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Posts tagged ‘Processing trauma’

Oct 23

Icebergs and Admirals, Part 1: Melting

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.

May 8

Editor’s Pick: The Relationship File

As Gail’s editor, I’ve had the pleasure of reading and editing all the posts here on The Gift of Being Heard. This week, to conclude a series of “author’s picks” of posts from the last several years, I am pleased to have my own pick. While there are many pieces that stand out for a variety of reasons, I decided to revisit this one, as it poignantly touches on several issues that resonate with me, such as how we can avoid antagonism in the midst of sweeping changes in one’s life, and how relationships really do continue after death, regardless of whether one believes in an afterlife. Most memorable for me, however, is the insight Gail shares about veterans returning from the First and Second World Wars, and what this meant for their processing of trauma and grief. For better or for worse, we live in a different world now. We have gained so much. But what have we lost? I hope you enjoy this post, especially if you missed it the first time around.

-Claudia

In the last decade, I’ve lost my husband, mother, brother, and sister. I’ve jokingly told my younger brother that he’s under orders not to die on me. I’ve also said goodbye to an old faith home and welcomed a new place of faith into my life. All of this comes with grief, loss, mourning what was, and needing to reexamine relationships.

Of those who have exited life, only one was old enough to do so; the other three were all far too young to go. The reality is that they are all gone. The relationships now stand for review in the memory file, and what is done is done. The past faith home also stands in a memory file. Everything is up for discussion and it’s all fair game; nothing is sacred, not even my mother, whom I love deeply.

In looking at all of this, I must turn back the clock to the year 2006, when my husband’s questioning of his faith began. At the time, I wasn’t questioning, but I did want to hear about what he was thinking, feeling, learning, and what was making him angry about it all. The process altered the way we communicated, and it led me to my own path of discovery. It was a good thing, and ultimately, I took from it that relationships can change and that the change can be for the better. We didn’t need to go to antagonism. The concept that we could be different and have a healthy relationship was new to him. We could talk and nothing was off limits. That was where we were when he made his exit. Because examination of things was possible while he was alive, it made it possible to return to the relationship after his death and turn over some of the things that I needed to look at.

Relationships don’t end at death. We carry them forward; they are woven into the tapestry of our ongoing existence. As much as we may wish to erase someone or something from our lives, we can’t. We learn through turning over the rocks to look at it all.

This is also true of my relationship with my mother. I was fortunate that for approximately eighteen years, my mother and I spent every Monday in conversation. We’d giggle, laugh, cry, learn from each other, and talk about things that were deep and serious. Obviously, we spent hours before that time in conversation. When she made her exit, the “I love yous” had been said, and the one question I never asked—the one that I’d like to go back and ask now—I think I know the answer to. Her death came less than six months after Jon’s traumatic death, and I did not go to the memorial. My not attending was a bad choice, and I learned from it. Being there is needful in so many ways.

As I examine my relationship with my mother, I can make peace with what negatives there were. I think the fact that we had that conversation base to draw on has really helped. Pushback was allowed.

Then I look at my sibling relationships. My two older siblings and I didn’t always understand each other. I’m sad about this, and I also know that it wasn’t of my making. I tried. Could I have done more?

In looking at the hard question of putting things right in life, and after they’ve made their exits, I’m challenged by the meaning of our relationship. What is “right?” I love them both. I know that they, each in their own way, loved me. As I take relationships apart, I arrive at the same nasty conclusion that I did in life: They never understood disability the way they needed to understand disability. They were never able to completely understand me. I’ve come to the conclusion that I can be at peace with my end of the relationship and that is the best I can do. This brings up another question for me, and it is one I’ve been musing on for some time.

Why is it that in death, loss, and grief, many people choose to move forward without the work of examining the loss they’ve had in life? The urge to replace someone or something can be strong, and it can also damage us. The more I sit with this question, the more I wonder if it has to do with the fact that our society has radically changed relationships, trauma, and life in general. I’ll explain using WWI and WWII.

Both of my grandfathers were veterans of WWI. They came home on ships. They came home together with war buddies, and in large numbers. On the ships they had time to process the violence and the trauma, and they supported one another. WWII came around, and their sons enlisted and went off to two different fronts: Europe and Japan. They also witnessed violence and trauma, and they came home on ships. They also came home to a hero’s welcome. Their fathers had processed the war and now could mentor their sons. War breeds atrocities, and WWII left the world with several that can never be undone. Old times weren’t any simpler, but they were slower. What’s changed? My grandfather knew the wisdom of allowing his son to prune the rosebushes and tend the garden. He worked through some of the trauma that way.

Leaving the site of battle is a matter of days or hours now. People now come home by boarding a flight that will carry them home. Veterans now come home to a fast-changing society, fast tech, and a culture that is in constant motion. They return traumatized and, in many situations, misunderstood by loved ones and society in general. It alters relationships. This is not to say that my parents’ and grandparents’ generation didn’t suffer from PTSD and other war-related issues. I’m pointing out that their return was slower and allowed for a different type of processing time.

I’m suggesting that maybe we’ve become immune to the damage we’re causing to each other by not slowing things down. In the past seventy-plus years, we’ve moved forward in both healthy and unhealthy ways. This applies to how we treat our relationships.

Are we willing to slow down and take the time to process our lives a wee bit more gently? Parting is hard. No matter how hard we try to avoid it, the past does catch us, and sooner or later what we failed to look at in the near or distant past resurfaces to bite us when we’re not looking!

I reflect back to a night around the dinner table when my father lost it over food. I realize now it was a war memory that he should have sought therapy for, but in those days doing therapy wasn’t common. At the time, it had been about thirty years post war—pruning the roses had not resolved it all. I wonder what would have happened had he looked, talked, and resolved? I wonder how our family would have been changed had he looked. I know how I’m being changed by working slowly and deeply on the past, whether it is peaceful or difficult. I’m moving forward in a healthier manner than had I rushed into my future life. I’m walking into something new, and I hope I’m doing it with grace.