Trauma Therapy--Heavy Metal Style

A friend sent me a link to this song, thinking its story might find resonance with my story. He had no idea how right he was. Despite his trigger warning, I didn't expect how deeply into the buried recesses of my mind this song would reach.  I listened to it probably five times straight through before I could make myself quit hitting repeat.  Or, my hands were shaking so badly I couldn't press the button.  I didn't have the luxury of truly falling apart then. Ruthlessly shoving the response back into barely conscious places, I kept on with my week until I did have a few hours of uninterrupted time to allow the ripples of trauma to bubble up from their underground hiding places.

The migraines and gastric disruption that I had so recently learned how to (mostly) control came back and lingered despite my extra handfuls of pills.  Fatigue overtook me again no matter how early I went to bed.  Strange dreams echoed (barely) into my waking.  I needed to feel this song.  Hear this song.  Sing these lyrics. Scream these lyrics.

This song is mine, it owns me.  It cries the words I've never said, could never say.  It is the song of far too many, so many children grown to adult or even old age without the words to capture the ache in their souls. The smoldering coals of rage that lie waiting under the ashes of long burnt flame in so many hearts, branded on our bodies in chronic disease, mental disorder, addiction and social dysfunction.

This morning I put this video on constant replay for nearly two hours, until the shaking and nausea ended.  Even so, I was able to only barely more than whisper the words, though now they echo like a descant in the back of my mind. It still owns me.

I will sing this song, write this song, my story, until I own it.  Until I own it and can set it free.

A Parable of Forgiveness

Once there was a very old man who lived next door to me.  He'd lived there forever; I'd grown up with his children, and his wife was my confidant.  Long after I grew up,  I moved back into the old house to raise my own children.  He was still next door.

After living some years as friendly neighbors, sharing rakes and shovels and plates of Christmas cookies, I discovered that he had taken something from my garage.  Something that had been there from my own childhood, just some old junk of my grandma's, probably only worth ten bucks at a garage sale. It's value to me was mostly that it had belonged to my family for three generation. But still, he'd just come over and taken it.

I confronted the old man.  He sorrowfully professed his apologies but said the item had since broken and he'd thrown it out; there was no returning it.  I was vastly annoyed and wanted little to do with him after that, though still being close with his wife, I had to swallow my irritation and make nice.

Another while passed and my children began watching one of those antiques shows on television where people sell their attic-finds for pennies or fortunes.  They discovered that the item the old man had stolen was not worth the mere ten dollars I'd imagined but was being bought by collectors for a thousand dollars.  I began to doubt that grandma's junk had so conveniently broken as the old man had claimed.

My anger and resentment of the old man grew.  Bitterness galled in my belly when I saw him in his yard.  My relationship with his wife withered.  I realized that I had to forgive him for my own sake, if not for his.  I told myself that I hadn't lost anymore than when I was unaware of the actual monetary value of grandma's piece.  It was simply a bit of family history and I still had my memories of grandma, after all.  It took a long time of inhaling So and exhaling Hum, of praying for peace and seeking to see the divine in the old man.  But finally, I could smile at him and actually mean it.

Eventually, the old man's wife became ill and died.  My family and I went over to help him sort out his belongings and close up his house before he moved in with his daughter.  I found a note addressed to me in his wife's handwriting, wavering and spotty, clearly written just before her death.

The note revealed that in her last days, the old man had confessed to her.  For decades he had been breaking into my house and systematically stealing my grandmother's treasures.  After emptying the storage boxes in the garage, he decimated the long neglected attic.  He'd even brought in knock-offs to replace the valuable antiques he stole from the main house.  My beloved family heirlooms, the tangible bits of long ago memories, the irreplaceable things I'd so adored because I thought they held the imprint of my grandma's touch were all cheap fakes.  The dead woman guessed that the old man had sold my belongings for hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least a half a million, probably more.  She'd thought he'd been fortunate at his online trading, when in fact, his trades had been disastrous and it was the sale of my own goods that had kept the two of them out of financial disaster many times.

I was shocked into immobility while my mind raced.  What good had been all the work I'd put into forgiving him for the one theft I'd known about?  Had his apology that I'd struggled so to accept had any value at all? Could he possibly have had any repentance for the one when he still continued with the other?  Was my hard-won forgiveness worth anything at all in the face of this deeper and infinitely more personal violation?

