Tag: Beyond trauma

Reflections, Part 6

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in Discharging Trauma, Soul Peace and Journeys, The Suicide and its Aftermath

Read Part 5 here.

The Dissection

Giving that outfit I wore on the day of Jon’s death a send-off was hard, and it opened the door to other life changes. Like the outfit, I gave other changes time and sat with each one over a period of time. The first major life change was my exit from the Mormon Church. It had been brewing for years, and when I finally did leave, I left peacefully. No regrets or looking back: only looking forward now.

The spiritual direction program I became involved in was about my soul journey and being led to a new place in my life. That happened four years after I became a widow and took a full two years to complete. It opened up a new way of framing spirituality in my life. It taught me that “fixing” a perceived wrong in someone is not the only path to healing. Therapists fix; spiritual directors don’t, and whatever needs healing happens. Sometimes the healing comes from within, and spiritual direction facilitates changes in its own powerful way. Prior to 2016, I had not been aware of what power “direction” could hold. I had to be out from my former church for that to happen.

Covid-19 taught me about staying safe and challenged me to accept my own vulnerability. While we as a world sat isolated in our homes, we each came to grips in our own way that this thing could kill us. When I was told by a doctor to not risk going out, I listened, and that choice was a no-brainer for me. It also made me realize that this was one thing I was glad that Jon wasn’t around for. He’d have been unreasonably scared. Part of his bipolar pathology revolved around outside threats. We were all scared of something we couldn’t see, and watching friends and family get sick and die was hard. Knowing it could kill us was worse in many ways. And so, in 2023, when the doctors told me to not travel anywhere where I couldn’t get to a hospital fast, I listened, and I cancelled a planned trip. Four years into the process (2020), I listened because I was learning to make choices that kept me safe. This would serve me well when, in 2023, I listened to a friend, and then to myself. It saved my life—twice.

Walking this new path enabled me to admit to myself that it was time to do the personal therapy I needed to take on. I needed to stop stuffing it in and jettisoning the entire trauma. My captive iceberg needed to be freed.

Looking back on all of it now, I see the chain of events that led up to where I am now.

The freedom of exploring my life after I left Mormondom also allowed me to look at who I am as a woman. As women in the Mormon Church, we have a narrow field of options: sister, daughter, wife, and mother. Being raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the options in adult life were wife and mother.

I knew early on that marriage was not in the plans for me. I understood that I needed to follow a professional path. The problem in the Mormon Church is that you are taught from an early age to trust fifteen old white men. You are at their mercy, and if they are super conservative in their thinking, your options get quelled. In the 1960s and 1970s, women started finding jobs out of the home, and the war within raged as it did with me in the 2000s when I was married. With a prophet in the 1970s telling women to stay home, and a prophet in the 1980s telling women to leave jobs and to go back into the home, women were pulled and torn between what was best for them on a personal level and what church leadership was saying they should do.

I made the choice while in the Mormon Church to pursue my professional goals, and to work as a therapist. This was a personal choice, and one that only I could make. Like other women of my generation, I made the choice that would enable me to pursue the goal I’d set at sixteen: becoming a therapist.

When I married in 1998, the war waged on in my mind. Wife vs. wanting and needing to do what I loved doing: working in my profession. The good Mormon wife stayed home. We didn’t have children, and we’d never have children. I was torn between guilt and what I knew my personal truth to be. Whether it was volunteer work in the early 2000s, or paid work later on, I chose to work.

Once I left the Mormon Church, it all opened up! I didn’t have to play a role. I could enter into life not having to ask if I should walk a path that would allow me to be seen as Gail the woman, and not the wife, the woman who was not a mother, the woman who loves her profession, the woman who is even free to explore her sexuality—no matter who she is. This was just as liberating as the day in September of 2016 when I walked into the hair salon and announced that I wanted to go grey. Oh my, the women celebrated my newfound freedom from the bottle. That journey took six months and has been something I’ve enjoyed. Yes, Jon, I will never bottle my hair again.

And so, like the grey hair, I settled in to enjoying the real Gail.

I stand in my petiteness, and I claim myself as I am. I understand that who I am is mine alone to claim. I honor the process of releasing the trauma of my life—all of it had to go. I sit here and recall the mail I got right before the therapy session. My therapist sent it to me. It was the story of an iceberg. I crushed on the iceberg. “She” gave me courage. With her in my thoughts and at my side, I tore into the trauma, and I set it free. I owe my happy iceberg a huge thank you. I owe myself a thank you. Where will this journey head to next?

Icebergs and Admirals, Part 1: Melting

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in Discharging Trauma

This post is going to attempt to explain how the mess of trauma operates in the mind. There are players in this post: the iceberg, which serves as a safe place to store the trauma, and the loyal soldiers who are assigned to defend the fortress on land, or the mind. The soldiers send the trauma to the admiral, who is in a boat by the iceberg. The admiral is a gatekeeper who lets trauma in to be stored inside of the iceberg and can alert the players to the situation as needed. The therapist is a neutral facilitator of the healing.

Walking out of trauma is tricky. We believe that trauma is completely “land based,” guarded in our personal land fortress, as we explored in “Soldiers of the Mind.” But that isn’t the whole story.

While our “soldiers” have been busy protecting the “battlements” of our minds, the real action has been going on out in the blue ocean waters, where “icebergs,” the storage centers of our trauma, have been building over time. On the surface, they look steadfast and serene. The trouble lies beneath the surface, where they grow and expand, slowly but menacingly. The beauty of the iceberg is deceptive, and each time more growth occurs, it is at the expense of its beauty. Underneath is where the ugly resides. Below the surface, jagged edges form, and they pierce anything that touches them. It is bloody and painful.

