Journal, 10 31, 2024
The Beauty of the Swamp
Spiritual growth is not found in the happy places.
Most of the time, moments of “enlightenment”
are in the places that suck.
While some can be found standing on the mountain top rejoicing over the view,
more often,
it is in the descent to the valley swamp,
wading through the muck with the bugs and the leeches,
with no exit in sight,
hoping maybe you’ll “get there,”
and yes, you’ll get part of the way there,
but “all the way,” you probably won’t
because to do spiritual growth right
means it never ends until you are dead —
maybe not even then —
…or until you are dead while still breathing.
Spiritual growth is about examining your life,
looking at and facing your past,
the one that still haunts you.
It is dealing with the consequences of your actions,
and there is no shortcut around the uncomfortable places.
Still, you can learn to love a swamp
as much as the hillsides around it.
You can learn to love the steely gray skies and the foggy mists of the heart
as much as the rare sunshine.
You can learn to love that swamp
and even be grateful for it,
because within it you grow strong with the struggle
and learn that you really can endure.
For sure you will revisit it again in life.
I know for me it WILL always return,
that is just life.
But still, there is beauty in the swamp
because now I know I can make it through.
Therapy strategy
Over these years, my therapist and I worked tirelessly, chipping away at the mountain of issues that would present themselves for processing. While we did do some conscious strategizing for which topics to deal with, or in what order, nothing was forced. Life itself would direct what topics and incidents to deal with next.
Still, it helped to have some points clearly distilled. With so many possible choices for “What next?” it helped to have some structure for how to evaluate the next most pressing need in that moment.
Some of my notes from my journals then, listing guidelines and conclusions we reached:
What are the messages underneath the rage?
- I don’t matter, I struggle to care for me and feel self-love
- I am bad, trash, and an aberration of nature, and no one will love me
- The many unhealthy family-system beliefs he brainwashed me with
- My female friendships never work, and I will be found “lesser than” and abandoned
- I struggle to believe in me or embrace my own power
The emotions underneath the rage:
- Hurt
- Abandonment
- Fear
- Grief
- Betrayal
- Lack of self-worth/Insecurity
EMDR is needed for these because:
- My issues won’t change even as my logic brain wants them to, and I know it would be a good thing
- My issues are rooted in my emotion-based brain, not the logic side
- I am naturally smart, curious, analytical, and that is my way into these issues, but EMDR is what will actually heal them
- My neural circuits are on fire, driving the PTSD reactions
- These are issues I have struggled with my whole life, and I am so weary of carrying them/trying to thwart them
These are the four main issues to work on, in order of how often they come up in EMDR:
- Impatience/driving/risk-taking/rage/proxy battles – Dad-related
- Mother wound and friendship fears and insecurities – Mom-related
- Weekend body memories/anxieties/fears/depression – Dad-related
- Resistance to self-caring and love – Primarily Dad-related
The Question: Which should be dealt with first and why?
- For safety and stress reasons – driving/impatience/rage first?
- For pain and self-esteem reasons – friendship & insecurity?
- For lifelong anxiety, weariness – body memories on weekends?
- For health reasons – self-love and care needs to come first?
Yoga and EMDR to the rescue
To get a session started, we would identify a current issue, belief, or a physical reaction that was causing me emotional or even physical pain. Those would be the “problem(s)” to tackle next.
On the latter – physical reactions – those were most related to body memories that had no specific “images or narrative” to go with them. These were most likely things done to me at a very young age, infancy/pre-verbal times in my life.
Those body memories would often happen after we did some intense work, or I’d had a bad nightmare. My therapist explained that body memories are real and come up because the abuse went on for such a long time. The question to tease out when they came up is what age or memory they might be rooted in.
Sometimes the body memory was joint pain; another time it was pelvic pain (in the absence of any pelvic disease that I confirmed with a visit to the gynecologist).
One time it was even a stabbing vaginal pain that woke me out of a sound sleep. And during the day, a common one was a “choking” sensation. It was a sense of “fullness” in my throat and upper chest, followed by the sensation of wanting to throw up because I felt nauseated.
Given his physical abuse of me when he would hold me against a wall by my throat, or the time at a young age when I clearly remember him trying to make me perform oral sex on him, any of those abuses could trigger these sensations in me.
To deal with those, my therapist would take me through Yoga poses and various breathing techniques. These would help me calm my stress reaction in those moments.
The bulk of our work was to talk through issues. But for those deep-seated issues I listed above, we would prepare to do EMDR. First, we would identify the underlying error messages or beliefs that were harming me, then we would define what new messages I wanted to hold instead.
