Listening to Silence

by Mikele Rauch, LMFT

But there comes a time—perhaps this is one of them—
when we must take ourselves more seriously or die,
when we must pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we've moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow ourselves to silence...

Adrienne Rich

Moving through the pain of this life, you inevitably confront your past. 

Either you repeat strategies for survival you have always used—even when they do not work—or you take a risk and try something else. You see it repeated again and again in history, in families, and in yourself. You contract. You open. You snap back to small. Change is particularly hard in response to pain. 

Survival responses.  

Dissociation—losing track of time or self—is nature's most basic numbing response to pain. Rage, compulsive attachment to abusive patterns and relationships, drugs, sex, and addiction have been embedded in the nervous system as strategies for survival. "Laziness" or compulsive overwork have become learned cultural responses to inherited trauma. Shame is often forged from exploitation, profound neglect, and the damage instilled by a perpetrator or a system. All of these responses temporarily mask the fear and self loathing that are remnants of abuse.

Beyond your old response cycles.

Consider another possibility beyond the endless cycles you repeat. Can you cross the chasm to the unknown and step into air?

Can you ask hard questions about everything you have ever learned or believed about yourself?

Can you wonder about your purpose and your course?

You may have to turn back the pages of your pain with more kindness than you usually exhibit inside to see yourself anew.

Maybe you’ve always depended on someone else for advice or rules or dogmas. You learned not to trust your own heart—your own wisdom. You test the waters with new input, new resources, new community.   

Perhaps music or words crowd out the sense of loneliness and memories. So you grit your teeth, turn up the volume, and ruck through the mud with your gadgets, podcasts, soundtracks, and distractions.

But what if you disenthrall yourself to a deeper listening? What if you simply stop and listen?

Silence.

You stare into space. The mind is racing. Lists, ideas, grievances, regrets. You grapple. You run the same scenario over and over. You sit blank. You may resist this sitting. You reach for your phone and scroll. It is a habit you find hard to break. It is difficult remembering how hard it has been to be alone, to feel the grief, the isolation, and the endless inner voices of shame and self loathing that loop again and again.  

But listen again. 

There is a truth that has always lived inside, long before you were conditioned not to trust yourself or your own wisdom, your own creative soul. Quiet in the noise. 

When you open the window of change, in community and in solitude, it will take courage to outgrow the snakeskin of the past and expose yourself to new skin. You must be tender and fierce in the process.

Life is a series of these explorations. You cannot wait until you are no longer afraid to grieve what has been lost. You might just dig deeper into the ground, not knowing just yet what's growing under the earth.

Listen.  

Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo,
so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window,
when I can see what I couldn’t see before
through the glass of my most battered dream
I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind
and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.

Andrea Gibson

2024

We are all of us, together standing in the dark, waiting

to hear the heartbeat of a new beginning, waiting to

find our voice and become the people who our

ancestors promised we would become. ¹

                Patty Krawec 

Anishinaabe Reserve

Today, the earth makes a slight turn in time. The dawn is ripe with promise and resolve. This day I greet you with a heart full of fierce optimism, despite the conditions we face on the planet.  

The world is struggling. At this moment, many may dance with their eyes shut, hearts closed to its pain. But imagine if we did not look away. This is not easy, especially for survivors who have been abused or neglected.  

Today, I’d like to share with you an especially poignant story about Dawn Prince-Hughes, a trauma survivor and anthropologist who identifies as autistic. She had struggled all through her life to communicate and connect with people where she was ostracized and isolated. She had become involved with the daily life of gorillas, who in many ways mirrored the way she related to humans. During a very difficult time in her life, Dawn came to witness again and again that even in captivity, the gorillas had the capacity to empathize, even with the species that put them behind bars. 

Congo was a captured silverback gorilla who had been abused as a baby and taken from his murdered mother. Yet from the bars of his pen, he could see that Dawn was falling apart, unable to articulate her suffering with anyone. 

In her writings, Dawn describes her extraordinary experience with Congo.

"He rushed over and searched my face intently. My vision blurred, and tears spilled out of my eyes and dropped onto my clothes and the barrier between us. We looked at each other. He saw in me what I could never see in others. He moved toward me, put his massive shoulder against the window and motioned with his hand for me to lay my head there. Why should this animal, living in a prison of human making, care about my pain? It was the foundation of his inner dignity to care..."²

Having the inner dignity to care is the essence of compassion...

