The Geology of Silence

“I need you to hear everything I say, and everything I can’t say must be heard too. It is terrifying to listen this way, leaving everything behind. Maybe I ask something impossible.”
— Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault

Oh that there were more words for silence.

Many years ago I worked in an elementary school and a six year old girl was brought in to talk to me by her teacher because she had filled an entire notebook with the sentence “I hate myself’ in black marker. This is not what six year olds usually do, even when they get upset. She was an adorable chubby girl with tears streaming down her face, and she didn’t say anything. She just sat on my lap and cried. When I asked her to talk she said everything was fine. But she continued to cry. Eventually she stopped and we played awhile. It was the end of the school day and her teacher sent her mother in to pick her up and talk to me. Her mother’s first question in a defensive tone was, “So. What did she tell you?”

‘Nothing,’  I said. Which was both true and untrue. She said nothing with her words, but her writing and tears said a lot. I told the mom I was concerned and that this type of behavior was worrying—her daughter was asking for help, and we could fit her in to our counseling schedule. Her mother said, “Absolutely not, we don’t talk to outsiders.” I said I understood and suggested she find a counseling center in her neighborhood, where she felt more comfortable. I also was pretty sure this would never happen. She took her daughter’s hand and left, saying nothing more to me.

This was one of many, many lessons I learned about the Code of Silence that is the cultural underpinning to many of the communities around Boston. But my travels and work have taken me much further than Somerville or Dorchester or Southie and I have found that the Code of Silence expands across the wide world. Wherever there has been great hurt, great shame, great loss, great despair—where people have endured years of struggle, there you will find a reverence and an obedience to silence that has a power and vortex of its own. Silence becomes one of the natural laws, like gravity. You have no other choice but to follow it because if you don’t, it feels like the world you know would come apart. Silence becomes something that everyone can agree on, even when nothing at all seems certain. In a world of hurt, or rage or shame, silence can be the one thing that everyone is proud of.

Silence gets treated as if it were all the same thing. Maybe the legend of 100 words for snow wasn’t accurate, but it is true that the Inupiaq of Wales, Alaska have over 70 words for ice, and the Inuit of the Nunavik region of Canada have 53 words for snow.  Silence—all the many types of silence—could really benefit from this same linguistic expertise. The many words for ice were a necessity—they describe conditions that could make distinctions that allowed people to be safe or fed –matters of life and death.

And silence is its own complex landscape. The study of trauma is, in many ways, the study of silence--the way geology and archaeology are also the study of time. Silence exists in layers, and needs names and descriptions the way we can name the layers of geologic time in the Grand Canyon. Layers and layers of silence. For there is no long term trauma without a deluge of silence that overwhelms it. Silences rush in to trauma like the endorphins that flood our bodies and help us survive. Silence cushions our identity, our sense of safety and our ability to think. It connects our communities even as it keeps us apart.

I have found that most people see silence as a form of direct resistance: a sort of a defiant silence. The kind of silence where you know what to say but just refuse to say it. And in my experience working with trauma and working with people all over the world, this is the most rare form of silence.

When this form of silence shows up the biggest obstacle is typically fear. I am silent because I am afraid—afraid of retaliation, afraid of conflict, afraid to hurt someone, afraid of my own feelings.  I am silent because I feel shame or fear being shamed for what I must speak.  It can feel impossible to speak because what you need to say, what has happened is 'unspeakable.' I’m not dismissing the difficulty of this silence, and the courage it takes to overcome it. Or the need for compassionate listening to witness the conversations.

But when you encounter this silence in yourself (I know what I need to say but I am afraid or it feels impossible) or in others (I can’t trust you yet). You know where you are, you know where the work is, you have found the trail. Now you just have the slow and arduous and rewarding work of staying on it. Of trying over and over to get the words out.

But with repeated trauma and deep grief you can experience a far bigger, deeper canyon of silence. Sometimes it is the silence of despair: It feels as if there is just no point to talking about it. No one would get it. I just don’t have the energy or the interest to try because it just doesn’t matter. This is an exhausting silence. It feels endless and hopeless and it makes you want to sleep. To go where silence is just the expected norm.

And then there is the silence that can come from no words at all. No story at all. You may have feelings, or a sense of something. But it can feel so amorphous or disconnected that you don’t feel like you can talk because it feels like there is literally ‘nothing’ to talk about. A fog has descended on memory or experience.

Some of this has to do with traumatic memory. Science tells us that stress hormones inhibit our memory for knowledge, making it more likely that we will store trauma as emotional and implicit memory. Memory of experience that we don’t have a story about. And to make that even more likely, during trauma there is reduced blood flow to the language centers in our brain making it even more difficult to attach language to the experience.

This is where I wish for other words for silence. For the silences that are foggy, or distant. For when you aren’t afraid to speak the words, you can’t find them at all. For the silences that are a complete blank and the silences where words float in and out so quickly, like wispy clouds and when you try to grab them they disappear. For silences that feel like a heavy weight that you can’t lift off your chest or the ones that grab your throat. There are just layers and layers of silence.

And the thing about silence, about the layers of silence, is that in trauma, you usually get all the layers. And just like the canyon, the forces of your life and time itself will wear away the layers--and will expose some of the story and some of the feelings and you will begin to try to talk. You will have some things you know and don’t want to talk about, some things you feel that you can’t find words for. And some things that just feel so big or so far away, so ineffable, they don’t yet have any way of being described—things that don’t feel like yours yet, or maybe never were.

Rumi said that "Silence was the language of God and all else was a poor translation." I don’t know about that, but I would say that Silence is the language of creation. Silence protects a place that needed to grow under better conditions. That hid away seeds and spores that would grow and bloom when the floods came to take them away to a new place where they could find light. So whether it is your silence or someone else’s –wonder what word for silence would better describe it. Wonder where in the layers of your history this silence exists. And be in awe of what you can create when you are courageous enough to work with it. 

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Refuge. Sanctuary. Love.

“That vague sweetness/ made my heart ache with longing/ and it seemed to me/ that is was the eager breath of the summer/ seeking for its completion./ I knew not then that it was so near,/ that it was mine,/ and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed/ in the depth of my own heart”
— Tagore

Refuge is the end of the trauma—a place where the active part of trauma is over. But it is not the end. It is a beginning. Refuge is the beginning of healing. It is a place where the possibility of healing exists.

Refuge is the minimal requisite environment for healing, but it is not the healing itself. Refuge is a place where you can rest. Often physically, but most importantly, emotionally. It isn’t the rest itself. I make this distinction because healing and mending can take a lot of work. A place of safety and refuge allow you to do this, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. Healing isn’t just being away from trauma or grief. Healing is the work of mending, repair, grieving. And once you have sufficiently healed there is the possibility of resurgence of growth—a place I would call sanctuary. In refuge you mend, in sanctuary you grow.

No one wants to be a refugee, but I believe that anyone who has lived through trauma or severe grief is a refugee--especially if you choose to heal. Trauma and traumatic grief mean that you are cast out of a land of innocence. Not just a world where you would believe that everything is okay—or that the world is just. It’s bigger than that—because trauma and severe loss mean that you lose an innocence of self—an innocence of believing that in a difficult situation you would rise to the occasion—you would do the right thing, not the human thing. You know that you have done whatever you needed to do to survive and you know what it means to feel truly helpless. You have seen yourself at your worst in a world that couldn’t help you at that moment: and you can’t ever go back. And never being able to go back is the working definition of refugee.

And the truth is, there is no going back. For those who had peace and safety before the trauma or loss, you long for the world as it was, and for yourself as you were. But you can’t unknow what you know, and you can’t unfeel what you feel. You are changed. This is a simple, but difficult fact. And for those who never experienced anything but trauma and loss—you long for safety, for a world you have only heard about, or read about, or seen from far away. And really, it is all a longing for refuge, for a safe space. For care. For a chance to repair what was torn apart. For the chance at a heart that can love again, and can be loved.

