Complex Trauma

I have some things to say about trauma. (I have much more to say than this, but this is plenty for now.)

Most of us can identify acute trauma (following an accident or an assault, etc), but complex trauma can result from something seemingly benign or invisible, like being parented by a person who is chronically (even mildly) anxious or dissociated. The fewer caretakers we have, the steeper their job is in teaching us how to regulate. 

I’ve been recovering from complex trauma. It’s tricky. I had a loving, supported childhood, with attentive, conscious parents. No major mishaps and no major heart breaks. Mostly what I want to say is that I had no idea what complex trauma was or that I was living with it. My attachment wounding (which I also didn’t realize I carried) is synonymous with this trauma.  

I have been astonished the last few years with all of the healing my nervous system has needed. For months I would say to my therapist, “I had NO idea I was so fucked up”. Though, when I sat down to write this, I suddenly recalled telling a couple of therapists beginning in my late 20s (roughly ten years in to talk therapy) that I was “ready to do the deeper work”. I remember being met with bafflement and questions about whether I had ever suffered any acute trauma, neglect, or abuse. I said no and was told that there really wasn’t anything else to be done. I think one of them said, “I don’t know what you mean.” They really seemed puzzled by my proclamation. And I didn’t have anything more than this vague feeling, so I dropped it.   

A decade later, between existential pain and chronic illness it became clear I needed to do something different. I began work with an attachment-focused somatic practitioner who explained to me what I was experiencing.  

It’s wild to look back as I piece this all together. I knew so much more about myself than I was given credit for, but I just wasn’t in touch with anybody who understood what I was holding. There were ways, though, in which I had no idea anything was wrong. I lived my whole life thinking that feelings, beliefs, behaviors, and habits of mine were organic to me, when in fact they were protective strategies. (Even my introversion is suspect.) Some were also symptoms of backlash from those protective strategies.  

I felt moved to write because I encountered my 16-year-old self while driving home today. I love her. A piece of music came into my head and with it the memory of who I was when, at 16, I heard it for the first time.  

I’m fortunate that despite carrying this trauma, I’ve always loved myself deeply, and for the most part I’ve also liked myself. Though the way I've treated myself has not always been congruent with this love. It’s a really complicated thing, maybe even impossible to understand when you’re on the inside of it, (or if you’ve never experienced it?) because in a way, it is you. It isn’t. It’s patterns to unlearn, but it’s often patterns you learn before your prefrontal cortex is cataloging your memories with time and date stamps, so there is no explicit memory (which is the way most of us conceive of memory) of your learning.  

Whenever people use the phrase “self-sabotage” I bristle, because this is likely what is at play: a (now unhelpful) protective strategy that you aren’t consciously aware of, or you’re aware, but the strategy can’t be changed or discarded using the intellect.  

WE ARE NOT BORN TO INTENTIONALLY CAUSE OURSELVES HARM.  

But I hear “self-sabotage” or “get out of your own way” as putting the onus on the person suffering to “fix” themselves cognitively, to think their way out of a problem which can only be solved in intentional, loving, compassionate relationship.  

I consider myself to have been mostly healed for the past year and I’m still sorting pieces and getting context for the bigger picture that is me, my life. It’s an ongoing, nonlinear process.  

For a lot of years before I started doing this trauma work (or even knew that one could do this trauma work) I started having visions of younger versions of myself. I understood immediately I was going back in time to offer protection to past selves who were feeling fear. I think now that there’s more to it. In various healing movements, people talk about soul retrieval work. There are many ways to view this, but this is what I’ve been doing. Hakomi practitioners refer to the symptom as fragmentation: some way we show up in the world is deemed unacceptable and we have to adopt a coping strategy to be different in order to increase our chances of survival; this causes internal injury and some piece of our being gets splintered off, stashed away in a secret, untraversed place.  

So, often these memories for me are a moment of healing. I get to go back in time metaphorically speaking and collect a version of myself who has been in hiding due to a need for self-protection and reintegrate her. I’m really grateful for this process. It’s a beautiful thing to come back into relationship with me at 11, or 16, or 23. And today I’m mostly feeling gratitude. But there’s been a lot of grief in this process too. Because I have to come to terms with the fact that I didn’t get to show up as my full self at 11, or 16, or 23. I was afraid of so much. I hurt people I loved because I wasn’t fully embodied. I missed out on opportunities because I was busy protecting myself. I missed out on joy and beauty and love and connection in the present moment because I was in a constant state of hyper-vigilance because I (often unknowingly) didn’t feel safe. (For my counseling people out there, my therapist hypothesized some time ago that perhaps I was operating in what’s called a “faux window”, a concept outlined in the book, Nurturing Resilience. In other words, my coping strategies were so sophisticated I had no idea I was ALWAYS outside my window of tolerance.)  

