Beyond Broken

Trauma

I WONDER WHY

As a teacher trained in Special Education I was taught to use every question children ask as a learning opportunity.  “What is that,” the child asks pointing to a stop light.  I would answer, “it is a stop light and watch it change colors, red, yellow and green.  Red means stop, yellow means slow down and green means go.” In recent years, I have seen teachers in the Waldorf School respond differently. When a child asks a question (and inevitably children ask a ton of questions) the parents and teachers are likely to answer, “I wonder.”

Sensing the wisdom of this, I was challenged to change my approach and answer, “I wonder.” And it took me a while to understand the depth of this philosophy of letting children stay in the wonder and mystery of world, and find the answer for themselves when they are ready.

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What Is Being Revealed to Heal?

Week nine of our respective isolations and aloneness is bringing with it a phenomenon I am observing in many of us.

This iceberg is a classic metaphor. The part seen above the water line is what we are conscious of knowing, experiencing and remembering, and the mass below water represents material that lives in our unconscious.  What is beginning to happen is that as the waters of life have been quieted by our slowing down and staying still, we can see what is below more clearly and more unconscious material is making itself known.  It is fascinating to watch this in myself and in those with whom I work. Here is how things were revealed in some dreams.

I dream I am in the hospital with the virus and I feel its desperate grip on me.  I can feel the moment of choice — will I fight to live or will I succumb?   It is a desperate moment and I am all alone.  I choose life and wake up realizing that I have often made a different choice — one of living with depression and contemplating suicide.  I are now affirming life!
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Little Drops of Rain – The Grace of Grief

Walking on the beach yesterday — a beach that is officially closed except for exercise — I started to let in the fact that our summer is essentially cancelled.  Each event was cancelled one at a time and there was a feeling of loss, or sometimes relief. But now there is the empty beach and the empty summer stretched out in front of me for miles.  My mind went to all kinds of conclusions.  First, that I should not feel sad because I have so much to be grateful for, second that we could stay a shorter time here and then go home and third that I was just feeling blah and would get over it.

I came back home and listened to a Tara Brach podcast I have been following Called Sheltering in Love.  She has been a teacher of the practice of RAIN meditation, a profound process of Recognizing a feeling, Allowing it, Intimately feeling it in the body, and then Nurturing it.  As I fought my feelings that arose when I felt the loss of our summer I had hoped for, we usually resist our feelings.  We do this by minimizing them to try and make them small or exaggerating them so they feel too big to handle or by trying to fix them. So naming them and allowing them is so different.  And then giving them space in our bodies and our own comfort — it is revolutionary.

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Traveling at the speed of… me?

Dear Lord Prayer

Actually my boat is relatively small, even though I was told as a child that I should not be afraid of anything because my mother was afraid of everything.  I felt like an adult from the day I was born.  I honestly believed that some of us are born full grown.  We are the special ones, we know to keep our napkins in our laps, to use big words and how to shadow all the grown ups in our lives to be really helpful.  ‘Mother’s little helper’ was the grandest of praise!  Me along side my mother baking eight kinds of Christmas cookies—all to perfection—until my mother’s ‘back’ gave out and sent her to bed, never to recover. Instead, she would  die eighteen months later.  I never made the connection between her death and her perfectionism until  now.  How driven she was to always ‘look’ so good to the outside world, many times at my expense.  My father and I got used to staying clear of her right before a dinner party when she was entertaining.  A tantrum would ensue with slamming doors and fits of hysteria at one or the other of us. Her little helper was watching, and learning.
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Are You A Good Person Who Was In A Bad Situation?

Lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are typically found to accompany the distress states caused by early trauma.  Children cannot experience themselves as being a good person in a bad situation.  Failure of the holding environment (family) is experienced as failure of the self.  Later thoughts like, ‘there is something wrong with me’, or, ‘I am not worthy or bad’, are built upon early sensations in the body of ‘I feel bad’.  Simply understanding that your shame reflects the environmental failure you experienced rather than who you really are can help shift lifelong patterns of low self esteem, shame and a sense of worthlessness and help you see yourself in a new, more compassionate way.  Paraphrased from Healing Developmental Trauma with Laurence Heller, PHD

 

Have you experienced extreme highs when something good happens to you and extreme lows or deflation when facing something bad or a disappointment?  Do you feel like you are bouncing up and down, dependent on outside forces?  If things are going really well and you are making your goals, do you still have a nagging feeling that you are not enough?  Do you sense an emptiness that does not respond to how much you fill your life or even how happy you seem to be?  Even as your confidence grows, and your accomplishments pile up, do you notice you are afraid that failure could be lurking right around the next corner? Or do you feel that, no matter how successful you are, you are just fooling everyone—playing a charade of a confident, accomplished person; that you’re a fake?
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