On constant surveillance of our iceberg is our “admiral.” Sitting on her ship, she tries to forestall the inevitable: the heat wave that will cause the iceberg to melt in an uncontrolled manner. Melting happens, and it happened to me.

Melting, or the discovery of how significant the trauma below the surface is, caused me to sit in my living room on my sofa and sob. Sobbing was the awakening of how ugly the underside of my iceberg was. It took three more months to commit to a step that led me to do the work of healing what was below the surface. The jagged edges had to go.

I’m all about rubber-meets-the-road solutions, so I’m going to tell you how to find what you need to heal the iceberg.

I had to talk to a great many therapists to sift out the right therapist from wrong fits. This is where my journey began.

I wanted someone who was reliable and intelligent, someone who had done their own deep soul work, and who understood trauma. I wanted someone who would call me out if I tried to raise walls and distract myself from the process of the work. I quickly established the places where I would not find this person. I finally found the right person, wrote an email, and had something set up when, kerplop! I broke my left femur and I had to delay the onset of treatment.

Who and what I found was someone who was qualified, had done their own work, would be able to treat me like the client in the relationship, and hold me to this role. While I am a therapist, this is about me doing some hard work. I didn’t need someone who could not hold that boundary. Adam (not his real name) could do all of this. Gender wasn’t an issue for me with finding the right person. Qualifications were the top priority. And so, with the admiral guarding the iceberg both above and below the surface, the work of reconfiguring the iceberg began.

The admiral’s role in all of this is to serve as a safety while the real work beneath the surface occurs. The therapist is going to take things apart in a safe manner and move cautiously to rebuild what soldiers on the iceberg’s mass have defended, while the soldier’s job is to defend on land what is actually occurring beneath the iceberg and out at sea.

The best way of explaining it is that while the trauma happens on land, it sends out messengers who can deliver the needed information to be stored in the iceberg. Trauma is a two-front war.

How this all happens with things getting sent to the iceberg is not our fault. If we did not send things to the iceberg, we’d be in an even larger mess.

Healing from trauma is going to destabilize the iceberg. It is a good thing, this shrinking of the iceberg. Lots of stuff that has been sent out to sea to be protected is going to get knocked free, and with the freedom, a healthy, pretty iceberg will float proudly on the surface of the water.

So, with the admiral controlling the iceberg, the job is to alert the mind to when critical mass has been reached. Once again, and this time in reverse fashion, the admiral contacts the land forces, alerting them to the fact that the iceberg is in a dangerous situation, and that destruction is certain should things go any further.

In a very real way, this is what caused me to sob on the sofa, and to finally, after decades of filling my iceberg to dangerous capacity below the surface, let the admiral know that it was time to clean the mess out.

I think what most people do is bargain with their subconscious and strike a deal to coexist and believe that they can stuff things away. The crazy of it all is that we are not at fault for trying to survive. There comes a time when stuffing away no longer works. If we look at the iceberg as a container for what we are not willing to take apart, then it will all eventually blow apart on us.

The reason people don’t seek treatment is that they have come to believe that they can get by without addressing the pain. They keep telling themselves, “I’ll just do what I normally do with my inner pain and let it sit below in my iceberg.” The thing is, the iceberg just wants to be a beautiful part of the ocean landscape, and it didn’t ask to be made a most ugly thing: it got assigned to that role. Not our fault, in so many ways.

External or Internal?

Posted on by Gail Shurtleff in Discharging Trauma

I sat with someone as they went through a memory of an event. They were in the past, seeing it in the present. My job was to calm them down. It took a while.

Trauma is both internal and external. Surviving a heart attack is internal, and we also witness it externally. We’ll carry the memory with us inside our head forever.

Trauma can also be deceptive. What we experience as being within ourselves is actually outside of the self. A physical reaction to external cues might cause internal reactions. We might come to believe that what we experienced was internal rather than external trauma. And so it goes that we might live years believing and thinking about our experiences in one way rather than another.

When I was six, I was abused by those who used water to traumatize me. I wasn’t able to learn to swim… until one day when I was seven, and I figured out that the water would hold me up, and I’d be able to float on the top of it. Once I figured that out, I was able to take my feet off the bottom of the pool and kick. At first nobody could tell I had my feet off the bottom of the pool, and then I got it and you couldn’t keep me out of the water. Water is an equalizer. The memory of the water stayed in my head as I conquered the physical act of swimming. It was an external thing that lived in my head.

What we fear might be the monsters in our head, and for some people with mental illness the monsters become quite real. For most of us, the monsters we live with are easier to cope with.

Sometimes our liberations come via a comment, something others say and do with us that causes us to rethink the vision of ourselves. Trauma can cause a great deal of self-doubt and second-guessing who we are. We second-guess who we are to ourselves and to the world. What if we need to cut ourselves a great deal of slack? Most of the time we need to offer ourselves kindness.

I’ve witnessed the trauma perfection cycle, and I believe it stems from thinking that “if I just do this right, all will be well.” The problem with this type of thinking is that you can never do it well enough.

When trauma is discharged, and we set our loyal soldiers free, something amazing happens. Our ability to love ourselves increases and, with it, the loss of perfectionism. Along with this loss comes the ability to react differently to what once bothered us. We tend to look at those old rainbows in new ways, and our minds are blown away by our new actions. Now the rainbows are alive with vibrant colors that we may have never been able to see before!

I’ve talked about arriving on new shores after crossing the river Styx, and this is different. Whatever this is, it brings deep peace. It satisfies. This is a different internal that resolves the external stuff. I think it is to be defined for each person in their own way. What I understand isn’t what you will understand. Once again, I thank the loyal soldiers who served. Once again, I stand in amazement for what they did for me. For now, peace has come and made a home in my soul.