Worse than the loss of the material goods he'd stolen was the sense that his theft had been from my soul.  He'd stolen forgiveness from me with his fraudulent apology, capitalizing on my own inner belief in turning the other cheek.  I wished I'd never wasted any effort at all on the struggle to forgive him for his now-petty crime.  I wished I'd built up the wall between our houses, cut off relations with his wife, guarded myself from his thievery.  He'd manipulated my goodness and his wife's to serve his own greed.  He'd exploited my trust to cover his poor judgement in stocks.  His rape of my innocence tainted even the memories his false heirlooms once inspired. I couldn't even think of my grandma without being ripped off by him all over again.

I doubted that all the novenas, all the so hums, all the praying in the world could ever give me the grace to forgive the old man again.

A Haunting

Halloween. The veil between the worlds of spirit and body wavers and thins.  Knowledge and fear of knowledge, consciousness of The Unknown, are close at hand.  Ghosts walk, demons dance, all the skeletons in the closet rattle.  I am tense with horror at what I am about to call up, at my own deadly courage in facing the shade that hovers.   

A year ago, I was lying here in my bed, weeping again from exhaustion.  It was 7pm, the trick-or-treaters were in full parade.  One daughter was downstairs dispensing candy to the crowds and laughing with the neighbors; the other daughter pacing the floor, waiting for a ride to a party who never showed up. I was so tired, fatigued from my hysterical illness, the six weeks of continuous bleeding, the runaround in the health-care system.  I drove my daughter to her party, shaking like a palsied old woman.  Three hours from now, I was checking into the Emergency Hospital.

A year of doctors and tests that told no story, of healers and pills and therapies that dug new stories out of the depths of lost memory.  I lost forty pounds; it all found me again and brought extra.  I've been to a dozen doctors. I've consulted astrologers, psychics, and charlatans.  I've been hopeful and morose, resigned, and suicidal.  I spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in analysis, diagnosis, meditation--scouring my case history for clues, making peace with skeletons in my past, finding skeletons lurking that I never suspected.

Last Christmas I lay in my bed, wishing I were dead.  Lent came around to find me hopeful of a resurrection into new life, a renewed spirit.  I wondered what would grow from my broken body and bruised heart.  Grace had cracked open my life, deeper than I imagined possible.  The self I laid down is dead; the self that rises now, I still don't recognize.

Not two weeks after my Lenten post, I lay on my healer's table, confronting my long-dead mother.  More than one of my sensitive friends told me that I had an attachment, that the ghosts of uneasy souls lay in my spirit.  My mother appeared to me with remorse, anxiety and longing.  Death had given her a new perspective of our lives.  She begged my forgiveness for her sins.  She warned me of demons hiding in my psyche.  She gave me few words but what she said turned everything I remembered of my childhood upside down.

It felt like my memories, and the meanings I attached to them, were a kaleidoscope, a familiar pattern of sights and sounds and feelings.  But Mom came and shifted the lens just a quarter turn.  All those  pieces suddenly fell into a different pattern with all new meaning.  Everything I thought I understood about myself, my childhood, my family was new.  I had stepped into a parallel universe, a Twilight Zone.

But how could these implications of my mother's words be true?  I had no recollection of anything that supported what she suggested that day. I was haunted now as I'd never been when her spirit had lingered.  I'd watched her fade into the light of my healer's window but I was burdened now with a new, terrible truth I couldn't accept.

My lack of confirmation weighed heavy, though the scars of the truth were now clear.  I felt like a physicist who hadn't seen the unknown planet but knew it had to exist because of its effects on nearby space were obvious.  Suddenly, the many questions through the years from psychologists and psychics weren't so absurd.  Perhaps the wounds they suggested had happened.

Then the memories began to leak out.  In dreams.  And flashbacks.  Glimpses of sights and sensations that had no context but I could feel them in my body, gagging me, tearing my most sensitive places, burning my belly, the gall strong.The demon danced always just out of sight, daring me to call him by name.

My body is the battleground of this fight to own my memories.  I was struck with Bell's palsy; I lost part of the vision in one eye, and have been tortured with pain that threatened to blast my brain out through the sutures of my skull bones.  The medicines and therapies prescribed to lessen the pain, served also to weaken my defenses that blocked these memories to begin with.  The more I mediate the pain, the more the demon dances and, by force of long and well-ingrained habit, I try to repress him.  I am about to start my third round of remedy/therapy combinations that will safely exorcise this evil from me.

I long to name this demon with confidence.  Fetch him to dance to my tune.  Tame him to work for me in healing, not destroy me.  As I write, a muscle under my eye is twitching, my whole body aches in a permanent flinch, the frozen trauma caught in the muscle memory I can't yet allow fully into consciousness.  

Tonight I step into the circle, howling my terror, singing my strength, this demon is mine.  Bring to consciousness the fears and the memories that terrify. While the veil to the unconscious is thin and shifting, when the power of those saints who passed before us lingers close, I invoke Grace.  The demon Grace who dances, not to terrify but to save me from what I could not be permitted to see.  Grace, whose blindness now will be sight, I call you to transmute from fear to love, no longer Death but Life.  

Tomorrow, I go to a Franciscan labyrinth to honor All Saints Day/Dia de los Muertes.  I will walk into the path as to the grave, to bury my fears and traumas.  The dreams and knowings I call forth tonight will go with me tomorrow into the labyrinth. I will bring the demon fears with me, but in the holy center space where grace happens, he will be no demon to me. When I come out, it will be wisdom that walks with me.  

In Memoriam

Matishayahu "One Day"

It’s not about win or lose because we all lose when we feed on the souls of the innocent.

Diana Butler Bass, "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent"

There is, however, a difference between memory—the snapshots that stay in our minds always—and RE-membering.  Remembering means to “put back together” the pieces of the past, to rearrange the pictures of memory in order to make meaning, to heal, to forgive, or to inspire.

Brilliant at Breakfast. "Ten Years On and What Have We Learned"

Today is not for politicians fighting the culture wars. It is not for religious leaders to try to score converts or demonize those who believe differently. It is not for posturing for the 2012 election. Today is for those who were there, for those who made it home, and for the families of those who didn't. It's for heroes and victims alike, and the people they left behind. Today is THEIR day.

Halaina Hovitz, Salon.com, "The 9/11 Stories We've Never Told Anyone"

But "living in the shadow of 9/11" means something very different to at least 16 children who grew up in Lower Manhattan. It means being engulfed in the "shadow" of the dust cloud, then watching it hover over your home for months (if your home wasn't destroyed). It means standing in the "shadow" of your apartment building whose entire north side had been burned off, allowing you to look directly into people's apartments. It means living in the "shadow" of your health that's been compromised from breathing toxic fumes. It means living in the "shadow" of the person you could have been, which was more than just interrupted.

Michael Gould-Wartofsky, Common Dreams, "America the Amnesiac"

For ten years after 9/11, the Arab Spring is here, reminding us that the future need not look anything like the past. Yet the past hasn't gone anywhere. It still demands its day of reckoning. But first, let us say Kaddish for the dead.

Michael Spencer, internetMONK, "iMonk Classic: Michael Spencer's Early Response to 9/11"

Our innocence is over, and if we try to protect our children or the flying public or the nation in general, we are going to see the beginning of a new dark ages.

Scott Morizot, Faith and Food "Reflections from September 11, 2001"

From my perspective, sadly, we did allow the terrorists to win. I don’t think in their wildest dreams they ever though they could provoke such drastic and lasting change in our nation from a single attack. They successfully instilled fear in our nation and acting under the impetus of that fear, we changed in ways that would have been inconceivable before that attack.

Rainer Maria Rilke, A Year With Rilke, "Dear Darkening Ground"

in that hour of inconceivable terror

when you take back your name

from all things.

Confessions of a Book Junkie

(the following is a series of posts on my Facebook Wall today.  Oh, the truth in humor! And how the truth hurts.)

The Heretic:  Today's finds at the used bookstore.

The Heretic:  What am I thinking, buying more books? I haven't yet read all of the last several book hauls, or listened to the podcasts and iTunesU courses. So many ideas, so little time.

The Heretic:  Especially with these black holes in my brain that eat my thoughts, memories, connections, and executive function. And apparently my impulse control.

My cogent and comedic friend:  Hello, my name is John and I'm a bookaholic.

1. We admitted we were powerless over books—that our lives, bookshelves, and end tables had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. We made a decision to turn our Kindles, iPods, and Nooks over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. We made a searching and fearless inventory of our homes looking for that one book we hid away for a rainy day.

5. We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to our blog readers the exact nature of the books we had already read.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these titles and sell them on eBay.