So, this grief…it hurts to be 40 and feel like I’ve just come alive. And I’ve never been so happy, I’ve never been so at ease. I just wanted to acknowledge today this grief and the reality that despite all of my hard work and best intentions I didn’t get to arrive here at 26. I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot. And I have a suspicion that complex trauma resembling mine is a widespread phenomenon in our capitalist, patriarchal, White supremacist, individualistic culture. I know how fortunate I am that I had the time and space and resources to do this work.

Lupine for healthy relationship to community

Note: in the weeks since writing this I have been hyper focused on the realization that I knew I needed this healing 15 years before anyone helped me. I have been cycling through frustration and grief and anger and regret and all the other emotions synonymous with these. I KNEW. I KNEW and was told I was wrong, and I put my knowing away. This happens. It is part of being in human relationship. The practitioners who “failed” me didn’t do it out of spite or negligence. People we trust offer us wisdom and if we have no context for our own knowing, we sometimes take that wisdom, even if it is lacking or it contradicts what we feel. And it sucks. If I had known one person who was familiar with complex trauma, my life might have taken a whole different shape.  

As a result, the principle at the heart of my practice is: we each know what we need better than anyone else. In America we exist in a culture that does everything it can to disconnect us from our knowing and from each other. Resolving complex trauma and attachment wounding using a lens critical of systemic oppression is my primary interest as a practitioner.  

Sink

I spent an afternoon in active imagination with the sinks of my dreams (thank you, Robert Johnson). Sometimes I am leaning over them, sometimes using them, sometimes the faucets are broken, sometimes they are stopped up, sometimes they are the sinks of my childhood. Sometimes they are upside down, embedded in ceilings (quiet, elevation, more difficult to reach, solitude). Sometimes suspicious folks are lurking in them. They are often warmth; I linger here when I am visiting with loved ones in the kitchen. My pose embodies the mundane. I love the mundane, especially when I am in community. 

I was told clearly in a dream once that swimming pools are portals, a way to connect to my dead, to spirits. So, are sinks the same? They are simply smaller basins for holding water, after all. 

I learned this: the bath/tub, sink, pool are kin. Sinks are vessels, receptacles, they hold both waste and food/nourishment, they are a valve, a portal, a gateway between the material and the elevated (this means the eighth house: the altar, thanks to Carol). They are transition, a catchment, a go-between, a symbol of choice, a womb, medium of spirit and earth. Something holy. Sink/sing are phonetically similar. As I made this connection the sinks began to sing: they are whistling as air blown past the drain makes a song. To sink is also to hide, to make invisible, to slink, escape. The sink is protective cover, containment with an out, a built in trap door, a way to disappear. Water can go to places the body cannot go and also fills the body.

I now approach my dishes with both the old disdain and new reverence. I feel great joy and gratitude when the dishes are clean and cleared. I am mindful what I dispose of, what I ask a sink to hold. I give thanks for what they contain and what they carry away.

Not My Medium

I am a worthless photographer. Mostly I’m too impatient. Brain goes too fast. With some media I’ve learned how to work with this energy. Not photography. 

For my eighth birthday my favorite babysitter gave me a camera. She was in high school and had hot pink acrylic nails with palm trees painted on them. This was still in the age of disposable flash bulbs. My gift came with one tower of ten bulbs: one flash per photo and then it was spent. The camera never worked. My mom took me to our neighborhood camera shop to see if there was any fixing it. At Orange Camera Dick and Wanda chain-smoked while their gazillion cats lounged on the counters. Can you smell it? Developer and burnt tobacco and cat fluff settled on 1980s formica and low pile carpet? 

Our family was getting ready to make our first trip to Alaska. I had been so excited about taking my own photos. But no dice, this little royal blue plastic baby was garbage. Dick and Wanda felt bad and graciously loaned me a scrappy camera just for the trip. This is what happened:

I don’t know who these people are.

Spoils

I love compost. 

I love decay. 

A Dutch still life, the mound in the garden that tells you the story of my dinner table, weeks old flowers I am reluctant to relinquish, peeling decades of wallpaper. Even the list of synonyms for the word ‘decay’ fascinates me.

I was recently diagnosed with acute mold toxicity. All manner of mycotoxins my body has been holding. Refusing to release. An apt metaphor for my life.

I learned from my doctor that often when people have this diagnosis and seek a new, mold-free environment, despite all signs pointing to safety, inevitably, a secret mold is discovered. As if the toxin in their bodies is guiding them. As if the body doesn’t have a say. The mold is governing now. I got chills. It reminded me of the first time I learned about toxoplasmosis. I shared this information with my acupuncturist, who shrugged: of course. She spoke about mold energy as a form of ghost energy. It’s parasitic. It wants what it wants. And it wants to stay. It wants company.

Is this why I love a dilapidated house? The residents in this vessel of mine feel welcome? Among kin? Or is it thanks to the Scorpio mask I wear? My x-ray vision? Because this is where the story is? Because when we see decomposition engaging with life, we see the whole of things? 

Tomato and Nectarine

When I was twenty-one, I spent a month living in Rome with some classmates. We were earning credits for a drawing and painting intensive. The small heartbreak of this memory is how unable I was to be present to the luxury of the experience. 

I spent most of each day wanting to go home. Wishing I was with my boyfriend in the dark, rainy northwest. I was hot and lonely and frustrated. And yet. 

This was how I fell in love with Calvino; Hanna reading to us every afternoon from Invisible Cities. This was the summer Jenny taught me about glass jars of tuna packed in olive oil. And the summer she and Karen agreed to adventure with me to Capalbio so I could finally touch the figures of Niki de Saint Phalle’s tarot garden with my own fingers. 

Every day that month I ate fresh pasta from the giant supermarket below our apartment. With that tuna, and capers. And tomatoes. And then nectarines. My body that summer was ninety percent tomatoes and stone fruit. It was impossible to hold both sadness and one of those nectarines. 

Fatigue

This seems to be the year, no? The one that will break us? I am watching the people I love grapple with trauma and stress and upheaval, while on the news the whole world is burning. The fatigue is real. I’ve slowed my studio practice to a crawl the last few months. My health, which has been compromised since December, has taken precedence. And while painting is healing for me, I just haven’t had the stamina. I think the bottom line is that the painting process for me has become a very powerful spiritual practice and I am too tired to take on all the energy that wants to channel through me. Until I am well, or have fortified my boundaries, or both, painting is mostly too taxing for my system.

I have dreamed of being a working artist since I was small. And it is really only in the last two years that I could see this becoming a reality for me. But I also began to feel this was not my whole story. The idea of being alone in my studio full time is a lonely idea. And I’ve known my work needs to give back in some way, I need to participate more actively in my community, but I’ve had no idea how.

Nine months in, being sick all the time is draining and scary. I am intimate with nausea, hives, insomnia, fatigue, anxiety, and depression at the unrelenting mystery of it all. The healthy foods I always found comforting make me physically ill. These days I go to work, I go to various medical and counseling appointments, and then I come home and lie down. I spend my weekends lying down too. I am very lucky to have, I kid you not, the world’s best boss. Someone who gives me space and understanding and support in staggering quantity. I am very lucky to have benefits that cover some of my treatments, though not nearly all, and I have to fight the insurance company with alarming frequency. I am also very lucky to be surrounded by skilled healers. I have often felt a surprising kinship with these people and now, I find, that in my way, healing is where I am headed. I don't imagine I'll go back to school to study medicine. I will always be an artist first. But somewhere at the intersection of art and wellness is where I am going. Like all of the most influential healers I have worked with, I am coming to this work because my body has left me no choice. No one knows exactly what is wrong with me, so I am my first healing experiment. And as I build up my reserves, I can finally spend some energy helping others.

Some minutes the future feels so bleak I want to give in and give up, but some minutes I feel clear and hopeful and I can see progress, a way through. So to everyone who is hurting now, I’m sending love. To everyone who is exhausted, give yourself permission to rest. For as long as your body says you need it, or you will have nothing left to give yourself or this world. In many ways, your body is wiser than your brain. Give it the space and nourishment and compassion it asks for.    

Getting Here

Ten years ago I was living in Brooklyn. Painting in a small living room my artist roommates and I used as a studio. I have a visceral memory of my body craving the movement a big canvas would afford me. I would sit hunched over my desk and think, “if only I could move my arms like this,” and then envision making broad sweeping strokes. But there was nowhere I could go to move my body like that while working. No room for canvases of the size that would allow me such freedom. And I had no idea what moving “my arms like this” meant. Or what would happen if I tried. So I kept having the thought, but I kept it close and shushed it often. Most likely the urge predated even Brooklyn and the cramped style of New York City living simply forced the issue to the surface. It’s amazing to look back and see the wisdom we carry around, isn’t it? Wisdom that is simply adrift until we’ve built the proper container for it. I shake my head at how long it took me to connect the dots, but holy holy is the gratitude that they did connect after all.

