Home at Last?

I have returned to Texas (from New England) to stay with a nice couple that can be considered my family of choice.  I talk to them typically a couple times a week on the phone or so and we talk about pretty profound stuff.  They’re an essential part of my support network.

As I drove onto their property, I was confronted with the sign above.  The sign reflects that they have some understanding about what I have been through recently.  I visited my childhood homes and purged some serious trauma by doing so.

Visiting the sites of the past is not something that most survivors can do lightly.  I only did with some serious trepidation myself.  Of course, not all survivor experiences are created equally.

Revisiting sites of emotional and physical violence is challenging.  You never know where the landmines of past emotional and physical pain can hit.  Coming to terms with the past in whatever ways might surface can tax people’s ability to cope.  I was relatively fortunate with only one major and one minor trigger surfacing during my visit.

The triggers are just the surface, though.  Those who, like myself, are fortunate enough to be able to fully process whatever surfaces, have more to deal with.  Even though I feel I “got off easy” in my return home after 25 years, the existential questions still hit me.

First of all, home was not the same.  Portland, Maine is radically different than when I left it.  It’s prettier, it’s cleaner, and a much nicer place than the home I remember.  I found myself sentimental for everything I left, which was surprising considering how much I hated it while I was there.

I suspect that my nostalgia had a lot more to deal with a desire to have a home than what I actually found there.  It was most likely a reflection of the fact that I have never felt that I’ve had a real home to begin with.  Have I had safe places where I lived that I enjoyed?  Yes.  But never any real sense of permanency or stability.

This is the kind of challenge that many survivors face.  It is easy for them to end up feeling out of place.  A sense of home can be elusive, particularly given how psychological trauma can drive people from place to place and relationship to relationship, as it has done to me in the past.

It is one thing to be intellectually aware of these kinds of issues, but it is another thing entirely to be in the middle of the emotions and thoughts that are caused by them.  I found myself emotionally adrift.  Where was home?  Where could home be?  What did home mean to me?  These were not trivial questions, nor did my tentative answers to them bring me much comfort.

I considered these questions on my drive back to Texas across 1900 miles that I made in two days.  Not my idea of a great time, but it just was the right thing to do at that moment.  I remained adrift.

While I would like to fully accept my family of choice as a home of sorts, doing so goes against my coping mechanisms.  Even considering the idea is uncomfortable.  While I very much appreciate the efforts of my family of choice to provide me that safe place, I found that it presented a new set of issues.

The journey from old home to “new home” or even “new potential home” tends to surface old feelings.  It is just one aspect of the more general problem that survivors face.  When they find safety, they have difficulty feeling safe until the old emotional wounds are healed.  Furthermore, the new safety tends to drive those old emotional issues to the surface and force people to deal with them if they can.

I my own case, my new proposed “home” just further fed the existential questions I’ve been struggling with for some time.  Where do I go to use my gifts?  Where will they be appreciated?  No easy answers.

Like so many others, “home” still feels like a mirage to me.  I can chase it, but it feels unlikely ever to arrive.  Until that time, I will continue to peel my recovery onion and hope for the best.

 

The Face of PTSD

Does this man look relaxed to you?  Me neither.

Above is a picture I’m repeating from my last blog.  Behind me is the parking lot where I learned to ride a bike as a child.  When I took the picture, I knew I was a little uncomfortable, but I wasn’t aware of the strength of the trigger that was lurking and would hit me later (when I was writing my last blog entry).

Triggers can be subtle, even for people that are attuned to them.  A change in mood is not an accident.  There’s always a reason for what we feel.

I “should have” recognized that I was triggered at the moment when I snapped that selfie.  One of the problems with mental health issues is that what people “should do” is simply not a realistic possibility.  Coping mechanisms get in the way of people acting out of what others might call “common sense”.

Three days ago, I got a reminder of just how deep that can go.  You can look back at what I wrote when I posted the picture the last time.  I captioned it something like “me demonstrating I’m not a member of the selfie generation”.

That’s denial, folks.  You would think that as a hypnotherapist trained to recognize symptoms of stress in others, I would notice it in myself.  Well, I do, most of the time.

However, there’s a “peel the onion” process of increasing sensitivity.  In order to connect with what you feel, it has to be safe.  That means purging the barriers to increasing your sense of safety.  It often includes changing your emotional environment as well.  I’ve done a lot of all of this stuff over the past ten years or so.  It can be profoundly challenging for people like me.

Now, what was really going on in that photo?  Well, as I found out writing my last blog post, I was triggered on feelings of worthlessness, and being unworthy of praise.  Even when I did do something right in my family, like learning to ride my bike unassisted, any positive feedback that I got was blotted out by the traumatic experiences that had been used to force me into that state.

Way too many people suffer from circumstances like this daily.  This is to say that people use fear to motivate others to an extent that is harmful.  Then the targets end up with mental health problems, like I did.

This situation leads to the classic mental health paradox: people often know they can do something successfully, but feel too awful to do it.  This can lead to problems of behavioral “stuckness” that often get labels like depression and mood disorders.

The worst part of being motivated out of fear is that people come to take this kind of suffering for granted or “normal”.  When normal doesn’t feel good, there’s a problem, folks.  Bad feelings usually snowball over time and lead to larger issues.

Awareness can help reverse this dynamic, but it does not solve all problems at once.  Awareness is just the doorway to changing your feelings and behavior.  Emotional release is what steps you through the doorway and onto the other side where your feelings and behavior change.

The other thing about awareness is that is limited by your environment.  While meditation can go a very long way towards resolving mental health issues, reality checks are useful.  And that is exactly why I went back to my home town to see the places where I lived in the past:  to get that extra reality check and see what else I could do to improve my mental and emotional health.

Back Home? Part One – The Triggers

Above: me, demonstrating I am not a member of the selfie generation. The picture was taken at Willard Beach, in South Portland, Maine.  I used to play there as a child. It was two blocks from the house where I lived in first and second grade.  It is far more beautiful than the picture suggests.

Two days ago I returned to several major places where I grew up as a test of how well I was doing in my recovery from PTSD.  As expected, I did hit triggers, but they were not where I expected them to be.

The first one was actually at Higgins Beach, in Cape Elizabeth on my way up to South Portland from Biddeford, where I had visited my high school teacher, Dr. Santa Lucia earlier that day.  I briefly stopped at a house where some friends of mine lived.  I rang the bell, but no one answered.  After waiting a minute or so on the open deck, I turned back to face the sea, and I was hit by a strong feeling of sadness and helplessness.

What it was, I don’t know exactly.  I suspect it was mostly missing people that I cared about, something I’ve done too much of in my life.  It passed quickly, leaving me after maybe 15 seconds or so.

One of the things about flashbacks and triggers is that you don’t always know exactly what is going on or why.  Another thing is that because of their intensity, they often feel much longer than they actually are.  This was one of those triggers where it felt fleeting… it came and went quickly, leaving me with little in the way of answers.

On the flipside, I returned to a positive state of mind where I could enjoy the beauty of my surroundings.  So much of Maine is stunningly beautiful and the sunny late fall day I had driven into from hours of drizzle on the road made it that much sweeter.  Given how depressed I was when I lived in Maine, this was just one sign of the progress I have made in my recovery.

After taking in the scenery for a few minutes, I drove on to Elsmere Ave, where I lived in first and second grade.  In the first pass, I did not recognize the house where I lived, although I did recognize my best friend’s house at the time because it had changed less.  To orient myself, drove down the street and tried to find the beach by memory.

Even though I knew it was close, it still surprised me.  A zig and a zag, and I was facing the ocean.  The next surprise was that the parking lot for the beach where I learned to ride a bicycle was still there!

(Here is me, once again demonstrating that I am not a member of the selfie generation.)  Learning to ride was tough, because my parents did not supply me with training wheels.  Instead my father pushed my bike, ran, and yelled at me a lot.  There was never any real praise for anything I did, and learning to ride a bike was no exception.

It’s funny how triggers can creep up on you.  While I was there, I remembered some of how challenging it was to deal with my father emotionally as a child, but it remained dissociated until I wrote the paragraph above.  I had to pause and bawl for a while writing this one, as some more of the emotional reality of my childhood hit me.

When you suffer from PTSD and depression, you come to take a certain amount of dissociation for granted.  It becomes a baseline, and it is the new “normal”.  The new “normal” is typically protective in nature, and disconnects you from the intensity of the pain that hovers under the surface, waiting to be purged.

From the parking lot, I pressed onto the beach.  I was able to acknowledge the beauty of the scene, but I felt a bit of unease.  I had no sense of what it was about yet.

So I walked down the beach and up a slate staircase on the side of the rocks at the far edge of the beach.  I still hadn’t hit the trigger yet, so I walked down the path to the edge of the rocks, following a woman and her dog.

I looked off to the right, and I saw rocks that I had played on and walked over as a child.  I remembered collecting “glass rocks” – beads of broken glass that had been tumbled smooth by the ocean.  The trigger finally made itself known.

I warned the woman a few yards away.  “Mam – I have PTSD.  This is the place where I grew up, and I’m about to trigger hard.  I’ll be fine, but I just need to do it.”  She give me a slight smile, and said “thank you for telling me.”

I took a few steps over to the bench, sat down, covered my face with my hands, and cried and screamed into my hands, muffling the noise.  This trigger went on for far longer than the first.  Again, there was sadness, but also dismay.  I had a sense of feeling like a child lost in a world of adults, where there were no good answers about anything.  I had been trapped in a world of pain from which there had been no escape.

Once again, in writing this, I got to peel more of the onion.  I’m sure that’s part of why I felt compelled to write about this.  So many people shelve the reality of being a child as an adult.  On the flipside, it’s something that I have always remembered.

As a child, you don’t know what you don’t know.  Adult options and perspective are not available to you.  Often, the steps that children take to attempt to control their environment are not effective at critical times.  These kinds of experiences can teach children painful lessons about their lack of control, and the lessons can haunt them as adults.

People’s past lack of control can trap them in patterns of learned helplessness for the rest of their lives.  I consider myself to be fortunate in some ways in that I have escaped most of it.  That is even if it cost me a traditional middle class life in the process.

At least I have the tools to understand why I have the problems I do, and to improve my life when I recognize negative patterns now.  Too many people do not have that luxury.  I wish that more people understood these kind of things, which is why I’ve written three books about it that are sitting with my publisher.

From the beach, I returned to Elsmere Ave.  I parked, and walked up and down part of the street, trying to figure out which house was mine.  Suddenly, I got hit by a memory.  The telephone pole!

There was a telephone pole that I had climbed outside my house as a kid.  It had spikes coming off of it that were at about eight or nine feet off the ground.  After the blizzard of ’77, the snowbanks had gotten built up to an insane degree.  They got so high that I could just step up and climb the telephone pole without any help.

And there it was, the pole that I had climbed as a child.  I didn’t go to the top, because I was both scared of heights and of being electrocuted.  Which meant… that must be my house right there!

The paint job was very different than when I was a child.  I braced myself emotionally, and then walked into the porch and rang the bell.  I was greeted by a friendly woman, and I explained who I was and that I was doing PTSD recovery work.  She was very friendly, and offered to show me around.

It was fascinating to see the house that I had grown up in as a child.  Very little was the same, except for the layout.  On the other hand, when I saw the kitchen, I was sure that it was the right house.  I asked if there had been a woodstove in one corner, and the answer was yes.  Spatially, it felt right to me, although I’m much taller now (obviously).

It was so much prettier than I remember it.  It had beautiful wood floors, and cheerful paint… tasteful wood furniture… the list goes on.  I wonder about the differences between my general memories of how it looked in the past, and how it looked while I was there.

I’m sure some of the emotional difference lies in the fact that anything different would feel nicer than the potential triggers for old painful differences.  Another factor is probably  that it was inhabited by a nice pleasant couple that was not my parents and had nothing to do with them.  Finally, there’s the fact that I liked their taste, though it wasn’t my own.

Finally, I got to see the upstairs, and I found my room from the past.  Wow.  It seemed so much smaller than I had remembered it as a child.  The difference in size makes such a huge change in perception.  Experimentally, I squatted to shift my perspective… and it felt more like what I had remembered.

Once I had seen everything, I thanked the couple and left.  I was amazed that I hadn’t been triggered by seeing the house.  It was really surprising to me, because I expected at least one landmine, if not more.  My experience was strong validation of the fact that screaming into a pillow for eight years has made a huge positive difference for me.

All in all, this part of my day was a fascinating microcosm of PTSD recovery work.  It reinforced many of the lessons that I have learned over the years.  You don’t know where the triggers are, or when they will hit you.  Often, what you think is going to trigger you does not.

Approaching trauma from different directions helps process it.  I got one level when I was physically present, and another when I wrote about my experience afterward today.  If you want to be as clear as possible, putting in this kind of effort will make a positive difference.

I hope you enjoyed my little journey into my emotional past.  If you choose to follow into your own, I wish you the best of luck with it.  May all of you out there find the peace of mind and body that you deserve.

Back to High School

So I’m in Portland, Maine writing this post. That still feels unreal to me. It has been 24 years since I spent any real time here. The last time I was here (ten years ago) I was so triggered that I was barely functional. About six months later, I manifested PTSD.

I have had many dreams about finding myself back in high school. One of the worst was when I had to repeat a couple grades as an adult in my 40s, and I ended up not doing any better than when I had been there originally. That dream felt like it lasted a lifetime, and I woke up with an intense feeling of failure, which I immediately did healing work on. Yecccch.

Fortunately, my real world visit went much better than that. My day in Maine started off by visiting my high school senior English teacher, Dr. Stanta Lucia… I wasn’t entirely sure why I was visiting him consciously, but I got a couple of strong other-than-conscious pings about it. So I called him up, made arrangements, sent him my books, and showed up.

When I first showed up, I was a bit taken aback. When I had him in high school, he had been a large man. Today, he was a frail shadow of his old self. In fact, when I first saw him, he didn’t seem very present or aware at all.

However, I helped him up from his bed to his computer, and he started getting a little more alert. I showed him how to open the pdf files I had sent him, and he started to rally more. Then things got really interesting.

He told me several things that I hadn’t known about him. Like me, he discovered that he had dyslexia as an adult in his 40s. He also told me that he had flashbacks. We didn’t go into why but it was obvious that we shared a much greater frame of reference than I had previously realized.

I don’t remember everything about our conversation. He praised me for being a serious student, which I appreciated. I can only wonder about how well I might have done if I had been emotionally healthy while I had been in school.

When the topic of my mother came up, I asked him if he knew she was an alcoholic. He did.I told him that she was also a sociopath. He said “I knew something was wrong, but I did not know that.” IIRC.. He seemed unsurprised, though.

We talked about how everything had been buried at that point in time, and how it had not been safe for me to know what had happened to me. I mentioned about how I had become my brother’s protector, and how it had not been safe for me to know the role that I had taken on. I also explained how it had taken me until I was just shy of a brown belt in Aikido before I felt safe enough to have my first flashbacks. All of that made sense to him.

We also talked about how my recovery work had opened up a connection to the spirit world, which was something I had never expected to experience as an atheist of over 20 years. That was something that he understood from his own experience.

Towards the end of my visit, he got a call from one of his sisters, and mentioned that his brother had died three weeks ago. At that point he was no longer feeling very well. I helped him back into bed, and lifted his feet up for him.

“May I be candid?” I asked. “Please,” he replied. “Given, your health and your loss, it’s only natural that death be on your mind.” He nodded. “Death is close, and I would suggest that you meditate on death, both as a scene, and as an entity.” It was something that seemed intuitively accurate to me.

“Wow! I got goosebumps on my arms when you said that! I have been doing that!”

“You’ve done your job here,” I replied. It felt right, and he seemed the calmest that he had been the entire time I had been there.

We exchanged goodbyes, and I left, feeling that I had done my job and delivered peace that was well deserved.

Headed Home: The Usual Chaos

So, I’ve been planning a trip back to my hometown this weekend.  I had a place to stay, and it fell through due to illness.  Someone else expressed interest in seeing me, and then silence.  The contact I’ve made that I’m most sure about is my old high school senior English teacher.  That alone would justify the trip.  But I’ve got much more to do than just that.

As I often say to clients, closure is priceless.  Visiting my hometown ten years after I fully manifested PTSD is going to give me a very concrete idea about where I stand with my mental health.  There will be triggers.  I will purge and grind through them to become a healthier person.  Facing my past will take courage and strength.

It would be nice if the universe was kinder in laying out a path for me to do these things.  I’d prefer not to be spending extra money on a hotel, and so forth.  It’s disappointing.  On the other hand, I’m not going to let it stop me, either.  At the end of the day, it’s a minor nuisance.  I want closure, and it’s worth paying for.

I don’t know exactly how this is going to work.  I don’t know where I will get triggered the most.  I expect the unexpected and surprises.  I hope that one day will be enough to do what I need to do.

A Healer’s Dilemma: Initimate Personal Relationships

As a healer, I put myself in other people’s shoes all the time.  It’s the nature of my job that I have to be good at looking at things from other people’s perspectives.  I’ve gotten rather good at it over the years.

Empathy comes with the job description.  If you want to be any good at helping other people deal with their emotions, it helps to understand what they are feeling.  Often, that can mean that you literally feel what other people are feeling, although not always to the same degree.  Still, being able to hold that space can be challenging at times.

While I’m at work, I can contain these feelings.  I have good boundaries and the time I spend working with other people is constrained.  This allows me to walk away from people when the day is done with peace of mind and body.

With an intimate relationship, the boundaries are different than in a professional context.  During family life, you’re around people that you’re emotionally connected to a greater degree of the time.  It means that you’re exposed to what they feel more often and in a different way.  The feelings are about things that are closer to home.

While things are going well, there’s no problem with this.  On the other hand, when people start having mental health issues, this can become a serious issue.  It means the healer starts feeling the other person’s negative emotions.

In theory, the solution is simple.  Either the healer helps the person or walks away.  However, this doesn’t reflect real life conditions well in my experience.

Family ties tend to difficult to disconnect.  Often, that’s intentional.  This means that the healer can have difficulty disconnecting from what is going on around them.

Boundary setting can help to a degree.  However, boundaries only take the issue so far.  If a healer is around someone who is sick and refuses help regularly, it can be a serious drain on them.  This can be just as true for anyone else; healers just tends to be more conscious about what is going on.

The thing about mental health problems is that they persist.  They have hang time.  During that time, people with these kinds of issues may be inconsistently open to assistance.  So it’s not an “all-or-nothing” kind of problem.

This puts the healer in a position where they can feel like they are the judge, jury, and executioner for the state of the relationship.  While people are open to help, they’re worth helping.  When they close off for too long, they can become a liability.

The choices that healers face under circumstances like this aren’t really any different than anyone else.  The challenge for the healer is that they are hyper aware of what is going on.  Mentally ill people are often in denial about the nature of their symptoms and how serious they are.  On the flipside, any healer worth their salt is going be tuned in to the warning signals.

The question of when to cut the cord can become a serious dilemma.  It can be soul-wracking to talk about the issues and not have other people take them seriously.  “I told you so” is never what you want to have to say to someone when they are sinking in emotional and mental quicksand.

The solution to this problem that I have found over the years is not a fun one, but I do find it practical.  The answer is for me to watch my own mood and functioning.  If I find myself starting to slide… sleeping too much or getting emotionally out of control, those are warning signals.

Corrective action is cases like these is required immediately.  I bring up the issues I am going through with my partner and I talk about what needs to be done.  Does that always fix the problem(s)?  Unfortunately, no.

On the other hand, that is what I have direct control over.  Talking about the issues means that I have done what I can do.  Now it’s up to my partner to either address my concerns directly, or propose alternate solutions.

Many times in the past, I have found myself in situations where not enough was done to address my concerns.  This is similar to what I’ve heard other people complaining about in their own relationships in the past.  While I’ve chosen better partners over the years, it hasn’t fixed everything yet.

This is to say, that once again, I had to walk away from a relationship that became unhealthy for me recently.  It was no fun.  I have been grieving it just like my other relationships.

On the other hand, I deserve to be happy and healthy.  That is exactly what I tell my clients.  And I owe it to both them and myself to take what actions I can to do that.

Uprooted and Wandering

There are times when risks are worth taking because you care. I’ve just done that, and no, things didn’t turn out the way either party wanted them to. Such is the nature of life. While I still wish things could have been different, I am mostly at peace with my path.

So I find myself with just a carload of my possessions, without any particularly clear destination, and no real roots. On Oct 1, I will depart to help a dear old friend of mine close down a game store in Massachusetts for probably about a month. What I do after that, I have no idea.

One of my apprentices checked in with the spirit world and suggested that I might connect with some folks in South Carolina and Atlanta. Who that might be I have no idea yet. I’m open to whoever and wherever might have a place for me.

I’ve been told by many that I am a man of considerable talents in both the shamanic and healing spheres. I’m a Hypnotherapist, Master NLP Practitioner, and energy worker. I’ve written three books on emotional healing (soon to be published) and have more to come.

Come November, I will most likely be looking for opportunities elsewhere.  I’d like to find someplace where I could teach and help people be their best selves. I’m open to whatever ideas people might have about where to go and who to meet.

Grief and Secondary Conditioning

Today, my girlfriend talked to me about her favorite family member.  She had a gay uncle who was a super nice guy. He was a professional musician who did well enough that he could afford an apartment in Manhattan.  He helped her develop her skill as a pianist, and break through to higher skill levels that most people never achieve.

What he did for her was not unusual.  He was always helping other musicians develop their talent.  He was flawlessly supportive of the people around him.  He always took a personal interest in people’s happiness.

She told me that when he would talk to people, they would feel like they were the only person in the world.  Anyone would have been really lucky to have him in their life.  He took an a serious interest in her at the age of four.  This was one area of her life where she was really fortunate.

A couple years ago, he got cancer and died relatively suddenly.  Given that she comes from a family full of abusers and religious fundamentalism, losing him was a huge deal for her.  Since he died, she hasn’t enjoyed playing the piano.

I walked her through purging a bunch of layers of bad feelings about playing the piano.  The final layer we hit was sadness.  She, like many people, has difficultly crying.  This is because her parents had nothing but contempt for her tears once she was older.  She didn’t get to the point of crying in the way that would benefited her the most, this time.

To me, her problem was obvious.  She associated playing the piano with the loss of her uncle, which made it hurt to play or even think about playing.  This had nothing to do with her skill level, abilities, or talent, and everything to do with the fact that he had been the most important person in her life for a long time.

Playing the piano had been a powerful connection to something loving and hopeful to her.  It was critical for her mental and emotional health for many years while she was being raped by her father behind closed doors.  It seemed to me that without her uncle, it was very unlikely that she would be alive today.

When people have been traumatized, it is essential that they have emotional support.  Without it, whatever positives they have going on in their life can suddenly get cut off.  Particularly when positive activities and behaviors become associated with a traumatic event, they can stop cold.  This is exactly what happened to my girlfriend when she stopped playing the piano because it reminded her of the death of the person that loved her the most.

While negative feelings can be motivating, they are limited, and typically will not generate the best performance for people.  Peak performance comes in flow states of joy and connection.  Negative feelings rarely trigger that kind of headspace.  While negative feelings dominate, it is difficult do something for positive reasons.

This is to say that motivation is emotional.  While intellectually, my girlfriend recognizes that she is a great pianist, that isn’t enough to motivate her to play.  To play well, people need some kind of positive reason, whatever that might be.  This is an example of how secondary conditioning caused by traumatic events gets between people and some of the best things in their lives.

When people can not grieve, the problem is compounded.  They have no way to deal with the negative conditioning of traumatic events.  A natural evolutionary mechanism of shedding detrimental negative conditioning is shut down.

Active grieving, where people are doing things like crying that leads to emotional release, is nature’s release valve.  It allows people to shed their pain and return to what most people would label as a more rational state.  Without it, people do not function fully or properly.

This is something I know all too well from personal experience.  It took me until I was 35 until I really started grieving with any regularity.  While my life was already in shambles, my pent up grief was even more challenging to deal with than the depression had been.

The trade off was that now, I finally knew why I felt so awful.  My amnesia about the past started to lift, and my life finally started to make sense.  The other thing was that I finally had something I could do that really helped me feel better.

Grieving is now a tool that I use daily to change what I feel.  I had to use it about almost everything in my life.  It took years and years of crying daily before I began feeling anything resembling the way I wanted to.  However, slowly but surely, my feelings and my life improved.

This is a lesson that my girlfriend is still learning.  Most people do not have the in depth experience with personal grief that I do.  It’s hard to trust the grieving process when so many people in our culture shun it.

Furthermore, when people have had family members train them not to be emotionally expressive, it often takes others who are very emotionally close to the person to help them unwind that negative conditioning.  This is to say, problems that are created by social behavior are best unlearned in a social setting with the proper emotional support.  I’m doing my best to be that for my girlfriend.

Yes, the feelings that make up grief are scary.  Grieving makes you feel vulnerable and out of control.  Letting go of past pain can be uncomfortable and can sometimes seem bottomless.  On the other hand, it is one of the single best tools that people have to improve their mental health.

How about Some Sex?

Sex is messy business.  No, I didn’t mean *that* way.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  Or keep it there, if you prefer.  Up to you, really.

Above, I’ve drawn your attention to some cultural preconceptions about sex.  Why should sex be associated with the gutter?  In my mind, that is a pretty nasty judgment about a fundamentally enjoyable, connective, healthy activity.  According to recent research published in Sex at Dawn, “The average human has sex about 1,000 times per birth.”  In spite of that fact, many people have associations with sex that render it “unclean”, “dirty”, “bad”, or “evil”.  That’s a lot of “evil” that most people are doing…!

There are many way that people can develop negative associations and preconceptions about sex.  Incest and rape are at the top of the list.  Even when people are not sexually penetrated, non-consensual sexual activity causes strong conditioning and strong emotions.

The after effects of these events last long afterward and many people who live through them never fully come to terms with what happened and why.  In fact, many people can become so traumatized by sexual violation that they can even forget the original events completely.  It has happened both to myself and to many others I know.

When people survive sexual assaults, it changes how they think and feel about sex in unpredictable ways.  Some people become hypersexual.  Other people can come to appear asexual.  Many uncontrollable factors in people’s environments shape how they respond to their experience that are unknowable until someone has the safety necessary to fully come to terms with their experience.

According to RAINN (the Rape And Incest National Network) symptoms of sexual violence can include (but are not limited to):

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Flashbacks, Depression, Self-Harm, Sexually Transmitted Infections, Substance Use, Dissociation, Eating Disorders, Pregnancy, Sleep Disorders, and Suicide.

Personally, I found this list rather limited.  Many other problems can show up as a result of sexual trauma.  It’s been my experience that sexual trauma can lead to just about any mental and behavioral problem you can imagine.  Part of the reason why that can happen is that sexual violence is often combined with other forms of violence like physical and verbal abuse.

When I said that sex was messy business earlier, what I meant was that it can bring these issues front and center in your conscious awareness.  This can activate mental illness symptoms like flashbacks and eating disorders, making them worse.  When people are not consciously aware of where their symptoms are coming from, this can be terrifying.  It can cause major disruptions to people’s ability to function normally.

In my own case, it wasn’t safe for me to remember what happened to me until I was 35, just shy of a brown belt in Aikido, married, and 3000 miles away from my parents in a foreign country.  When my wife and I were having sex, I suddenly felt terrified, and developed a sharp pain in my throat.  We stopped, and I meditated on why I felt.

Within about 20 minutes or so, I found myself in my first conscious flashback, screaming at the top of my lungs as a memory of me being strangled by someone (likely my mother) as an infant surfaced.  I felt completely helpless had difficulty breathing as the memory ripped through me.  I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone.

While what I went through is extreme, other people face similar problems at lower levels of intensity.  Memories like mine can surface when people have sexual contact.  Worse, the memories that cause the negative conditioning that so many people struggle with.

People can suffer from shame, guilt, anger, fear, and other negative emotions from wanting sex, having sex, or even just thinking about sex.  Inevitably, most people have contact with people in our culture who struggle with these issues.  How we respond to others that suffer through these things makes a big difference in their quality of life.

For most of us, sex is a basic way of connecting to other human beings.  Trivializing the emotions or the experience of people during sex can cause enormous damage. Telling people how or when they “should” or “should not” be having sex can be similarly damaging, particularly when they are acting out of compulsions. On the other hand, when you can accept other people’s experience, it can be empowering and healing.

When you can accept other people’s lack of control over what they think, what they feel, and how they behave around sex, it helps them recover more quickly.  Accepting people’s lack of control about secondary symptoms is similarly useful.  Things like eating disorders are not chosen.  They are coping mechanisms that are imposed on people against their will.  When you understand this fact, you are far better equipped to support someone through their recovery efforts.  That is  doubly true if that person happens to be you.

Facing Past Psychological Trauma in Romantic Relationships

Facing the trauma behind PTSD and other forms of mental illness can be extremely challenging at times.  There are times when past trauma makes itself known and surfaces fully, regardless of whether anyone likes it or not.  The loss of control and the distress people experience when this happens can be very scary.  Having a solid support network when this happens can make a big difference in what you can face and how quickly you can recover.  That is regardless of how serious your symptoms might be.

Trauma has a way of surfacing in romantic relationships.  When people avoid intimacy and become more inauthentic, there is always a reason why.  Typically, it is because people are avoiding becoming consciously aware of past pain.  When you are aware of this reality, it allows you to be more compassionate and stay more present in your relationships.  In turn, this allows you to support your partner(s) in why they are scared of fully reconnecting with you.

It can help to remember that people to not typically consciously choose to disconnect. While they might think they are consciously choosing to disconnect in some cases, trauma drives people far more deeply than is safe for many people to know.  If given a real choice, most people I know would prefer to stay emotionally connected to their loved ones.  The problem is that trauma gets in the way of people being able to do that.

At times, people become inauthentic and disconnect from emotional intimacy when trauma is surfacing.  Dissociation and “checking out” is another thing that can happen.  Incest survivors like myself are at particularly high risk for both behaviors during sexual intimacy.

In my romantic relationship, all of these things have been issues at times.  It is not something I blame my girlfriend or myself for when it happens.  I just call her out on her behavior and ask her why she thinks it is happening on her side. On my side, I tell her when I notice that I’m dissociating, and she helps bring me back by addressing my fears in the heat of the moment.  She also calls me out when she notices that I’m not as present as I could be.

Recently, when I called her out on doing being inauthentic, she got very sick.  Then she got the insight as to why she was going through what she was going through.  The following is an edited online chat transcript of when that happened:

Me> I’m here to help when you are ready

Her> Oh my god love

Me> Love you

Her> That was the vomit to end all vomiting.

Me> *smooch* I’m so sorry honey

Her> I would sacrifice a kitten to end this.

Me> Poor dear. *rocks you gently*

Her> Never in my life have I been so sick.

Me> *kisses your forehead*

Her>  I was actually afraid I was going to drown or choke to death.

Me> I’m proud of you.  You are going to make it through this soon

Her> I remember when I felt like this before.

Me> Good, that’s a breakthrough.

Her> I had my period then too.

Me> (no surprise)  *listens*

Her> My mom was working at the library, so I was probably eleven. It would have been one of my first periods. And I remember I had diarrhea and I could not stop vomiting and I was bleeding. And I was laying on the floor in the basement begging my mom to take me to the hospital and she wouldn’t take me.

Me> I’m so sorry honey.

Her> It’s okay lol. My mom finally got tired of listening to me complaining, so she took me to the ER.

Me> I’m guessing that you are unlearning neglect here? what do you think?

Her> But she wouldn’t even let me get a change of clothes or tampons or anything.

Me> That is nuts. You deserve better than that and I hope you know that now.

Her> It’s fine. She actually didn’t even stay with me. I was there for four days.

Me> Yikes.  I’m so sorry honey.

Her> She didn’t take off work. My dad had his tumors and was too sick to stay.  It’s okay. It did suck though.

In this particular case, my girlfriend was scared that I would not be present for her emotionally if she got sick.  When people are scared that others will not take care of them, it makes sense for them to preemptively disconnect.  By calling her out on what she was doing, this traumatic memory made its way to the surface.  As sometimes happens in these cases, the physical reaction can be intense.

Another thing that you may notice above is how she repeatedly says things like “It’s okay” and “It’s fine”.  I do respect her strength in being able to soldier on ahead in spite of her past.  On the other hand, as I’ve told her many times before, I don’t think that these things from her past are fine or okay.  Just because she was able to endure doesn’t mean that she’s okay now.

Sooner or later, she’s going to have to face her minimizing of her past pain.  While she still carries it, it will get in the way of the emotional connection that we want to have.  Of course, when it is ready to surface, I want to be there for her.

This is the same kind of thing that everyone faces in romantic relationships.  We all face the pressures of whether or not we feel safe enough to be vulnerable and face whatever it might be from our pasts to make it safe for us to connect and to be fully present for ourselves and our partners.

It is not easy to face these types of things.  It can be scary and brutally painful.  However, when you are ready to face the past and have the support that is necessary to do so, you will make immense gains when you face things like this.  Facing down past pain allows you to have the relationship(s) and love that you deserve.