The 'inside magic' of healing and growth

“Now, if you sit perfectly silent for a long time and look at the sea, or the sky, or the running water of a river, something happens to you . . . a kind of gentle but very strong inside magic, that makes things clear, and shows you what things are important, and what are not.”
— E. Nesbit, House of Arden

Words often fail when you are trying to describe the shifts that happen inside of you as you heal or grow. Or maybe the words don’t fail so much as they fail to fit our conventional idea of ‘legitimate’ change. There is such a desire to have the changes that we make as we heal, or grow be something that is measurable—tangible. Something that is easy to explain to others. The world of mental health is now inextricably linked to medicine and the categorization of diagnoses and insurance codes for billing—both of which pull for an analytical or categorical description. But change, growth and healing—when you actually experience them—don’t really fit a solid metric for description. Yes, you know something is different—but rather than language neatly describing something, you find yourself lost in metaphor, or song lyrics or poetry. Nesbit’s description of inside magic –gentle, strong, clear—may be the best description I’ve found so far.

First and foremost, healing is inside magic. Yes, outside conditions matter. Yes, no one heals alone. Yes, you need support and help. But the healing happens inside of you. Gabor Mate says of trauma ‘that it is not what happens to you—it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.’ So it is important to remember that healing, like trauma, happens inside.  

And healing can feel like magic because the ability or capacity that you have been working toward seems to suddenly appear—the way a rainbow appears, or a butterfly appears, or a storm stops. It is one of those things that you can’t make happen. You can’t muscle it or force it. It is magic that you create the conditions for. You can’t make a bird land in your hand. But if you want a bird to land in your hand and eat out of it you have to stand outside, put your arm out and have seeds or peanuts in your hand. You must wait patiently. And it helps if you offer the seed consistently—perhaps creating a routine that the birds can come to count on. The magic of having a bird land in your hand is made up of the conditions you create, your waiting, your constancy, your patience, and a lot of grace. And the magic of healing is created from many of the same elements.

You sit by the threshold of your healing or growth for a really long time—working at your edge of whatever you are trying to learn or unlearn. You struggle at this edge. Most often you feel that nothing is changing. You don’t see movement. You don’t feel different. And you can feel discouraged that perhaps nothing will change.

And then suddenly – magic-- a shift happens.

And the magic is not so much a presence of something as the absence of something that you have been wrestling with.  The obstacle is gone, or its different. A veil lifts—a fog lifts, and there is clarity. A tightness recedes and you can breathe or move more freely. A heaviness fades and there is a lightness in the conversation that is brand new. Where it seemed somber and serious, you can laugh a bit—maybe even play.

Healing and growth are states of expansion, movement, flexibility. Where you used to be shut down or closed off –there is a sudden and welcome state of openness. Where you used to feel rigid and stuck—you can feel moments of elasticity or flexibility. You suddenly can feel possibility and choice.

You can breathe more easily. You can be more patient. Your attention is outward, forward and present. You find yourself looking to a future, and not protecting yourself from a past that may happen again at any minute.

This inside magic is powerful.  In fact, the word for magic comes from the pro Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to be able, have power.” But the power isn’t otherworldly—it is basic. It is grounded. It is rooted. It is almost ordinary. This magic doesn’t imply power over—instead it is the power to. It is more like empowerment. It is the invisible power of everyday capabilities—and in that way is linked to the same root that is found in old German, Slavic, Russian and Norse in their words for ‘can, do, be able, power and might.’ The psychology term that is closest is probably self-efficacy—which I often translate to clients as ‘can-do-it-ness. But I think I’m going to use inside magic from now on because it is way more fun—and I encourage you to do the same.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2023

 

Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com


Learning to live with what is broken

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“....In feigned completeness I would walk the lonely
longest distance between all points and others
because in their connection my geometry will have
been faithful to its own imagined laws...”
— Barbara Kingsolver, American Biographies

My own imagined laws. These laws make so much sense in my inner world—with my geometry. They are the laws of nature, the rules, the commandments I created to survive trauma. Don’t move. Don’t flinch. Ignore what hurts. Figure out what they want or need and do it. Feelings are dangerous, shut them down. I used to call them the ‘old rules’ but now I don’t even know what to call them. They were habit, they were instinct, they were woven into the way I approached relationships. The way I formed expectations. They were so hard to unlearn, to ignore, to change.

It is so hard to see these laws for what they are because they are substrate, they live below the surface, they are not what you see in my work, or hear in my words, they are the emotional source code that my behavioral computer runs off of. I can’t see them until I have lived them. So many times I have thought that I understood them, changed them, saw them for what they were—and then I suddenly find that I am living the old laws again.  I stay silent when I should have spoken up. I don’t ask for help or reach out. I am sure I have made them angry. The rules can feel so real, even if you know, really know, that they aren’t real anymore. That they don’t fit your life now.