My host mother in Germany, a refugee during World War II, recounted a story on my last visit. Her family had fled the East as the Russians approached. They had travelled terrible miles in trains meant for animals—they were exhausted and hungry and frightened. And when they got to the West, host families took in the refuges from the East. The family who took in her family gave them dinner, and clean clothes and warm beds. The host-wife took the youngest sister, a baby, and let my host mother’s mother go to sleep. The first sleep she had had in days. The host family did everything in their worldly power they could to allow that tired refugee family to rest.

That is refuge. The space to rest. To breathe. To look around, not out of fear, but curiosity. Refuge allows you to notice and see. All through the trauma you had to be nothing but vigilant. And refuge allows you the chance, the beginning, a place to practice, just being again.

Everyone needs different amounts of time in refuge. Some people need days or weeks. Some people need years. Some people need decades. In refuge the walls that helped you survive begin to come down—some you actively take down and some just fade away over time. But the walls only come down if you are in a state of refuge, if your brain and heart have an environment to rest in.

No words can capture the heart-wrenching longing that binds you to refuge like a mother to a sick child. A longing that seems to break your heart—because that is exactly what it is doing: breaking down the walls that surrounded your heart during the trauma. This longing is excruciating, intense, and ever-present. And it if you are lucky enough to feel it, to work with it, to lean in to it—it is your lifeline through refuge to healing.

And no words can capture the devotion and gratitude you have for the people who provide this refuge and the fear you can carry that they might leave or disappear. People who live through famine stockpile food. And people who have lived through terror want to stockpile safety—but it's intangible, it always feels as if it could slip through your fingers. It always feels like you could lose this place you have worked so hard to find and keep. That you might be exiled back to trauma at any moment. Refuge is to healing trauma as a cast and crutches are to a broken bone: you must rely on refuge and the people who provide it utterly—you must put all your weight on refuge and your helpers so that the bones of your heart and your life might mend. This is fierce and powerful. And takes more courage than most people recognize. 

And then one day, unexplainably, you feel a fleeting sense that you can’t lose it—lose refuge, lose the people, or even abandon yourself.  This is sanctuary. That the days, weeks, years of refuge have woven themselves in to your being. That the people who helped you are with you even when you can’t see them. In this fleeting moment you are not standing in refuge, you are standing in sanctuary.

Sanctuary is an open space. Your heart is open. Your mind is open. The future is wide open. In trauma the future is known: you are always anticipating the trauma you lived through. In sanctuary, you really don’t know what might happen next. It is lovely. And it can be scary. Like any big developmental milestone. You have arrived in a place where you can’t return. The way a toddler can’t turn back in to a baby—the way a tree can’t turn back in to a sapling.

Both as a therapist and as a client I have found that healing defies language—and this can get in the way of helping people find and tolerate healing. It’s so hard to find the language of refuge, of sanctuary, of healing. It’s so hard to tolerate the feelings of longing, of leaning, of needing that healing requires. But from my many expeditions I am here to tell you, to report back that these amazing views exist if you stay faithful to your trail. If you trust in your own hard work and the hearts of others.

A few years ago, I was in my own struggle in refuge—tangled in longing, in reaching, in the fear of letting go of the ‘known’ shores of the old story. I was walking up the stairs to my office and caught the sight of sunlight on the wall and decided to just turn around and sit on the stairs, half-way up. Sit there and lean on the wall and be in that space—neither here, nor there. Instead of running from the feelings, I would just sit in them. And I did. I sat there for nearly an hour. I sat there long enough to literally lean on refuge, on the walls of my home to hold me up, and find that solid place inside. Find the sanctuary of not abandoning yourself. Find that years of refuge had woven a rope for me to affix myself. To feel solid in a moment I had thought one of my worst. Find that you can lean on your own heart and it holds again. The way to sanctuary is through refuge. You must lean on it with all of your heart, and you will find that the center, your heart, holds.

“I knew not then that it was so near,/ that it was mine,/ and that this perfect sweetness had blossomed/ in the depth of my own heart.”

