TRANSCRIPT
From time to time, over the years, people have asked me how they can speed up the path in their life of healing from childhood trauma. I thought about that a lot. I’ve actually written an essay about it some 15 or so years ago, and I’ve also thought about it in my own life for, well, 25, 30 years now that I’ve been engaged in the healing path. And it’s rather strange. My answer is that I don’t actually think that speeding up the healing path is necessarily a good idea. Actually, what I like more is the idea of an organic process of healing from childhood trauma. Not going too fast, not going too slow, not even worrying about the speed of the healing process. Instead, just letting it take its own natural pace.
I think our job as healing people, my job as a healing person, is to set the stage for my body, my mind, my soul, my psyche to do its own healing. To basically clear the path, to treat the healing path as like a seed in the garden, and that my job is not to make that seed grow faster, but instead to give it all the things that it requires to grow well. To plant it in good soil, maybe with some compost around it, to give it enough water, to give it enough space so that it can expand its roots without having to compete with lots of other things, to give it the right kind of sunlight that it needs, to give it time, maybe to give it a little bit of stress with some wind and things like that, maybe also to give it protection so animals can’t eat it up. That’s how I think of my healing process—not something that I’m supposed to pressure to make it go faster.
But what can I do to water the seed, the plant of my healing process? Well, the main things that I’ve done in my life—and I’ve talked about this a lot—there’s a lot of them. Living a very, very healthy lifestyle, not using drugs, not drinking alcohol, journaling, journaling a lot, often really trying to make sense of how I’m feeling, being honest with myself about who I am, what I’m going through, writing a lot about my history, really working hard to make sense of my history. To me, that opens up my Vista to really understand who I am, where I came from, to really understand, well, the roots of my problems, the roots of my strengths, the roots of my weaknesses. To see and really understand what I have gone through, to see where I am scarred, to see how I am traumatized still. I’m a lot less traumatized than I used to be, but when I think about myself when I was younger, it was a lot of it was just opening myself up and really discovering what is in there, what history is in there, what buried emotions are in there, and giving myself that island of safety to be able to feel my feelings, especially the feelings that I wasn’t allowed when I was a child—the anger, the sadness, the rage, even that feeling of rejection, my feeling of fury and abandonment and rejection that my parents voiced it on me.
To really make sense of who they were, where they came from, why they did the things that they did, but most importantly, specifically what they did to me. To be able to really look at the unvarnished truth, to do all of these things, to give myself the space to be able to have time to do this for a while. Certainly, to do a lot less intensive work in the outside world so I could focus more internally. To do, well, a lot less dating and romance, sometimes even to be totally celibate for years at a time, at one point a decade, just so I could be with me. So I wasn’t playing all this out in romance. And when I did get into romance, to go slow, not to go fast, not to speed it up, but to purposefully go slow, let it take an organic pace that really honored how I was feeling and to explore how I was feeling along the way.
Certainly, when I was younger, I saw that I wanted to put romance into high, high gear so I could feel secure, so I could feel loved, so I could lock some relationship into place with some sort of formal commitment so that I wouldn’t have to feel all that pain and abandonment and rejection of childhood. Also, with all my other relationships, to study them, to see my patterns of behavior, to see what kind of people I attracted, to study the ways in which I interacted, to see how my patterns of interaction were healthy and sometimes how they were not healthy. How I was still playing out some of my historical traumas, my unresolved emotional needs with friends or partners, even bosses at work or subordinates at work, perhaps if I had some sort of authority position. Learning slowly, slowly learning a lot of gathering data, making a lifestyle of it.
I don’t think this applies to all people who want to speed up the healing path, but something I’ve seen in some people who want to speed up the healing path—I think in some of them, some of them even told me this. I think about therapy clients of mine who overtly said it. They said, “I want to speed up the healing path as fast as I possibly can so I could just get through it and be done. I don’t want to deal with this healing for months and years and years and decades.” I hear people talk about healing for decades. That’s crazy! I want to get through it, be done, move on with my life, close up that chapter, and not have to deal with it ever again.