This is the disorientation of surviving trauma. You are always living in more than one place at a time: your body is in 2023 and your brain, your emotional system can be catapulted back to 1969. Or 1972. Or 1982. It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived through trauma. It’s hard to make this dynamic visible. It’s hard to objectively see the dilemma for what it is. But a few years ago, I got to see in a much more visible and less emotionally charged way what it looks like when a map doesn’t match reality.

I was visiting my brother in Nashville and we spent a Saturday running errands for his job. He had a truck with a video screen GPS navigation system built in to the dashboard. As I had never been to Nashville before I didn’t notice at first that his GPS didn’t match up with where we were. But as I began to pay attention, I noticed that the road we were on was not the road on the screen. His GPS was broken, but in a sort of magical way. The road we were driving on was in Tennessee; the road on his screen was in Missouri. No matter where we were driving—we were in one place, and the GPS had us located in someplace completely different. It was inconsistent and it would shift around. Sometimes on the screen we were on a small back road even though we were currently on a major highway. Twice the GPS located us in the middle of a lake. Once we were even in France. His GPS also had a feature that showed the weather—so often the GPS warned us of rain and lightning even though at the time we were driving through a cloudless day. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the make-believe world we were driving in. I’d look at the road ahead and then look at the GPS to see where the car thought we were. The map that looked so real, and actually was real, it just wasn’t where we actually were. It wasn’t our currently reality. It was impossible to use this GPS map to navigate.

I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs, “THIS IS IT! THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO SURVIVE TRAUMA!”  You are in 2019 driving through your life and your whole internal GPS operating system is running off of a different map. I wanted to take everyone I knew for a ride in that car. I wanted to shout “YOU TRY AND NAVIGATE YOUR WORLD WITH THAT MAP.” It is exhausting to always feel lost. It is exhausting to always be trying to get back to where you are.

Seeing that GPS made me realize something I had been fighting for a very long time. As hard as I had tried to reprogram that map—years and years trying to undo, unlearn, rewrite those old laws—much of my GPS was fundamentally broken. Yes, some of my hard work had paid off—and some of the old rules and old laws seemed to fade away. But there were plenty that never seemed to yield. There were too many times that I was standing in the present trying to navigate with an old map and the weight of this constant struggle filled me with despair.

I took my inability to fix my internal maps personally. I saw it as a character flaw. But realistically I could no longer see it as a lack of effort. Watching that broken GPS helped me decide that I was too tired to fight my old GPS anymore. When I got back from Nashville my therapist and I discussed whether it was time to admit that perhaps there were parts of me that just weren’t going to get better. Parts that might remain hurt and that what I was living with was as good as it was going to get. I decided to finally surrender to what was broken in me: I was just going to observe it and let it be. I was going to do what my brother did with his broken GPS—just drive around with it and not use it for navigation—not try to use it as any form of information other than what it was—information about my history.

In admitting defeat the first thing I noticed was a sense of relief. I could feel the exhaustion and there was massive relief from not having to fight it anymore, not have to rally against it anymore. I actually could feel myself breathe more deeply.

And then this relief gave way to sadness. At first I felt sad because I didn’t just let go of the fight, I also let go of hope. And there is real sadness at this loss of hope—loss of the relentless hope that it all would get better. Hope that there was a version of me that was unhurt by the trauma. Relentless hope is a such a powerful pain medicine—it numbs this sadness somehow— and it allows the fantasy that if you can heal something, then maybe the trauma never even happened.

But once the sadness from the loss of hope subsided a different sadness appeared. A deep, heavy grief—grief for what I lived through, grief for what didn’t happen and grief for what might never heal. And that grief was hard. I realized I had spent years running away from it, wanting it to be gone, wanting to fix it, wanting it not to be true. And for a long time I sat with it the way you sit at the bedside of a very sick friend. Learning to live with what is broken is like that I think. You can’t do anything to actually change the situation, but you can be there, you can stick by yourself, and you can be good company to yourself while you go through the experience.

And maybe staying away from this grief all those years was also keeping me from a different kind of hope. By sitting with the grief —the hope that I seemed to have lost came back. Not at first. At first it was just hard. But slowly— a different hope emerged. Quieter. Sturdier. Wiser. More patient.

© 2023/2019 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD


Beauty and Terror.

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

This week as I was flying across country for work we flew past the most amazing storm. We were up above 30,000 feet and the thunderhead clouds loomed above us. Giant oval domes of clouds. Dozens of them. And for the better part of 15 minutes as we flew past them they were lit up with lightening in an array of patterns and flashes. It was breathtaking.

It really was a moment of beauty and terror. I couldn’t stop watching. And I couldn’t stop wondering what the line was between beauty and terror.

