One of the biggest problems I've run into is finding access to really valuable tools for coping with trauma. Even accessing or uncovering trauma can be nearly impossible without the "right" kind of therapist. I keep getting told "oh, we don't know how to do that here," or "I want to study that, but we don't have time."
Recently I was working on an inner landscape. Inner visualization is something I've explored most of my life, and as an Occultist, I highly recommend working with inner visualization. It's not terribly difficult. If you've ever read The Magician's Nephew (the prequel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) you'll be familiar with Aslan's "singing" the world into existence. In a similar fashion, many years ago, I began with a blank slate, built a beach on the ocean, a house, mountains, forests, temples, etc... and populated it with people, archetypes, and characters from books.
In the language of Jung, I gave form to the inner Parts of my personality and psychology. By interacting with these Parts I have often been able to communicate with my own subconscious in a way not unlike "talking" to Tarot Keys.
What's interesting is that these parts also seem to have fallen into the roles described in Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS). IFS teaches that there are certain personalities, certain Parts, that act as Managers, and these Managers can help protect the conscious mind from traumatic events. We know from fMRI studies that accessing traumatic memories is really re-living those memories, rather than recalling them. By accessing these memories we can re-traumatize ourselves (which is why MDMA is being used in trauma therapy).
A few weeks ago I went back to my old neighbourhood. I haven't been there in about 25 years, and it's been a constant source of personal pain, for I never got to say goodbye. The experience was intense and strange. Nothing was the same. They'd heavily modified my old house, the nearby school is empty and covered in graffiti, and the creekbed where I used to play has become overgrown and unloved. It was as though the Spiritus Loci had fled.
The entire experience was like walking in a dream or watching some post-apocalyptic film. I even found an old friend of mine who is back living in the house next to my old home. They're also not what I remember. No longer is my childhood friend full of promise and excited about technology, hacking computer games for fun, but she's a bitter, wrung-out, racist, and petty person, so far from what I recall. It was painful.
I was able to find some large stones from the river, itself but a trickle, no deeper than my ankle, and I was able to finally leave because I wanted to leave. It was left behind, and it took a while to process.
After that, one of the primary denizens of my inner landscape changed their personality. They were suddenly deferential, polite, subservient. So I asked them about trauma, I asked about the places where my trauma has been stored. I've been depressed lately, and rather than deal with psychiatric drugs, I'd rather find ways to integrate the traumas that are at the root of the problem.
I was taken to a dungeon and told that behind each great wooden door is a trauma. The row doors disappeared into the darkness. So I thought I'd try to open one.
I want to share this for two reasons. The first is that I had no idea what to expect, and perhaps, dear reader, you will fare somewhat better than I if you make the attempt. The second is to talk about the methods I tried to employ, and why they were difficult.
A few months back I tried to deal with one of my primary trauma memories. It's the memory of an assault that often dominates my thinking for weeks on end. I've found diary entries from a decade ago where I've been stuck fighting that same assault in dreams, or struggling through the day when nothing can distract me.
Using visualization techniques I tried to re-frame the experience, to move outside of the "first person" perspective and re-process the memory. Rather than being helpless (I was a child, he was not) I entered the scene as the "me" of today and rescued the "me" of back then from the attacker. While doing this I kept moving my eyes back and forth emulating the EMDR eye movements.
After having done this a couple of times I can honestly say that memory is NOT as intense as it once was. I no longer feel utterly trapped or helpless, and if I start to, I can re-play the "new" memory and "fix" it in place with eye movements. Perhaps that alone deserves its own blog post.
Feeling somewhat confident in this experience, I thought I'd be fine to open a door. It was more intense than that.
Behind that door, I found more than one trauma, all of them sexual, some of them were things I haven't thought about in a very long time, but remain strangely relevant to my day to day experience. Some of them were things I "know happened" but only in a detached sort of way. Like knowing the Battle of Agincourt happened, but have no real experience to connect with the knowledge.
Three experiences, three moments in time, three traumatic experiences, and all of them extremely intense. I've never felt my vagus nerve convulse before. It wasn't just the tightening of the chest that one might associate with a trauma response or anxiety, but waves of clenching and vibrating. I was doubled over, pulled into a near fetal position. With each one I tried to reframe the memory, I tried to activate the eye movements, but the vagus nerve would clench and dance and I couldn't concentrate. It was like trying to stop a firehose with a marble.
It was awful. The realizations that it forced me to make, equally as terrible. Although I'd thought about how #MeToo is about people in positions of power taking sexual advantage of people over whom they have power, and how it technically might apply to myself, it wasn't until this "relived" experience that I felt forced to accept the truth of what happened to me in that context.
Perhaps uncovering the memories and reprocessing the memories have to happen at different times. You can't mop up the soda while the bottle is still erupting. You have to wait until it's done before you can deal with the mess it leaves behind. Similarly, the explosion that came from these memories being properly revealed had to be ridden out before I can try to tackle them from a re-processing perspective.
I have not yet tried to open any more doors. I want to try to work through these memories first. The memories were forceful and intense, each memory leading to the next, and it was an act of will that stopped the cascade. One door intentionally opened either opened two more, or there's more than one trauma behind each door.
What's interesting is that, after that experience, I'm already feeling better than I have for a while. I still want to try to "save myself" and re-frame the narrative of these memories. I want to understand them, see how they've shaped me, and take back my power from them. I'm just somewhat surprised that I've had any relief from the simple experience of accessing them, remembering, reliving, and re-experiencing them.
There's no real "textbook" on trauma. Every person responds differently, and the nature of a traumatic memory, and what counts as trauma to the individual is irrelevant to the rest of the world. One person is destroyed by something that another person hardly notices. Even when another person is involved, it has more to do with how your amygdala responds than any intent on their part. Certainly, 2/3 of these traumas were due to the actions of someone who should have known better, but the first one I encountered was more accident than assault.
I found one more thing that needs to be said, and perhaps it comes back to Megan Devine's concept of "bearing witness" to pain. I found that I HAVE to talk about my traumatic experiences. Some memories I've had, and suffered with, for a very long time without expressing them properly. I've found it very important to tell people, especially people close to you, about your traumas. It's important that they understand they are not expected to "fix" anything. They are not expected to pity or try to bolster your self-esteem. All I wanted, all I needed, was to have others bear witness.
When someone says "I hear you" or "I can see that you are in pain," or something along these lines, the emergency system responds in an interesting way. The mirror neurons fire, and somehow one feels so much less alone. Bearing witness to pain, to trauma, to fear, to whatever, and articulating it is perhaps the best thing anyone can do to help work through these things.
It's like working on some powerful piece of magic. You don't talk about it, you don't post the talismans online, or blog, brag, or whatever part-way through. You have to "Keep Silent" in order to build up the forces with which you are working. Talking about it, not keeping silent, disperses the force you've so carefully built up over time. This is simply the opposite use of that maxim. When a memory, trauma, etc... has power over you, that power grows the longer you keep silent, and only by "speaking its name aloud" do you take its power away and give yourself power over that particular "demon."
I may move these posts to a new blog, I think I have, and will have, a lot to say about this particular journey, and I hope that it can be of help to others. Also, a good Records Manager knows that once you have five records of a specific type in a general folder they need to be put in a specific folder of their own.
in LVX