THERAPY
Behavior is purposeful. That’s what my
last shrink told me. Over and over again
she would recite that mantra. It was
meant to help me to see that my thoughts and actions pertaining to my PTSD had
a root[1]
somewhere. It wasn’t until later that I
learned what a root even was, or that it was pertinent to find them, weed them
out, exhume them, and then to be able to move on. P!nk says “We’re not broken, just bent.” I like that one equally well. It has hope.
It says that whatever the circumstance, whatever the mental blockage or
stuck point (again from my therapist), we can move on. We can mend.
We can move beyond and heal. My
mother recently sent me a meme from Facebook that sparked my thought process on
healing. All of these things, all of
these people have led me to one grand epiphany, and that is that life, in all
its ups and down, heartbreaks and soaring moments of triumph, IS therapy. The people that we interact with and listen,
really listen to, are our therapists.
This is not to discount the value of actual therapy, the kind where you
meet with someone qualified by years of training to help you move past things,
but to give merit to the people we meet and the experiences we have with them.
Roots.
Those little bastards that have buried themselves down so deep into your
psyche that it takes damn near a miracle to pull them up, well, they’re
everywhere. At least they are for
me. The first earth shattering root that
I discovered and dug out wore the same face that I did at five years old. She was blonde haired, with torn blue jeans,
and you could see the absolute terror in those tiny hazel eyes of hers. If you looked deep enough, long enough, you
could see the events which transpired which firmly planted her into my
sub-conscious. I’ve written about them
so much in the process of my therapy that they almost seem a cliché to me
now. She was hurt, several times, and by
several people, and it won’t help to dig any further into that so I’ll move
on. The point of that root is that it
opened a kind of Pandora’s Box of other roots for me. When I pulled her out, and gave her a voice,
she was no longer attached to every other root; no longer did she color every
experience I had with another human being.
I had had no idea that for thirty years this one root had been the lens
through which I would view my interactions and relationship with every other
human being. Completely in my sub-conscious,
she was there, telling me to be careful, to keep my distance because everyone
would end up hurting me eventually. She
was incessant with her assertion that I had been a bad person, which was why
bad things happened to me. Her terror
led her to believe that any kind of perceived weakness or vulnerability would
serve as a beacon to the very worst in people, and that they WOULD take
advantage of that.
Vulnerability
is quite an interesting word. Depending
on one’s lens, it can mean so many different things. For me it meant not just the opportunity to
be hurt, but the absolute guarantee that I would undergo agonizingly painful experiences
if I let it show. Judging the world
around me through this lens, I spent decades assuming the very worst, and
physically and emotionally distancing myself from, well, everyone. We’ve all heard the adage that “misery loves company”,
but in the case of fear of everyone and everything, my misery demanded absolute
solitude. So I lived my life apart,
alone, unable to truly connect with anyone, unable to settle down or to have
any kind of home base. In one of my very
favorite books, Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote “[S]o I lived alone, without
anyone that I could really talk to…”[2] , and
that certainly held true for me. Now, I
don’t mean to portray my life as tragic, or lacking in love or friendship. I had all of these things. I was just unable and unwilling to truly let
anyone in, or to truly seek out to know anyone else.
It took eight solid months (of
what was supposed to be a 12 week program) before I could begin to see
vulnerability as more than a weakness and beacon for disaster. It took more than a year after that before I
could finally let all of my barriers down and be completely open and honest
with someone. The first person I was
able to do that with, as sappy as it may sound, was me. It was indeed, just as I had anticipated,
agonizingly painful, even torturous, for quite some time, until one day it wasn’t
anymore. Eventually I came to an
emotional breakthrough, and this complete self honesty was finally liberating,
and comforting, and amazingly, well, amazing.
The second person I was able to experience this kind of total emotional,
wall-shattering interaction with will probably be my best friend for the rest
of my life. If nothing else, I will
always treasure her for honoring me and my vulnerable and sometimes (we could
even say often at this juncture) uncomfortable full disclosure of self. That I could make that kind of connection
with another person, and that this person did not violate this trust, was monumental
in my trek to get beyond the emotional peak of the mountain.
Having stated that it took an exorbitant
amount of time to get through my therapy program, it should be stated that
there were several factors at play. The
first of these factors was that I lacked severely in the most basic of coping
skills. At thirty years old I had to
re-learn how to process nearly everything.
Having shed that hazel-eyed lens I was now at a juncture where I simply
did not know how to process my own emotions and experiences. I was void, vacuous, without the ability to
even verbalize what I was feeling, and this was worse even than simply
expecting the worst of everyone. I felt
constantly out of control, unable to realize what I was feeling, and so every
emotion turned into anger for me. The
thing that I think most people don’t realize about anger, and people they would
describe as angry, is that it is a very defensive emotion. You see, the image of an angry person does
not invite face-to-face scrutiny. It
repels people. The best offense being a
good defense, it was my way of keeping the world at large, at bay. Whenever anything happened which triggered an
emotional response, my brain responded with the muscle memory which I had given
it, and turned it to anger. This was
true of positive emotion as well as negative.
Finally I began to see that even my children expected an angry response
from me, even in the best of circumstances.
This was, of course, with the help of my therapist.
Stopping midway through my
therapy program, we backtracked, and began what I came to know as Skills Training. Months of writing about every instance which
elicited an emotional response, and going through prescribed steps and
worksheets eventually paid off, and allowed me to be able to assess each and
every situation based upon its own merit and particular circumstance, until
finally I was able to stave off the anger, and just feel the emotion as it came
and eventually went. Doc compared the
process of acknowledging and processing emotion with watching a wave come in
and go out, without trying to hold it to the shoreline. I still use that metaphor whenever strong
negative emotions arise. (Visualizations
became huge for me as well) The key to
the wave metaphor is that one MUST accept that the emotion is there for a
reason, and that it is futile to try to fight it off, or to hold onto it. The best thing is to watch it as it comes in,
to appreciate it for the merit that it has, and then to let it go, watch it
disappear into the horizon. The key here
is that our, my emotional responses to things have merit, they are there for a
reason, and to acknowledge that is to allow, to find that root, and to dig it
out. It is impossible to see and
understand the distant winds over the water, while you are standing in the
water, being bowled over by the crashing tides.
What skills training did for me was to give me a tower, a lighthouse, to
watch the tides come in and go out, to experience their beauty and ferocity,
without being crushed by them. It was an
integral part in the ability I have today to live and love my life.