Imagine if you will, a possibility to create a space inside for fear, fury, and loss—holding compassion for the other, no matter which side one sits.

Imagine honoring the struggle and dignity of your own life and those you love, including those you do not understand or agree with. For a survivor, it may be a challenge to break out of the prison of one's familiar sense of safety to envision such a concept. This does not mean engaging in unsafe or toxic situations, but reckoning with a deeper understanding how and why humans do what they do.

Imagine not repeating what has been done to you, or to your ancestors. This is the power of standing your ground without retribution, activating the courageous work of change and possibility instead. Our own journey of recovery can lay the seeds that nourish the earth with new life for what lies ahead.  

Yes.  Imagine that.

Happy New Year 2024.

Mikele

1. Becoming Kin, An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. Patti Krawec

2. Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism. Dawn Prince-Hughes, Ph.D

Hatred: Theirs or Yours

Let it come

like wildflowers, suddenly, because

the field must have it: wildpeace.

- Yahuda Amichai

Unless we are without much contact across the planet, we live in a time of serious anxiety and stress. All over the world, across our communities and perhaps within our own families, we are witnessing or directly experiencing an unleashing of frayed and violent regression to hatred.

Almost every survivor has experienced hatred in some form. Perhaps you have known the blanket of fear, powerlessness and rage if you are the one where it is directed. Or perhaps, if you are honest, you have felt an almost aphrodisiac giddiness if you are the one directing it to an other, especially if you act on it with violence or active vitriol.

Hatred is a fever. You may be a product of trauma of racial and religious oppression, or your own upbringing and personal history of abuse. You may understand hatred toward those who are other, whether you know them or not. Or more personally, you may harbor visceral contempt toward those who have abused you or your communities. Whatever harm has been done, there is a history of bigotry or violence either as a target or as a perpetrator of the hatred. You witness this in a world of severe political and civic unrest, with raw generalities of hatred and violence toward whole groups of people. You yourself may be a casualty of racial or religious aggression and violence, or the personal experience of demoralizing abuse and defilement and denial within your own family.

The inevitable consequences. Hatred can overtake your mind and especially your heart. This poison can create a sense or fantasy of entitlement to retribution. It is not necessarily justice.

It is almost impossible to be unaffected by hatred in all its forms. It can weaken the immune system, raise blood pressure and affect the ability to rest. It can create disease, depression, addiction or a learned reenactment of internalized self loathing. It can destroy a sense of one's own humanity as it reverberates back on us. This is not only a remnant of hatred, but an inevitable result of living inside its toxicity.

It is not an easy thing to release yourself from this. To say to a survivor, "You can choose to let it go," is easier said than done. But you may already know that if you choose to hold onto the armor of hatred, there can be profound consequences that will not serve you breaking free.

The journey of healing. It can take a lot of time to heal from the direct experience of hatred or the memories that still live in your body. It is not enough to simply remove yourself, although it may be crucial to keep a distance. Space is both a physical and a cognitive reality. You may not be able to relocate geographically, or easily reconfigure your neighborhood or family, unless the situation is so intolerable it warrants a move.

There needs to be a place to be free enough not only to rant and rave, but to be still and quiet. It is important to find a community that is safe enough to do both, where you can think things through, and get or give understanding, and to release some of the anger, the deep fear or hurt you carry.

Letting it go. It is essential to consider what it means to let go of hatred. Often you are asked to forgive. But forgiveness is often misconstrued in response to those who have harmed you. It is often far more complicated and nuanced to cover with platitudes, and too easily glossed over even in therapy or in pastoral care.

Recovery from hatred is a journey of grief. It takes time and respect for all the rage and loss, pain and betrayal that has transpired in your life. But what is possible, albeit some work--is to find a way to let go and release yourself from the aggression you have suffered and embodied.