As we passed the storm we came to the edge of the front. A wall of clouds. And here at the edge of the front the wind picked up so that it seemed we were in a wind tunnel—though we were approaching the edge of the clouds, we seemed to stand still.  And once again I was riveted to the scene. Watching the wall of clouds and feeling the strain of forward motion against the power of nature.

I think what was so powerful about the experience was how familiar it was. That feeling of being right at the edge of something huge. The feeling of standing still, no matter how hard you work. The feeling of the powerful forces working against you and the excitement and longing to move forward. It was the experience of transformation all sped up. I know the experience so much slower.

It’s hard to hold both when you are healing—both the beauty and the terror. There are some moments of healing that are so difficult. So massive. Those giant cloud domes filled with lightening. All the pain you experience lighting up as you bring your attention to it.

My dog hated lightening and thunder. When there was a storm, he freaked out and jumped on top of me: he wanted to tuck himself inside my ribs and press himself on my spine. He couldn’t get close enough. And I know this feeling too. It can take such strength and patience and discipline to stay and breathe when the lightening and thunder hits. It can be really tough not to run and hide. You just want to melt into a bigger being—something that can hold you and the pain of it all.

But as soon as you can really pay attention to it. Breathe with it. Sit with it. And be safe in the witnessing of it: you can also take in the power of it. The beauty in the tenderness of it. Healing, like lightning, is magic. It comes in flashes. If you can actually stay with it, it doesn’t last long and you realize that in seeing the hard part you get access to the bigger part of yourself. You can see all of the edges. Let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just keep going/No feeling is final.

© 2023/2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

 

Imagine being loved anyway

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“The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”
— Barbara Kingsolver

I am so tired of people lecturing about trust. About how it is the basis of relationships and what ‘3 things’ lead to trust. I’m tired of it because it is all too simplistic. I am tired of it because they try to make it sound neat and clean and easy. Something you can accomplish in a workshop or in some online class. They give you catchy slogans. Inspiring picture quotes. They make it sound logical and linear and they support this with symbolic equations such as Trust = relationship X time—even though obviously neither relationships nor time is completely linear so how could the product of these two things end up tidy or logical?

When you learn about the psychology of attachment you learn that trust is built from the survivability of the parent. Parents create attachment because they just keep showing up and trying to make things a little better for the infant—they feed it, change it, rock it and help it get to sleep. They make mistakes and they repair them. They are there. Over and over endlessly, they are there. And this endless thereness. This endless thereness with repair after repair—this is what creates basic trust.

And this week after a difficult conversation in my own life I am convinced more than ever that trust is built not because you are loved, but because someone loved you anyway. They loved you when you were angry, or messy, or cranky or a total and complete pain in the ass. They loved you when you forgot, or remembered—when you said it or when you didn’t say it. They didn’t love you because you could do it—they loved you anyway, even when you couldn’t.

It’s hard to describe how fully you lean in to someone in this moment—the moment when you can’t or you didn’t or you won’t. The moment that you feel so badly about yourself, the moment that you think all is lost and you think you are falling off a cliff into some abyss where you will be all alone.  The moment that you don’t believe in love at all, the moment you don’t for a second think you could be loved as you are—that moment: you lean all your weight in to the hope that it exists. That moment you let go and jump with no real belief that anything will catch you but with the prayer that it will. You think you are falling forever and then the rope holds and there’s something that catches you. You find out that you are tied in to something--that you are held.

This is what infants do every day. They can’t live on their own, so they place their entire lives in the hands of their caretakers. They cannot do anything without the help of the adults around them. They cannot express themselves except to cry or protest when they need something else. Infants make this trust fall every single day. And, lucky for them, they don’t know anything else—so they just do it.

But if you didn’t get to learn this lesson in trust and attachment when you were young, then you know too much fear to treat these kind of trust falls as anything other than danger. You organize your whole life so you never have to rely on anyone. You make sure that you never get caught off guard--you never get disappointed.

But if you are lucky, at some point your long practiced strategy will fail you. The chess pieces will align on your board in such a way that you can’t use your old moves. There’s no other square to move to. You can’t use any of your old tricks. You will run in to a situation that you just can’t control and your guard will come down. You won’t be able to do it yourself. You won’t be able to fix it so you don’t feel anything.  You will be disappointed. You will be disappointing. You won’t be able to hold yourself together. You will fall apart, and you will lean on the support of something other than yourself.

And remarkably, the world doesn’t actually end. In fact, it sort of begins.

You find yourself in a world where you no longer have a fear of falling because you have hit the ground and despite the loud ‘thud’—you are actually fine. You are cranky, you are messy. But you are fine. You find yourself in a world where there is space enough for all of you, even, or especially, the parts you don’t like.  Being loved anyway means that suddenly, there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nothing else to do. There’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing to get right and there’s no one else to be, but yourself.

And that’s enough.

© 2023/2017 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD