I think God has an awesome sense if humor. I wrote this entry as a three-part discussion about one of the books I had read ... The first part was about the beginning of recovery. The second part was how depression can be transformed and this one was about going beyond the transformation to dancing in the dark.
I planned to publish this entry on Thursday ... Then the Carolinas got hit with an ice storm and I lost power for five days! I wasn't just writing about "dancing in the dark" ... I was doing it!
The book we were talking about is,
I CAN'T GET OVER IT - A Handbook For Trauma Survivors by Aphrodite Matsakis, Ph.D.
We will pick up our discussion at my favorite part, healing!
HEALING
Remembering The Trauma
You know that remembering is neither easy or fun. In your heart you know that remembering is worse than being there. Remembering is worse because while you were actually in the traumatic situation, you may have been anesthetized to the physical, emotional, and moral pain. Your body may have emitted a natural emotional or physical anesthetic, or you may have numbed yourself with some substance or compulsive behavior. During the trauma, your mind was focused on survival. Only later, once you felt somewhat safe, could you begin to comprehend, and feel, the full extent of your losses.
It takes much courage and a dedication to one's healing to take the time, effort, and risk involved in returning to people and places from the past to find out what happened. Many survivors have found great peace in finally uncovering some of the missing pieces of their story. "It was worth the pain to find out the truth," is the feeling of many who have been finally able to use the facts they gathered to make peace with the past. And if they did not find out everything they had hopedto discover about themselves and the trauma, they still felt pride in having done all they could to heal themselves.
Feeling The Feelings
An improved understanding of the traumatic event, however, is not enough. The effects of the trauma cannot be erased by rethinking the event. For you to completely heal, the trauma must be reworked not on the mental level but on the emotional level as well.
No matter how objectively you have come to view the trauma, the fact is that a life-threatening event occurred. Not only did it happen, it happened to you or people you care about. The feelings trauma generates are perhaps the most powerful feelings known to human beings. If you don't think you have feelings, think again! Do you have headaches, backaches, stomach problems, or other physical symptoms of unexplained origin? If so, this suggests that even though you may not want to deal with your feelings, your feelings are dealing with you. There are two kinds of courage: courage to act and courage to feel.
It is important to remember that at times of strong feeling that the emotionality you are experiencing is temporary. It will pass. The human organism simply cannot sustain a state of such intense feeling for a prolonged period of time without shutting down for a rest. Don't be surprised if after an emotional day or two, you suddenly feel numb and exhausted. For hours, perhaps even a few days, you may be able to feel very little. The strong feelings have drained you, and you need time to recuperate.
Allow your own internal healing process to bring your feelings to the surface. Your feelings will manifest themselves in their own time, in their own way.
Just as you cannot will or force yourself to remember the trauma or get over it within a certain time period, you cannot force yourself to feel the feelings and get rid of them by such-and-such a date. When the feelings do begin to emerge, it maymean that your routine is temporarily interrupted. For example, spending an hour, an evening, or even an entire day crying orangry, unable to concentrate on anything but your emotions, is to be expected.
All you have to do is when you feel an emotion, feel it. Mastery means that you can tolerate the intensity and duration of your feelings without abusing yourself or others. It also means that you can decide which emotions you wish to do something about, and which you wish simply to experience and nothing more.
Attaining Empowerment
You can use what you have learned in healing from your wrenching experiences to exert increasing mastery and control over your life. You have taken the risk of looking at your trauma and your secondary wounding experiences, rather than running from them. And you made the effort to gather additional information about what happened to you and to share your experiences with others.
You have taken the risk of looking at your feelings. Dealing with the feelings has been painful. So much so that the pain seemed to be unending and you often wondered if it was worth the trouble. But today you probably understand your emotional workings on a deeper level than those who have not been forced by circumstances to confront their emotional selves.
You have a distinct advantage. You have learned some constructive ways of coping with feelings and with stress. You are also capable of carrying on with life while enduring great emotional pain. These skills are invaluable in dealing with the unexpected challenges of life. The trauma has allowed you to grow existentially or spiritually.
During the trauma, you touched your own death. The knowledge that you, too, will someday die, no matter how smart, rich, competent, careful, or good you are can encourage you to take greater control of your life and push you toward pursuing your dreams and goals more vigorously than ever before.
SURVIVOR MISSIONS
As a trauma survivor, you are subject to unwanted, recurring thoughts of the trauma, to nightmares, and perhaps even to flashbacks. You may have times of rage, emotional pain, numbing, anxiety attacks, physical pain, and other symptoms related to the trauma. All the positive actions in the world cannot make them go away entirely either.
Yet, not taking the positive action in the present, not finding ways to compensate yourself, not pursuing your dreams, and instead of treating yourself badly will not remove the scars either. There seem to be few choices other than either giving up and letting your wounds crush you or accepting the scars and going on with your life.
Because you have been wounded by life, you are in a unique position to help others who also have been wounded. You have gained a great deal of insight. Others who have never been traumatized may not have such insights. At the very minimum you are most certainly an expert on what it feels like to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder and other psychological reactions to the trauma and from secondary wounding experiences.
An expert ... at something I never really wanted to know about in the first place ... but now, I know about it and there is nothing for me to do but take that knowledge and use it to help someone else.
No one but someone who has been there can really know how dark that place is ... and as someone who has been there, I want to tell you that there is a way out. There really is. I promise. Nothing ever stays the same. As much as it hurts in the beginning ... the hurt does let up. As hopeless as things can seem, hope returns when things begin to work out and fall together, and things will work out.
I found myself taking one day at a time ... I swear it felt like I held my breath for days! Of course I didn't really, but there were so many things running through my mind at the same time that the rest of me felt frozen, paralyzed somehow ... Some days, I only managed to make a few steps. Other days ... good days ... I made considerable improvement, covering an amazing distance in a short time ...
There were times when nothing around me had changed all that much but I had changed on the inside where it really counts. In recovery, we are each faced with our own private battles and challenges. We each have our own story ... and we all have times when we will be tested. Sometimes, we will fail. It won't be the end of the world. It just proves we are human like everybody else. There will be other times that we are tested and we will know the minute we react that we are "acing" that test! No one is there to grade us or give us a score, but WE KNOW we passed it with FLYING COLORS!
We might still be in the darkest place of our life, but we got it right! We nailed it! We are on top of the world! And, right there, in the middle of all that darkness, we dance! That's right! We twirl! We two step! We do-si-do! We dance!
We know that no matter what happens, we can handle it!
We know that it doesn't matter how we got here or how dark it is or even how long we have to be in the dark, it's okay, because ...
We are dancing in the dark!
There's nothing like it! (laughing) That first glimpse of the NEW YOU is a preview. The first time you realize that you really have grown! The first time you get a look at your new life. It might just be a glimpse at courage and strength you never knew you had! (laughing) Don't worry. That little preview will play longer and longer everyday.
We dance in the dark! We know it won't stay dark forever! It can't! We are filling up with light! We are outgrowing the dark! We are becoming our own strength! We are women of substance. We are a force to be reckoned with! We are dancing in the dark!
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