"Trauma into Truth - Gutsy Healing and Why It's Worth It" By Rythea Lee
This book is small but packed full of affirmations for my journey...and she sees what I see, feels what I have felt...makes me feel normal through her sharing of her own experiences.
She answers the question, "Who are your witnesses?"
"I found an enlightened witness when I was most unnerved. She looked quite normal but she had this unusual capacity to let me unravel. I came apart somewhat dramatically and it was almost as if she smiled because she knew I was coming together. But she didn't smile, she made a space so large and quiet that when she spoke, it reverberated into my suspicion. She was unafraid and that was a gift."
"It has become clear to me through the years that anyone can become a therapist. Anyone can go to graduate school, graduate with a degree, obtain a license, and saddle up with top-notch theories. Anyone can charge a bundle, sit on a wicker chair and look interested. I've met some of these anyones."
"My first official therapist assisted me in retrieving a repressed memory, rallied me through the grueling process of naming the face of my tormentor, and then announced that she didn't believe me. After devastating consequences, I came to learn that she did this with her clients as a regular practice. How lovely!"
"I swore off therapy for life but then in desperation began interviewing professionals like a mad woman. The process of asking questions and screening down the finalists lead me to a single question posed to each candidate, "Have you done your own healing?" Out of the large number of therapists, one woman told me then and there that a healer cannot heal unless she has healed herself first. Over many years of rock solid support, she proved to me how true that statement was." Rythea
My initial gut instinct as to be wary, very wary okay downright suspicious of therapists. I intuitively understood that if they hadn't traveled via experience into their own childhoods searching for the truth, how in the world could they help me with mine.
It didn't mean that they had to walk my same journey, but that they had to have walked theirs. Book learning doesn't equal experience.
Reading about betrayal, pain, or suffering, certainly doesn't equate with being a first hand learner of it. And it isn't so much experiencing or feeling the expressions of emotions, but then how did you right your world? How did you free yourself from the grips of dysfunction? How were you able to be a separated being?
What we do need is someone who can let us unravel without them being afraid...knowing we are not falling apart and breaking, but that we are "coming together"...and willing to witness and let us be our truth, no matter what it is.
Under the question "What if I don't want to remember what it was like to be a child?", she writes.
"You were a baby, you were a toddler, you were a young child, a teenager a budding adult. On a physiological level you remember it all. Each moment is stored somewhere in your brain, every cough, whisper, and breath, whether you consciously remember it or not."
"Sometimes I look at a friend or client and see the little girl or boy they once were. Their laugh, facial expression, or gesture has distinct childish qualities that are unmistakable. Even a person's voice can change from responsible adult to a higher pitched tone and there it is, that innocence."
"Alice Miller is one of my heroes. She has written prolifically on the subject of child abuse and how it gets passed down from one generation to the next through cultural and familial denial. She asserts that any individual who has not spent time unearthing the child they once were, coming to understand what it was like to be defenseless and vulnerable, will pass unresolved remembrances onto their children or loved ones. She has made it her life's work to prove that this is so."
"They did the best they could" is a phrase people use to dismiss the betrayals, abandonment, and violations they suffered. They do not want to go back and feel the raw emotion from the past. They believe it is easier to forget. But if you take a good look at someone's life, someone who doesn't want to look into their past, you can usually see the consequences of that choice. They are usually running scared, sprinting as fast as they can from what is screaming the loudest." Rythea Lee
I love that we both agree with Alice Miller a very controversial therapist of her time and I believe she still is so today. I too feel that this is my life's work, to share what I can about the pathology of abuse, how the patterns and legacy are repeated out of not dealing with the truth of YOUR parents. If you can't see them in their true light, you will never begin to heal from the abuse.
Whether you agree with Alice Miller or Rythea Lee, reality has proven these two women to be correct. Our society at large is paying the consequences of therapy practices that don't demand going back and feeling the truth of our childhoods.
By eliminating this one very crucial step, we have the repetition of our parents lives being played out...due not only to familial denial, cultural denial but that our therapist may be taught lots of theories in books, but are not made to travel back and heal their own childhoods.
Perhaps our planet would be better served if the prerequisite for being a therapist was to have corrected your familial denial. For, how can you possibly expect another to do what you haven't done, OR help them to get where you haven't been?
I love that I am in good company, that these two women are echoing my sentiments...and that we are not in the majority, but the minority. It truly is the path least traveled...and the one that can stop the legacy from dripping into the generations beneath us. We are the only ones who can stop the dysfunctional pattern of our parents from bleeding on to our children.
When asked if Rythea was healed, she answered this way.
"Yes, I am. My history no longer dictates how I live my life or how I feel about myself." I smiled because some evolved part of me had answered the question."
"I still hurt, I still struggle, I still have inner mulch to make art about (relationships, politics, potato chips), but now there is a place I tap into that is absolutely independent of my wounds and sufferings. The process of coming to full-bodied grips with my past has tipped the scales from unconscious reactions to a reality that moves from a deeper unscarred knowing. This is my evidence that there is rhyme and reason to dismantling our false beliefs, getting to the bottom of our self blame." Rythea
Perhaps healing is having two places within you...the wound and the space where you can now react to life, instead of being in the swirling patterns of a dysfunctional legacy.
