Thoughts on healing

“. . . to experience our suffering”

“Finally we become willing to experience our suffering instead of fighting it. When we do so our standpoint, our vision of life, abruptly shifts.”                                                                    -Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen: Love and Work

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When I began this substack, I didn’t intend to write about recovering from developmental trauma. I write about the neglected topic of dissociative disorders and how dissociative amnesia has appeared in and structured my life.

The question of recovery—the quest to heal—is a constant in my life, however, from long before I understood anything about trauma or amnesia. And if I am an advocate for penetrating amnesia and knowing oneself and one’s past, it’s because I believe that knowledge is an integral part of recovery. How can you be said to have recovered if you are split in two, a traumatized part stifled and exiled, and a more-or-less-normal self ignorant of the very existence of that younger part?

The only way around trauma is through it. It took me 20 years to confront the cause of my PTSD. Until I did, it took everything from me. -Leon Macfayden, Medium

More prosaically, learning about my past gave me some hope of resolving the numerous aftereffects of trauma that I have always suffered from. I have not actually resolved them. I still suffer. I regularly feel various ugly, painful emotions and bodily sensations. I have the same difficulties relating to people—the same fear—I’ve always had. When my pain and fear are most activated, I doubt the wisdom of what I do. I wonder: is it possible to heal? Is it possible to process traumatic memories? If so, am I doing something wrong? If not, should I stop doing what I do to try to heal?

We all ask these questions, I imagine. And keep asking them because the answers out there are ambiguous and contradictory. Every therapist tells me there are no guarantees, no “silver bullet,” and probably no such thing as complete recovery from developmental trauma. Maybe from adult trauma, but not from what shaped your developing brain. At a panel on writing memoirs about trauma, one of the three writers told us: “I hate talk of recovery. How do I live with breakage?”

On the other hand, some survivors say they have (mostly) healed. So I accept that there is a range of outcomes, and I continue to be committed to healing. But I keep coming up against the question: How do I know if something is helping if I’m suffering? Only if we have faith do we keep trying. Whether it’s exercise or medication or therapy or meditation or writing or psychedelics, we need to have some confidence that we’re on the right path. But if one of these causes an increase in pain and distress, as any one one of them might, what then?

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Recovering from our childhoods requires breaking some of the habits, bonds, beliefs, and behaviors that were seared into us before we had any understanding or choice. Forty years ago, I read a book whose title I don’t recall and wrote these sentences from it in my journal.

The individual may suffer severe inhibition when [s]he seeks to assert his will. [S]He has become habituated to coping with anxiety by turning away from self-assertion. Submissiveness is a safety device; efforts to drop the device will touch off deep anxiety. The security operations whereby the child achieved a sense of acceptance may be the habits of reaction which seriously curtail his[her] self-realization in later life.

This describes me. It doesn’t necessarily describe you. Your problem might be the opposite—that you assert your will too much. Maybe you’ve become a bully. Or not. But whatever you’ve become, trying to change is going to “touch off deep anxiety.” We’ve trapped in a cage made of our procedural memories, our habituations, our beliefs about what we are and what it’s necessary to do to get by in the world. We’re trapped by our traumatic memories as we try to avoid them at all costs.

The thing is, the path of recovery inevitably includes pain. Nate Postlethwaite writes:

People don’t talk about how painful it is to come alive. To begin telling stories you were forced to hide. To start naming things that shut our hearts off. To let anger and grief breathe. They don’t talk about it because few do it. Peace to those willing to heal. -Nate Postlethwaite, Facebook, Oct 6, 2023

Trauma is frozen up inside us, and we are blocked from healing by addictions and dissociation and all sorts of behaviors like workaholism and lashing out at others. To recover, we need to remove these addictions, and as we remove them the trauma thaws and we feel more of the fear and anguish they were protecting us from.

I say ‘trauma’ but let’s just face what developmental trauma is. It is fear, even terror. It is anguish—the anguish of being a vulnerable child or teen violated by the people we have inevitably and profoundly bonded with, the people we love.

As we diminish our addictions and turn to our inner younger selves, learning to love them instead of loving (and hating) those who hurt us, it’s going to hurt. So learning how to cope with that hurt—to develop that capacity—is essential.

Others’ advice is similar, like this from an unexpected source:

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain. -Jim Morrison, lead vocalist and primary lyricist of the rock band, the Doors

Still, Jim Morrison died at 27, probably from an overdose. His use of drugs probably wasn’t a result of his attempts to carry his pain, but it points to the fact that failure of one kind or another is always possible.

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This brings me back to where I started. This worry that keeps popping up that I’m doing it wrong. Not that anyone’s going to think that methods I use like yoga, intentional breathing, or self-compassion practice are wrong, but that approaching my trauma is wrong. In fact, many people, probably most people, believe that it’s better not to. Every single person in my family apparently believed that. Most therapists believe that. We’re trying to be happier, right? Not dwell on the past, not do anything that makes us feel worse.

This is a further belief that’s instilled in abused children, one of the beliefs that needs to be countered and overthrown—that we should suppress our pain.

