I Want to Sing

I Want to Sing

‘Isn’t all grief a prayer?’

you asked.

I rolled my eyes.

The animal of my grief

is feral and hurt,

and I hide him

under a heavy blanket.

There is no poem.

All the words

I want to say

rise from my heart

and crumble apart

when I open my mouth--

fragments of silence.

I want a voice

as sharp and clear

as the cardinal perched

in the side yard.

I don’t know whether

his song is celebration

or sorrow, but I want

to learn how to

sing those things

with my whole body.

I want to be

the red thing

against a blue sky

breathing in all

of the pain

and filling the silence

with song, whether

grief or love—

singing so loud

I can be heard

above the hammers

fixing the roof

next door.

I want to be the red thing

among green leaves

steady and strong,

though the wind

tosses the branches

back and forth.

I want to sing

a melody so pure

I pierce your heart—

your burden lightened,

suddenly,

by my song.

© 2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

*A shout out to Cohort 30 of the Teleos Coach Development Program who, this week, each found their clear voice and inspired others, including me, to do the same.

Vocabularies of Healing

“Most of the best poems, the most personal, are gathered crumbs.”

— Robert Lowell

I have an artist friend who has sketchbooks upon sketchbooks filled with color studies and studies of shapes and figures. They are beautiful, organic, colorful and rich. When she talks about these studies she talks about learning and playing with vocabularies of shapes and colors. She talks about trying out new vocabularies for her work. Vocabularies of colors. Vocabularies of shapes. The term vocabularies made my head spin -- I wanted to shout, “That’s it!”

She offered language, or the possibility of language, for something I couldn’t quite put words to. There was suddenly vocabularies for languages that defied words. You could make, study, and create with the fragments that might make a whole. During difficult stretches of healing, I often found that the words I had or the words I knew seemed too small to describe my experience. Feeling words didn’t seem to match the way I felt. Sadness felt too small. Longing felt too far away. Rage felt both inadequate and out of proportion.

And maybe visual vocabularies felt congruent or familiar – as images often were better communicators of feelings and experience than words alone. Early on in my healing a feeling I often had was the feeling of coming apart: I felt like my arms and legs weren’t attached. The image I had was a small doll that I owned as a child whose arms, legs and head were connected internally with a central rubber band. When the rubber band broke—her arms, legs and head detached. The image wasn’t violent, as much as it was simply disconnected. But words—such as detached, or disconnected, or even coming apart didn’t describe how I felt. I felt like I was in pieces, like I was fragmented, like I couldn’t move as a whole, like I had to sit still.

When words don’t match your feelings or experience it can feel hopeless or pointless to communicate and this can make healing frustrating. Yet, communicating your experience and feelings--having them validated and witnessed is a crucial part of healing--and why it’s so important to expand what we think of as vocabularies of healing. Most often when we imagine talking about trauma we think of feeling words---and feeling words are important. Research shows that merely putting feelings into words can help us feel better. And tools like the Feelings Wheel can help you do that by finding more words than the simple five: mad, sad, afraid, happy and disgusted. Putting our feelings into words is important for everyone, not just trauma survivors.

But what I have found in my own healing and in working with others is that for people who have experienced trauma—feeling words, even the more descriptive feeling words, don’t feel like they fit. They feel alien. And there are many good reasons they don’t fit. One reason is a lack of experience of saying the words and having them validated or heard. In essence feeling words are a foreign language—they’ve never been paired with anything. And another big reason is that repeated trauma causes us to go numb—or to shut down emotion. So that not only don’t you have words for feelings, but you may not actually have any experience with the feelings themselves. The sensations themselves are new—and trying to describe them with words seems impossible.

So what are the vocabularies of healing? How can you find them or create them? It requires experimenting with different ways of seeing and hearing—and it requires you risking saying whatever feels true to you at the time. You can make vocabularies of healing from words, images, metaphors, poems, songs, dreams, stories, or films that ring true or resonate somewhere in your body and mind. They may come from dance, or yoga or the natural world. Sometimes an image or fragment of words shouts your experience in a way that you never could have—and sometimes the experience is quiet—like an echo—like a distant image of something that just catches your eye—but it gives you hope that you might be able to describe this feeling soon.