7. We humbly asked Him to remove our books, both hardcover and paperback.

8. We made a list of all persons we had ignored while reading, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would require putting a book down in the middle of a chapter.

10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we bought new books promptly read them.

11. We sought through bargain hunting and coupon clipping to improve our relationship with Barnes and Noble and Amazon as we understood them, asking only for knowledge of new releases and the time to read them all.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to bookaholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

What I Really, Really Want (I)

Recently, in an email about my journey to healing and wholeness through my hysterical illness, a friend challenged me with this project:

…Write a five-page essay to yourself (yes, five pages) about what it is that you really, really, really want in life. (Really want... not just tell yourself that you want.) Then compare the last page of your essay what it is with what you've got now in your life...

I stomped my foot, stuck out my lip and mumbled, “uh-uh.”  Then I said, “yeah, sure, prolly a good idea,” but, instead of actually thinking about the question, I spent my time writing long, detailed comments to other people’s Facebook statuses, huge discourses on other people’s blogs, rambling emails, and couldn’t write a single thing for my own blog.  Not even the stilted, dead-end bits I’d been writing for the last month.  Mm-hmm, some major psychological resistance going on there.

Then, when I found myself tied in knots over a discussion with some stranger on another stranger’s blog, even blowing off my daily Call to Prayer because I wanted to set this guy straight, I had to call “foul” on my game.  As usual, when I finally quit procrastinating on some project, I found that I already knew the answer quite clearly.  I knew exactly who I wished I could be and what I want to do, if only I could get out of my own way.

Four years ago, not long before I got started getting really sick, I was studying homeopathic acid remedies for the school I was attending with the above-mentioned friend.  I wrote her the following note:

May 2007

Monday night I was reading about the acids, finishing up with Nitric Acid before I went to sleep.  I dreamed that night about the aftermath of a battle. 

There were hundreds of bomb victims on the battleground, hung from trees and scaffolding and makeshift things because the burns they had sustained from the nitric acid bombs were so extensive and devastating that they couldn't be laid down. The trees and landscape themselves were horribly burned and skeletal just as were the human victims (mostly but not exclusively children). 

No one was crying or screaming; the pain was too great for any vocalization.  The word DESOLATION burned into my soul.  A low moaning of the slight wind through the blackened trees highlighted the silence.  Almost as many doctors and other healing practitioners were in the field treating the victims as there were victims but the doctors and others were so overcome by the extent of the devastation that even they worked in near silence.  Everything was black and grey through the pale blue of lingering smoke. 

I walked through the battlefield touching as many of the people as I could, especially the children with their huge, silent, desolate eyes.  I felt my hands buzzing with healing energy and as I put my palm on each person, I could feel the healing flow through me into their souls.  The healing energy brought each one to the place where he or she could find peace:  for some it was that they found renewed resources to accept the medical treatment and recover, for others it was moving into death, maybe half and half. 

The doctors were so deeply shocked by the suffering that they themselves were grateful for what I did, even though it meant death for many.  And I remember thinking that no one who had not been there would understand that I was not killing anyone, rather bringing grace in whatever form could be accepted by the recipient.  I remember wondering if I should be concerned with that—that maybe I'd find myself in trouble later for what I was doing—but found I couldn't even spare the attention to think about it.  What I was doing was so urgent and so deeply, spiritually necessary that I truly couldn't choose to worry about myself.

It was a pretty horrible dream but I was never afraid during it, nor later when I awoke.  I was so full of profound gladness that I could bring grace to these souls (and it really was their souls that were my focus not the bodies) that fear could not enter in.  "Perfect love casteth out fear."  Fear and love cannot coexist.  I was so grateful for the opportunity to carry out my sacred responsibility that nothing else mattered. 

Oh, and I kept catching glimpses of my sleeves as if from the corner of my eye as I reached out to touch someone:  they were the blue of the Renaissance Madonnas.  It was really the only color in my dream, kind of like the little girl in the red coat in the Spielberg movie about the Holocaust.

I really, really want to be the woman in the dream:  bringing healing grace to tortured souls, releasing fears, alleviating suffering, and facilitating spiritual transformation. I want to be the catalyst to take stuck, scared and suffering people into a place of love, peace, and freedom.  I want to be fearless, confident and competent, grateful, serene, intense, and compassionate.  I want to channel the grace of God to those who need a healing hand.  I want to be the imago Dei to desperate souls.  I want to be a priest facilitating communion with the Divine, a midwife easing the birthing pains for souls in transformation.  I want to administer Last Rites, witness first cries, and revel in the sight of someone meeting God on a new and glorious path.