As children trying to cope with our fear and anguish, our families and teachers tell us that nobody likes our moping and self-pity, nobody likes anger and negativity. “Why can’t you be more like so and so? She’s so fun.” Is there any child who hasn’t heard something of this sort? If adults can’t be with our distress, sit down with us, comfort us, try to understand what is causing our distress—we learn our distress is wrong.

As an adult I learned the same thing from therapists. When I became agitated, they led me away from what I was trying to talk about. They didn’t support me in moving toward the truth. Maybe they were triggered themselves, or maybe they were waiting until they deemed I was ‘ready’ or until I felt ‘safe.’ Either way, they didn’t return to it, and why would I? They taught me what I’d already learned from my family—to be ashamed of my emotions and memories and hide them. Therapists as much as anyone made me afraid to bring to consciousness what I feel and what I know.

Even reading and listening to writers and teachers can lead to shame and a sense of defeat for what I feel. The story they tell is often about how they or their patients were at some point in their lives lost, until they found X. X might be meditation or EMDR or IFS or neurofeedback or psychedelics or yoga. All good methods, but by telling the stories of their successes, these writers/speakers suggest, without explicitly saying so, that if I do X, I too can heal. And it won’t be all that painful or take that long.

Having said all that, I’ll admit that I’m almost certainly doing it wrong, making mistakes. I may sometimes be doing too much; I have often done too little, given up. Unfortunately, I think it’s inevitable that we all make mistakes as we try to recover, because nobody knows of any reliable path. You might think that thousands of years of humanity trying to heal would have taught us more, but that’s not how it’s worked out.

Change is painful and destabilizing, and since we’re trying to change so we can be happier we consider the pain a sign we’re doing it wrong, and we lose faith. We get scared. We lose our nerve. And so do practitioners.

What can we do? How do we build our faith and nerve, push back against our fear?

Jim Morrison again:

Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters.

I believe he’s right. How then do we learn to carry our pain? There are different ways. One is a daily practice of mediation on the body. I believe in meditation because it always makes me better—if I can do it. (That’s a big if.) It doesn’t necessarily relieve pain—it may increase pain—but then I become a person who can be with pain. That is tremendous.

Joko Beck, a meditation teacher in the Buddhist Zen tradition, wrote:

Finally we become willing to experience our suffering instead of fighting it. When we do so our standpoint, our vision of life, abruptly shifts . . . Once again the unease comes up. And we have to struggle, to go through it again. Each time we do this – each time we go into the suffering and let it be – our vision of life enlarges. It’s like climbing a mountain. At each point that we ascend we see more; and that becomes broader with each cycle of climbing, of struggle. And the more we see, the more expansive our vision, the more we know what to do, what action to take. -Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen: Love and Work

I love this quote because it inspires me, but maybe it’s too grand. It suggests a steady progression. In my experience there is nothing steady about anything. I balance it with Pema Chödrön’s:

We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. -Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

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We also need self-love. The love we get from others is always going to be insufficient or unreliable. The only love we can depend on—that we have control over—is the love we give ourselves.

One way to give ourselves love and goodness is through music. My current way to meditate is to lie down and listen to (meditate on) thirty to sixty minutes of music. As I listen I attempt to meditate on the fractious, sometimes hideous, sensations in my body. If I sink into sleep, I lift myself out. I do my best to stop resisting my feelings, to simply “experience” them. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t, but the music definitely supports me. Sometimes the music grates on me; occasionally it is sublime. Often I offer the music—as love and consolation—to my traumatized self. A bridge for consolation to travel over.

I believe this mindfulness of the body—feeling what you feel—is the bedrock of recovery, the essential practice. Since I can’t stay with my feelings without support, I do it with music. (I suggest this practice not knowing if it’s right for you. A five or ten minute sitting practice is often best for those of us who have been traumatized. You might begin by meditating on an object as Christine Forner recommends in her book and interviews.)

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What is recovery? Is it a lack of pain or feeling ’safe’? Is it being able to enjoy life and enjoy other people? Definitely—no one would argue with that—but there are other aspects of recovery, and I’ve learned that sometimes tradeoffs are inevitable. For me, recovery includes knowledge, understanding, honest connection, and agency. After a journey with psychedelic mushrooms last July, I wrote:

July, 2023
In the healing of trauma there is the body and all the bodily methods.
Also in the healing of trauma, there is the mind which is largely verbal. 
-To put into words what I experienced (itself a long and arduous process.) 
-To be heard and assisted by someone further along the path. 
-To understand that what I have gone through and am going through is a primordial/universal/mythical/historical process. 
-And to join in community with others which involves speaking, writing and listening.

According to this view of healing, I have come a ways from where I was eleven years ago at realization, or even five years ago when I started doing psychedelic journeys. The fact that I still have a long way to go is not something to be ashamed of. It doesn’t mean I’m doing it wrong, though I might be. Most likely it’s as Pema Chödrön wrote:

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move.

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See my Resources page for book recommendations and links to more information about dissociative amnesia.