These vocabularies would look different for everyone: some might be actual sketchbooks, some might be boxes of found objects, some might be playlists of music or piles of books with post-its marking the pages. I have sketchbooks of watercolors, and poems typed and pasted to the pages, map fragments, and notes from books I have read. The word ‘vocabulary’ comes from the latin vocare –to name or to call. Much of the work of healing from trauma is naming—sorting the experiences you had and giving each part of the experience a name.

But the root of the word ‘vocabulary’ is actually the root of the word for voice and this is what creating a healing vocabulary does: it gives you a voice about something that rendered you voiceless. It gives you language for things that you had to be silent about—that were often unspeakable. It gives you a voice to your trauma—but also, importantly, to your healing—a way to be understood and connect. A way to go from lost to found. A way to go from hidden to seen. A way to go from healing to growth. Becoming whole--one image, poem, fragment, metaphor at a time.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Robert Lowell in Hirsch, Edward (2021). 100 poems to break your heart. NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 133

Healing from Trauma? Use Training Wheels!

I have decided that the only thing more difficult than having training wheels is not having training wheels. Feeling tippy is better than being stuck, or afraid to move. In my current place of growth I am in a ‘tippy place’ where I wobble precariously from one side to the other side trying to find my balance: I am moving forward, and I can feel my own hard work, and every once in a while I get the sensation of what it might be like to not have the training wheels at all, where I can feel open space, where I can glide. And then moments later, I reach towards something new and I feel the wobbliness again.

New learning in adulthood is awkward. And learning or re-learning any of the skills of relationship or attachment is really hard. It’s not easy to find your center from the wild swings to the edges. Training wheels can be perfect for learning because you can actually start with them right on the ground—as if you had a perfect third wheel. You get to feel what it is like to sit and steer with the bike completely balanced. Having training wheels lets you incrementally decrease your need to rely on an old source of support so that you can rely gradually on your new skills and sources of support.

What is the psychological equivalent to training wheels?  The stepwise and incremental progressions of mending a heart and repairing trust?  How do you shift a worldview from one that is always vigilant—to one that can relax and lean in to safety and in to relationship?

We always want the solution to look more complicated or exciting than it really is. We don’t like to admit how even a small adjustment can make us feel wobbly. So how do we begin? The starting place for creating your metaphorical training wheels is a sense of solid ground. But what feels solid and comfortable?  In my book, Journey Through Trauma, I talk about the first phase of healing from repeated trauma as the Preparation Phase. The Preparation Phase is where you work on all of your resources for healing and you find some solid ground for yourself: where you make things more predictable or more routine or more supported than you have ever had, or than you will eventually need.

And then as you begin to take in the experience of safety and predictability that you have put in place—not unlike the training wheels set to the ground—you may begin to try to find some new edges of learning. You feel safe enough in a relationship to ask for a need to be met. You risk saying, “No.” You admit how you are feeling. Finding your learning edge in the  psychological world than they are in the physical world can more difficult than it is in the physical world because in the physical world you can see clearly what you are using or not using. One of the best examples of this kind of learning comes from Norman Doidge’s book The Brain that Changes Itself, where researchers figured out what it took to bring back full functioning to a person who had experienced a stroke, where the stroke makes impairs functioning on one side of their body. The prevailing treatment had been to work with the side that was not functioning with physical therapy—to teach it to work again. But that treatment had slow and intermittent success—most people reverted to using their ‘good hand’ to do most of the things that they needed to do, and the less functioning hand rarely gained functioning again. Instead, the new treatment intervened by strapping down the good arm or leg with an ace bandage, or putting an oven mitt on it—making it impossible to use the good side at all.  In the absence of being able to use the functioning limb, the brain appears to rewire the weaker side and eventually allow a person to gain complete functioning. So learning and healing is not just about what makes you feel more solid or helping you lean in to new learning—it is also about knowing what needs to be unlearned, or unused so new learning can take place.  And psychologically, what are those things you need to put your oven mitt on so that you have no choice but to lean in to the new learning?

