Peeling The Recovery Onion

The objective of the healing process is to feel better.  When you change what you feel, your behavior follows and changes in turn.  If you do this enough, it will become a habit.  It’s most powerful when you learn healing techniques and start doing it on your own.

Changing what you feel allows you to feel the way you want to.  This may sound simple, because it is.  That doesn’t mean it’s always easy though.  For some people, particularly those that have been heavily traumatized, this can be the hardest work they will ever do.

Regrettably, there are many out there in the mental health field that are less than candid about this reality.  There are also those that lack clarity about this point and drown others under a sea of jargon and technical expertise.  The DSM is a wonderful example of this.  It is a very expensive book that is filled with all sorts of problems, and very short on offering any solutions to the problems.

People can focus on the problem people have and talk about the symptoms of mental illness and feeling bad all they like, but it really doesn’t help much.  Having different labels and sets of related symptoms just tells you how the problem manifests.  It doesn’t tell you how to fix the problem.

Another way to say this is that just because you’ve named the problem doesn’t mean that you have any idea how to go about fixing it.  Admittedly, sometimes having a label for your problems is useful.  It can help you feel less alone and less crazy.  That’s a good thing.

However, having a name for your problems is only useful if helps motivate you to start moving towards healing.  It’s a question of understanding how your fears have limited you, and feeling good enough to move beyond it.  If you don’t feel good about fixing your problems, your recovery process is unlikely to be sustainable.

The tools that you use to do this matter less than the results.  If the tools you are using don’t help you feel better then you may be better off changing them.  On the other hand, for those that have been badly hurt, it can be challenging to feel better even when you are using tools that are working.

One of the things that challenges people is using techniques and not ending up feeling better.  Particularly with complex PTSD, when the psychological trauma is stacked thick and deep, people can peel layers and not feel significant relief at times.  This can be absolutely brutal.  When people are in the middle of this, the agony is soul-wracking.

It can be heartrending to see people working as hard as they can to hold onto some kind of hope.  When they are facing everything they can with every ounce of courage and energy they can muster, and not getting the results that they would want, it is extremely unfair.  On the other hand, sometimes that is the only way out.  When you’re going through hell, the key is to keep going!

I’ve walked this path myself.  For over 30 years, I had no real hope that my life would ever get better.  Even when I started feeling better, and starting using healing techniques on a daily basis, I did not consciously believe that I would ever have the life that I wanted.  This makes me extremely sympathetic towards those that face similar circumstances.

People often deny the harshness of this reality.  They will minimize or judge others on this kind of path, and blame the victim.  Certainly, some people do fear what they do not understand.  However, it is also likely that they fear what it would take for themselves to also walk the path of healing.

I believe that it is critical for our species’ survival to understand the nature of mental health problems.  However, it is even more important to understand the nature of the solution than the problem itself.  And that is to keep purging until you feel the way you want to.

It also means supporting others who are doing the same.  We can all use help on our paths to creating the lives that we want.  Giving and receiving and feeling positive about it makes the process a whole lot easier.

Healing Adventures

More than a year ago, I was out walking to the neighborhood store, I noticed a man with a shopping cart under the underpass. I immediately made the assumption that he was homeless, because it’s likely that you’re pretty down and out if you’re facing that social stigma, even for a single day.

Given my life, I would like to have more financial resources available to me, both for myself and others. What I do have is some time, and when it feels good, I tend to give it away to others in need. This was one of those times where I could do that, so I approached him, and handed him my card, and sat down next to him. He was listening to a small portable radio.

“Hi. I’m a hypnotherapist. So what’s your story?” I was in the moment, feeling totally comfortable.

He didn’t meet my eye at first, and took a long moment before he began. “Well, I’ve lost a lot of jobs, and I’m an alcoholic.” (I’m going to do my best to reconstruct the conversation as I remember it here.)

“My mother was an alcoholic,” I replied. “I’ve helped a girlfriend of mine off of alcohol and another off of speed.”

“I was in Alcoholics Anonymous for a while. I stopped drinking for six years.”

“Good for you.” I said it without thinking, without judgment or preconception, as I often do when I’m working with others. In retrospect, in text it looks like it could be condescending, but it certainly wasn’t intended that way, and I’m pretty sure he read it as I intended it.

“I felt a lot of pressure from my family… and at some point, I just started drinking again. I don’t know…” he said with a shrug.

“More than ninety five percent of people spend most of their time making the decision that feels least bad to them. Very few people feel good enough to go after what would actually feel good to them. That’s been most of my life. Does that sound familiar to you?” (I was repeating information from a hypnotherapist named Kappas I’ve studied, which coincides with my own experience.)

He nodded in grim agreement.

“Have you heard of PTSD? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

“I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know anything about it.”

“PTSD is caused by really bad things happening to you. There’s also something called complex PTSD where you have so many bad things happen to you, it’s literally not safe for you to remember what happened. I didn’t remember much of the critical stuff until I was 35. It took me being just shy of a brown belt before I felt safe enough that I had my first flashback, to make it safe for me to remember that was an incest survivor. I’ve been going through flashbacks almost every day, screaming into a pillow for around seven years now.”

He nodded.

“It may not be safe yet for you to understand why you feel the way you do.”

He appeared to consider the idea, and to my eye, was looking a lot calmer and more at peace then when I first sat down.

I changed the subject. “Do you believe that god is all loving?” I was hoping to tap into his experience in AA, regardless of my own beliefs.

“I believe that god is love. I’m a christian,” he answered.

“Good. That makes things a little easier.” It’s a little easier to work with people who have a positive frame of reference. “What’s the hardest feeling that you face every day?”

“Going over there, “ he waved his arm toward the corner, “and facing people. It doesn’t feel good. I see a lot of unhappy people,” he explained. I found it fascinating that although it was pretty clear to me that he was talking about begging people for money, his emphasis was on the bad feelings of others, rather than himself. In retrospect, I wonder if perhaps he felt bad for feeling like he was making other people feel bad?

“So, shame?”

“Yeah, shame,” he said smiling.

“I’m going to invite you to conduct a little experiment with me. This is a little Hawaiian ritual called Ho’oponopono. It’s four phrases:
“I love you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Please forgive me.”
“Thank you.”
“I say these phrases to myself every day, and they’ve made a huge amount of difference for me. For the first six months or so, they worked all the time, but these days I have to be more patient and give myself emotional space to really feel it to get the results I want,” I explained. “I invite you to say these phrases with me to the parts of both of us that still feel shame.” He was smiling, so I continued, and he said the words with me. “Now give yourself a moment to let that settle in.” I paused, giving him a moment to reflect. “Now go back and check in and notice if you feel a difference.”

He was smiling broadly now, and his posture had improved. “Yeah!”

“Going over there is something that you do to take care of yourself. It would be good if it felt good to you.” Again, I was in the moment. How can you possibly expect someone to recover from whatever they’re struggling with, unless they feel good about basic self-care, regardless of what our social rules and stigmas are? But those thoughts were very distant while I was talking to him.

“My name is Tony, brother,” he said, and extended his hand, which I shook. When I shook it, my arm lit up with energetic pain. You may or may not believe in healing energy work. It’s something that I didn’t use to believe in, but in recent years I’ve become very conscious of. Sometimes I do it consciously, and other times, like this one, it just happens automatically.

“Nice to meet you Tony. Best of luck to you.” I smiled and walked off without any thought. Things just felt complete at that moment. Even as I was walking away, I was surprised that I hadn’t spent more time talking with him. It’s getting easier to trust my instincts. I’m still learning.

Looking back on that day, there was more said, and I left a thing or two out, but this was the gist of it. What counts is that I helped someone feel better who really needed it, regardless of how I did it. Most people that I’ve talked to say that making other people feel good is really important to them. The thing is though, that can be extremely challenging to do that if you’re carrying a lot of judgment and preconceptions. I’m the least judgmental person I know, but I’ve had that forced onto me by circumstances. If I had been more judgmental in the past, I doubt I’d be here to tell my story today.

While you were reading this story, I wonder whether you identify more with me or with Tony. Even though I’ve got my challenges, I at least can count on having food, a place to sleep, and an internet connection, along with a few luxuries. Too many of us can’t count on those things. Somewhere, somehow, I’ll eventually find a place that appreciates the gifts that I have been given, even if I have days where I don’t feel that way. The Tonys of this world don’t have that.

I hope that whoever reads this becomes more open to releasing judgment of themselves. When we carry judgment, we all become poorer, and put ourselves at increasing risk of becoming the next Tony. Instead, I’d like to see more people taking care of each other, in the way that I did for Tony that day.

The Ecology Of Healing

Before I started my recovery journey in earnest, I struggled mightily with depression and self-sabotage.  I thought about killing myself frequently on a daily basis.  I had little reason to be hopeful about my future.  My depression would get better, and then get worse.  I had had my hopes crushed repeatedly that anything would make a sustained positive difference in my life.

One of the things that I tried during this time was timeline therapy, which is under the NLP umbrella.  The concept is very simple.  You imagine a line which represents your life.  At some point there’s the present, and before and after are your past and future.

I was working with a hypnotherapist named Wesley Anderson.  He had me do timeline on my past and asked me to perform a metaphorical intervention with my younger self.  Notably, I didn’t really see or imagine anything in my past.  However, I got a a feeling of dread.

In response, I told him was, “there is nothing I can say or do to make it any better.  The only thing I can do is remove my younger self from that environment.”  So we did that.  Even though Wesley was very supportive of my experience, I didn’t feel substantially better.

At that point in time, I was married to someone who was not very supportive of me.  I stayed with her because I loved her, and I had no reason to believe that anyone would treat me better than she did.  (In fact, immediately after her, I found someone that treated me far, far worse, but that’s another story.)

My lack of hope and emotional support limited what I could do in the healing arena.  I was stuck between my fear that nothing would ever get better, and my other-than-conscious fear of my pain.  I did not know at that point in time that I was an incest survivor, had cPTSD, or multiple personalities (DID).  I had not yet bottomed out to the point where I was forced to look inside myself for answers.

What I had going on limited my ability to do recovery work at that point in time.  I did talk therapy from 1993 to 2006 before I (re)discovered I was an incest survivor.  My life had to be in shambles before I started getting serious answers to why I felt the way that I did.  Fortunately, this is far less of an issue for most people than it was for me.  On the other hand, there are a few out there like me that have to be shoved kicking and screaming to start doing the internal work that will give them a chance at finally having a functional life.

Forward progress can still be sabotaged when people don’t have an environment supportive of change.  I hinted at that above when I mentioned the relationship I found after my first wife.  I found a sociopath who was emotionally abusive and stalked me for years after our relationship ended.  Not the sort of thing that I would wish on anyone.

These kinds of things do happen to people who are struggling with pain beyond their conscious control.  If you have patterns of self-sabotage, and doubt your competence to create a healthy life for yourself, it’s a strong warning signal that healing should be made a priority for you.

Self sabotage can be a serious challenge for people who live in hostile environments.  I’ve helped a number of people with chronic pain over the years.  I often get really good results with almost all of the pain leaving by the end of the first session. On the other hand, there have been cases where people have had setbacks afterward.  One woman crashed her car after our session, and re-injured herself.  A couple others got very good results, and within a few weeks were worse off again.  While they didn’t get worse than where they started when they saw me, they did not have the right environment to hold on to their changes.

One woman talked to someone else who was hostile to the idea that someone could recover from chronic pain, and her symptoms came right back on the spot.  Another woman had a husband in a wheelchair who she resented taking care of.  However, in the same way it took me years to leave my first wife, she was too scared to leave him.  Her symptoms came over time back as well.  It can be hard to feel better if you are only paying one person to help you and you have many more around you to help you feel worse for free.

These kinds of challenges with people’s environment are a common problem.  A healer friend of mine had a client who had been in a wheel chair for years.  She got him to take his first steps in years, and to feel good about it.  However, her positive results were undone by his girlfriend, who’s self-worth depended on having someone to take care of.  This resulted in him giving up on the healing process.

Fortunately, for every person that relapses, there are many, many more that have much more even progress.  The trick is to feel good enough to both remember to use the healing techniques you know and to actually use them.  When you can do this. you are much more likely to hold on to the positive results you want.

Healing is a non-linear process.  When you think about what you want, it can help to think in terms of whether you have people around you who will support you in getting what you want.  If you don’t have that, when you do find some, it can make a huge difference.

Social Media Concerns

Mr. Social Media writes:

“I have a recurring problem. I have run into the same issue for years that my relationships hit problems because I won’t to the “Facebook Official” thing and establish relationship proclamations on social media sites. I had some very traumatic issues with an ex stalking my current girlfriends and creating issues. This grew very complicated and cost me a lot, both in terms of real world loss and the emotional damages and now even trying to process the idea of putting my relationships out like that makes my mind go white-hot. I freeze up and my anxiety kicks into overdrive. I get a migraine and I CANNOT process thoughts. I shut down and my mind runs to something else, anything else to put that thought far away.

“Obviously I recognize the perception that I don’t take pride in my relationships, or the suspicion that I’m trying to hide something. I’m very up front in all other aspects of my life. I talk about my relationships and my feelings openly and I pride myself on being doting and the slightest bit sickening in my bragging about the sweet lovely things I think of my loved ones. Somehow the thought of putting those things on display brings to mind only laying them out for sacrifice. I feel like I have lost anything I’m willing to put out for the taking.

“What do I do? I’m scared and tired of kicking myself in the same fucking circle trying to make my brain do something that should just be fucking normal.”

Dear Mr. Social Media:

When you are “scared and tired of kicking myself in the same fucking circle trying to make my brain do something that should just be fucking normal” – it is a position of inner conflict. You are at war with your fear, and that is a battle that no one can ever win.

The solution is to purge the fear itself. I had a stalker for quite a few years. It wasn’t until I forgave her that she stopped. I didn’t expect that, but it happened anyway.

The thing about fear is that it shifts our focus. It has a tendency to make people focus on the problem, rather than the solution. If you are afraid of social media problems, people are more likely to react negatively to you in that area of your life. It’s the same as having fear in any other area.

Social media is a social convention like marriage, like the label girlfriend, and so forth.  It can be used responsibly or irresponsibly.  Generally, I find that people get the best results when they use social conventions to serve them, rather than the purposes of other people.  If a convention doesn’t feel good to, I would say don’t use it unless you have to.

I’ve been married twice in the past, and I’m not opposed to going there again.  However, I have a much clearer sense of what I want at this point in time.  I want someone who is very serious about personal development.  I’m fortunate to have a girlfriend who meets that requirement at the moment, but we’re not quite to the point where we’ve met all the other bullet points on the list yet.  (We’re not living together yet, for example, although we continue to make progress in that direction.)

My requirements around marriage are an example of boundaries.  When you are able to maintain them in healthy ways, you tend to get better results.  You may want to consider boundary violations in your past, particularly in your family of origin, and how your current situation might be similar to others you have faced.  Considering this question might open you up to healthier relationships that are more respectful of your boundaries.

I’ve been much more successful in my relationships when I’ve been up front about the fact I have PTSD and multiple personalities. When I was unaware of it was when I had the problems. What I found was that many people have similar problems, and appreciate someone who is willing to work with what they have in a positive mindset.

