I had a dream when I was twenty-six and suffering from depression and anxiety due to developmental trauma (sometimes called complex-ptsd), which was not “a thing” back then.
In the dream, I was a little boy in my grandmother’s kitchen back there in Appalachia, a few miles from ground zero of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, where I grew up.
I was trying very hard to make it out of this poverty at twenty-six, with two kids, working full-time, and going to graduate school in Memphis, Tennessee.
I was a long way from that place in the mountains, but my body was a raging fire with the splitting forces of fight, flight & freeze always hijacking my discipline and willpower to work my ass off.
I didn’t know how to BE in my body. My body was traumatizing to itself.
But, I was willing to face all of me and get to the bottom of it. I didn’t quit even though I quit many times.
The dream in my grandmother’s kitchen has remained with me all these years.
A visitor in the dream told me I would make it through this long journey. He said, “You will survive this pain.”
But, he also told me a second message: “You have to learn to pass through suffering.” “Through” being the key word he emphasized.
Healing my trauma-shaped brain and nervous system and learning to pass through that kind of suffering meant I had to find the relational therapy models where another human being could help co-regulate the extreme trauma-emotions in my body.
Through resonating, attuned therapists who knew how to dance with the trauma in my body, I learned how to allow calming, soothing presence “be with” without “fixing” these traumatized states..
I have lived that dream-journey now of passing through suffering. It can be traveled.
You can become all of the parts of you that might have been haunting to you up to this point in your life.
There is a relational art to healing trauma and you know you’re with the right type of therapy when . ALL of you is welcome to the dance of the relationship.
But, we need help in becoming and integrating all of the parts of who we are, especially the highly reactive side of us. We need help passing through the pain in the form of a relational type of presence who can help regulate our suffering so that we can pass through it and transmute it.