Healing Trauma

My therapy group had a retreat this past weekend.   We traveled a few hours,  stayed in a house,  ate well,  and processed a lot of grief.   The two therapists (a married couple) who facilitate the group are licensed social workers and have a spiritual orientation which feels comfortable to me as well as,  from what I can tell,  a few agnostics in the group.

The six members of the group started by pairing up and sharing with his/her partner what "story" each wished to work on over the weekend.   My story had to do with my social gesture;  how I am,  in a basic way,  with other people.   There are at least two traumas from my early life which affect my social gesture significantly.    

First is the sexual abuse I received at the hands of a 15 year old female babysitter,  over the course of several months,   when I was five and six years old.   

Second is being abandoned by my dad when I was six.

What I communicated to my "partner" and the group as a whole is that these two traumas affect my interaction with any human being I meet.     When I meet a woman/female there is part of me which experiences fear because I subconsciously wonder if she is going to sexually attack me.   When I meet a man/male there is part of me which experiences fear because I wonder if he is going to abandon me.

I am able to conduct myself passably in social situations.   At times people have even told me that I have skill and strength in the social realm.    I think that my higher self carries this strength but that my lower self,  the deeply wounded me inside of me,  keeps me from connecting with others.   I can connect on a relatively surface level but hold up an inner barrier to others (my wife excepted)  in terms of developing any deeper connection.

What I am feeling really good about is that this "story" I've just laid out started to get shaken during the retreat.     I was given an opportunity to tell my story,  do a lot of crying,  and process the trauma using a technique called "Body Centered Psychotherapy" (BCP)  used by the two facilitators.

The idea behind the BCP used in our group is that, being human,  we each store the feeling signature of trauma in our body.  If we can access the buried emotions stored in the body, in a safe and supportive environment,  and express them,  then we can free ourselves from what happens when we bottle them up.   

As I was talking with the group about my grief over being molested and having my father abandon me I started sobbing.   I came to a realization that I had been a bright and radiant little boy as a young child and much of that vitality inverted as I was getting slammed by these traumas at age five and six.   

I believe it is accurate to say that I went from being a radiant child to being a wounded child between the ages of 4 and 7.

As my sobs began to slow down one of the facilitators asked if I would be open to working with the trauma in a more physical way.   I agreed and we went to the next room where there was a large, cube-shaped cushion and a mattress-like cushion.   Everyone sat across from me,  so I could see them,   as I stood in front of the cube-cushion.

The therapist gave me a tennis racket and invited me to hit the cushion with it in a rhythmic way and vocalize as a way to access the buried emotions.    I looked at my friends in the room and they looked at me with great caring and compassion.   Some of them had tears streaming down their cheeks as they deeply empathized with the pain and anguish I was expressing.   I felt deeply cared for.

My emotions are very buried but nevertheless began to come up as I struck the cushion.   My energy for it let up a bit and at that moment the therapist took the mattress-like cushion and put it between me and the others in the room. 

The therapist said,  "this is the obstruction between you and these people--what are you going to do?"  He asked me if I thought the people in the room cared for me.   It was obvious to me they did.   He and another strong man stood on the other side of this cushion and provided resistance.   I pushed and pushed,  feeling like a wounded and sad soul.   He kept encouraging me to find the feelings that were there and express them.   

Suddenly,  I felt a connection with the feelings and began to push against the cushion such that the two on the other side could not hold me back.   My strength was much greater than it had been.   I had made a breakthrough.

If I had stopped with sitting on the chair sobbing I would also have processed some of the emotions.   But my experience I carried forward from that moment would have been of being a very sad and wounded person.   Because I brought my body into action with the subsequent exercise,  I was now becoming the hero in my new story.   The new story is that I am able to reach into my grief and process it so that I can develop deeper connections with the people who were in that room at that time.   I can build on that.

My part of the session ended as the therapist asked me if I wanted to lie down and ask others in the room to physically support me.   I asked someone to cradle my head,  to hold my leg,  to hold my hand.  All seven people in the room held me as I lay there,  feeling very supported as I processed my pain.   It was like I was lying on a cloud of human warmth and caring.

