I wrote a first lesson on emotions and thought that I might finally be able to write some of what I want to write about the body and receiving the Gospel. Only all that is in my head is simply not coming out through my fingertips. So, then I thought I would expand on some of the coping mechanisms referenced in yesterday's post, so that some of the thoughts behind them might help others understand whys and wherefores of seemingly harmful or strange coping mechanisms. Only, my heart cannot take how hard it is to write about some of the things I did then.
Shame.
It's rearing its head.
So, I wanted to write about how I wish things were, rather than how they are.
We have feelings all the time, whether we're consciously aware of them or not. Feelings arise in response to everything that happens in our lives. A threat makes us fearful. When someone injures us, we feel hurt and angry. When we are safe and our needs are met, we feel content. These are natural responses. We may not alway have the ability to recognize and understand your feelings, but they are there.
When you were a child, your feelings of love and trust were betrayed. Your fear, pain, rage, and shame were too great for you to experience fully and continue to function, so you suppressed your feelings in order to survive:
"Certain feelings just went under. I shopped having them at a really young age. I stopped having physical sensations. You could beat me and it literally didn't hurt. By the time I was thirteen, I no longer felt angry. And once I stopped feeling anger, I never felt love either. W hat I lived with most was boredom, which is really not a feeling but a lack of feeling. All the highs and lows were taken out."
Or, conversely, you may have lived with certain emotions so long and so intensely that you've gotten stuck in those feelings:
"I walked around leaking sadness most of my life. Almost anything could make me cry. I'd cry at phone commercials—reach out and touch someone. I drove my husband crazy. We couldn't' have even the smallest disagreement without my crying. I didn't want to cry. I'd try hard not to, but it was like an underground spring that just kept seeping up."
You may feel as though you've spent your whole life steeps in sadness, rage, or loneliness or that you struggle, even now, with constant anxiety, fear, or depression. Or you may find that you fluctuate between extremes: feeling flooded by overwhelming emotions and then shut down and numb inside. (The Courage to Heal, Bass & Davis, pp. 222-223)
Sometimes when I read things like this, even having already read them, doing so takes my breath away. It is both frightening and wonderful to be known, to be understood. I think about all the times I disassociated at the slightest bit of worry or fear and these words help me to think of myself as less of an axe murderer.
Once, when I first started talking to someone about my past, she was confused and then doubtful. She did not understand how I could recite such horrifying things without a speck of emotion. For one, she did not understand that what was horrifying to her was normal to me. For another, neither she nor I understood just how skilled I was at numbing my whole being.
The rest of this section I will finish below, but first I want to share a bit of what comes next because, to me, it makes more sense that way:
When you open yourself up to feelings, you don't get to pick and choose. They're a package deal. One of Ellen's clients had been abused by her father over the course of many years. When she and Ellen began working together, she said she felt numb; she wanted to have feelings. After a few months, she was crying through every session, crying at home, crying when she went out with friends. One day she came in, started crying, and then laughed, "Well, I sure got what I asked for."
Yes. She was feeling. And the way feelings work is that you can't feel selectively. When you allow yourself to feel, you feel what this is to feel. For this woman, there was a great deal of pain and sadness. And after that, a lot of anger. And some fear. But slipped in among those difficult feelings were pride, hope, pleasure, self-respect, and a growing contentment.
To feel, you have to open yourself up to the full spectrum of feelings:
"When I first started to grapple with the concept of feeling—and in the beginning it was only a concept—I ranked all the possible emotions into two lists: good feelings and bad feelings. Every time I had a feeling, I'd think, 'Is this a bad feeling or a good feeling? Is this a feeling I can allow myself to have?' Then I'd either feel it or suppress it. It's been hard for me to accept that there is no right or wrong to feeling."
The more you can accept your feelings without judgment, the easier it will be for you to lear to experience them, work with them, and learn from them." (223-224)
I think, for me, emotions are part of why I felt like an alien for so very long. I didn't have them, often, so I had to pretend to have them. I used words I neither understood or experienced.