How can we bring these ideas to healing from trauma? For learning or re-learning attachment? We need to remember that repeated trauma, and really, any relational trauma, is really three forms of trauma— what did happen (the trauma that occurred), what you did to survive--the protections you used to survive the trauma, and what didn’t happen— the growth and development you missed. And the work of creating training wheels is twofold—one wheel is like the oven mitt used for stroke patients— it is a set of behaviors that will keep you from using your old protections, and will keep you from following the old rules of survival. By putting a metaphorical oven mitt on your old protections—you will have to lean in to new behaviors and new attitudes. And these new behaviors and attitudes are the other training wheel—the things you may never have tried before.

So now you get to practice with the training wheels. You head to one side thinking you can use your old protections but you can’t because you have covered them with an ‘oven mitt’, so you wobble to the other side looking for refuge, and instead you find a new behavior that feels like a risky new behavior—which you try and feel anxious so you lean back toward your protections which you are bravely giving up and you go back and forth –sometimes gloriously finding the center—finding something brand new.

I call these moments new beginnings, they are ‘what didn’t happen.’ But how can these moments become woven in, become the new default? I have another example from Norman Doidge’s book, where a woman has severe vertigo from a reaction to antibiotics and is unable to stand or walk. As treatment she uses a helmet that serves as an external vestibular function for her inner ear that has been damaged. When she puts on the helmet she can stand up and stay balanced and doesn’t feel nauseous. That the helmet can support her this way is amazing, but what is really amazing is that wearing the helmet gives residual benefits that increase over time. The longer she wears the helmet, the longer she can feel the benefits even when she takes the helmet off: the helmet re-teaches her brain how to experience and manage balance. And this residual learning mirrors my own experience of psychological training wheels: you get a benefit in the moment of the new learning experience—but if you can stay in it with some constant repetition—you can begin to feel a residual benefit long past the actual practice time.

These moments of new beginning give you the brand new experience of growth—and the more they happen, the more of these moments that can get strung together, the more they have residual effects where you can pedal for a while without the wobbliness. Where you carry your center with you.

In healing the relational aspects of trauma what I have noticed is that these new moments of growth give me a sturdiness, I can feel my own two feet.  They give me a feeling of elasticity— I can feel like relationships have an elastic quality that will allow some give and take, and they give me a feeling of openness and expansiveness where I can look up and around. For me and many people with a history of trauma there is a hyper vigilance that is the constant background noise—the constant operating system running in the background all the time. Finding the tippy place between the two training wheels means living in a place where that operating system isn’t in the background: its acknowledged and worked with. In the tippy place you have owned the protections that keep you from learning a new way, and you have identified the new behaviors that are your learning edge. In the training wheels model you aren’t denying your problem or wishing it away—you are living with it—and working not to use your old protections so that you can try something new.

© 2018/2025 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Journey Through Trauma: A Trail Guide to the 5-Phase Cycle of Healing Repeated Trauma

By Gretchen L. Schmelzer PhD

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

By Norman Doidge

For What is There and What Isn't

For What is There and What Isn’t

Sometimes the mountain you climb

is the one you carry inside—

a weight, a sorrow, a hope,

a heaviness with each footfall.

I find myself on a path

soft with red pine needles

twisting along a narrow pond.

All is calm and still,

cattails swaying in the slight breeze,

winter’s grey giving way to green.

If someone told me that this cove

was the entrance to heaven

I would believe them.

The swans with their arched necks

swimming slowly as sentries

in front of the tall grass.

Like heaven, it is so quiet

until your ears adjust—

and then you hear the music—

a cardinal singing high and clear,

the red wing blackbird shrills,

the goldfinches flicker from branch

to branch to the surface of the water.

Sometimes the mountain you climb

carries you home.

Last week the Ramapos and the Catskills,

the Adirondacks and the Berkshires

bore me with such kindness and patience

guiding me home until they gently

set me down in the valley.

Mountains can give us sight:

upward, outward, inward—

and anyway,

they all hurt my heart.

My feet are tired and

the cove is long and deep.

Beyond the tall grass

is a tangle of trees and bramble

and I can’t see where it ends.

And it is hard to tell in this

afternoon light whether the cove

is the entrance to heaven

or heaven itself.

Whether the longing I carry in my heart

is for what is there,

or what isn’t.

© 2025 Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD