Integration

Writing, for me, is often about integration. Integration is a quest towards processing change. I change frequently, and hopefully this goes in a change-for-the-better direction most of the time. I certainly have much in me that needs continued growth; I don't seem to ever run short there. 

The ending of this last term of my spiritual direction course has me looking back over the last four months, which quite frankly feels more like a year if not a few years. And I suppose I might sound like I am just going over and over the same territory in several blog posts, but you know what? It's my blog and I'll write what I want to. 🙂 And what I need to, towards that integration.

Because while in the beginning of the course, and just before it started, I began grappling with my sense of identity. Then, much to my surprise and shock, a fissure opened up in the earth and swallowed whole a central feature on which my identity had rested. And it was gone. My sense of emotional safety was slammed, and interiorly I involuntarily went time traveling into young adulthood. But at the same time, I was given a precious gift of safety personified, which helped me process this identity-rending. One of these "interior meetings" I had was a first time re-visit of a significant trauma I experienced as an adult. I had filed it away as "things I will pretend never happened." Yeah, honey, it doesn't work that way. 

In the course of time, I decided I really, really liked the taste of emotional safety I had, and I knew that I needed to go to counseling, because it was a contagion I really wanted to possess me whole. And I kept meeting areas within that were frozen and not capable of freeing up in the face of safety. It took me all the courage I had at the time to make that appointment, but I am so glad I did, because we started EMDR therapy, which is highly effective with trauma. I had thought of my life as "a little rough" but fairly typical. The more I looked at it, I realize I am the poster child of Complex PTSD. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

In early March of this year, one of those EMDR sessions left me feeling absolutely melted like butter inside, where my "inner 4 year old" was concerned. This is how I think of the mental space where I remember things going wrong -- namely, my parents splitting up. And at that point, the little girl was very much at peace, and all was right. And then another fissure opened up in the earth, and my safety personified was swallowed whole, and was gone. 

Now this -- this -- was a problem. In hindsight, on the prior occasions when I had some premonition of this happening, I associated it with my death. And in the interior landscape I'm exploring, this now makes 100% valid sense. Because the Lord was now going down deeper, as I entered into this study of and spiritual partnership with St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the Lord was going into the recesses of my soul before any memories found words, and had instead only feelings. What I've learned about trauma is that it is not so much the thing that happened as the reaction is evoked which never got completed. The emotional response that stopped short of the running or yelling or crying or verbalizing or whatever would have completed the interior signal that fired when the thing happened. And when something very primordial is threatened, and a trauma is triggered, the brain essentially cannot tell what year it is. The brain reacts exactly the same way when the initial trauma occurred. Until such a time that the thing can be completed, dealt with, addressed. One of the things about EMDR is that it doesn't work very well when a person is in the throes of something in real time. It requires a memory you can access while in real time you are basically stable. So for a bunch of weeks there, we didn't do any EMDR and I labored through it all the hard way: by living.

But the Lord knew what He was doing, pairing me up with St. Therese, my SDFP friends, and the program itself. All I can say is, the Lord wanted to get to the bottom of my childhood trauma, and He did. I recognize that everything about how I have lived has been effected. I wrote a paper on St. Therese and the Little Way which has revolutionized my understand of God as my Father and of myself as His child, and vulnerability as the way of holiness. It will crush you to death, like Jesus on the cross -- yes. But Jesus rose from the dead, and cannot die anymore. In Him we live a resurrected life.

Something a little strange happened while I prayed during the throes of the worst of these weeks. I clocked about 250k steps in about a month of prayer walks. I kept having this image that greatly disoriented me, of a vast green field. Everywhere I looked, I could see nothing but grass. No trees, no birds, no buildings, no people. For several days when I prayed, I had this image. It was deeply bewildering to me, and I kept telling the Lord, "There's nothing here! There's no one!" And after a few days of this, I suddenly realized, Wait. That's not true. I'm here. It almost felt wrong for me to notice I existed. Like, as I prayed. In this space that was supposed to be sacred and very, very important, to recognize and acknowledge that I existed, because I was the one seeing this grassy field. It was akin to a feeling of guilt. And honestly, one of the core beliefs I carried out of my childhood was that the world would be better off if I didn't exist. This was the beginning of the Lord re-orienting me to truth.

I will have more to integrate in the future, I know. But for now, I know safety in a new way: it lives in me, and I care for it and protect it for myself. It means some things have to change about how I've lived -- but so much has changed already, so it no longer feels impossible. God's care is something I am learning to become aware of daily; to see it, acknowledge it. I don't have to beg for it or wonder if He'll follow through. I do have to believe it when it shows up, though, which is usually much quicker than I'm prepared for. I'm learning to show up for myself in things like making goals and accomplishing them, so that I'm not either feeling like I have to be a workaholic or that I'm lazy and wasting my life (which I've usually felt at the same time). I am the Lord's to guide and care for. I'm in good hands.