My old story has been about suffering trauma and then not being able to tell anyone about it (or telling people but not having it be acknowledged).   In recent years my wife has been a wonderful friend to me and has helped me bring out parts of my pain in order that it might be healed.   

My therapy group is taking this process to the next level.   And as I make progress I can build on the work I have already done.   

Having been home for a few days,   going back to work,  etc.   I have felt very tender.   I caught a cold for the first time in several months.     The group facilitators told us that as we went from the "expanded" state of the retreat to being back home,  we would likely start feeling more "small".   They reassured us that it is about the "breathing" of the healing process and that we should not feel alarmed.

I feel like a weight is coming off of my shoulders;  like the little kid who wanted to scream as he was getting hammered now could let out the pain and be supported and cared for in a way he never was before.   It is safe now.   I can heal the little guy who has been so hurt for the past 35 years.

I know this healing path will take time,  most likely years,  to release and properly grieve the traumas which have,  for so long,  colored the lens of what I think of myself,  how I express myself.   It seems like my higher self is going to have more room to grow now that all that pain,  all that is so deeply connected to my lower self,  is coming forward for healing.

This is not easy.   But it's all I can do.    To refuse to do this work would be to negate myself.  And I am done with that.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Trauma

 I have been working with the ideas of Charles Whitfield lately and am finding them very helpful.   In his book, Healing the Child Within and companion book A Gift to Myself, he describes a system of classifying trauma which I'll use as the framework of this post.   

The categories, with examples given for children/adolescenrts,  are as follows:

1.  None:          No apparent psychological stressor

2.  Minimal:    Vacation with family

3. Mild:            Change in school year,  new teacher

4. Moderate:   Chronic parental fighting, change to new school, illness of a close relative, sibling birth.

5. Severe:         Death of peer,  divorce of parents,  arrest,  hospitalization, persistent and harsh parental discipline

6.  Extreme:     Death of a parent or sibling,  repeated sexual/physical abuse.

7.  Catastrophic:   Multiple family deaths.

Obviously,  numbers 1-3 are the kinds of stressors which we encounter all the time and which do not typically damage our sense of well being.   Whitfield says that if a person can name the more severe traumas and be able to speak about them,  s/he is off to a good start.  So here goes:

First of all,  I don't think any stressor in my life so far could be categorized as Catastrophic.   My entry into the scale is at the level of Extreme.   

My extreme stressors:   

--My father abandoning me when I was six.   

--Sexual abuse by a babysitter over a several month period when I was six.

--The death of my father at age fourteen.

--My mom became psychotic and was hospitalized when I was fifteen.

My severe stressors: 

--I fell while riding my tricycle and busted my chin open when I was three.  Had to get multiple stitches and there is a clear scar today.

--My parents divorced when I was four.

--Moving to a town many hours away from my dad when I was four.

--Shortly before my dad exited my life he came to my house to pick me up, quickly left,  and I was not able to catch up with him--so I rode my bike across town to his house.  He was not there and so my mom came and picked me there after several hours.

--Being in a car accident where I and my mom were relatively unhurt but the other car occupants had serious injuries (broken leg, pelvis, ribs) when I was nine.

--My mom having a nervous breakdown when I was ten.  I went to stay with the family of a class friend for several days while she was in the hospital.

--Getting slapped down by my mom's boyfriend, in front of my mom,  when I was thirteen.

My moderate stressors: 

--My mom's frequent irritable mood when I was growing up.

--My mom chronically being (sometimes hours)  late to pick me up all through my childhood.

---A neighbor friend of mine hit me in the face with a child's rake when I was three.

--We moved to a new state when I was four.

--Watching "The Exorcist" with my dad at the movie theater when I was five.

--Having kids in the neighborhood try to convince me that my mom was not my real mom and that they knew my real mom when I was six.

--I showed the babysitter who molested me a piece of art I had done and she said,  "You didn't do that--you're not good enough to do that."

--Receiving (infrequent) mail or phone calls from my dad from age six to age fourteen.

--My cousin coming to live with us (for about a year) when I was nine.

--Neighborhood bullies surrounded me and spit all over me when I was ten.

--Getting stabbed in the eye with a pencil by a bully in my class when I was ten.   The principal rushed my to the hospital and there was no permanent damage.   However, the lead made a mark in my eye which is still there today.

--I pooped my pants on my way home from school one day when I was ten.

--My mom having a blow-up fight with my aunt's new husband when we were visiting them--we abruptly left and flew back home,  when I was thirteen.

--A man who lived a few doors down from us called me up and said "I want your body" when I was thirteen.

--I was caught shoplifting when I was thirteen.

--Having sex with a total stranger as my first sexual experience after puberty,  when I was thirteen.

--A friend of the family's  killed himself when I was fifteen.

--My girlfriend was hit by a car as she walked to my soccer game when I was fifteen.  She was hospitalized for several days and recovered.

--My mom married a guy I did not all like when I was fifteen.

--Her subsequent marriage to him which included frequent yelling and emotional abuse.

--Having a near miss of a head-on collision when I was driving at age seventeen.

--Death of a close family friend when I was seventeen.

I probably have other stressors that I'm not thinking of,  most likely in the moderate level.    According to Whitfield I may have some level of PTSD as a result of these traumas.   He asks further questions:   

--How did you handle these stresses?

--Did anyone teach you healthy ways to handle these?

He says that if a person doesn't handle these stressors in healthy ways that s/he may still have some level of PTSD.   

He further says that the PTSD is more damaging and difficult to treat if 1)  the stressors happen over a long period of time (more than six months),  2) if the traumas are of human origin,  and 3) if the people around the stressed person tend to deny or minimize the existence of the stressor.

According to Whitfield, some of the symptoms can be 

1) re-experiencing the trauma (upsetting recollections, bad dreams, etc)

2)  Psychic numbing:    This may include a constriction or absence of feeling, or expressing feeling,  which often results in a sense of estrangement, withdrawal,  isolation or alienation.

3)  Hyper-alertness or hyper-vigilance:  person is constantly on the lookout for potential similar stressors

4)  Survivor guilt:  ie. escaping the trauma when others are still experiencing the trauma.

5)  Chemical dependence

6) Avoiding activities associated with the trauma

7)  Developing multiple personalties.

"When we are not allowed to remember,  to express our feelings and to grieve or mourn our losses or traumas…through the free expression of our Child Within,  we become ill."

More on this next week.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben

Not Crazy

I have been reading lately a book by Charles Whitfield,  "Not Crazy:  You May not be Mentally Ill".   For anyone who wants to see all the sides of the MI debate,  it seems to me required reading.  He is an M.D. who first came into the public eye with his book "Healing the Child Within".   I recently was introduced to this book about a month ago and it is having a very real,  and very positive influence on my life.   

I liked Whitfield's book "Healing the Child Within" so much that I ordered a few of his more recent books.     He paints a very different picture of treatment for mental illness than what I have learned so far in NAMI.   In fact,  he's pretty critical of NAMI's emphasis on the genetic components of MI and strong focus on pharmaceutical treatment.   

Whitfield has written several other books on the topics of recovery and whether today's medical mental health community is doing a good job.   Let's just say that his critique is scathing.   Basically,  he posits that MI is often diagnosed and treated using drugs when what a person may actually have going is PTSD and unresolved grief.     He says that, in many cases, these unresolved PTSD issues, coupled with other factors such as substance abuse,  can easily present as MI.

Furthermore,  he says that once people start taking pharmaceuticals that they can be subject to serious withdrawal symptoms by stopping or being sporadic in taking the pills.   

What resonates very deeply for me is how Whitfield starts with the premise that each human being is spiritual in nature.

He seems to be steeped in a spiritual path called A Course in Miracles and to be joining his spiritual understandings with his decades as a doctor and psychotherapist.     Something that has really struck me as I've read his book involves what I would term the "spiritual individuality" of a person.   I understand this as the being at the core of who we are,  the essential  part of each of us which existed before we were born and will exist after we die.   