I would also like to point out that experiencing feelings—being overwhelmed by them and the realization that to open yourself up to some is to open yourself up to all—is the same bittersweet that I talked about with learning about how sexual abuse has affected your life. You want to know, but the knowing can be hard. And sometimes ... sometimes you just want to go back to not knowing.
It is the same with memories. You want them to come, but when they begin, you can end up wondering why you ever did. And if you will survive them. No matter that you did once before. Because ... before... you did not feel them, experience them, remain present for them.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
At this point, I would also like to note that there are stages to healing from sexual abuse, much like the stages of grief. And, similarly, the stages of healing from sexual abuse are not linear. They are on a continuum. Soon, I hope to talk about those. But, for now, I would like to mention one: the emergency stage.
This is a time when beginning to deal with suppressed memories and emotions can throw your life into turmoil. Your old coping mechanisms are no longer are as effective or fail you altogether. It may be difficult to function and you may think or believe or feel as if you are going crazy. You are not.
When I was in this stage, I had people tell me that I was crazy. I had people tell me that I was sick. I had people tell me that there was something deeply and most likely irreversibly wrong with me. Those lies hurt me in ways that made my entire life more difficult. Those lies and judgments deepened my wounds and made following through on my decision to heal far, far more difficult.
They were lies. Whether they were well-intentioned or not, they were lies. And they hurt me at a time when I was more vulnerable than I have ever been. In part, the fragility that still exists is because the very people who spoke these things were people I trusted to speak the truth and to accept me as I was. I thought they were safe. In this matter, they were not.
At one point, a confluence of the breaking down of all my coping mechanisms and a severe hormonal imbalance left me weeping for over a year. No matter how hard I tried, I could not stop weeping. I was not crazy. I was not sick. I was not irreversibly wrong. However, in the middle of my private confession, a pastor told me that God was not impressed by my tears, nor was he. So, I just stop crying, stop pretending. I was devastated. And I stopped going to confession, even though hearing the words from Christ to me, " I forgive you, Myrtle" were sometimes the only thing that gave me hope for a future and turned my thoughts from death.
I still struggle with the weeping that will come unwanted. I give thanks that low-dose hormones righted a balance so that the ever-present tears dried up and the weeping came ... perhaps more purposefully? I wept most of the next year following the swallowing of that first dose, but I was weeping tears the little girl I was never could and tears for the woman I never became ... not that that will necessarily make sense to you.
In any case, it is understandable that the emergency stage can be as overwhelming for loved ones and friends and neighbors and fellow parishioners and strangers as it is for the one going through it. Knowledge about the stage is key. For it is my most fervent wish that no other survivor would hear the lies I heard and be bound further by them than she or he already is. We can learn about and accept the stages of grief as a society, as a community, as a family. I believe we can learn about and accept the stages of healing from sexual abuse as well.
A final thought about the emergency stage to hold on to is that sometimes healing hurts. With our physical bodies, this is often the case. Therapy for burn victims is agonizing. Sometimes broken bones have to be re-broken in order to heal properly. Vomiting and diarrhea are sometimes our bodies way of expelling things that are harmful to use. I am not a medical doctor, but if I were, I would proffer I could fill an entire book walking readers through the whys and wherefores of how it is that healing often hurts, that healing often brings a necessary, needful, good, right, and salutary pain. After all, is that not what Christ experienced on the cross when He healed us from our sin?
In any case, here is the bit that I skipped over to share the point that feeling emotions is a package deal:
If you have often felt overwhelmed by your emotions, it can seem especially frightening to get in touch with the feelings that arise during the healing process. But experiencing our full range of feelings is important. Emotions are useful messengers that give us insight and the ability to make wise choices. Feelings, even painful ones, are allies. They tell us what's going on inside and often guide us in responding to the situations in our lives.