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

 

The Whispered Prayer of Enough

“We have forgotten the virtue of sitting, watching, observing. Nothing much happens. This is the way of nature. We breathe together. Simply this. For long periods of time, the meadow is still. We watch. We wait. We wonder. Our eyes find a resting place. And then the slightest of breezes move the grass. It can be heard as a whispered prayer. ”
— Terry Tempest Williams

For most of my life, the word enough had no meaning at all. I know it had a meaning in an academic sense. For me it was an abstraction—an idea. I had no actual idea of what the word enough felt like.

To understand the word enough you have to be observant: you have to be aware of your sensations—you have to really feel the space that needs filling. You have to feel every contour of that space: that space in your body, that space in your emotions, that space in your heart. Feel all of those delicate and tender edges to know when the rim of that particular reservoir has been filled. At least in theory that’s what you have to do, because for most of my adult life I wasn’t going anywhere near those tender edges. It was too terrifying. It was too painful. Like most trauma survivors I was in long-distance relationship with myself—and especially my emotions and body.

It is actually hard to even describe how far away that capacity of observance and the connection to that inner landscape of feeling and emotion is if you are a trauma survivor. Surviving trauma means cutting off any possible communication with those spaces of emotions and needs and hungers. It means cutting connections between your brains and any feelings or sensations in your body. It means exiling those parts and banishing them from your consciousness.

But you need to function somehow in the give and take of life. Relationships require you to make requests and say ‘Yes’ and “No.” Your body needs to be fed every day. So in order to function with all of those needs and wants and hungers that would require you to be aware of feelings and sensations, you replace them instead with shoulds and rules. What enough should look like or feel like. How much I should want. Or should need. How much I should eat. These rules and shoulds are not connected to your body. They are not connected to your emotions. They are not connected to the here and now. They are connected to your history. They are connected to your head—to your fears—to your trauma—and mostly to how you managed to survive it.

So you learn to orient to the world through an outside-in approach paying attention to the shoulds and the rules. You never build the muscles or fluency or awareness of enough.  

And while this is hard, the truth is—being numb, and starving for love and care is almost easier than the experience of healing—when hunger, need or want is woken up. When you begin to invite in the wanting, needing and hunger, they come back with a blinding intensity –an intensity that feels bottomless, endless. They come back with an intensity that can border on panic, impatience and rage.

And so for a very long time you can find yourself swinging between two poles—staying numb and not needing—so you don’t have to feel and see the empty reservoir; and feeling out of control and overwhelmed by an intensity of wanting and longing and hunger that feels insatiable. And both of these poles make you believe you are incapable of enough. You come to believe that you are either unfeeling and cold or you are a bottomless pit. That you will never understand that elusive, contented, satisfied state of enough.

Which brings me to my current experiment. I realized a few weeks ago that I had conflated resting and eating by always eating and watching something on TV. Lunch and dinner were my break from work, so I looked forward to what I would watch. But I realized this habit that was meant to be relaxing was keeping me from being able to pay attention to my eating—to notice what enough was. To notice what I actually needed. So I embarked on an experiment to split food and rest—I would eat at a table, with no distractions, much like Geneen Roth always recommended. I would journal about the eating experiment and then I would do something restful afterwards.

It turns out learning enough is a lot like bird watching. Except at first you are the bird, and not the watcher. You feel observed, scrutinized. A bit fearful and anxious. You perch nervously on your chair. You aren’t used to anyone, including yourself, watching you eat. You feel vulnerable and seen. It’s unnerving.

And you start with the should and rules, but because you are bird watching—and there are no other things to pay attention to but your own sensations of fullness or hunger—you try to feel what enough feels like. And the biggest surprise of all is that you can. And the craziest thing, after decades of fearing your wants and needs and hungers is to find out how small they are. Find out how quickly they are met.

Enough is so much smaller than you think it will be. When you have spent a long time in your life enduring abuse—you come to believe that enough is something that is shouted. That it is something that is obvious or loud. But it’s not. Enough is a small voice. Enough is quiet. Enough is a whisper.