Two years ago I was talking about my creative practice with Carol, my astrologer, who also happens to be an artist. I lamented that despite wanting to be an artist my whole life long, I struggled to get myself into the studio. STRUGGLED. I was working from my sunny basement in the home I own. Surely, for a homebody, a home studio would make working a joy. But still, it mostly felt like punishment. If I wanted to paint, why was I always stalling, always making excuses, always cringing at the thought of getting myself off the couch or out of bed to my desk? Maybe I loved the idea more than the practice? Maybe I had built my whole life around a fantasy about what it meant to be an artist? Maybe I was lazy? These ideas sickened me. And I had given them only sidelong glances for years. But when I could finally say, “maybe I won’t be an artist after all” without crying or throwing up, a small corner of my heart broke, and then I felt some space open. I had a little freedom to move and explore.

I told Carol all of this. She said, “drawing might not be sensual enough for you…let’s look at the Sun, Mercury, Venus. My experience of all my Taurus clients is, that they really have to chew it, and taste it, and smell it…my suspicion is…it’s just not visceral enough. With all these planets in Taurus it has to turn you on physically. Maybe the kind of marks you want to make you haven’t met yet…get the brush out of the way and fingerpaint for a while. Taurus is in the body, in the house of the body.” (My stellium of Taurus planets is in the sixth house, for any of you who study astrology.) She suggested some new materials, some new methods. And, tentatively, I began to experiment. I put down my brushes and began to paint with my hands. It was good, but I was still so conscious of the mess I was making. Then I took off my clothes.

Slowly, I let go of my own expectations about what it meant to be an artist, to make work. After years of being told to stop working so tight and having zero ideas about HOW, some light finally fell on me. I moved my desk out of my studio. I let my body go. And all of a sudden I was “moving my arms like this”. And then all I wanted was to work bigger and messier and why would I ever stop painting when painting felt so good?

Some of my arriving here is the result of desperation, some of it faith. And the whole thing is so much more complex than I can say. Arriving in this space was only possible because of so many other searches, so many quests. Only possible because I asked so many wise people for guidance. It was years of flailing and failing and aching at the seeming futility of it all. And then, it was everything I’d ever wanted my creative work to be, and nothing I had ever expected.

Regarding Dreams

(I find teeth dreams to be among the most disturbing....)

At the very least, I believe dreamtime provides a channel for our subconscious to communicate with us without the noisy interference of our conscious brains. Sometimes perhaps, our subconscious is just venting, but other times it is problem solving or pointing us to the places of our greatest inherent power. 

I often make sketches of my dream imagery or incorporate dream elements in my paintings. I have grand fantasies about constructing garments, buildings, whole worlds, based on strange and beautiful things my brain has presented to me while I've slept. 

But sometimes the imagery is a metaphor with a longer arc. 

Yesterday I had a thrilling conversation with a friend about one of his dreams. It gave me perspective about an old dream of mine. In retrospect I can now see my dream as a marker of where I was headed. I knew it's significance at the time, but not the specifics. Now I can mark my progress against it and know I am on the right track. 

We are wise. We only need to give ourselves the space to be seen and heard. 

If you are interested in dream analysis, Jeremy Taylor's books are hugely inspiring and informative: http://www.jeremytaylor.com/

Spring

Every year, without fail, on the first evening the temperature rises and the rain is fat and soft, I hear this poem in my head:

The Return of the Rivers

All the rivers run into the sea;

yet the sea is not full;

unto the place from whence the rivers come,

thither they return again.

It is raining today

in the mountains.

It is a warm green rain

with love

in its pockets

for spring is here,

and does not dream

of death.

Birds happen music

like clocks ticking heavens

in a land

where children love spiders,

and let them sleep

in their hair.

A slow rain sizzles

on the river

like a pan

full of frying flowers,

and with each drop

of rain

the ocean

begins again. 

-Richard Brautigan

Every year for more than twenty.

My copy of 'The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster', taken from my parents shelves when I was probably thirteen, is now a stack of loose, crumbling pages. But each year the return of spring still feels like new magic and this unprompted, internal recitation warms me and brings me back to myself, back to my joy. This is how I know spring is really here.