin. That we get to play? And can we bring awareness to our starting place—so we can start wherever we are—in whatever state we are in—and allow ourselves to really be the beginners we need to be in order to grow.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Protest as a source of identity and connection

“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvements and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protestors who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”
— Wendell Berry from A Poem of Difficult Hope.

Protest, in the public sense, has always been a necessary part of community change and growth. Whether it is the massive injustices that continue to happen or the real threats to our environment and the health of the ecosystem we share. Protest is an important part of managing and engaging with power—and enacting change.

Understanding protest may require us to explore protest from the inside out—from the places where we uttered our first protest. We often conflate the protest at the individual level with protest at the community level. And by doing so we tend to judge the act of individual protest as childish or stubborn—and we don’t honor how important the act of protest is in growing our capacity for choice, judgment, justice and our ability to hold our center.

Protest may be the first real declaration of identity—a separate identity from a parent or caretaker—a statement that sets you apart—even momentarily. I have just spent the past week getting a masterclass in protest from a fabulous six year old. The protests of this six year are so familiar you could probably rattle them off yourself: No to brushing teeth, No to going to bed, No to homework, No I don’t want to eat that. Protest isn’t something separate from life when you are young, it’s the way we learn where we begin and end—what we like—who we are. It’s the way we slow things down from the constant onslaught of new information and learning.

It’s the way we manage our emotions when we just can’t handle the emotion that would arise if we said ‘Yes.’ We protest when we don’t have other language or words for what we want: we don’t know how to say that it’s just too hard to let go of a big day and let go of my parents at night. So we fight over bedtime instead.

Protest is essentially “I don’t want your rules to be my rules right now.” As such, protest is often seen and felt (I hear it from parents all the time) as an affront to their authority—which it is. But protest a necessary affront. It’s the way we wrestle with the rule. It’s the way we wrestle with ourselves. It’s the way we can feel the relationship’s strength. It’s the way you come to know something about yourself and how you may be alike or different than the rule makers (parents, teachers, coaches, friends). This friction between the rulemakers and the self is what builds the necessary components of discernment, conscience, judgment, self-efficacy or self-esteem. Our I-can-do-it-ness may be entirely dependent on our “I-won’t-do-it-ness.”

And to be clear—voicing protest doesn’t mean that often the rule isn’t essentially upheld—bedtimes are important, as is homework, as are the rules of safe behavior. But when there’s protest --there’s a relationship—between two entities who have different opinions—and this tension is a source of connection—a source of connection that supports relationship, as opposed to weakening it. If a child comes to know himself through protest, a parent also comes to know their child better, and maybe themselves as a parent.

For many people who grew up in households with trauma or violence this kind of learning didn’t happen.  Protest wasn’t an option. You never really got to protest or you were punished for doing so. As an adult you may find it hard to say no. And many adults I have worked with have found themselves frustrated with an inability to say No, and feeling like they get caught up with people pleasing. And these behaviors aren’t personality problems. They are a lack of practice and skill development. You have to practice saying No. It’s something that you learn—but most importantly, it’s something you learn in relationship.

Learning protest in adulthood is hard. It almost always feels and sounds childish at first. In part because our protests often show up small: I don’t want to do that task, I don’t want to have that conversation, I don’t want to go to that event. The No seems petty. Small. Not worth the fight. And certainly not worth the relationship. It’s why I counsel people who have never learned protest to choose their practice partners well—trusted and sturdy friends and spouses/partners, or therapists or coaches—folks who know that this is a growing edge and can hold the other side as you learn. And to not, for example, to try to learn protest first with your manager or some other place that provides stability or your livelihood.

Protest helps us grow our values and our purpose—we start with what we don’t want—and don’t like and then we begin to know what we do want. Protest teaches us to speak up for ourselves –and it’s the source of being able to speak up on behalf of others. Yes, protest may be an affront to authority, but it’s also an invitation. In the moment that you are the receiver of protest you are invited to be the container, to hold the other end of the belay rope. You are invited to assess the authority you hold and how it may be serving or impeding what you hold dear.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD