So, it's been an interesting last week or so. Hard to know where to start exactly with this story, but I guess a good starting point is to talk about a couple of books I've been reading.
I read the book Fringeology recently (very fun read, about the problems with the sort of extreme rationalism that dominates much of science; the kind of uber-rationalism that refuses to look at things that are not easily explained and writes off those who do investigate phenomena on the fringes as kooks, that ends up being closer to dogmatism than what science in theory is all about: discovery); the author is not a "true believer," but he's curious and open-minded. The book was fascinating on many levels, but one immediate result was that it piqued my interest about a therapy called EMDR.
I guess EMDR is nothing new, but it was new to me. I got a book about it written by the woman who first started developing the treatment protocol, Dr. Francine Shapiro, called EMDR: The Breakthrough "Eye Movement" Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. The book is written with counselors in mind, so I found myself skipping parts of the book that were too dense and technical to be interesting to me. But the case studies were fascinating, of how a very short series of treatments could allow people who've experienced trauma to integrate and move past the pain of these experiences.
I didn't really think I was reading the book for myself. I've never thought of myself as a victim of trauma or anything like that. Sure, I've had some things happen that were difficult, things that I've struggled with through the years. But I was more interested in how this could help other people, people who've experienced "real" trauma. But then I picked up a book we had in the house about raising emotionally intelligent children, by John Gottman. I've read a number of his other books about relationships, and I picked it up because my kid is navigating the start of middle school and something he'd said made me think that perhaps the book could be helpful. He saw it, picked it up, and asked who was reading it. I told him that I was, so he started flipping through it and came to a page that talked about the three types of parenting styles that Gottman's lab work had helped identify that were not helpful in raising children with emotional intelligence. He told me that he thought I was a "dismissing" parent. Which is not something that I would have thought. So I kept reading.
When I took the test in the book (with some prompting from said kid; it was late at night and I was sleepy), it turns out that although my score wasn't super-high for "dismissing," it wasn't, well, super-low either. Reading the description made me realize that I do have some aspects of that in myself; that some things from my childhood had made me very uncomfortable with anger. Although I knew that, and that I've certainly gotten more in touch with my angry side as an adult, still it hadn't occurred to me to think that this had caused me to sometimes shut him down, to downplay his emotions, especially the ones that I found threatening. His dad was often more angry than I could handle, which was one factor leading to the end of our marriage. More times than I can count, I've worried that he had his dad's temper, his dad's habit of shifting blame. Sometimes I think it's felt safer to try to distract away the anger than to face it and deal with it head on. When I was talking to him about it, I remembered that much of my terror around anger had come from the scary fights that went on in my house between my sister and my parents. I was afraid of my sister for a long, long time after that.
And then yesterday, I was telling a new friend something about my painful experience in the church I used to belong to, and how my heart rate and breathing used to accelerate when I heard the word "Jesus." And it occurred to me in that moment that this was a PTSD response. That I'd conditioned myself past that reaction, but that perhaps there was still some place where that trauma, and perhaps others, are still locked up in my body, or my brain. That maybe there might be something there to explore, whether there might be an expedited way to really heal that trauma, and perhaps some others that I'm not even consciously aware of but that perhaps I still hold within this body.
Today my workbook lesson was Lesson 222: "God is with me. I live and breathe in Him." I was doing my meditation on this lesson and suddenly I was sobbing. And then calm, and then sobbing again, and yet again.
Now I don't cry too often, unless I'm doing watching something emotional (like the "Born This Way" episode of Glee I watched yesterday—totally made me cry), and even then it's just the tears. So this took me somewhat by surprise. I asked the Holy Spirit for help, and guidance.
Now, according to ACIM, we are not bodies, we are projections of separation, cooked up by the delusional Mind to help us hide from God. So...I think part of me has thought, well, all I should need is the Course. I shouldn't need hocus-pocus to heal me, if the real problem is with this Mind anyhow and the body is just a mistaken idea. Especially when it comes to the emotional stuff. The Course has done a lot to help me suspend judgment, and to practice forgiveness.
But the body is a persuasive illusion. If my mind were healed, I wouldn't need any form of magic. But it is not healed. If I sometimes will take pain capsules, or homeopathic tablets, or immune-supporting supplements, and I can justify that to myself, then how really is it different to seek treatment for a trauma that seems to be real? This treatment may be magic, but I think that sometimes (and maybe most of the time), we aren't really ready to handle Reality yet, and that magic (in the sense that the Course talks about it, as using anything that isn't knowledge of our oneness with God) is sometimes what we need.
I thought I'd moved past this stuff. But maybe not, maybe mostly what I did is just stuffed it into a box and told myself that it didn't matter. That I'm a grown-up now, I've moved past these things, forgiven my parents for their neglect, the boys who said mean things to me growing up, the church people who thought they were doing the will of God by weeding me out...haven't I? Maybe not as much as I'd thought.
