I am reading a superb new book on trauma called The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by David J. Morris.  I heard about the book on the Diane Rehm show.  I have been intensively studying trauma and the treatment modality of Somatic Experiencing for the past two years.  That study is one of the ways that I am trying to hold my own heart.

One of the things that Morris writes about is how trauma disrupts our sense of time and place.  Our nervous system is in the past while our bodies are here.  The irresolution of that state is what perpetrates the trauma state.  He says that with trauma, we learn that there are things that break us.  Define us.  I do not want to be defined by my traumas, my losses.  And yet, to a fairly great extent, that is what happened to me two years ago.  I lost my daughter.  I had not seen her for two years, up until two weeks ago.

Seeing her – and one precious and priceless moment in particular, where I saw her drop out of everything and place her hand softly on a horse’s face – is lifting some of the dark heaviness that has been with me for so long.  More than that.  I know that I can hold my love for her like the Buddha holds this heart.  In doing that, I am holding my own heart.

I am missing my daughter like a phantom limb – pain living in the tissue of absence.  Phantom limb pain used to be called a sensory ghost. It is a way in which the nervous system refuses to accept the absence of what was there.

She has become a ghost – an apparition that haunts all of us who knew her.  In Norman Doige’s book, The Brain That Changes Itself, he tells us that for those who have lost a limb, “Long after the body has healed, the pain system is still firing and the acute pain has developed an afterlife.”   Losing a daughter is like an amputation – there is no real turning off the pain signals.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen speaks about a way in which the nervous system can regenerate.   What happens when more information comes in than you can process?   To save our lives, we refuse the information.  She says that the trauma goes back into the tissues until it can be processed.  When we do not work to figure it out or change it, little by little, the body-mind finds a way for it to be absorbed.  We do this by choosing the easiest path, which I take to mean waiting the long wait as the system re-calibrates.

When I was studying the Sedona Method, the suggestion was made that when the storm hits, don’t try to ride those waves, but become the sea, dive under and wait it out in the quiet depths of the ocean floor.

Does that help?  Yes and no and then again yes.  Nothing makes us more vulnerable, more tender than our children.  Nothing. Is the pain less searing?  Yes.  Is it gone, no.  The difference is that more and more, I experience myself not as the pain itself but as the awareness that holds it, one breathing moment at a time.