The Way Back

by Mikele Rauch, LMFT

Why should I trust you?

What do YOU get out of this?

Are you a loser like me?

Or are you a "rescuer?”

Why would you want to deal with me? 

I do not trust you if you care. 

I don't trust myself...

Moral Injury...the betrayal of what is right by someone who holds legitimate authority in a high stakes situation over another.¹ It is the enduring impact of doing harm, failing to protect, or bearing witness to an act of violence, depravity or evil upon another that goes against one's own deeply held beliefs and values.

Jonathan Shay was a gifted psychiatrist who worked with Veteran survivors of war. He coined the term moral injury: those who suffered PTSD, and had done harm inadvertently or consciously because of the confusing, traumatizing hell of combat. The post-traumatic stress disorder, Dr. Shay explained, is the primary injury, the uncomplicated injury. Moral injury is the infection.² 

It is often the story of many a survivor who has been groomed, tricked, or trafficked by someone they depended on to do harm to another because of religion, family loyalty, "love," or sadistic cruelty.

This is a moral injury of the heart, body and mind, hemorrhaging the soul of its essence. If it is a part of your story, it may be difficult at first to calculate how deeply you have been affected, not just the confusing memory of what you did or had to do, but how it impacts your relationships and the sense of who you are now.    

If you witnessed another's abuse but were shamed to secrecy to survive or protect, you may take the blame that you did not intervene. The vicarious complicity of shielding the perpetrator because of ignorance, loyalty, or fear can transfer the weight of the abuse from the perpetrator to you, because you could not or did not stop it.

Blame is a significant part of moral injury. Someone must be blamed for the loss that you or others suffered because of your participation or presence. He’s to blame, they’re to blame, it’s to blame. But certainly, I'm to blame. You may have believed this for so long that you are unable to assign the true blame to the one who put you up to it. The hardest piece of this is a toxic unrelenting shame, the belief that you are forever flawed, unworthy of love or forgiveness. It is also why many survivors reenact their own abuse by repeating the conditions of the harm done to them upon themselves again and again.

Perhaps you deny yourself what would bring you joy or repair. You may even forego opportunities for respite or safety that could offer a possibility to heal. You may have no sense of how to be intimate without fear of harming another, even your own children.

But if you cannot find your creativity or hope, or you expect to be humiliated or exploited—if you simply resort to isolation, could it also be the result of the perpetrator's own sick self-contempt thrust upon you?  

Can you remember who you were before this betrayal? Can you garner some understanding for yourself in the face of all you have been through?  

You may roll your eyes if I recommend that you have compassion for yourself. But you might start by at least having some respect for the struggle of the younger you that you see behind your eyes when you look in the mirror. Remember all you went through then to survive when you had far fewer tools than you have today?

You might consider finding a trusted friend who takes you as you are, perhaps a sweet pet who loves you unconditionally, and good therapy that can move you forward. There is a way to trust again safely and honestly and find a way to break free.

It will also go a long way to have a community of survivors who really see you in your full self and don't patronize you. You need people that let you grieve for the harm done without offering platitudes, because they have been there themselves. Kindness like this is what you so readily give to others. Community can help you tenderly touch the part that struggles to forgive yourself, as you restore your heart.

There is a way back. The brain and the soul have a remarkable ability to heal and recover a connection to your heart. And besides, that tender heart of yours is still very much intact, or you would not be reading this...taking back yourself.

¹Achilles in Vietnam, Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Jonathan Shay, 1995.

²Ibid.

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