Here are the messages we listed for one session:
- I am wrong/bad, and that leaves me abandoned/alone.
- I have no right
- I am unworthy
- I am stuck, and failing to move forward
- I feel like a “baby,” and I feel ashamed of my pain and my needs
- I ABHOR needing help from anyone
- My abuse wasn’t “bad enough” for anyone else to care about
Then we made up a list of things I wanted to believe and used these statements during EMDR:
- I have a right to take good care of me now and be gentle to me
- I have scars, and what I endured was severely damaging
- I am worthy
- I am strong, good, innocent
- I endured
- I am allowed
- My reactions are normal ones to a severely abnormal situation
- What I feel simply “is”
- Proving any of this to anyone else is unnecessary…MY understanding is enough
The sessions usually lasted from forty minutes to an hour and involved using the light beam on an LED light bar that my eyes followed back and forth. And for me, each time we did this, SOMETHING shifted during the work. While the deeply entrenched issues didn’t go away, there was always some quality or message that did change. So the process for me was more a series of small changes over time…an “evolution” towards growth.
The evolution of those four topics
As I noted in the swamp poem above, spiritual growth seems endless at times and probably is endless. For sure, I have come back to the same issues again and again.
While that might seem like wasted effort and failure, that’s where having a journal is a gift.
Those pages have allowed me to see the evolution of change, which has been heartening and fuels more growth and change. A couple of examples from my journal notes:
Impatience/driving/rage/proxy battles:
Certainly, it’s not an exaggeration to say that if I had a nickel for every time we tackled rage in therapy and EMDR, I would be rich by now. But it is equally fair to celebrate progress.
While my original relationship with rage was to have knee-jerk responses and no awareness, after a few early EMDR sessions I started to see PATTERNS in my behaviors.
Once I saw patterns, I did a lot of “recognize, disengage, recenter, and try again.” And I failed a lot. But I kept trying. By bringing those failures into round after round of EMDR, I started to discover inner messages that I was carrying: “I’m trapped; I have no power; This slow person is wasting my precious time and life; I will make them pay.” AND I learned about proxy battles I was waging to re-enact the past for a different outcome.
It was slow improvement, but it bought me time to focus on how to slow and soothe the rage and try for patience. That was like climbing the sheer face of a cliff. Patience felt like an unreasonable ask on a level with sainthood.
Then I discovered the Hebrew word: “Savlanut.” While it can be translated as “patience,” Savlanut goes deeper than that. I found a definition that helped me greatly: Savlanut is to “patiently bear a burden with love.” THAT gave me a sense of relief.
That definition acknowledged that it WAS a burden to try to be patient, especially when carrying rage I was entitled to. It affirmed I was doing something that WAS hard to do. And when something is hard, you can’t expect miracles. You have to, instead, nurture and grow it. That gave me hope that Savlanut was something I had a chance to achieve. I knew how to struggle.
There was then a crucial EMDR session about how to reclaim my own sense of power in those moments. That was a BIG one, and I’ll write about it in the next post.
So while I will still react with rage, there has also been an “integration” of sorts. By pulling together all of these EMDR insights, I slowly learned I could take a “pause” – stop the reaction, breathe, and think of how to change my actions. That has been a HUGE shift from my early days.
While it’s a battle that will go on forever, it is a much different “opponent” these days.
The Mother Wound, Weekend Anxiety/Self-Care, and Self-Worth
Using the same approach with these issues as I did with the rage, including again, many rounds of EMDR, I was slowly able to shift my perceptions. With the opening that the shift gave us, we worked again and again to install some new positive belief statements. Slowly these are helping me view myself with more love, caring, and sense of personal power, leaving me in a better place to keep learning:
Mother Wound: “I was NOT unlovable. I was UNLOVED; that was her failing, NOT mine. I AM lovable and deserve love.
Weekend Anxiety/Self-Care: “I am safe whenever I am relaxed and enjoying something I choose. I deserve that and to have free time of my own. Self-care is STRENGTH.”
Self-Worth: I can find my own self-worth within me, not from outside of me. I VALUE this in me; it IS me, and THAT is my power. I am VERY clear about this.
Up Next: THAT EMDR session…
At some point there comes a place in the work where we come face to face with a part of ourselves that is as intractable as a stone wall. It won’t move. Yet it must if we are to go on. And so, that becomes the battle for one’s life psychically….
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and make a visit to my home state for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Soul Mosaic 
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