There are times in the healing process, however, when you may be inundated with feelings and you need a respite from their intensity. In these situations, it is more important to use the skills you have—or are learning—for self-soothing and calming down. Even though getting in touch with your feelings is necessary, there are times when regaining your equilibrium and sense of balance can take precedence. (p. 223)
This really is another facet to coping, building coping mechanisms for things you didn't previously need, such as experiencing emotions and sensations, staying present in your body. This is where learning about coping and emotions are mingled together and are the launching place for self-soothing, calming down, acceptance, pride, courage, shedding shame, and so much more.
I want to talk more about my own means of navigating emotions, and I will. But, for now, I want to say that just as I hope that the stages of healing from sexual abuse become common knowledge, I hope that calm down techniques can be appreciated and even applauded for what they are and what the represent in the life of a sexual abuse survivor or someone struggling with anxiety or PTSD.
I say this because I was recently telling someone about my use of two calm down techniques, both of which were not all that well-received: stuffing myself behind and beneath a chair in a changing room and clutching a pinecone during a procedure. In the conversation, I noted that a friend of my mine whose arsenal of calm-down techniques includes clicking her fingers before her ears was also not something she felt was well-recieved in public. The one I was talking with suggested that my friend try to transition to something more socially acceptable and I instantly rejected the thought. After all, right now, it is socially acceptable for pre-teens and teens to have sex and to drink. Our government believes that there should be no age restriction on medication to trigger an abortion. Those things are socially acceptable. So, I ask, why should we use socially acceptable as a standard?
Instead, the standard should be what is helpful and not harmful. It is not harmful to squeeze into tight spaces or to hold a pinecone or to snap fingers before one's ears. And those things can be immensely helpful in preventing harm. In that case, then, I wish and hope for those things—as well as other calm down techniques—to be accepted and even applauded, to be welcomed and honored. After all, they are a facet of healing and a part of choosing life for those battling the effects of sexual abuse, for those battling the damage living in a sinful world can have on body, mind, and spirit.
I will finish with a final thought. To me, calm-down techniques are to help you step outside of the moment so that you are not swallowed whole or find yourself stepping backwards in your healing process. Calm-down techniques are also external to the moment, whether you are actually doing the external, such as grasping a pinecone to concentrate on its texture and the sensations in your hand rather than the thoughts and emotions flooding your mind, or someone else is doing the external to you, such as when a parent bear hugs a child lost in an emotional and/or physical outburst.
For me, hands down, the most effective calm down technique is to have the Living Word read aloud to me. Any of it will do, but I am partial to the Psalter and to book of John, especially the first five verses. Strangely, I have found that few actually believe in the power and the efficacy of the Living Word. Luther, in the Large Catechism teaches:
Understanding the difference, then. Baptism is quite a different thing from all other water. This is not because of its natural quality but because something more noble is added here. God Himself stakes His honor, His power, and His might on it. Therefore, Baptism is not only natural water, but a diving, heavenly, holy, and blessed water, and whatever other terms we can find to praise it. This is all because of the Word, which is a heavily, holy Word, which no one can praise enough. For it has, and is able to do, all that God is and can do. (BOC, LC, IV, 17)
For it has, and is able to do, all that God is and can do.
For it has, and is able to do, all that God is and can do.
For it has, and is able to do, all that God is and can do.
No matter how many times I tell people that all I need is for them to do to is read to me the Living Word, I get the response that doing so doesn't seem enough. Not enough to help. Not enough to be of any use. Not enough to make things better.
It is.
If you don't take my word for it or Luther's word for it, spend time perusing the Bible to see what God says about His Word. Start with Isaiah 55.
Even when I do not particularly desire to be calmed down, the Living Word is effective. For it has nothing to do with me or my thoughts or feelings or desires or motives. It is outside of me and all that is going on within me. And, thankfully, its work and efficacy is not dependent upon me.
The Living Word forgives.
The Living Word sustains.
The Living Word heals.
It is powerful and perfect and, therefore, is my external calm-down technique of choice. Though, since getting others to pour the Living Word in my hears has been rather difficult and rarely a technique readily at hand, I have others and will share them later. For now, I'd rather leave you with the wonderful, amazing, nearly-impossible-to-grasp blessing that God's Word has and is able to do all that God is and can do.
Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!
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