Category: Healing

Healing, Newsletter, Trauma recovery

OCTOBER NEWS

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GATHERING STARS

Gathering Stars offers what trauma recovery so often requires: wisdom in small doses, compassion without easy answers, and hope grounded in faith.

~Lori Erickson, author of The Soul of the Family Tree

BOOK RELEASE PARTY

Book sales by the Atlas Collective.

NEW SUBSTACK POST

Sometimes I like to rework old posts from a few years back which is what I did with this one. You may also follow me on Substack at https://jenniferohmanrodriguez.substack.com/

In a sterile hotel room I reread Harriet Lerner’s, The Dance of Anger. Passing the time while I wait for one of my beloved son’s to finish class or homework or something. Earlier this morning I found these pages of wisdom tucked into a shelf at the local bookstore down the street.

I first discovered Lerner’s classic book during my college years in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The title spoke to me. Enough to buy a copy with my spare change. Its torn pages however lost in my disruptive twenties.

Recently I’ve been reflecting as I walk or journal on how we lose ourselves in crisis, grief, and trauma’s afterlife. Seized during this time by the past with future dissipating, crumbling, ceasing. Both in reality and in imagination. Induced in part by the de-selfing of traumatic experience caused by its infliction on our beings erupting and impacting ourselves and our relationships. Causing overfunctioning in stuck flight or fight or ongoing underfunctioning in overwhelm, dissociation, and freeze.

Our relationship to self and others controlled by what remains of our former selves. Spinning with trauma’s ongoing truths and lies feeding past’s patterns while thoughts evaporate. Fueling internal and external turbulence. Directed toward us with pain, sorrow, sadness. Leaving a wondering of how to stop this incorrigible dance pointing toward destruction within and around. Anger’s waltz keeping pain’s memory fed and alive but not forgiven. Each step of this dance minimizing our compassion for self. My compassion for me. My compassion for others.

Lerner writes of shifting anger’s you to me or I. Not because we are to blame for our traumas. Lerner is not a blame-the-victim clinician. But because when we project the entirety of our anger onto others we could be avoiding our own feelings and in doing so our own healing. Blame can be an unwillingness to feel what needs to be felt.

It’s all so tricky, this time after traumatic experience. But if our blame has become a part of our pain then it is our pain asking for healing. With love. Love leading to knowing where I begin and also end. You (the one or ones I so often blame) existing outside the boundary of me.

So, what if I said to myself and those I blame, “I want different music. I want a different dance?”

These thoughts cause my lips to lift upward. Bringing my cheeks along with them as held breath escapes from within. My body showing me in the simplicity of a smile that my internal direction gravitates once again toward healing and health. Creating a new step in this dance called my life. A new direction leading toward finding me in the midst of its steps.

Paperback The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships Book

Above Image courtesy of Pixabay.

FIRST COVER RECOMMENDATION

In August, I was asked for the first time to provide another author with a book cover recommendation. Dr. Frank Spinelli’s new book is well worth the read. Learn more about Dr. Frank Spinelli here.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

May you sit with your breath, befriend your deepest self, and know that you have the courage to heal.


~Jennifer

Healing, Healing meditation, Trauma, Trauma recovery

FEAR, COMPASSION, & COURAGE

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

“For they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Mark 6:50 NRSV (similar to Matthew 14:27)

Reflection

In the aftermath of trauma, the disciples felt fear. The cross’ terror pounded through their bodies. Causing them to hide from the world. Live inside locked doors. Stay on guard. Peek out with wary eyes.

Jesus’ reassurance consoled the disciples. Settled their activated nervous systems. Gave them a sense of relief. The space to see and hear.

These words, “do not be afraid,” may also console us now. Remind us to breathe into our racing thoughts. Breathe into our protruding visions of what happened. The ones breaking into our everyday moments. Victimizing our survivorship. Directing our words and actions. In harm-filled ways.

Yet there may be days in which these words, “do not be afraid,” just hurt. Illicit curses like WTF, Jesus! And questions such as how? How can I not be troubled or worried or afraid? Jesus’ words working not as reassurances. But as platitudes. No better than “God has a plan,” or “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.” Making our whole bodies, even our toes shout into our socks and shoes, “bullshit!”

Because we are afraid. Fear brought us to this place in trauma’s afterlife. Life threatening fear still lives within us. Refusing to be calmed by four words.

Healing Practice: Take Heart

Breathe into your fear-filled heart. Just breathe into it. Allow your fears their space in your heart. Know that this action takes courage.

Picture your heart. Breathe into your troubled heart. Breathe deeper and wider. Know that this action takes compassion.

Picture those who weigh heavy on your heart. Loved ones’ suffering. Joining you on your heart. Breathe into your troubled heart. Breathe deeper and wider.

Expand your breathe until it dances with your fearing heart. Its wind weaving in, around, and out of heart’s pumping action.

Keep breathing. Allowing your breath’s wind to dance with all who are on your heart this day. Allowing your breath to bring all of you together in one big dance.

Prayer

God of troubled hearts, worried minds, and fearful bodies, show us what Jesus meant when he said, “do not be afraid.” For his disciples then. For us now. Help Jesus’ words break into our fear. Acknowledging it. Grow our compassion for self. Give us courage. Amen.

Image by Annette Meyer from Pixabay

Faith, Grief, Healing, Hope, Trauma

Thoughts on Grief, Compassion, & Joy

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

From my journal, January 20, 2021

I think Jesus fished for people in need of compassion. Maybe he saw the disciples lacking in it. Heard this void in their words and actions. Knowing God wanted more for them.

Read an article by Nicholas Wolterstorff in The Christian Century magazine a couple of years ago, the January 16, 2019 edition. Struck once again how Christian doctrine often works against us in relationship to one another. Doctrine becoming a shield. Creating a wall of souls. Not allowing the other, the one holding up the shield, to step beyond entering into our pain. Embodying our experience. Creating compassion for and with us.

Wolterstorff was called heretical after writing honestly about suddenly losing his beloved son, Eric. A reviewer of Wolterstorff’s book, Lament for a Son , guarded something, maybe the vestiges of their own unresolved trauma with their words. Instead becoming a humanly righteous defender of the faith (as the reviewer saw it). But Wolterstorff needed a defender of his heart. From others. Especially Christians. I quote this man who endured profound loss here.

“I am not angry [at God] but baffled and hurt. My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.” *

As Christians, we do not hold a doctrine of grief. Of how we believe, even trust, and then act upon our belief in times of grief. On how to love others through the most profoundly painful times in life. Perhaps we need such doctrines. Doctrines of grief, sorrow, trauma, anguish. Small frameworks reminding us of our human responsibility to ourselves and to one another. Not just to God in abstraction. In human configuration. But to the holy within us or in front of us who ask merely for a small bit of compassion. Love. Understanding. Claiming there is nothing heretical about any form of human love including grief for the loss of what we love. Loved. Of a beloved.

My mind winds through these thoughts on grief and compassion leading me to joy. Not that joy should be the end result of grief. Perhaps only because I want as a giver of compassion to hold joy for those who hurt until they may reclaim it for themselves. Some claiming it for the first time.

Joy often brings me to the verse from Psalm 30–words I discovered as a teenager full of feelings, hormones, insecurities, and fears.

“…Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 30:5 NRSV

I hope that the psalmist knows something I do not. Not that sorrow is an active ingredient of joy. Necessary to make joy rise. But that all feelings and especially intense feelings have an active lifespan which does not last in intensity and duration. Acute only for a period of time-an expanse we cannot predict yet must travel through. The longing never fully dissipating. Yet with the increase of self-compassion and compassion freely given by others, the longing has a sense of healing and a willingness to embrace other feelings, the ones supporting new life in the after time of sorrow.

Perhaps joy doesn’t come the morning after waking on and off, weeping. Or even the next. Or the next. Perhaps joy comes in small glimmering ways. Like the fall afternoon light dancing on rippling water. The steadiness in night’s sky of a shining planet. A dewy bud opening at dawn. The busy butterfly on summer’s flower. A moment of silence shared with an understanding other. Slight moments reflected off bits and pieces of the world, the natural world and sometimes even its humans. Momentary brightness showing us, reminding us of something other than sorrow. Which feels good enough. Better than what was. A particle of joy amidst what we cannot change.

A prayer.

God of all emotions, We wait for joy found in small gestures of human compassion and glimmers of life within our view or on their way. Weaving in and out of obstacles, sadness, shock. We wait while you hold hope for us in its coming. Slowly, through minutes, hours, days, months, years. Waiting. You in joy. You in sorrow. Amen.

* Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Healing, Trauma, Trauma recovery

From Hurting to Healing

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

Life has a way of hurting. The unhealed pain of other people impacts our very existence. Nature, despite human taming and because it, will have its own way. No one lives then without wounds whether buried, forgotten, open, mending, or scars. Two truths:

Every human being hurts.

Every human being can heal.

If we all hurt, then why does the ongoing pain of others so often go unnoticed? And when we do notice why do we tend to stand, literally and metaphorically, an arm’s length away (if not more)? Distancing ourselves while also adding commentary as if their pain is an abstraction? Secretly relieved it is not us.

Because a distinct symptom of human unhealed pain from traumatic experiences of any size, duration, and intensity is disconnection. In disconnection, our relationship with ourselves, others, the world, and the Divine is disrupted. This chasm causes us to struggle with experiencing our own emotions, empathizing with and having compassion for others, and the Divine seems to vanish.

Disconnection, also called dissociation, is not a conscious choice. Often this separation from self and others is a lifesaving one. It is our wonderfully made bodies working to protect us from harm during an fear filled event. Yet if left unattended disconnection causes us and others further suffering.

Research tells us that the prevalence of unhealed pain from traumatic experiences in the United States is estimated to be 60 to 67% of the population.[1] In other words, more of us suffer from the unhealed pain of traumatic experiences than do not. The immensity and commonality of our suffering then demands that the act of ongoing healing be included in our thinking, meditations, prayers, and subsequent actions as a basic need for all humankind. That means you as well as me.

Let’s be clear: Healing takes courage, work, resources, healers, and time. The work of healing earns its worth however in the reconnection our minds to our bodies, hearts, and souls. Our true selves and our common humanity are uncovered and embraced so that we see once again or for the first time the pain of others. Reconnection then creates the space within us to accompany others–friend, family member, stranger–toward healing as our empathy grows and shifts into action. This action is called compassion.

Our healing then is the beginning. Our accompaniment of others, the mission we are called into as human beings on a spiritual journey with the Divine.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/washington/testimony/2019/t20190711.htm

Image by Luda Kot from Pixabay