This was the last of six lectures I had the opportunity to listen to on January 4th in the presence of the group of ten women that I am traveling this healing journey with.
One way to think about the gospel is that it is God's one sweeping, overarching movement toward ultimate repair of ultimate rupture. The challenge of allowing yourself to be loved begins with secure attachment and what happens when that is created successfully.
When we hear about relational rupture we see it as a negative thing. But the very nature of our trauma means that we mis-imagine the original intention of rupture. Let's look back at the Biblical narrative. We are people of the second wound. The first wound happened in Genesis 2 when God takes the woman out of Adam's rib. The first wound is designed with something good coming!
Our traumatic wounding makes us think that wounds are all bad, but the truth is: repairing ruptures is a normal developmental part of secure attachment.
Children don't naturally have a lot of braking systems available to them. They have some inbuilt braking systems (like a reaction to a hot stove). But a child requires the external brain of a parent who provides an additional brake for a child when the child is moving too fast toward danger and is unaware. A parent may stop a child or redirect a child. The parent can slow down a child and their breathing system or heart rate just by their presence. These are natural systems that are built into the human state that allows us to go and to slow.
Remember Jimmy in the previous lecture playing airplanes before bed? His dad is helping him to slow down slowly. A parent joins the child in an attuned fashion which really helps a child learn how to apply the clutch.
Our greatest distress as human beings is not just the experience of pain. It is our pain in isolation. When we experience grief by ourselves, we are disconnected. We are people who can anticipate other people's intention.
It is not good for the man to be alone. We are always longing for the intention of others to long for us.
This is what it means to be someone looking for someone looking for us, especially in our distress. We are not really consciously aware of this. When a parent responds to a child's distress, the child is calmed. A child wants to know, "when I am in distress, comfort will come. It is on the way!"
But for many children, they don't know this. And that is where trauma comes into play.
There are three kinds of ruptures:
1. Benign Ruptures: The first ruptures occur when there is no malintent but something happens. Maybe I'm coming around the corner and someone bumps into me and I spill my coffee. They apologize. It was not intended to harm. There is a rupture, but I quickly recover from this. Maybe a mother is with an infant and they walk out of the room and the infant becomes upset that the parent has moved away. When the parent comes back to the infant, the rupture is repaired. These are part of the natural course of human's lives together.
2. Limit-setting ruptures: Parents, also, have to help the child develop by setting limits (you can have milk but not juice). The parent is creating an opportunity for the child's neural networks to expand when they are able to tolerate a certain level of distress. The connection between them and their parent is actually being strengthened during this.
I mean Jesus had to leave his disciples! They didn't want this. But if He didn't leave, would the disciples have been able to grow-up appropriately without leaning on Jesus more than necessary? Jesus is saying, "You can have milk but not juice."
These limit-setting ruptures occur when they parent is nearby. They feel distress but the parent is with them in the middle of this.
3. Toxic Ruptures: Toxic ruptures take benign ruptures and make them bigger than they actually are. We feel alone in our rupture. And this is where trauma begins to define itself in a child. One of the hallmarks of this is the use of shame by intent. We can do some things intentionally but not consciously. (Driving a car for instance. We don't even have to think about what we are doing.) We may demonstrate shame or contempt toward others non-consciously but yet still willfully. However, the shame we demonstrate toward others is usually way bigger than the shame you have already directed toward yourself. We can only shame others to the degree that we have run out of space for the self-contempt we have for ourselves.
Shame, through toxic ruptures, shatters our stories and also our story-telling mechanics. Toxic ruptures ruin our capacity to properly tell time and accurately recall memory as it really is. We want to remember our stories more truly. We are often not telling the full story which includes Jesus being present. Our memory really pays attention to the pain which is why we can't imagine a future that includes anything but that danger being present.
I need the imagination of an outside brain in order to imagine things on my behalf while my imagination is waiting to catch up. Toxic ruptures, wielding shame, draw our attention toward self-contempt in ways that are often not conscious.
A person is speaking to me. And they say, "You are going to think this is stupid." And then they say it. And I think: "Well, that wasn't stupid." And the person isn't even aware how ingrained the thought that "this is stupid" is in their mind! So they are repeating I am stupid over and over again in their mind. These are the kind of things that are willful but are not consciously available to us until someone else draws our attention to them and then begins to invite us to pay attention to them and the frequency with which we utter words that reinforce the toxicity of the shame that we encounter.
A ten-year-old boy brings home a test with a 92% and when the father sees it says, "Where is the other 8%?" The boy was so proud, but this "good father" has accidentally entangled what should have been a good memory with shame. He was looking for his father's joy. But in his own anxiety and his own unfinished business, the father has demonstrated contempt without being aware of what he is doing. Eight years later when this boy is a straight-A student, he will still be looking for the other 8%. The kid still thinks he hasn't done as well as he should have done. He will have an internal mantra which reinacts these very small toxic ruptures that have never been repaired. Instead of looking for his father's joy, he is working.
All of us can be curious to where non-conscious toxic ruptures are occurring. You can have these ruptures with parents who are beautiful Jesus-following people but instead created negligent traumas unconsciously. A good dad who doesn't talk much to his son, might see his son fill the silence with his own words that are very negative because his dad was so quiet.
So what do we do about these toxic ruptures? How do we begin to turn the bow of our ship toward repair?
If you are listening to this lecture, you are looking to repair ruptures in yourself or to help others repair their ruptures. The repair of rupture requires three things:
1. Timing: Sometimes
our traumas are so big that to imagine repair is impossible to do. This
is why we need a co-regulating brain in the process. We may need to have space to put words to the painful affect in the presence of a receptive container long enough to begin to imagine how repair might begin its process. I name what I want, but I have to move through grief stages as we even begin to imagine what repair might look like. What do I want and when do I want it? Our culture right now is constantly cancelling each other. They say they are cutting the person off entirely. A parent or a church for example. A lot of times people say what they don't want instead of what they DO want. Do you want there to be repair?
2. Tempo: When asking yourself this question, you might also want to ask yourself: What am I afraid of? When
we talk about fear of the future we are afraid of a certain thing. But
the brain is not afraid of the event. We are afraid of our body's
reaction to the thing. I am most afraid of the state that I will
enter and that there will be no way out of it. No one will be coming to
find me. You are not "afraid of the unknown." You are instead afraid of
stories you are making up about the future that come from my remembered
past. I am afraid of finding myself in an emotional state of
dysregulation and there be no way for me to regulate my way out of it.
We are anticipating a felt sense of shame or rejection. I'm really
trying to get a sense of what it will be like to live with the felt
sense of abandonment. This is coming from something out of my remembered
past that is anticipating the future and what it will be like for me to
be in the place. This is why asking What I am afraid of? And this is why talking about our fear is so important! We need another person to discuss what this actually means because we aren't actually trying to keep Joe from abandoning me. What you are actually trying to do is stay away from the fear of abandonment. This is why asking what you are afraid of is crucially important.
3. Time: We need to attune to very small movements. If we want to try to repair a rupture, it is easy to keep all the memories and distress about this event in your mind. But there is a discipline that is required in asking to have an intentional conversation with someone about a repair. Trauma, in order to protect you, will have you pay attention to your catastrophic past to make sure you don't get hoodwinked. And this is why having others with you in this process is so important. You need an external brain to help us navigate things. This external brain can help us reduce our anxiety one small action at a time.
You don't go from a near-drowning event to jumping into twelve-feet of water. You move from where you are to taking baby steps back into the pool.
When we think about repair, here's a good question to ask yourself: What do I want? We may want things but our traumas make us skiddish to answer that question! Can you answer that in concrete terms?
Think about one relational rupture in your life and answer this question: What do I want?
Personally, what Wendi wants is to be able to see myself getting dysregulated and be a step in front of it so that it doesn't affect my husband and kids. I don't want to lose it and be in distress and not act appropriately.
CENTERING
When preparing to tackle a traumatic event, we need to think about centering. Centering exercises help you to be mindful of your body and that your right brain and left brain are working together to accomplish this task. Prayer. Meditation. Scripture. Fasting. All of these exercises bring us into an awareness of our self that we can face moment-by-moment-by-moment without our pre-frontal cortex being hijacked! We can then take initiative.
With our child we start slowly. "Can we talk about what happened?" Timing. Intentionality. When you say something to your child that isn't correct, what is your actual reason for why you are saying what you are saying? Is it that you are worried you are going to lose your son? The timing and tempo is important.
How many times have you had a rupture and you want it fixed right away? We have to discern what both people can handle and what the tempo will be?
You may have an injury in a sport. And a similar motion or movement will stop you in your tracks. The bones and fracture lines have memory! The fracture lines remember the trauma.
That is similar to what happens to us as humans.
We want to be curious instead of condemning.
We want to be unsurprised when things pop up again. It reminds us that our nervous system is built with memory that lasts. I wish there were things I could forget! We must continually remind ourselves that wherever we are continuing to remember rupture from the past, it becomes one more opportunity to pause and employ self-and-other-compassion.
This is not easy to do. A therapist has to be patient with people who can be so self-condemning. It is difficult to give those methods up. When I am in a dysregulated state and I am the only one that can do anything about it, being hard on myself helps me to not forget what has happened so that mistake doesn't happen again. This is very typical when we are solely regulating ourselves. It is with the presence of another that we learn how to practice what we have received.
Jesus has a conversation with Peter surrounding forgiveness. Jesus says we should forgive 70 times 7! Forgiveness is not a thing we do. It is a thing we become. We must forgive ourselves as much as Jesus encourages us to forgive others. The trauma housed in our body can, through the bodies of others, become channels for healing of the holy spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment