Daffodils Along the Way of the Higher Path

Through daffodils forgotten and found and reclaimed in my recent meltdown, perhaps those reading here can catch a glimpse of how healing from trauma can unfold. In the writing of this, I am almost amused by how spontaneously the whole concept bubbles up in me. I spent many years wondering whether I ever even know joy because it seemed that I'd forgotten because trauma alienated me from the memories of it. I couldn't find it no matter how hard I tried.

Having already defined my dilemma of moving through the Third Stage of healing in the last post, I feel as though I tackled the integration element well. Moving forward and reconnecting, the other tasks involved in Stage Three, blend for me in what I have yet to work through. I noted an example of a meme that objected liars and gossips as “lowlifes,” yet I wanted to aspire to something better. But I hadn't figured out how to get to “the high road,” having made the choice to seek resolution of conflict as opposed to perpetuating it. For my own benefit, I wanted and needed to aspire to something better.

Disclaimer: Everyone has to find their own way through their conflict in ways that work well for them, and It's important to note that not everything works for everybody. I draw on my own supportive beliefs to transcend pain and loss and trauma, though I understand and expect that many people will find their way through such conflicts differently. I also find myself at a point in my own exemplar conflict where I've come to terms with my anger and the injustice. I also don't want anyone to misunderstand this approach as offering forgiveness to people who aren't sorry for what they've done. I do hope to see justice for everyone involved. Taking an approach that avoids marking people as adversaries or that comes from the secure perspective that love can offer shouldn't be mistaken for cheap forgiveness that ignores justice. (Here's an index of over seventy blog posts that basically argue that without justice, forgiveness and mercy are meaningless.)

Tweet

Daffodil Season Ends but Recovery Continues

More than a month ago, I learned about some cruel gossip that's being spread about me and it triggered a host of complicated hurdles for me. The questions of others sent me back to revisit my history of hopping around through some truly fringe varieties of cultic Christianity, but I also found myself more affected by the deep personal losses that are all wrapped around that history, too.

Ironically, I'd just started blogging about the stages of recovery right before this happened, but I suddenly realized that I was living an experiential reminder, too. Stage One persisted for a good two weeks before it faded into decrescendo, mostly because I still can't understand that if people took issue with me that they didn't feel comfortable with approaching me. And the truth is that there may be no rational reason behind their actions.

Concurrent with seeking stability came the grieving of Stage Two (Part 2) as did remembrance (Part 3). That grieving involved identifying and expressing my anger in a healthy way – once I was able to identify it as anger. Some Stage Three surprised me pleasantly in renewal of old friendships. Elements of safety in recovery emerged, too, for I found that while I was coping with my own emotional soup, those who love me also became offended on my behalf. At times, I had to juggle their responses when I wasn't exactly in the best form myself.

Integration and Reconnection

Though I hate to realize it, this challenge did affect me strongly enough that I've recoiled in constriction. Though a string of my own illnesses and my concerns for my aging cat's health have added to stress, I realized that I'd fallen into my familiar old pattern of retreat. Friends have been calling, wondering where I am and whether I still love them.

As my shock and awe abates, I'm now faced with connecting again with those things and people from whom I've backed away. Social isolation never helps, and I find myself working hard to pull out of it. Time with others heals me, but I feel weary. I've neglected self care along with my friends. I struggle to attend to work projects as the stress of the conflict seems to run at a low level, but constantly in background in my mind.

Then there are other things that leave me weary like the announcement that CJ Mahaney was speaking at The Gospel Coalition. I also look forward to writing about Eric Pazdziora's the beautiful lament that he composed for Lydia Schatz which was recently featured at a Chorosynthesis event. (Lydia was the Liberian adoptee who died a few years ago due to beatings according to her parents' observance of Michael Pearl's teachings.) John Weaver's excellent new book about the New Apostolic Reformation brings up another set of ideas and history that I must revisit as I read.

And with both Eric and John who could almost be my sons age wise, in my joy over their recent accomplishments, there is a tinge of melancholy. I planned on having my own children but I didn't get the life I ordered. In this season of remembrance for me and as I approach my fiftieth birthday, the subject of opportunities lost takes on greater significance. Eric has also been a kind ear and encouragement for me as I set out to reclaim my connection to music which I largely buried after I left my church nineteen years ago. (That's part of another aspect of my ongoing recovery that finally emerged about a year ago.)

Reconnection and Moving On

So here I am, waiting to see what unfolds regarding my relationships with people who are claiming that there are elephants in the room. I have a talent for pointing out the fact that naked emperors have no clothes, often at the worst possible moment. I have to interact with many people involved in the telling and in the hearing of the elephant tales before we all have a good opportunity to address these matters.

