My daughter and I have a long (3 year) history of making videos. We’ve gotten comfortable in front of my computer video and this was just a spontaneous moment that captures what we do for hours. Puppet Elizabeth is my daughter’s baby in this particular skit and an interview follows that covers topics such as feelings, lions, and food. Hint: don’t watch me (the adult), keep your eyes on the puppet and the 3 year old.
I love this video and not because I’m in it. Or because it was partly taped at my studio. Or because I know the singer/songwriter and love her as a human being. Or because I also know the videographer and think he rocks it out. But because the song makes me happy and the people in the video make me want to dance and because this music has a message about love that still needs to be sung…a lot.
“Gina” a client of mine, was a really lovely, likable human being but she found herself alone and isolated much of the time. She worked hard on her own issues but found connection mysteriously out of reach in terms of solid, stable groups of friends and community. At the same time, she has fears and old patterns around making herself vulnerable, reaching out, getting close to others because she judged her own feelings as “too much” and “too intense” and “too different” than everyone else. This created a catch 22 situation; she desperately wanted connection but wouldn’t take a risk towards it for fear of being rejected. Traumatic rejection, of course went way back into her family history and her whole defense system was organized around avoiding the same experience.
So…in comes Peer Counseling (often referred to as Co-counseling. I use Peer Counseling because it is my own version of the Co-counseling form), a practice of sitting with another person, splitting the time (for example 20 minutes each) and offering a non-judgmental container for good listening and being held in high regard. One person listens and the other person shares and then you switch. Skills around emotional release are taught in Peer Counseling to help your client (the person sharing) to allow feelings to be expressed. Feelings that have been held in, shamed, dissociated, and shut down are invited to bubble up and be shared. Clients learn to identify core feelings such as anger, fear, shame, happiness, and sadness. Release of these feelings can come through crying, shaking, sweating, yawning, laughing, raging, or talking in an insightful way. Feelings that seem to be about your present life are also encouraged to be explored as something historical for you as well, something from your childhood, something that has been in your body for a long time. Counselors get skilled at asking how current feelings and problems remind clients of “old” material so that a pathway from the past to the present is made. Connecting childhood issues with present day issues is a huge foot in the door for shifting life long stuck patterns.
I encouraged Gina to join some Peer Counseling classes. This was a big step for her. She had grown so used to hiding her pain, hiding her loneliness, that stepping out into a weekly class felt like a big pattern breaker in itself. She began slowly learning the skills of Peer Counseling- how to “hold space” for another person who is sharing feelings and to allow her own emotions and issues to be witnessed at a peer level. This is an essential aspect to note: creating a peer practice of support offers a whole other set of benefits as compared to working with a therapist.
1) It levels the playing field and creates an equal relationship of support and connection
2) It heals peer-to-peer wounds by creating a very clear container where a certain level of intimacy and respect can be expected
3) It empowers both client and counselor to take charge of their own healing processes. Peer counselors can counsel as much or as little as they need. Weekly or daily check-ins with your Peer Counselors can be built into your lifestyle so that you can lean into the experience of being heard, supported, seen, and being cared for.
Gina’s shame around her too-muchness began to shift because she found that the people listening to her were enthusiastic and compassionate. The structure of Peer Counseling contradicted her patterns of being rejected. She began to take the judgment off of the fact that she had so much to share, so much to express. This was in part because she saw others expressing at the same level and partly because her own shut down mechanisms has begun to soften and move. Also, she began working directly on her historic material around rejection. She released deep, old feelings about neglect and at the same time found her counselors present and understanding of what she had lived through. This began a shift in Gina’s ability to get close and stay close to others.
Peer Counseling is not a cure-all or a fix-it plan. It is a PRACTICE that supports human, heart-centered connection. It is a lifestyle of giving and receiving loving kindness. It invites the range of expression that has been systematically oppressed by our culture and continues to be. It is a radical departure from the divide-and-conquer structures that trickle down from societies power structures (ok, that’s my next blog entry…don’t get me started). It offers us a chance to experience the profound restorative and creative benefits of expressing how we feel! If we can’t feel, we can’t really feel our lives. If we are isolated, we cannot thrive. If we are silenced, we cannot give what we need to give. If we can’t express fully, we cannot fully love.
Rythea Lee is the co-director of the Zany Angels Dance Theatre Company and an Inner Bonding® Counselor with a private practice for 18 years. She has been a professional artist her whole adult life, including Performance Art, visual art, her book called “Trauma into Truth: Gutsy Healing and Why It’s Worth It” and her CD called “Something Knows You.” Co-Counseling/Peer Counseling is one of the great loves of her life. Her next workshop in Peer Counseling is December 14th, 2014. See website above.
I have an unusual relationship to my spiritual guides. Don’t roll your eyes, you’re just jealous. I don’t know what else to call them, my spiritual friends? My higher selves? My Smurfs? (haha, cracked myself up with that one). Whatever, the thing is, I talk to them. Daily, and they literally show me a map of my spiritual landscape and say YOU ARE HERE. They tell me things like:
“You are scraping the bottom of the trauma you have lived through. You are up against a particular memory sequence of being taken advantage of and everything in your current life is hitting that same wound. You think it’s now, you think that your landlord is getting away with something shitty (yes, my guides use the word shitty) but the truth it, this is old honey. The charge is old. Work early on it, my dear, go back and FEEL THIS and the release of those feelings will clear this up.”
And I’m like OHHHHH, I just thought my car mechanic was a fucking asshole but now, I get it, I feel taken advantage of all over the globe because my parents fucked me over and got away with it. They murdered my innocence and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Ok, I guess I haven’t hit the bottom of that WORST THING EVER….hmmmm, more to feel, darn.