We all have problems. They all have the potential to cause us intimacy issues. When we walk the path of constant recovery, people tend to respect that much more than avoidance.

Best of luck to you.

(This has been reposted from another site with permission and answered in more detail here.)

Learning And Using NLP And Healing Techniques

I got into NLP at the beginning of my hypnotherapy training, because, well duh, it works.  I got consistent positive results once I really understood how to use the techniques.  Even though I was interested in NLP before my recovery process started in earnest, it took until I understood the fundamentals of trauma work before I could apply it well.

You could easily say that about any healing technique.  Understanding the fundamentals of how trauma can be removed is more important than the technique itself.  On the flipside, when people have poor understanding of the fundamentals, they tend to get poor results.

Another critical element in generating positive change results is faith in the process.  That means having positive practical experience with the techniques you are using for yourself.  If you haven’t directly experienced a success with using a particular technique for yourself you are unlikely to be as effective with it as someone who has.

This is to say that setting a positive example for yourself and others matters.  My NLP courses made good use of this idea.  First, they gave you theory, then they demoed the techniques, and then they had you trade off both giving and receiving the techniques.

I vastly preferred this method of teaching to what I encountered in academia.  There was endless discussion of theory at the expense of any real application of technique.  In 36 hours of classes, I did not once apply a technique to a problem.  I spent less time in my NLP training, and I got a whole lot of personal change work done.

Fortunately, at the time I entered academia, I was already studying hypnosis and hypnotherapy and practicing on my own extensively.  Otherwise, I would have completely given up hope.  Fortunately, the success I found with those methods (which I might add, were not available academically near me) kept me motivated to continue on my path.

I am hoping that the world catches up with NLP and hypnotherapy and the possibilities that it has opened up for myself and my clients.  Even if it’s not those specific techniques, giving people practical experience with healing matters.  When you send people home with techniques that they are motivated to use to change what they feel, you have changed the world.

Confessions Of A Healing Agnostic

I’ve always been a bit of a heretic.  I have yet to be burned at the stake, though.  On the other hand, I can get a little crotchety in the pursuit of truth and logic.

In that spirit, I consider the results that healing methods generate to be paramount.  I also recognize that not all healers are created equal, and that some people are going to get better methods with some results than others.  How people feel about the methods they use also makes a difference.

The methods I use have gotten me excellent results in the past, so I continue to use and refine them because they do so.  This is not rocket science.  You do what works, and you refine what works so that it works better.  Amazingly enough, you learn from your experience to become a better healer.

The methods I use come from different places.  While I am a certified hypnotherapist and master NLP practitioner, that doesn’t limit what I do.  The pieces of paper are ultimately just a permission slip.  I pick up and use techniques wherever I find them, and I keep using them when the work well.

A professor once said to me, “you can’t just read a book and doing what you read.”  I wasn’t quite direct enough at that point time to tell him “maybe you can’t, but I sure as hell can.”  Not only can I, but I do with some frequency.  Furthermore, I hope than other people will do the same, regardless of whether they are healers or not.

If you don’t feel good enough to pick up and use what you read, why the heck are you reading it in the first place?  Who’s permission are you waiting for to use what you know, exactly?  I recognize that there are people out there that are traumatized enough that they need permission to do everything, but I kind of thought the point of being a healer was helping people get past that sort of thing.

As I’ve grown as a healer, I’ve come to recognize that many roads lead to healing.  Similarly, many roads lead to catharsis, which is often where the deepest healing happens for someone.  Having flexibility in how you travel to those destinations is useful.  What degree or credentials you have is secondary to how you behave.

I continue to refine my behavior because I believe that is what matters.  After all, it is what drives people’s results.  I am really passionate about being the best healer I can be for my clients.  That means that I’m going to endlessly disect my behavior and refine my methods.  And yes, I will drive myself to catharsis to do so.  Repeatedly.

This is what I would want from any healer that I placed my trust in.  Therefore, I will do no less for others.