Hello dear ones,
I don’t know about you, but the last few days I have been one weepy human. Gentle reminder that our first eclipse portal of 2022 is on its way and will be starting on April 30th with a full moon in Taurus. So if you’re feeling a little topsy turvy like dear Alice above, that might be why.
A few reminders before we dive in:
You have 5 days left to submit your question for episode 4 of OPENINGS: a monthly advice podcast. You can do so by sending me an email at hello@margeauxfeldman.com with the subject line OPENINGS SUBMISSION. Please try to keep submissions to 300 words or less. You have until Friday April 29th at 11:59pm MST.
Make sure you scroll to the bottom for an opportunity to get a zine from my Soft Magic series!!
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Thank you, as always, for being a part of the CARESCAPES universe! It’s such a deep honour to have you here with me!
THOUGHTS & FEELINGS
I’ve been thinking about this question: what is healing was a practice, rather than a process? I can remember so many moments throughout my years in therapy where I thought to myself “Aren’t I over this already? I thought I’d dealt with this! When will I finally be Fully Healed™????”
I get why I’d ask these questions:
Healing from trauma is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and to be quite honest I’d love for it to be over already.
Therapy costs money and wow would I ever save some money if I could just be Fully Healed™.
It is very common for folks in the mental health world to talk about trauma work as a process with the beginning, middle, and end.
Just like the 5 Stages of Grief, there are different stages to trauma healing. Judith Herman made the phased model popular in her book Trauma and Recovery. The number of stages (usually between 3-5) varies based off of the therapy modality and practitioner. Here are the three stages as I know them, which come from the work I’ve done with my therapist: stabilization and establishing a sense of safety; reprocessing and grieving; and integration, reconnection, and the creation of future templates.
When I started somatic trauma therapy five years ago, I’d been in a state of constant dissociation and chronic pain for months. Any sense of safety I may have felt was totally gone. Some days I could barely leave my couch. Cooking for myself was challenging on good days. I felt totally disembodied and would get dizzy walking down the street. In other words, I was a hot mess. Many, many months in therapy were spent introducing me to the window of tolerance (a concept developed by Dan Siegel to describe the mental space of being calm, connected, curious, compassionate; our nervous system sweet spot). I began to learn that I could feel safety in my body. I developed new tools for self-regulation and co-regulation. I stabilized.
Then we started to do some reprocessing of my traumas, focusing mostly on my relationship with my dad. Trauma work is grief work. And my trauma responses (or parts) did NOT want to grieve. Many months were then spent on getting to know my different parts: fight, flight, freeze, submit, and attach-cry. I got to know them deeply and intimately: their fears, their beliefs, how old they were, their strategies for keeping me alive. Eventually, they began to see that an adult self was present with them now: me. We could begin to feel the grief of not receiving the love we needed from the only parent we had left. We could grieve the emotional abuse and neglect that were a part of our daily life.
As we did this work, I returned to phase one again and again. And so we did more work to stabilize and create a sense of safety. Eventually, I experienced phase three. I was in a situation with so many different triggers, and I did not get triggered. I was able to see how this present experience was different from the past. I’d created the future templates that my nervous system needed.
I have moved through all three of these phases multiple times. I will establish a sense of safety in one relationship and then a new one starts and it’s like I’m back at square one and am terrified again. I reprocess and grieve one traumatic event and then I come back to reprocess and grieve others. I integrate the work I’ve done, I have reconnected with myself and all parts of me, I have created future templates for how I want to be in the world — and then I am triggered by something and I have to do it all over.
And yet, there is a difference. Each time I find myself back at phase one, or two, or three, I’m there for less time; the distress I feel is a little less intense than the time before. This is why, for me, healing from trauma is more of a practice than a process. Healing from trauma is iterative. In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes about the power of the nonlinear and iterative: “Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves — how do I learn from this?” (105). What I hear in brown’s words — cycles, convergences, explosions — is that transformation, healing, and growth are imperfect practices.
The word practice has been an anchor for me over the last year. I look up the etymology of the word practice and am surprised and delighted to find that it comes from the Latin practizare in medicina “to practise medicine” and the z is later replaced with a c: practicare. That the word “care” is at the root of practice helps me understand why this word is an anchor. Caring for ourselves is a practice. When we practice, we are enacting care. Healing is a practice of care.
Healing from trauma is a continual practice. For me, the word “process” is too linear, too invested in advancement, forward motion. If you take one step forward and two steps back, then the process is failing. I need space for failure. I need space for the non-linear and the spiralic in my healing. In this way, reimagining healing as a practice rather than a process has opened me up to the messiness of this work that is healing, this work that is being a human in the world.
PRACTICES
I’ve been very grateful for the opportunities to learn with and from Staci K Haines as part of the Embodied Social Justice program I’m in. She introduced us to a centering practice and its one that I’m trying to do at the start of each day before I get onto my devices.
ACTIONS
My dear friend Olivia is less than $700 away from reaching their GFM goal! To help them get there, I am going to give away my zines to anyone who make a donation of $5 or more!!
If you donate $25 or more, I will ship you all three zines.
Open to folks in Canada and the US (because international shipping costs $$).
Will update when submissions have closed.
Here’s how it works:
Make a donation here. Take a screenshot of your donation with your name and the GFM info visible. Minimum of $5.
Send me your receipt at hello@margeauxfeldman.com with the subject line GFM DONATION.
Tell me which zine from my Soft Magic series you’d like and your mailing address. You can check out my zines here.
Healing as a Practice Rather Than a Process
As someone who is just starting to more deeply engage in the "reprocessing and grieving" stage (first appointment with my new therapist next week!), this was really softening. I have been quoting Joanna Macy in her Buddhist description of the "self as process", but I also like imagining the self, and healing, as a practice. Of something that is tended to and updated everyday, or when you can.
thank you always for your writing <3