Once I know where I am, what I’m working with, I feel grounded in myself. I know how to get support now and work on my old material. That doesn’t mean I particularly like the healing lifestyle but man, I’m good at it. And you must know, it works people. It fucking works.
The other day, my friend cried about her Mother abandoning her and she cried so hard, she practically threw up, and then her ribs froze up and her back went out. The next day, despite the pain the night before, she felt a freedom she had never known before. We both agreed that some people spend their whole lives avoiding those feelings and it just CRUSHES their joy for years and years and years (we’d done it too so we were talking from experience as well). Then, you do it, you get help, you dive in, and it hurts like hell but you realize, once you are there in the agony, that you are deeply longing to grieve. I mean DYING to grieve and be held there. Just dying to feel what could never be felt even though you’d spent a lifetime trying not to feel it.
SO. My spiritual guides keep telling me that freedom is coming my way and I can taste it. They keep pointing me towards profoundly hard choices and changes and stepping out of the norm of how people live and behave and think. They are showing me that the spiritual life is not about security. It’s not about comfort. It’s not finally getting successful enough to fit in. It’s not about any of the things we are taught and brainwashed to follow. It’s some kind of constant radical departure from what is socially acceptable and safe.
Love will rip your life to shreds. If love is your priority, then love will slay anything that is not love. You thought your health made you happy and worthy, your family, your partner, your friends, your job, your art, your stuff, your good looks? At some point, love will strip you of those things and leave you naked and alone and you’ll be forced to ask the question, is love still here?
Love will be there but not with the packaging you are used to. In fact you might not recognize that love is still wrapped around you and singing your heart a lullaby.
I am diving into the eye of the storm because that is what it means to truly live. I am following where I am guided to go, though it is terrifying and requires me to leap and leap and leap over the edge. Love is all that is left in the end and the end is always right here. Goodbye security, I never could never make you stay. Hello death, in the form of all my lost emotions, I am coming for you and I know where you are hiding…
For me, my daughter points the way. All day long, she points me in the direction of opening. She shows me how to do it. She thrives at a level way beyond my usual, daily suffering. She reaches towards me with her big, fearless heart and says “Go this way” and when I follow her, things get better. That’s just the truth. My job is to not interrupt her expressions of joy, wonder, curiosity, anger, sadness, or peace but to pay attention to where she needs me to validate and care for what she feels and to share in it. Be with her in it.
Today, she insisted on an hour and half dance party! I’m serious, she MADE me dance for an hour and a half. What a drill sergaent. She forced me to do improvisation and then aerobics. When I tried to sit down, she would point at me and say “Dance, dance now” and I had no choice. So there we were, sweaty, singing, rolling on the rug, then going into full out boogie moves until she finally let me stop. She came over to me and put her arm around my shoulders (keep in mind, she’s 2 and a 1/2 years old), she looked me in the eye and said three times “You’re my Mama. You’re my Mama. You’re my Mama.” I’m pretty sure she was telling me that I had done well for her today. At least that’s how I took it.
VIDEO ON THIS
When I was 24, my life, as I knew it, shattered. I had my first flashback of childhood sexual abuse, attempted to speak up about it to my family of origin, and was promptly kicked to the curb. I was set loose into what felt like a violent, insane world. Before the flashback, life looked one way, and after the flashback, I was, quite literally, living in a changed version of reality. This reality meant that the people I thought were safe were actually my abusers and the whole construct that I had imagined was supporting me was now, gone. I was alone and falling. Nothing was as it seemed. My own body became a minefield of horror. Sleeping, eating, moving, walking, working, thinking, talking, being- was a challenge so as not to explode into unrelenting traumatic memory.
I did not, however, have a nervous breakdown. This is because even though the new reality broke my heart, brought me into a non-functioning state of terror, ripped my trust for people clear out of my body, I felt sane. I was an utter mess but finally sane. I arrived, amidst the chaos, as myself.
My life has proven that the saying “the truth will set you free” is true.
For many years, it seemed like each moment required a constant level of hanging on. I felt so broken…and yet the sanity got stronger and stronger. For me, sanity was self-love and it grew.
There was a lot of resistance. I wanted the trauma to end, the memories, the losses, the fears, the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the projections onto people I knew and loved. I was so pissed that I couldn’t get my act together even when it had been 4, 6, 8 years of therapy, journaling, support groups, expressive arts, and constant practices in dance, meditation, yoga, and visual art.
I think it was around the age of 32 that I made a decision. I decided to stop trying to get better and to just accept the fact that I had had enough trauma to possibly require life long healing. I decided to live a healing life and stop waiting for the healing to end. I stopped trying to be “normal” and “better” and “over it.” Though I had little reflection from the world I lived in that my healing process was meaningful, I did it anyway. I chose it for real.
The choice to ACCEPT and build a healing lifestyle required coming out of denial about how bad the abuse was. It was bad enough that it would require a lifetime of attention, care, and support from other people. I chose to accept that because so far, it was true. Also, choosing the healing life had already transformed my every day into something worth loving. Through facing my abuse and working with it daily, I was able to find a career I love, a community that became my family of choice, form a dance/theatre company that fed my artistic needs, and slowly create a nuclear family of my own. I COULD NOT DENY THAT COMING OUT OF DENIAL had allowed me to save the only life I could save.
Facing the truth and having the feelings associated with the truth is a lifestyle, it is not an event. It is not a phase. It is not a quick fix. It is not a poison that needs purging. It is a lifestyle, like a garden that requires sun, rain, and seeds so that the crops can grow high and bright and strong. My advice is: turn towards the pain and open to the quiet truths that are waiting in the soil. If you are scared to do it, get help.
Photo of author and her husband and daughter
Gutsy Healing 