I must make it an adventure of learning not to care too much about those things which I can't do anything about. I may ultimately just chose to walk away from the endeavor that links me to these critics. I might stay involved but just suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous ideas because it's just not worth the effort of opposing them. I can't end them, either, but I can address them assertively. Not knowing more about how the conflict will end doesn't feel very comfortable for me.

Climbing up to the High Road

I saw a meme the other day that was meant to encourage children of narcissists to choose healthy ways of dealing with the difficulties that such relationships create. It affirmed a strong internal locus of control – to focus on that which one can do and to accept what is outside of one's influence – but it became rather snide. It said that you can't control what other people think or the lies that they tell or whether people believe them. But a person can sit back and “laugh at the lowlifes who have nothing better to do” than gossip.

On the surface, it sounded good, and a part of me said, “Yeah!” But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was wrong to foster more division by essentially returning cruel behavior with equally cruel behavior and condescension. Two wrongs don't make a right. While the person who lies about someone deserves to face thos consequences, responding in kind doesn't solve anything. It only fosters more conflict, and it feeds into the power struggle that the first party tried to establish.

I must choose whether I want to stoop to returning evil with evil or whether I want to “take the high road.” When I read the “lowlifes” moniker, I decided that I didn't want to feed name calling. Ideally and while it may be too much to ask, my ultimate goal in these relationships in particular aspires to reconciliation. I have to follow that course for my own sake, so I need to climb up out of the hurt and think about walking the high road.

In the next post:

How I found a map to the “high road.”

For further reading until the next post:

• Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery
• Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
• Bessel Van der Kolk's The Body Keeps Score 

Tweet

Daffodils of Integration: First Promise of Joy through Recovery

(Photo Credit)

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 in

my Quick Revisit of the Stages of Recovery.
But only if you want to.)

James Taylor's melancholy Fire and Rain which laments the unexpected loss of a friend, and I now think of the loss of integration of trauma when I hear him sing “sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.”

In a way, that is what trauma does to us. Our dreams break apart, perhaps because they weren't very realistic but sometimes because we don't have time to realize them because we're so busy trying to figure out how to put ourselves back together. Sometimes, we just can't recover all that we've lost. Sometimes, we lose our ability to fly because the pieces lay on the ground, smashed and broken because of what happened to us. We become no longer whole. We dis-integrate.

Tweet

A New Springtime: Daffodils Reclaimed (A glimpse into Stage Three of Recovery)

(Read Part 1 and Part 2 in

my Quick Revisit of the Stages of Recovery.
But only if you want to!)

I wonder what I thought when I was old enough to find those scattered daffodils in the woods behind my parents' house. I must have been quite young, for in my mind, I seem to have always known that they were there. 

I had a good sense of what belonged to my family and what did not, for that is all wrapped around how I treated them. I must have asked permission to pick them, though I remember only being concerned about whether the property owner wanted them. Yet still, in their own way, they were mine. I saw what no one else saw in them. And I remember that excitement of going to look for their blooms when I saw daffodils bloom at my neighbor's house.

Tweet

Daffodils Grieved in Recovery

After the first stage of recovery where we find safety and stability (things we sometimes must learn about for the first time), we find ourselves in a place of revisiting trauma to see it for what it is.

Awareness in Grief

For me, though, the experience is more than that, and I find it to be more spontaneous. The best analogy that I have is that of driving home from work after a busy twelve hour shift as a nurse in critical care. I don't know how long it took for my body to become self-aware after a hard day, but I know that by the time I hit the ten mile point, I'd suddenly have acute awareness that I hadn't emptied my bladder in quite some time. Epinephrine or adrenalin suppresses function of the gut and the urinary tract, and for me leaving work, its effects lasted until I'd driven ten miles from my workplace. My brain would become magically aware of the needs of my body. I'd race in the house and retreat to the bathroom, and then, I'd remember that I was hungry, too.

Tweet

The Stages of Trauma in the Flowers of Spring: Daffodils Forgotten

I grew up in a house that stood at the edge of a small plateau on the incline of a mountain. It was bordered by unoccupied wooded acreage that sloped down behind it. In the spring, the forsythia and the azaleas bloomed in our yard, but we had no daffodils. Down in the woods behind the house however, daffodils poked their heads above the crisp, brown leaves that had covered them all winter. Nineteen plants grew there within twenty feet of the edge of our land on the hill as it rolled downward toward the city.

I don't know how they came to grow there in no particular pattern, but I looked forward to the appearance of the daffodils every year. I can only imagine that someone bought and forgot about them and just threw their remains into the woods. Maybe some naughty children used them to see how far they could throw them. I never harvested them to replant around our house because they weren't mine to take. I would wait for the first bloom to wilt first before I picked the ones that remained, just in case the owner came by, for he did occasionally used our driveway to gain easier access to that edge of his land. He may not have even known that those plants existed. I knew every single one of them.

Tweet