I started wondering – What does ‘healed’ look like? Sound like? Feel like? We hear the terms ‘healing’ and ‘closure’ all the time on TV and the media, but how does this manifest itself if it is to be anything more than lip-service to our emotional need? How do our ‘external’ images of healing and closure compare with our internal phenomenological reality? Do we seek a way of being on the outside, in the world as it were, to the detriment of the felt experience of healing on the inside? And what of the ‘change’ of healing? In healing, what heals? What do we change from and to? What’s different when we are healed. Simply saying ‘I feel better’ isn’t enough.
Well, that’s a lot of questions. I’d better start thinking of some answers. In no particular order, as they say.
UnSafety
The first thing which occurs to me when it comes to the effects of trauma is the loss of emotional safety. I see this as one of the more important, yet least spoken of, casualties of trauma and therefore one of the most important elements of healing. Let’s take it as read that the traumatic events has passed and there is no more physical threat or harm. Where, then, is the un-safety?
Although we accept quite readily the emotional pain of trauma, how often do we see emotional pain as causing us harm in and of itself? We know that this pain can be, and often is, agonizing. It can lead to self-harm and suicide, and the very expectation of such pain can be terrifying. A client spoke of how, as a child, he would “scream inside as the depression slid over me, begging it not to come, as though trying to fend off the torturer. The misery, the grief, the uncontrollable tears and the humiliation of being seen were all too excruciating to bear. Not to mention the fear of punishments to come for being like this”.
Feeling it twice
The constant companion of all painful emotions is anxiety. Repeated terrors of what happened haunt us for years, manifesting as memories, flashbacks and so on, re-traumatising us out of the blue. As they do this, they give us something more to be afraid of. The event may be long over, but the memory is just as frightening and could come back any time. So, we get to a state where the thing we are most afraid of is the return of our own emotions, especially in a way we cannot control. We become afraid of what we are going to feel again. Afraid of not being able to stop it.
Fear (let’s stop messing around and call anxiety what it is) has to be the omnipresent emotion because it presages all others. Any emotion which hurts is an emotion we’re going to be afraid of. Even if that emotion is fear itself. It’s the double whammy – not only are you going to be grieving, ashamed or afraid. You’re going to feel afraid of feeling grief, shame and fear too.
So the healing I’m talking about here is achieving at least some safety from the repeated emotional pain of loss and grieving. Safety from uncertainty and anxiety. I’m not so naïve as to think that these emotions can be ‘cured’ and done away with. We’re sweeping up leaves in the forest here. But, if we can create small clearings, places where we can hold these emotions in their place by understanding they are ours to keep and care for, then perhaps we can create safe places for us to begin to heal.
Does it sound strange to speak of caring for a painful emotion? The idea was strange to me, I have to admit. All my life I have wanted to be rid of the pain. Deny it. Reject it. Inflict it on others. Drink it away. Anything but feel it. To be honest, I’m still not keen on feeling, especially the really bad stuff, but the truth is, I realised, my pain is my pain. It’s there because, not only did nobody stop us from being hurt, nobody helped us afterwards to stop hurting. No-one brought the safety back, and we never learned how to hurt while feeling safe from further harm, how to look upon ourselves and our pain with care, compassion and forgiveness. Not forgiveness for ‘them’, but for ourselves. We were all taught that self-pity was contemptible, needing was selfish, and fear was weak. This, perhaps, is another change when healing. Understanding that the love which should have come from others can legitimately come from ourselves.
Seeking Safety by Looking for Harm
One thing which is rarely spoken of is paranoia. When it is considered, paranoia is usually dismissed or swept aside as ‘fantasy’. “Well, it’s about something that’s not there, isn’t it?”. Not really. Even delusions are real to the person having them. And if your life experience has been that there really is danger everywhere in your environment, it’s a hard lesson to un-learn. In some ways, I think paranoia could be viewed as ‘anxiety for a bloody good reason’. Fear with a very specific focus, even if that focus is not appropriate to one’s current situation anymore. It’s a creative adjustment made to seek safety. Are all these difficult emotions trying to find their way home to to safety? I wonder…
It isn’t unreasonable to see paranoia as another way in which we are trying to protect ourselves. Our abusers, our attackers, our bullies and our neglecters were all really there, they really happened to us. Our reactions may appear inappropriate or even distorted to other people, but their experiences are different from ours. As ours are from others still. I can understand how intense fear can anthropomorphize into a shape or a voice no-one else can hear when, like all humans, we are only trying to make sense of what happened to us.
I think that all paranoia, however mild or extreme, has its roots in seeking safety. But, at this point, we need to look at the difference between hope and fear. It’s apparent that the focus has swung right round from the hope of finding safety to the fear of being hurt. This ‘loss of hope’ may well be connected to the absence of a safe place when we were being abused. There’s nowhere to go because there’s no-one to trust. What happens then? If the polarity is hope or fear, then it’s fear from now on, and that fear must examine everything, whether it’s real or not.
Whether it’s a fear of the impossible due to psychosis, or a chronic hyper-vigilance grounded in reason-able experiences, we ought not to condemn this creative adjustment. To me it is very indicative of three things:
Firstly, a loss of trust, not only in our environment, but in ourselves, our ability to judge and assess. Deliberate or not, trauma gaslights us, distorts our perceptions of what is really happening. This is a vein running straight through PTSD and other conditions.
Secondly, a loss of hope that there is a way for things to be better, safer, and that it is accessible to us. With hope crushed so many times during the abuse, with having to survive in an inherently abusive world, it is yet another creative adjustment that there is little to hope for.
Thirdly, it makes clear that there has been, and possibly still is, a great deal to be afraid of.
Taking these three together, it is not surprising that a previous threat becomes an anticipated threat, which then becomes a far greater threat when our imagination (which is really only trying to cover all possibilities) engrosses it beyond the reality of the situation. In short, we become afraid of what might be. And ‘what might be’ can be bloody terrifying when we think about it.
As both hope and anxiety are entirely concerned with the future, is it then the return of hope which helps to enable healing? Is hope the antidote to anxiety? Certainly, it is the hopelessness of our emotional wounds which makes it so hard to recover (I heard a description of them becoming infected, which was very apt). Understanding that there will be, if not an end, then an improvement, gives us something to hope for. Being able to take our fear and look at it in perspective, even set it aside in this moment of safety, right here, right now, is a small step in healing. But it is still a step. And we can take more.
Their shame, not ours
A very large part of healing for me was understanding what’s mine and what isn’t, and this is especially important where our shame is concerned. I grew up in a time where the victim was most definitely blamed, firstly by our abusers and neglecters, but also by anyone else who found out about it. Their shame clings to us like a sin. I know social attitudes are a bit better now, but, it’s still a big risk to admit to being sexually abused. Particularly if you’re a man.
I think shame requires more than hope to recover. Something more absolute. Perhaps there is some kind of absolution which takes place, a ‘washing off’ of the sin still clinging to us. That feeling of dirtiness, of unforgiveability (I’m sure there’s a more proper word for it), and of ‘otherness’ which stays with us. Worse still, it accuses us, blames us, never lets us forget.
I’m finding harder to find where the healing is for shame. I know that shame ‘withers when we bring it into the light’ but that can be a very difficult and even dangerous thing to do for many who are struggling not to be overwhelmed by the judgement of others. It isn’t enough to ‘not care’ what they think (or do?). I come back to the idea of shedding it somehow, understanding, finally, that this has been placed on us by other, terrible, people. I can’t get away from the ‘washing off’ metaphor, but I think this is something we have to do ourselves.
Healing from shame is healing from the contempt of others. We are shamed by those who do not care about us. Those who have no interest in who we are, only in what they can inflict upon us, take from us, and then blame us for. In healing from this contempt, we must stop having contempt for ourselves. Not just for what happened, but for all the injuries, wounds and scars we carry because of it. How much of the fight we have with ourselves is the retroflected contempt for being what they made us: a victim of their will? Their will, not ours. Healing starts when self-contempt stops.
Re-thinking depression
Let’s finish up with depression. As I’ve said before, I’m not convinced that depression even exists in the way that many people claim it to be, i.e. an inexplicable welter of sadness with no apparent cause and no foreseeable end. When people feel like that, I can’t help wondering if they simply cannot see the relationship between the things which have happened to them and the way they feel now. Somehow, we’re not taught to look for existential causes for our emotional injuries, partly because of the need to sell pills, but also to protect the fragile egos of all the negligent caregivers out there.
For so many, I think it’s either chronic shame or chronic grief. We’ve done shame so let’s look at grief. When life is constantly taking so much away from us, in huge chunks or tiny crumbs at a time, there’s a lot of loss to grieve for. Yet we don’t see it until or unless something has caused us to have some insight into ourselves. This is where we can embrace our grief and not be ashamed or revulsed by it. To see its place as Lifegrief, telling us of our loss and our need to heal. Sometimes, the healing happens when we realise that, after what’s happened to us, we are meant to feel like this, it is perfectly normal and there is actually nothing wrong with us.
To understand that we are grieving means we can take at least some of the shame out of the situation. It’s grief, and there will be good reasons for that grief when we find them. Nothing to be ashamed of there. Understanding what loss is doing to us, that we are in its process, means understanding that all that is happening to us has a cause which can be either rectified or surmounted. The pain might be with us all our lives, but the grieving, the unbearable sadness, will not last for ever, and there will be healing to look forward to.
Here, too, the spectre of anxiety rears its head. I am terrified of my depression. I fear it every day and will do anything to keep it at bay. Like a Concierge of Misery, my fear of feeling of all these things is constantly at hand, ready to serve me whenever I let things slip. But he also reminds me that I need to heal still. That it is not over yet, and I must keep myself safe. So I come back to the idea that the pain of these emotions, like a bruise or healing wound, is also there to remind us not to let this happen again if we can help it.
Taking your time
With so much to do, is it any wonder that healing can take so long? Perhaps healing isn’t a place or an event, but a point of view. Context and perspective. A change in the way we see ourselves and the world around us. That said, things have to have changed for us, before they can change within us. Changed in a way we are aware of. As I said before, I’m assuming that the physical danger or trauma has passed for the purposes of our conversation.
Physical healing involves processes and changes so miniscule and finite that we can never see them. So it is, perhaps, with emotional healing. We can’t do it wilfully, we cannot ‘make it happen’. We can only set the scene, put things in order and let our emotional healing take the right path while hope, trust and safety pave the way. Learning to be kind to younger versions of yourself that didn’t know the things you know now. That’s a good start. And if we’re still not sure what to do then we can always take Arnold Beisser’s advice: Stop trying to be how you think you should be, and allow yourself to discover the way you actually are.
Take it easy, and love yourself first.
Chris Pilling M.Sc. is a psychotherapist based on the Isle of Wight.
Copyright © Chris Pilling. Not to be reproduced without permission.