The question I am considering has to do with a healing modality and how that is affected by pharmaceutical treatment.   

1)  We heal ourselves through being increasingly in touch with our spiritual identity.

2)  Drugs which treat MI make it harder for people taking them to be in touch with their spiritual identity.

3) Therefore,  are the drugs really healing?

My reading of Whitfield is that he sees the drugs as causing way more problems than they solve.   He references the side effects,  withdrawal symptoms and the the deeply faulty screening process by clinicians as being very significant flaws in treatment for people with psychological problems.   He states that often MI is diagnosed by a clinician who has never asked a client for a detailed health history which includes traumas a person may have suffered in the past.    He posits that many people with a diagnosis may not, in fact,  be mentally ill,  but may be suffering from PTSD.   If the person finds a context where s/he can work through unresolved trauma,  the "symptoms" which presented as MI begin to fade and the spiritual identity is strengthened.

Whitfield does not claim this process is easy.   He says typically it is a multi-year process of recovery for someone who is highly committed to transforming their issues.

What stands out to me about this book is that it is not at all "airy-fairy".   This is a person who has been a psychiatrist for over 30 years.  has worked with countless clients,   and who writes with great clarity and conviction.

As a teacher I have thought for years that the drug, Ritalin,  was spectacularly over-prescribed.   I can clearly see how the environment a child is in plays a fundamental role in how s/he may present as ADD or ADHD.   If we look at the environment (at home, at school, etc.) and make changes,  the child does not need the Ritalin to be able to pay attention in school.   Parents can and do make changes to how they are raising their kids.   There are tried and true methods for  raising a child that, I believe,    completely eliminate the chance that child would ever need such a drug as Ritalin.

Furthermore,  Ritalin is a powerful drug,  a stimulant which alters a child's consciousness.   If a child is not used to his/her own natural consciousness,  it seems like s/he may have a steeper grade to climb in looking for his/her spiritual identity.     

The movie "Garden State" is one I really like.    It is a story of a young person who was traumatized as a child by the death of his mother.   His father,  a psychiatrist,  has prescribed for him drugs (presumably anti-depressants) ever since that trauma which have put him in a permanent calm,  subdued state.   The movie is about the young person realizing that the drugs were keeping him from knowing who he was.   So he stops taking the drugs.    And he starts finding his way out of the state the drugs were imposing on his consciousness.   And towards an experience of his own true thoughts,  feelings and impulses.   

To my eye,  this is a movie which brings artistically what Charles Whitfield is talking about.    

1)  The protagonist is lost in the confusion of life and the fog of anti-depressants.

2)  He decides (spiritual identity is talking here) to stop taking the drugs.

3)  He realizes that he still has deep issues of trauma and grief which he has never dealt with (and neither has his father,  the psychiatrist)

4)  Life becomes more scary but also more real and interesting,  and it is much more about his evolution as a being.   

Now how would this person do if he had the active support of a skilled therapist or therapy group to help him reach those traumas, cognize them,  and grieve all of the pain he'd never been given the opportunity to?  (In the movie he has friends who are very helpful in that regard.)

As I read Whitfield's book I am coming to some realizations.   What seems likely to me is the following:   

1) Some psych drugs are useful in some cases.

2)  They are massively over-prescribed in general.

3)  They are harmful in many cases.

4)  There is a better way.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly,  Ben

Alternate Realities

I have been thinking lately about  alternate realities.   It has to do with my parents' patterns I imprinted on when I was a kid.  It has to do with what could have happened if  certain crucial support had not come through for our family.   First,  a little history.

When I was in high school there were several shocks that hit our family.   We made it through them relatively well because of critical support that came towards us from my grandparents.   Without the support things could have gone very differently.

When I was fourteen my dad,  who I had not seen for eight years,  killed himself.   This was a tremendous shock to me and to my mom.    About a year later my mom had a psychotic break in which she saw "guns going off" (my dad used a gun to kill himself).   That was when she went into the hospital,  received her diagnosis within a few weeks,  and started taking lithium.   About a year after that she was told by her supervisor that she was going to be fired from her professional job and gave her the option of resigning,  which she took.   

