Soul Mosaic

The main tools that I use with my therapist:

Before I continue with the story of my preparations for that upcoming EMDR session with my therapist, I wanted to give an overview of the various tools I use in my healing process, as well as some additional information about my two main techniques:

CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing

None of this is medical advice or recommendations for anyone. I just wanted to provide some additional background on what these terms mean, as well as some links to related professional organizations, if of interest.

Again, these methods were chosen by my therapist and me, based on what we both felt would be best for me. Each person needs to work with their therapist to determine their own best path, as it is a very individual process.

It goes without saying that there are many different types of therapy approaches. And there are also new tools being explored, such as psychedelic medications for the treatment of PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Toward the end of this book, I’ll touch on that a bit more. While I have no personal experience with the psychedelic medications, I watch the research to see what might develop in the future.

The tools I use on my own:

Here is a list of other tools that I use on my own, which augment the work I do with my therapist:

Some emotional “aftershocks” from that trip…

After the trip, I still wasn’t able to start “sorting and assessing” right away, because the flood of “things boiling to the surface” continued for a while. All I could do was let it come. Write it down. And when it started to settle, figure out what to do next. Those reverberations held some clues:

Journal entry: Sun, Oct 1, 2017:

• Feelings of anger, rage, not going to put up with anybody’s sh-t
• When a drawer knob catches my shirt and pulls at me, or I bump into something – I rage
• When anyone treats me like they think I’m stupid or they are pulling something over on me, I rage

Journal entry: Mon, Oct 23, 2017:

• I DID compartmentalize (back in that house and life). I dissociated. I had no voice.
• Now, I HAVE a voice.
• *I DON’T want to be silenced or stay in a closet any more, because of anyone not liking what I have to say
• I don’t like compartmentalizing anymore – I spent sooo much time dissociated.
• My work now is to reintegrate all and be whole.
• And the “Me Too” things …doesn’t answer for me, “So what is next?”

Journal entry: Sun, Nov 12, 2017:

• Ed asked me what my earliest childhood memory was that was not of the abuse.
• My earliest memory WAS the abuse.
• I can’t remember a “before time.” There never was a “before time.”

Journal entry: Mon, Nov 13, 2017

• Where am I now? I am ALREADY TRIGGERING my PTSD, just writing these things
• What do I expect to come out of writing this book?
• Change. Though I don’t know what form it will take.
• I’m optimistic it will be a good outcome.
• *But my guess is it will be something I won’t be expecting. That kind of change is never what you think
• *The purpose is not getting to the end of the book, its outcome, or money. It’s the process that I will experience through the writing and the changes that will come from that.
• *I have to pace it.
• If I rush and don’t touch emotions, I’ll be “okay,” but the experience won’t be worth anything.
• If I bull through and hit too many emotions too fast, that is emotionally DANGEROUS for me.
• Need a “middle path” approach
• I must learn to let it take as long as it will – and it WILL take longer than I want

Stopping the runaway freight train

Working with my therapist after my return, we focused on slowing down the abundance of emotions and thoughts coming up. They were all to the good, and I’d write them down as I knew they would have value….at some point. But we needed to slow things down enough to take stock of what I’d experienced.

Experiences are useless without reflection and then, some way to organize them and see the insights and patterns they hold. I’ll talk about reflection in a minute. But first, order.

Teshuvah – the turning and “re-turning” – Part I

Part I -my 2017 journaling:

It is almost Yom Kippur…Day of Atonement,
the end of the Days of Awe,
which are often summed up in the word, “Teshuvah.”
It’s a good word, combining the triad: “turning, returning, repentance,”
a “coming home” of sorts.

It comes in the reflective and fading days of the year – Fall –
and is a time that calls us to turn from ordinary busy lives,
return to ourselves to reflect,
and repent.

Then, with the end of those days,
we resume the cycle of life and the new year, all over again.
Always, the circle.

The Underworld – Things to remember….

“God is in the darkness.”
Dom Bede Griffiths (Midwinter God ix)

If I had to choose one song to be the theme song for this stage of the work, It would have to be “Break it Down Again, by Tears for Fears. The lyrics and even the pulse of the music capture the emotional turmoil of that nigredo, underworld place, the place where we rip it all open, take it all apart, then wait to hear what it will teach us.

For this post, I will not just share my own thoughts but invite the voices of many others who have made this journey, studied or guided it, and who have a wisdom far beyond me.

What is the Underworld Nigredo Journey?

Before I get into the “Teshuvah time” that I mentioned in the last post, I need a moment to talk about “dreams.”

Buried alive

For a lot of 2017, I was really busy. Between my treasured work teaching kids in a science museum, and helping with visits to see Mom, I was finishing up my book about another love – my fifty years of visits to Colonial Williamsburg, the reconstructed Revolutionary War capital of Virginia.

But in the quiet moments…things were coming alive. Things that had waited a lifetime, but that were growing impatient. And while my days might be too busy to allow many random thoughts to creep in, the nights were another matter.

For a lot of my early adulthood, I hadn’t had a lot of nightmares, maybe because my daytimes were enough of ones themselves. Still, there were some — memories of abuse, and they were never pleasant.

After my father died, they increased. And about the time I decided to undertake this deeper therapy, they showed up with a vengeance, becoming a regular occurrence.

They were ugly…really ugly. Disturbing, shame-filled portrayals of “something” that was buried alive within me. Sometimes, I would thrash around and talk in my sleep. My husband was aware that it happened, though he couldn’t make out what I was saying, given my CPAP mask. Except for one night very recently, when I yelled REALLY loudly…something I’d never done before. But I’ll get to that later.

He just said that the sounds coming out of me, and through that mask, had an “otherworldly” haunting quality. Which was appropriate since those dreams were filled with the ghosts of my past. It was my subconscious trying desperately, I think, to “flush the cesspool of my memory” and process things still trapped and unfinished.

The person in the journal pages

To write about the emotional therapy of the years from 2017 on, I want and need to be mindful. I have a wall chart full of the issues that were surfacing, and a list of themes I kept revisiting. I don’t just want to throw them all out haphazardly, but rather, reflect on them so I can tell a coherent story for all of us, myself included.

As I think back over these last few years and try to remember the specifics to share, my memory simply says: “It’s been painful, long, deeply emotional, and worth it.” Duh.

So I realized I needed to take some time and go back through my journals for these years. And hands down…that person in the journal pages tells a much richer tale of where I was at, what I was thinking about, and in much sharper detail than my memory.

While the early one in 2017 was more sparse than the later ones because I was still, in a lot of ways, emotionally unaware, it still contained enough information to get this journey started. So I’ll start that with a journal “warm-up,” a preview or “sampler buffet” of things to come….

The binder buffet

When I look at that journal now, I see it was often more abbreviated than I would have wished for. Comments were less elaborate and more cryptic in nature. But nevertheless, there were clues of what I was starting to feel.

Those journal pages were like charts from a volcanic seismograph — blips and peaks of new activity cropping up within me. They pointed to the fact that my “long-dormant volcano within” was coming alive. But the signs were still subtle enough for me to miss them. It would take a couple more years of therapy work, and my mother’s death, before gases would belch forth, and lava would finally shoot out. Reading the pages now, though, I can see the cryptic warnings seeping out in the words.