Exposure exercises can take myriad forms. Turning toward, instead of avoiding or covering over difficult situations, feelings, and experiences is frequently the active ingredient in trauma recovery. Finding creative, life-giving ways to turn toward can be a powerful experience for all
For Review Only
Rewire Your Brain
•
87 concerned. One patient, a visual artist, calls this her Rumpelstiltskin work: saving her life by “weaving straw into gold.”Another kind of artist, a professional dancer named Juan, lost his life partner to AIDS. Juan was devastated by this death. He plunged into a deep depression and felt a powerful urge to turn away from life itself. Without his soulmate and love of his life, Juan saw no point in living. Sensing Juan’s anguish one of his elderly teachers took him aside and offered to hear anything Juan might want to share. Juan opened up, weeping and pouring out all his grief, loneliness, anger, and despair.
His mentor sat quietly, nodding and listening to it all. When Juan grew quiet the old man took Juan’s hand, looked him in the eye, and said softly, “Put it into the dance.”
“I did,” Juan told us, “and it saved my life.” It also greatly deepened his understanding and expression of his art. As Juan’s heart reopened he began feeling the music his art physically expressed in an entirely new way. His students, audience, and critics noticed this shift and more and more people sought out his work. Embracing instead of turning away from the loss of his partner paradoxically brought tremendous new relationship into Juan’s life. It also put a new frame around this loss.
Memories of his partner now produced healthy negative emotions such as sadness, and healthy positive emotions such as gratitude and appre-ciation. Juan began accepting and once again loving the big picture of his life past, present, and future.
Mary, the woman who as a girl was abused by her grandfather, was a painter. For years she had avoided going into her studio. A part of her knew that to be happy she needed to paint. Another part kept turn-ing away from the openheartedness such work would require. Mary was tremendously angry about what had happened to her and frequently felt worthless as well. Opening herself to experiencing more of these feel-ings felt like a very bad idea. Her worthlessness had seeped into her artist soul as well. She continually asked herself, What if I start painting again and it’s no good?
When we met Mary her best effort to date was sitting on the
For Review Only
88
•
Rewire Your Brainproverbial fence. She did not completely relinquish her sense of herself as an artist but distracted herself from painting by telling herself she had “things to do first”—household chores, paying bills, cleaning out her garage, and so on. Neither did she completely turn away from feel-ings of anger and hopelessness, nor turn entirely toward them. So too she held onto her husband—at arm’s length. Months, then years passed and Mary became increasingly unhappy, hopeless, and isolated from others and from her true self.
After hearing Mary’s story we helped her see how avoidance was keeping her stuck emotionally, relationally, and artistically. She used hidden wisdom and price it and bravely decided to turn toward all these fronts in one fell swoop. She went into her studio at last and came back two weeks later with a large rolled canvas under her arm. We helped her unroll it and stood back to absorb it. What we saw took our breath away and brought tears to our eyes. Mary’s entire past, present, and future lay before us in all its heartbreaking form, feeling, and complex-ity. Mary took us through all the aspects of her creation, explaining the connections between its parts and the emotion associated with each.
Mary had created a masterpiece. For the first time she’d pulled together her entire life, spinning it into gold. The act of producing this work was itself an important part of the picture; she had turned her struggle into performance art. As we processed this with her we saw two more important aspects of what lay before us: First, this perfor-mance could continue for the rest of her life—and Mary’s happiness might well depend on it doing so. Second, for this Christian artist, this performance masterpiece had spiritual connotations. Mary believed that human life was God’s masterpiece. She began to consider including herself in this view. Instead of seeing herself as worthless or damaged goods, her work opened the door to experiencing herself and the big picture of her particular life as one of God’s great works.
We’ve been tremendously inspired by the work of Juan, Mary, and many others. Writers have produced wonderful writing. Photographers have made heartbreaking images. Singers have written songs that touch
For Review Only
Rewire Your Brain
•
89 the hearts of those who hear them. These creations have regularly been the turning point in these people’s recovery from trauma. These brave men and women decided to spin their personal straw into gold.In doing so they moved on from being passive victims of their experi-ences to being active creators of new life. In this regard they are godlike indeed. We are humbled before such work the way we are humbled by crimson sunsets, starry nights, and other treasures that come to us from the very heart of the universe.
EXPERIMENT XVII
•
Into Your DanceStep One: Take out your lab book, date this entry, and write down some feeling, memory, or situation you’ve been turning away from that you’d like now to turn toward and address. Write a number between 1 and 100 that expresses how afraid you feel of that thing right now.
Step Two: Brainstorm ways of spinning this straw into gold. If you have a knack for words, you might write a poem or story. If music is close to your heart you could compose a song. So, too, dance or other performance, painting, weaving, woodworking, or virtually any art form can provide a venue in which to “spin.”
Step Three: Start spinning your magical creation!
Step Four: Re-rate your fear of this symptom.
SYMPTOM CLUSTER: NUMBNESS, INDIFFERENCE, LACK OF MOTIVATION
One best effort to date the brain might respond to trauma with is turn-ing down or turnturn-ing off emotions. Unfeelturn-ing may appear preferable to feeling great fear, anger, worthlessness, or despair. Our brains might even consider numbness to be lifesaving. In a numbed out condition
For Review Only
90
•
Rewire Your Brainwe can continue to live our lives and do the things that must be done to survive. This strategy is similar to our brain’s decision in a physical crisis. While trying to escape a life threat it might be wise not to feel physical damage taking place. This might have been the decision Rick’s brain made when he was shot in combat yet felt no pain until he was out of harm’s way. Physical and emotional numbness might be an excel-lent short-term strategy.
Indifference and a lack of motivation might likewise contain tre-mendous hidden wisdom. Not caring about people and things protects us from hurt and disappointment. If we’ve experienced others as uncar-ing or overtly hostile, or experienced life as consistently withholduncar-ing good things from us, indifference makes a deep kind of sense. Likewise if our efforts have consistently not produced the desired outcomes, conserving energy by no longer trying seems a reasonable response.
Behavioral researchers have induced “learned helplessness” in lab ani-mals by consistently thwarting their efforts to influence their environ-ment in positive ways. At the end of these experienviron-ments such animals curl up in a corner of their cages and stop making any effort whatso-ever. Their brains seem to have priced it and decided to conserve any remaining energy for another day.
However successful they are in the short term, these distancing strategies come with a price tag. When our brains turn down or off their emotional centers, positive feelings also get dimmed or eliminated.
At this time in our evolution we don’t have the ability to block one class of feelings and remain truly open to some other class. If we walk the world with our ears stopped up to reduce the chances of hearing painful noises and harsh words, it’s unlikely we’ll hear birdsong, music, or words of love. Protective emotional numbing will necessarily turn down or off positive emotions such as joy, love, optimism, curiosity, and motivation.
We’ll assume you’ve done the usual Hidden Wisdom and Price It experiments on numbing, indifference, or lack of motivation and you’re ready to start feeling again. Feeling everything, as that’s the only deal on
For Review Only
Rewire Your Brain