My grandmother had already been giving my mom some financial support before this time.   When my mom lost her job she was "taken under the family wing".   She was given a job managing the small family business with grandma watching over her at every step.   My mom's picture of these events runs contrary to what I have explained.   She sees it that she went to help grandma.   My take on it was that it was grandma helping mom.   I have never shared my opinion with mom because I don't see what good it would do.   She would get very defensive and very angry.    I have to be careful when I choose to challenge my mom's fantasy thinking.   When I do it had better be for a good reason.

Without the support grandma provided,  my mom would have been out of a job and wondering what she was going to do for money.   She would have had to do something fairly different than what she'd been doing.   It would have been hard for her to get the same level of work when she'd been fired for incompetence at her previous job.   

My point in bringing this has to do with the inner gesture of my family,  the one I imprinted on.   That inner gesture, coming from both parents,  was one of spiraling down towards possible calamity.   Of reaching a certain level of professional status but not being able to sustain it for more than several years.     My father carried this gesture.   In his late twenties he had a PhD,  a great job and seemed like one of the "best and brightest" to quote a moniker of the time.   Alcohol and depression took him down to being penniless and alone,  and to taking his own life.

My mom also had great ambition and promise.   She had a Master's degree and was holding down a demanding professional job.   But her mental illness was digging away at her ability to maintain the life she so desperately  wanted to live.   She was not able to look squarely at her issues and work to remediate them.   That appears to be a common symptom of the illness.   Instead,  she created fantasies about what was happening to protect her fragile psyche from the slings and arrows of what life was bringing her.   Her protective denial has cost her dearly as it has kept her from seeing things as they are.  As she looks back at the main themes of her life,  many of them are wrapped in fantasy.     She is a very smart and perceptive person and, at the same time,  her thinking can be very skewed.

So both of my parents had the pattern of not being able to sustain a professional life.   My dad did not have a safety net to swoop in and save him.   My mom had the safety net.

I have also had a safety net.   My grandparents and mom paid for my college.   I have had help and support along the way.    When I resigned from my teaching job one year ago there was some buffer that is helping me to make the transition to a new career without severe financial stress.   

Guess what,  kiddo?   You're doing the pattern!

What I am doing is not all that different from what my mom did when she left her professional job.   In both cases it was family support which made the difference.   One difference is that I am trying to be honest with myself.     My mom built up fantasy structures around her psyche which have been there ever since.   She has such structures about a number of things,  including what my childhood was like.   The difference between how we see things is a major obstacle to being able to really enjoy being together.    We lived much of the same history but we see it very differently.

There are two sets of alternate realities to which I allude in the title.  

The first is how differently I see our family history from how my mom sees it.    This affects  mom's and my relationship significantly because we are looking at a two very different sets of "facts".   There is an enormous number of opinions and thoughts I have in her presence which are never spoken.  I just let her have "her way" of seeing things a lot of the time because for many issues,   to share my view would be upsetting to her and not all that important to me.  So I pick my battles carefully.

The second,  and more important to my process,  has to do with what might have happened to mom and me had my grandmother not bailed us out.   Without that significant family support I can easily imagine that life for us would have been much harder.   Poverty makes everything much harder.   And at a fairly basic level I imprinted on my parents' gesture of "sinking towards likely calamity" without realizing it.     Some part of me inside was expecting that I would reach a certain level of professional status and then start to spiral downwards.   I have had a visceral experience that what I am saying here is true.    I am getting at a whole new level how powerful family patterns can be.

So all of this is fairly sobering to me.   I have to admit that it all makes me look pretty weak.   Yes,  and it is a fact that I am also a strong person.   To be the strong person I can be I'm going to need to further understand the pattern,  then actively and consciously work to undo it in myself.   This is probably going to take some time.   The fact that I am aware of the pattern,  however,  is huge.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly, Ben