Just over two years ago, I decided to start telling people the truth when they asked me how I was doing.
When they’d say, “How are you?” rather than issuing the standard response of, “I’m fine,” I’d tell them, “I’m having a full human experience.”
I thought I was being clever, but it turns out it may not have been the best idea.
Right around that time, my human experience got even more full than it already was.
First came some incredibly bad back pain due to unexpressed past trauma attempting to be released. Then my youngest child coming out as non-binary gender, their next oldest sibling struggled with academics at school, and later in the year I experienced a significant health relapse that caused me to stop working for the next 6 months.
Life became more full than perhaps I bargained for. In many ways, it still is.
I’m pretty open about having experienced abuse and trauma in my life. One of the things I love about the work I do now is that talking about difficult things is actually part of the plan and the process.
Being vulnerable is an important part of healing and growth.
When I talk with my students about meditation or opening up to your intuition and my own failures in those things at times, they tell me it’s reassuring to know that the person they look up to, the person teaching them, isn’t perfect. That the teacher is still learning. It makes their own progress seem more attainable.
So I’ve decided to be more open about the journey of healing that I’m on. I’m not perfect. I haven’t figured it all out. But I’m willing to go on ahead, scout out the terrain and shine a light to help you find your way, too.
Here’s a bit about some of the things I’ve been dealing with and the methods I’ve been using to work through them. (By a bit, I mean tons and tons of words.)
When I first started seeing a counselor in my 20s, I remember lamenting having dropped out of college, largely due to health reasons, and not having finished my degree. She assured me that it was OK. I wasn’t a failure. I’d been through Life School, notably the School of Hard Knocks.
I learned a lot at the School of Hard Knocks. Often the wrong things, it turns out. I experienced multiple losses from an early age into my mid-twenties. A difficult childhood where my needs weren’t met, multiple instances of sexual assault, moving countries twice, serious health conditions, a few deaths, and a miscarriage.
And then some more in my 30s.
These losses restricted my life and kept me from being who I really was — with myself, in my work and in my relationships.
Talking it through
Talk therapy has been great on many levels. I’ve seen numerous therapists over the years to deal with the stresses of life, divorce and remarriage, and, somehow, attempt to face all the baggage I kept bringing with me.
But talking about it only got me so far. It’s hard when there’s a lot you don’t remember either due to the fuzziness of the years or emotions you’ve repressed due to their intensity.
When you take steps on the path of your highest good, the universe rises up to meet you, putting people, ideas and opportunities in your path and lighting them up so you see them, even if it feels like you’re stumbling around in the gloom.
Writing my way forward
A few years ago, feeling stuck and unable to move forward, it occurred to me to start writing about my life.
I’d been laid off from a job I loved and felt like I was meandering around, rudderless. I’d found a book about telling your own story and was working my way through the exercises, when a new story started flooding out.
It was the story of my tumultuous middle-school years in Barbados, where many losses occurred.
I realized a book was being birthed and I kept at it. It was, overall, a healing experience. It brought up a lot of old stuff — much of which I knew about, some of which I didn’t. It all rose up to the surface and said, “Hey, look at me. I’m still here. This still needs to come up and out and be dealt with.”
That’s a good thing. It’s healthy.
It was also messy. And the book isn’t yet published.
It was all finally unpacked and didn’t want to get put back in boxes and shoved beneath the surface again. But I didn’t know what to do with the pain.
EMDR for trauma
So I tried EMDR. Basically, it’s a type of “psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences.”
My mental health counselor specializes in it and it’s one of the reasons I went to see her in the first place. And yet, I avoided it for several years. Processing trauma is hard. EMDR gets it over with quicker than talk therapy, but it felt brutal.
There were times during writing when it was hard to write and maintain competence in the other areas of my life. EMDR felt similar. I made it through two sessions. The first took me through an ex-husband’s suicide attempt, the second through my first sexual assault. I’m made of some strong stuff, but even thinking about that second session made me tear up for a while afterward.
Once again, the universe rose up to meet me.
Trauma in the body
You won’t usually find me at trade shows and healing fairs, but my intuition told me to get a booth at one, so I did. The show was a bust in many ways, a long day of sitting at my table with mostly only the other vendors to talk to.
But one of those vendors was a local medium. I won a raffle for a free reading with her. At that session, she told me I had stored trauma in my body that wanted and needed to be released. It was a confirmation of what I knew, within me, but hadn’t been able to express.
This information set me on my path forward once again.
Releasing the body’s trauma
Right around that time, my counselor suggested I try TRE (Tension, Stress and Trauma Release Exercises) and taught me how to go through the exercises and how to allow my body to tremor.
I got perhaps a bit over-enthusiastic about it and, between TRE and an ill-timed chiropractic adjustment, by back went into painful spasms.