I understand the sentiment of that, but I don’t see that as realistic. Often with folks like this who have said this, or even times in my life when I say, “I just want to be done with this,” I think a lot of times it’s just not wanting to have to feel the pain of remembering anything. Almost like wanting to go through a medical procedure with anesthesia to not have to feel any of the feelings around the horror and the healing process. Because what I found is the healing process is inevitably very painful, and I can understand why people don’t want to feel that pain. It seems very unfair, in fact, that we suffered all this pain once upon a time, and now in order to heal, we have to feel it all over again, sometimes for a long period of time. What a raw, unfair deal in life! And my answer is yes, and I think the pain is inevitable. And sometimes a lot of it is inevitable for healing.
I think the question is how to make use of this pain for the purpose of growth. Actually, I think of the pain that’s kind of like the engine in my jets. It’s what motivates me to grow, motivates me to get deeper into my history and to make sense of it, to become a better person, to change my behavior. I think if people want to avoid the pain, in a way they don’t really get a fair chance to look at their history and to integrate the lessons that they’re learning and making sense of this history. I think the pain, I think it really is a necessary component of the healing process.
I think also this new trend that’s gone on in the world—all these new healing medicines, healing drugs, the Ayahuasca and the MDMA and the ketamine and the mushrooms. Oh, you can just blast the trauma out! You can work through the trauma in a week! You can do three years of therapy in three hours or three days! Also, all these new techniques for healing trauma. I hear them—EMDR and this one and that one and tapping and whatnot. I mean, I know bits and pieces about different ones, and people often ask me, “What do you think of these techniques?” Some of them actually may be very useful and are useful to some people at certain times, because I’ve seen it. But then I’ve seen these techniques in the hands of therapists who I don’t respect very much. I don’t like them sometimes, or therapists who I’ve seen who I look at them and I think, “I don’t think they’ve done much healing at all personally,” and here they are wielding these techniques.
Saw once upon a time, he says, “I can take a client and I can blast that trauma right out of them. I can get them through that trauma so fast.” And yet, I saw this guy, and he was perverse in a lot of ways. I don’t think he was a good father with his children. I thought he was really, really full of himself with his clients.
And then I heard through the grapevine over time that a few of his clients had ended up in mental hospitals as the result of him blasting the trauma out of them. I’ve heard this from other clients going through these really intense procedures with these fancy names, with all these acronyms. Yes, it might work well with some people, but some people become emotionally overwhelmed by putting their healing process into warp speed.
The same thing with some of these different medicinal psychedelic drugs: the MDMA, the Ayahuasca, mushrooms. People sometimes flip out as the result of going too fast. Too much emotion comes up. That, again, to me, highlights the importance of the organic, slow healing process. The slow recovery process, where part of the slow recovery process is building a structure in our psyche, in our emotions, to be able to handle the upwelling emotions.
And sometimes when people get into stuff too quickly, through different various external means advertised to help them go faster, to blast through the trauma more quickly, they don’t have the structure to be able to hold the emotions, and it can become overwhelming. I’ve seen people become psychotic. I’ve seen people end up in mental hospitals, not just from the psychedelic drugs, but even from the therapeutic treatments. People being unable to function, people unable to continue with their jobs, people unable to pay their rent, and having to go back and live with their actual parents—the people who traumatized them at the beginning—because they couldn’t function as an adult in their adult life anymore. There was too much emotion, too many feelings, too much rage, too much sadness.
Also, sometimes when people go too fast on their healing process and they can’t hold it, they can’t put these new emotions and these new insights into perspective, sometimes they can start playing out their sadness and rage and feelings of abandonment—these upwelling feelings—on people who didn’t necessarily cause the problem at all. I’ve seen people lose their marriages over trying to go too fast on their healing process, bringing up that trauma too fast.
So again, I think when I put my vote down, it’s for the long, slow healing process. Changing one’s life, making a healing lifestyle out of one’s existence—not with the intent of dragging it out forever, making it last any longer than it needs to last, because who wants to go through it any longer? But to be gentle with oneself. A long, respectful, gentle healing process that, in a way, reflects often the long, slow process by which people in their childhoods did get traumatized.