Building compassion. One way that I have found helpful comes from an ancient Buddhist practice called tonglen. Tonglen involves confronting pain, and in fact, opening the heart. It appears to be the opposite of how you might ever imagine you could ever deal with pain or hold yourself together. In this practice, you breathe in the suffering of others—even of those who have harmed or hated you. Yes. You take it in, instead of avoiding it. It is a way to confront the pain head-on and open the heart. It means acknowledging the pain in yourself and the other, and then hold a space of kindness around the injury instead of using the armor of hate. Then-and this is challenging at first, you breathe out the fear and resistance, sending calm and nourishment to the source of suffering. At first, such a practice seems almost impossible, because the mind is often hard-wired to feel tightness, anger, or revulsion in response to painful circumstances or difficult people. But tonglen is a practice of gradual steps. It is a practice, not simply a magical formula. But just the intention to breathe like this can increase compassion for yourself and for the situation, as impossible as it may be.

To let go of the crust of hatred can actually strengthen, not weaken us. That does not mean everything is fine. You still must set boundaries, trust your gut, and make a space for self care and self defense if need be. But practicing such compassion, or at least respect for yourself in this process can impact the way you preserve your feelings towards others.

Kindness. It takes time to heal and to think things through. But it is an important part of the journey of grief and fierce compassion to restore the love inside that has been lost or never felt at all. Perhaps this is a road to heal, practicing the wildpeace of kindness instead of hate...

-Mikele Rauch

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore...

--Naomi Shihab Nye

Recovery After Betrayal... The Power of Community

I don’t know you.

I don’t trust you.

How could I believe you?

Why would I trust you?

I want to trust.

I want to believe you.

I want to believe myself.

Betrayal: when the ones on which a person depends for survival significantly violate that person' s well-being...

Betrayal can profoundly devastate your safety. This experience can be embedded deep inside as a template for the future, holding you back, keeping you apart, afraid to connect.

Betrayal can happen when the details of the past provoke a reaction in the moment. Memory and present experience can feel mercurial. The mind can resonate and then forget in dissociation, like the quicksand of voice or faces after a dream. The mind may be flooded with a force field of feeling with no explanation. Current events or the memory of trauma can be in a smell, a sound, a mental snapshot; you see with the nose; you hear with the tongue. You feel in silence or chaos with a sense of neglect and abandonment.

The feeling of betrayal will show up in triggers that seem to come out of nowhere when even a fragment of the past shows up: a word, a gesture, a hint of patronizing. Family, partners, institutions, countries, churches, organizations may have betrayed you. You have to reckon with the collision of confusion and dependence that make it so hard to trust again or have conditioned you to continue to choose people that recreate your past. Then if things fall apart, you may automatically take the blame or simply retreat back into yourself. Sometimes it seems easier to self sabotage or take the blame yourself than to consider who was actually responsible for not protecting or responding to you.

Perhaps you have tried far too many times to find the key to feel safe after the betrayal of abuse. EMDR, therapy, yoga, self help books...drugs. There have been so many moments, so many starts and stops. Perhaps you have been waiting for a long time to blurt out the whole story. Maybe you cannot say what you went through because often there are no words.

You recognize that healing will not be simple because this process of recovery isn't just about the sexual abuse. It is about all the other elements of tumult and betrayals that may have made up your life. The lies, the secrets, the shame imposed by the ones who harmed you may still caution you to keep quiet. Maybe you have had to lie or diminish your story just to be sure that whoever listens to you can bear a piece of the truth. Perhaps you have left therapy because it was so hard to move forward, or you sensed you were not really seen. Maybe you could not assess whether the therapist was for real. If they had bad boundaries, it compromised or destroyed your safety yet again. You may wonder if it is worth the risk to find another way get out of this hole of loneliness and fear.

You just want to heal. So, you persist.

But the journey is truly worth every stop and start. It may not be easy to find a professional who is capable and committed to your recovery who you can count on to allow you to be vulnerable and powerful at the same time. You will have to ask hard questions, check your intuition, test the waters of safety and truth, and remain fierce and gentle with yourself in the process.

It also can take some time to find a community of support and learn to trust others again, but this is one of the most important parts of recovery. It is a series of small steps out of your comfort zone to look for a group where you finally feel seen and safe. You may be surprised who shows up to be the ones you most trust.

Eventually you begin to connect the dots because you have others to relate to that share your struggles. Even in confusion or clarity, you move in and through fear on a new path forward because you are not alone.

Something can open.

Respect. Movement. Stillness. Words. Push back. Pull in. Deconstruct. Remember. Recreate. Rework. Repeat. Laugh. Listen.

Connect.

We are out here.