The positive side of this is that it helped me get slightly better at asking for help.
I realized during that time that asking for help is hard for me because of all those times when I was younger and felt vulnerable and reached out for help, only to find none, so I had to suck it up and figure it out by myself anyway. I try and protect myself now by just doing it myself in the first place.
Connecting the dots
I also realized that the pain and my unprocessed trauma was, and always had been, connected.
The back pain I endured for two decades before having spinal fusion surgery may have been technically caused by a car accident when I was a teenager, but was really the trauma of sexual assault trying to get my attention and get out. It wanted to be birthed and allow something new to live and grow and thrive.
I began reading about Adverse Childhood Experiences. Basically, when you experience difficult and traumatic things in your childhood (before age 18) it can have a significant, lasting impact on your health. No matter your access to health care, ethnicity or socioeconomic standing.
Knowing I hadn’t caused my issues, that they were a result of the life I’d experienced, was a huge relief. For years I’d blamed myself for my chronic illness. And, yes, even the sexual assaults. (Shaming and blaming the victim of such things are still very real and present in our society.)
Given what I’d experienced growing up, of course there were ramifications in my current health.
But I’m not the type of person to sit back and not take action. I kept exploring ways to help myself heal, body, mind and heart.
Mindfulness
I’ve been practicing mindfulness, and teaching and writing about it, for a several years. But I was called to studying it in a deeper way. In 2018, I took an online class with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield called the Power of Awareness.
This deepened my mindfulness practice, giving me additional tools and techniques. It encouraged me to resource myself from within, to learn to sit with my discomfort, and to appreciate small moments of mindfulness and presence in everyday life.
Depth Journaling
In late 2017, I experienced a relapse from Fibromyalgia. It began with laryngitis, then another respiratory infection, both of which left me exhausted from either post-viral syndrome or a recurrence of Epstein Barr Virus.
By early 2018, I realized I needed some deep rest and took a hiatus from working.
A colleague reached out to me to offer an idea to help. They’d worked with Depth Journaling, based on Dr. John Sarno and Dr. Scott Brady’s work on Tension Myositis Syndrome and Autonomic Overload Syndrome respectively, to help their own chronic illness issues.
So I explored it and used the tools to release a surprising well of repressed emotions.
Writing about your intense feelings of anger, guilt, fear, shame and anxiety is profound and powerful work. I’m continuing to explore using these writing techniques for healing in my current work.
The Grief Recovery Method
One of the most useful processes I’ve found to work through the pain of loss it the Grief Recovery Method. Once I began working with it, things began to release and resolve within me in a profound way.
My emotional landscape shifted and friends noticed the difference. One good friend told me I now hold myself differently, that the energy I give off is cleaner and clearer. I look lighter. That’s how I feel internally as well.
Using the Grief Recovery Method, I’ve finally found tools to work through my most painful losses: loss of trust, loss of control of my body, loss of safety. And some more concrete losses as well, such as my Mum’s death 8 years ago, which continues to affect me today. For example, she’s not here to help my older child get through French classes at school, or able to be a shoulder for me to talk through the grief around issues related to my younger child. But it’s OK. I’ve found peace.
Am I all healed and raring to go? Yes, and no.
I feel remarkably awesome in my emotional life and my relationships with others. I’ve cleared up a lot of the tangled and complicated emotions I had about myself and my past.
I’m a committed friend to myself. I’m definitely, solidly on my own side now.
My health is still a bit bumpy, with lingering effects of the stresses of my youth: adrenal fatigue, early perimenopause, and hormonal imbalances causing anxiety.
But I know what’s coming from my emotions and what’s my body now. I can tell the difference between an emotional issue and a physical one.
I also have the tools to keep moving forward, to meet grief and loss head on and not let it have its way with me. And I have the confidence that the universe will keep rising up to meet me, that I’ll find my answers as long as I keep trusting myself, my heart and my inner voice.
What do I tell people now when they ask me how I am? It depends on the situation and how I’m feeling.
Sometimes I avoid answering altogether and just say, “How are you?” Other times, I’ll answer with an honest, but not detailed, “Hanging in there,” or “Still alive.” Some people just don’t want to hear anything other than, “I’m fine.”
When my kids’ middle school vice principal asked me one day and I replied, “Oh, just trying to keep my sanity while raising adolescents” and he gave me a super confused look, I decided to be more considerate of my audience.
If I know you, I’ll tell you what’s up (hopefully without oversharing). And I want you to answer me honestly, too. Most of us are dealing with something.
I’m going to keep writing about my healing journey. I hope you don’t mind. I know you’re on one too, finding your way to the best life you can have in this experience of existence. Maybe I can help you along your way.