I have visions and I dream dreams; I want to speak out with my voice what I know for the healing of individuals, families, and peoples.  I am a prophet and a seer; I want to see and prophesy for healing, to be the breath of God on the winds of change. I want to teach, to mentor, and to support people in their search for meaning. I can be a force to bend destiny.  Instead of running away from that ability, I want to develop it, practice it, and control it to channel God’s grace and healing to the world.

Knowledge of Good and Evil

I dreamed of holocaust and genocide last night.  Recently, I’ve been staring again into my own personal Abyss.  I guess now I’ve moved to staring into the communal Abyss of all humanity.  Whence comes man’s inhumanity to man? That very phrase implies that the evil perpetrated person to person is something intrinsically not human. It seems, however, that the perpetration of evil is specifically a human quality.  

Animals, to my knowledge, to do not engineer genocide, although they may murder, bully, and rape in maintaining social order or in a battle for territory. Animals, according to current research, commit personal atrocities as a means to an end but only people commit large-scale, tribal atrocities as ends to themselves.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, while animals may act with individual altruism in order to benefit the group, only people show any willingness to martyr themselves for ideology (a fact exploited by those engineering atrocity). 

Both poles of the human dichotomy, atrocity and martyrdom, can result only from the same aspect of humanity that I think is the defining separation of man and animal: self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is a sense of separateness from the rest of the world. 

There is no conclusive research on whether animals are self-conscious; certainly, they are aware of themselves—that my dog can be embarrassed when I talk about him is proof enough for me—but even animals that have been taught to sign do not refer to themselves in the first person.  They use the third person or call themselves by name. Human children commonly develop this sense around the third birthday, maybe a few months later.  They will start to use the word I to reference the self. 

Similarly, there seems to be no indication that animals have any sense of existentialism, that is, awareness that one day they will die (this is different than an end-of-life awareness of impending death).  Human children come to this awareness around age nine.  My elder daughter was 8½.  We were listening to the soundtrack to Ella Enchanted, and she was singing along.  She sang the first line of a song “every day, you die a little”, when abruptly she stopped singing, and ever so seriously informed me, “That’s true, you know.  Every day you live is one day sooner that you will die.”

I suspect that it is this existential self-consciousness that allows for both atrocity and ideological altruism.  To know that we are dying is terrifying, deeply and viscerally frightening to the human psyche. Life is a fragile and uncertain proposition.  Whether studied from the perspective of biology, chemistry, poetry, psychology, agriculture, philosophy, economics or religion, the deeper the subject is mined, the more clear the fragility and uncertainties.  It's all a crapshoot and then you die. That very knowledge demands that life become meaningful.  Why do we live, if only to die? We have a will to meaning—a drive innate within us to derive meaning from our lives (c.f. Viktor Frankl and the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy). If we cannot extract meaning and purpose from our lives, we will go insane.  

When the only certainty in life is death, uncertainty becomes the defining characteristic of Life.  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is Pascal’s “God-shaped Vacuum” into which is sucked every possible kind of meaning: tribalism, hedonism, greed, hierarchy, lust, imperialism, socialism, altruism, theism—and all are present and active in every religion in the world.

So few of us have the courage to acknowledge death, to create meaning, to accept uncertainty. We would prefer instead to expend our enormous psychic energies on denying the one certainty we have by inventing elaborate theories and formulae to simulate certainty.  Even simpler is to accept the theories and formulae of people we deem more willing than we to have looked into the Abyss (though we rarely check this sort of credential in deciding the credibility of our experts). And even more common than anything else is the tendency to abuse substances, behaviors, religions or other people to deny even the fear we feel at the uncertainty of Life.

Anyone who has looked into the Abyss and come away (too often people venture willingly or unwillingly into the Abyss and, in their terror, they get stuck there—our modern religious, medical, and psychiatric professions are more likely to ensure the stuckness rather than facilitating a return) has one other certainty in Life.  That Love exists.  That Love matters. Whether called Love, God, Allah, Light, OM, Brahman, or All/Nothing, whether found through science, religion, mysticism, or poetry, this succoring, sublime, transcendent Ineffability suffuses the Universe, both physical and psychic.  And that Love trumps existentialism in aeternum.