You are your own champion

I went to the same gray-blue office for 4 years. Every week, I sat on a 1980's reception area couch that had been repurposed for my therapist. As time went on, I discovered that my therapist was standing on the shore of the sea I was tossed about in, and she held a rope. I'm sure there had been other people standing on that shore holding rope before her, people whose presence was blurred by the gray fog of depression and voices swallowed by the deafening wind of the screams of my self-hatred. My therapist was just the first rescuer I could see.

Life is a series of small steps. In 2010, I took a small step into a therapist's office, a tentative conversation that led to four years of the most intense emotional healing I've ever experienced. Seeing my therapist and the rope - hope - was another small step. Each step carried me further away from the precipice of suicide and onto ground more solid than I'd believed possible. I wasn't able to do much other than hold on to the rope, hanging on it while the waves continued to pummel me. It was my anchor to a sense of direction in the endless gray seascape of emotion, chaos, trauma. It was what kept me afloat. My therapist stood patiently for 4 years, urging me to climb up the rope to the shore. But all I could do was hold on.

I held up a knife made out of lies. Lies told to protect myself from the x-ray vision of a trained professional. In my tears and my tormented monologues in the office once a week, I was shouting, "Pull me in!" with new desperation. But my therapist kept up her calm encouragement, "Pull yourself in. You can do it. You are stronger than you think."

The rope was cut without either of us realizing it at first. It was only when she pulled in a frayed length, the weight on the end gone, that she looked and realized how far I'd drifted from shore on a tide of those lies. I hadn't shown her myself for weeks, buried as I was under a mound of deception, a maze constructed subconsciously to lead people away from the rawness of my innermost self. She walked away, unable to help any longer. She left a sign on the beach for me, "I'll send someone back to help you."

.....................

For a while, I was angry and grief-stricken. I had become so used to looking at shore and seeing her comforting presence, still holding the rope through every storm. Now I was left to my own devices and adrift once again. What I discovered is that I became more buoyant during those years she supported me in my swimming. I'm more athletic - I can cross great swaths of ocean using only the power of my own body and mind.

Taking ownership of your own recovery is another small step. I still need a therapist every week. Sometimes I still call out for her to toss me some rope. But with each extra hour spent treading water all by myself, I am building the strength to heal myself, to love myself, to navigate without someone on the other end of a rope.

Someday I might even make that swim to shore.

Saving Seven

My therapist makes me think about the little girl in me all the time. It took me 30 some years to admit that she even existed. I didn't want to be "stunted" by my abuse history. I wanted to be normal.

The little girl in me is the part that comes out when I am afraid. She is a fierce protector. She has a notch in her belt for each of the brothers she saved from the filth of that woman. She has a notch in her belt for every time she laid herself down next to evil to prevent someone else from having to know that pain.

Now it is time for her to get back up. It is time for her to walk away from the dark corners she's been hiding in. It's time for her to grow up.

I've wept tears for her. There is part of me that can't imagine living without that little fierce creature within me. But it is not fair to trap her in a fear-filled 7 year old mind. I welcome her in to my own anxiety fraught brain. I imagine holding her close and the slow, tentative whimper that comes before the torrent of tears she always held in. I imagine her beating her little fists against my chest. I imagine her heart breaking right there in my arms. I know love is poor stitching for a broken heart. But it does close wounds.

I want her to know that I love her, bruises and brokenness and filth and terror and all. I want her to know it's okay to feel that way when someone does that to you. I want her to know it's not her fault.

I think she's starting to hear me when I say these things. And slowly, tentatively, she is walking toward healing.

Prompt: The Little Girl in You

Blue like me

Children's laughter floating on the breeze in the evening; diamond droplets of water cascading from splashing feet; 10,000 gallons of therapy just sitting in the yard waiting for company. We spend long summer days floating and laughing. The children are brown and sleek and sleepy after a day in the water. It calms the soul, distracts the senses, sends memories scurrying like water bugs off the surface. Here I can breathe, even without gills.

“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.” ― Hermann Hesse

How I learned to surf

I surfed once, in California in my early 20s. I only managed to get on top of 4 waves, but I will never forget the incredible feeling of falling and flying simultaneously. Since then, I've only been on a bodyboard. A doctor, John Kabat-Zinn, uses surfing as an analogy for emotions: "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf them." A surfer named "Buzzy" characterized surfing in a way that relates to all of life: "Waves are not measured in feet and inches, they are measured in increments of fear."

I am intimately acquainted with fear. It is the monster inside that roars at the slightest provocation, sometimes even convincing my terrorized brain that old threats long gone are nipping at my heels. Life feels not only radical as I step into a new reality, a new person, a new way of seeing - it is terrifying. Change of any kind is not a welcome guest in my life, and to change the very structure of my self is breathtakingly scary and uncertain.

Long ago, as a child, I built four sturdy walls in my soul and put a lid on top. It was my Pandora's box, my underground bunker where I could stuff all the bad things in life, all the tears, all the emotions I was too terrified to feel. I remember going into my room once at 10, clenching every muscle in my body and screaming silently. I was afraid that if I let my emotions out, they would destroy everything. As it turns out, avoiding them has nearly done just that.

Every Monday, in land-locked Wisconsin, I have a surfing lesson for one hour. It takes place in an office, not a beach, and the waves I'm surfing are the huge Mavericks - the biggest waves of all time - that come flooding out of that bunker when I take off the lid. Large waves can literally throw a surfer to the bottom of the ocean, turn him in so many somersaults that he can't tell which way is up, scrape his flesh on the coral, and either send him to Davy Jones' locker or toss him up like a fish gasping on the beach. How do you surf those emotions? The biggest ones of your life?

This is how I learned to surf the big ones:

1. Don't go it alone. You need a spotter when you're letting a tsunami out of your soul.
2. Don't rein it in. Realize it's just an emotion, and it will soon be over. Submit to the fact that you can't change the past and you can't change this giant wave of emotion. You can only ride out to safety.
3. Do be well prepared. If you're letting emotions out, sorting through old memories, often it's intentional. It's our human way of processing the good and the bad that happens to us. Make sure you've had good rest, good food, and a good mood most of the day before you purposefully open your Pandora's box.
4. Do let yourself be free to express the emotion. You may need to cry, scream, rant, rave, or curl up in a ball. Be somewhere safe for this.
5. Do rate your emotional pain. Before you start a session of internal or conversational processing of trauma in your life, rate how painful the memory is at the beginning, on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being low intensity and 10 being high intensity. After you've allowed yourself to surf the wave of emotion that comes with the memory, rate it again. You may find the memory is much less intense once you've allowed yourself to experience the emotions that went with it.
6. Do nothing but surf. A real surfer isn't dropping in on a wave thinking about his grocery list. In fact, surfers report that riding a wave is a blissful, meditative experience that fully captures their mind, body and soul. When you're surfing emotional waves, do so at a time you can concentrate fully on the sensations and feelings. Don't do it at work, or on your drive home, or when you have to do something later in the day. Do it when you have plenty of time and brainspace.
7. Do remember that emotions never last forever and they generally don't kill you. Emotional waves are always temporary. And they have little power over you once you accept them and let them flow. 

One last thought: when you're new to something, it's always good to have a few lessons. Especially when the stakes are as high as they are out on the ocean of emotion. Surfing isn't learned in a day, and there are many, many wipeouts along the way. A therapist, friend, or lay counselor you can trust may give you some tips on surfing that I cannot. I hope you find that, once you're out there among the waves, it is actually an good experience. And once you've ridden the biggest wave of your life, every other wave will seem tiny and totally rideable.

Surf's up - who's with me?

Progressing to exposure

I watch a ladybug lazily climbing towards the flowers. I don't know if this is her top pace or if the sun has made her drowsy. She inches along, bit by bit. This is me, I think. Inching along. Barely making progress. Feeling the "two steps forward, one step back" process is going too slowly.

Reprocessing is the next step in my therapy journey. This technique holds onto the hope that, if you talk about it enough, a memory loses it's power over your present and future. Before I began this part of therapy, I was very nervous about it. I held it at arms length, even thinking about refusing to participate at all. I also noted that I was self-sabotaging the very process that offered me the best chance at recovery.

Now it's started, and the debate is over. Two weeks of it brings a reduction in flashbacks and a return to somewhat normalcy. I wake up today, knowing it is therapy day, and there's that nervous excitement brewing in my belly. My heart speeds up in anticipation. My palms are cool and clammy. There is something about knowing a little surge of relief is coming. It cracks open the outer shell and tentatively tilts the tender to the sun. 

The best of therapies

She has a seizure about once a month, while she's falling asleep. Many days she loses control of her bowel or bladder, still, at almost five. She has her raspy Bostonian lisp that reminds everyone of Fran Drescher, but through speech therapy, is relearning how to use her tongue to swallow and speak more clearly.

She's a quirky one, with hilarious postures, faces, and ways of pairing words that often has our whole family in giggles. She's stick straight stiff-limbed and melts only after a half hour of rhythmic rocking and sucking at bedtime. Even then, she sleeps stiff, and I have to use force to bend her joints when I carry her back to her bed from ours in the dark of the night.

Her eyes don't always track together, and she is a klutzy one, running into things frequently and forever bonking her head and nose on things, with a torrent of tears to follow.

But the best of therapies for my child-forever-changed are the simple things in life. Riding horseback with the York girls. Jumping on her trampoline. Going swimming. Conversing over books with Mama.

I wonder if it is different for any other child? We all have our quirks, our weaknesses and strengths. I am in therapy myself, and there I learn about fear and anxiety and how it steals from the moment you're in and borrows trouble from tomorrow.

So I try to let her do what she can, try to protect her, but allow her freedom. I try not to imagine a 20-year-old who sleeps in a diaper and poops in her pants. I try to believe that she will be fully functional as an adult, and just focus on the moment. Watching her navigate the barn stairs in her own fashion. Smiling huge over the horses, and giving her deep, tenor belly laugh so many hundreds of times each day.

Please, Lord, keep healing. And keep us all focused on the ABILITY in disability. The CAN in can't. The many prayers answered instead of the prayers still being prayed.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work. Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines. (from I Corinthians 12)