© 2023 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

 

In Praise of Distraction

Distraction has gotten a bad rap. Dealing with your problems head on, figuring out why you feel that way, changing your thoughts. These are the strategies most employed by self-help books. But sometimes when you are stuck or overwhelmed or just need a break from the hard work of healing, distraction can be the best medicine.

There is a Calvinist thread that runs through the fabric of all healing and development: work harder. And if you knew me, you would know I am not against hard work. But as I have mentioned before, healing isn’t always about effort. When you break a bone, you don’t work harder for it to heal. You set it, you create the right conditions. You splint it so it can’t move. You do other things because you can’t do all of your usual things. And without your active intervention the bone knits back together.

And sometimes this is what the psyche needs too. Sometimes when your emotions are too irritated, when everything is setting them off, when you feel yourself constantly triggered—it's better not to engage the emotion at all. It’s better not to have that part of your brain work. The neuroscience adage is that what fires together-- wires together and when you get yourself in an endless loop of emotions or flashbacks you need to stop those neurons from firing together and ironically the best way to do that is to not do something, or do something else. When the emotion or flashback comes on, change your activity, change your location, put on music, watch a stupid TV show. Drown out, distract out, do whatever you have to do to shift your mind away.

A brain that has lost control is just like a toddler brain. I’m not insulting you. It happens to everyone, you, me, people who have experienced trauma and people who haven’t. And when a toddler loses it—nothing is going to get ‘talked’ away. Your best hope is distraction and jollying them into paying attention to something else.

For anyone whose brain has just had too much stress or emotion—distraction—rest from the stress and emotion can be very healing. It’s the emotional equivalent of putting your brain in a sling. It’s actually not easy to get brains to slow down and relax. In fact, mindfulness and relaxation, are paradoxically difficult practices. The more we sit in quiet, the more we see just how active and spinning our minds actually are. Doing absolutely nothing can actually be too hard, which is why distraction can be better rest. Just something for your brain to pay attention to instead. 

There are times to work hard at healing and figuring out what is working for you and what isn’t. But when the brain’s ‘check engine light’ goes on because everything feels like it’s on fire, this is the time to switch the engine off, and let it cool down.

There isn’t one thing that will work for everyone. What you need will match your temperament, your mood, your physiology, and your level of distress. Some things work better for emotional pain and some things work better for the endless loop thinking that can be so difficult. Sometimes being out and about among people helps and sometimes it’s an afternoon in your pajamas and a whole season of something on Netflix. Sometimes it’s tackling some project you have long ignored and sometimes it’s reading to your kids all afternoon. It merely needs to be something that when you do it, you notice that the pressure gauge in your system starts to go down. Or you notice that you can breathe better. Or you notice that for these moments you aren’t in pain.

Distraction allows for some of the rest and rejuvenation you will need to head back in to the harder pieces of work. It allows you, sometimes for the first time, to realize that you can switch your emotional or thinking state from one state to another.

I’ve found it helpful as both a therapist and a client to have a list of helpful distractions written on a piece of paper or notecard placed where it can easily be found. The reason this is helpful is that you can make the list with the resources of your whole brain.  When you are in a bad emotional place, you only have your small, toddler brain—so having the list allows you to tap in to your whole brain by looking at it. 

It’s a trial and error process. Some days some things work and some days things don’t. If you have ever met a 3 year old this will make total sense to you. Some days grilled cheese sandwiches are their favorite food ever. And some days they push it away as soon as you serve it saying they have always hated grilled cheese. Don’t expect yourself to like everything you do all the time. If it doesn’t work, move on to something else on the list. And it can even be helpful if it isn't perfect. If it lowers the volume in your head--if the feelings are less loud or less irritating--that can be a good start. Sometimes you will watch TV and the flashbacks will still be there, but more in the background. Sometimes that is the best you can do.

Just keep adding to the list. And use the distractions to give your emotions or thinking a rest. And don’t worry. You won’t spend the rest of your life watching re-runs or Youtube. That’s the beauty of healing and growth. When the brain is rested it will want to get busy again and you will head back to doing what you need to do. And, you will have learned how to give your brain a rest.

©Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD 2023