Category: Trauma recovery

Grief, Healing, Trauma recovery, Writing

Writing Tools

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

IMG-2135Once I wrote every morning. Upon waking. In dawn’s first light. Under cover’s warmth. Hidden. From world. Not long ago. Life laying low. No reason to rise. Except for brief moments. Fixing food picked at. Not fully ingested by three souls, sitting with silent, wailing hearts.

Still scratch away most mornings. In bed, abating cold under think downy comforter. Or at kitchen table, sky brightening over Eastern tree tops.  Or at desk, feeling grown-up and professional. Even in yoga pants and sweatshirt.

No longer all dawns though. Not now. Life’s varied actions taking over sacred word space. Words watching as I cook, clean, study, parent, build and rebuild relationships, love in verb form, plan ahead, make lists, pay bills, run errands, exercise, sleep.

Words sidelined. Pent up. Waiting. Nagging. Prodding. Agitated. Resentful. Impatient for cleared moments meant only for them. In stolen time away from all else. Thoughts, emotions, connections released from inner captivity. Swooshing out with sighs.

IMG-2118Write on drawing paper. Bound in books, not tablets. Large ones for home use. Small for travel. Not the blank books given at birthday or holiday. No glossy or smooth inspirational cover art or quote from famous author. No place inside front cover for printing name. Making words official if only to self. Instead simple black cover. Woven texture. Raised weave masking cardboard beneath. Square holes punched along left side. Two strands of black wire inserted and spiraling down. Holding innards together. Inside thick paper. Heartier than blank books. Strong enough for frequent erasure.

IMG-2122Write with pencil. Beginning long ago with a DIXON Ticonderoga 2 SOFT. Boxes left over from sons’ elementary school days. Specific request on school supply list each August. Boys calling them “sturdier.” Me, grumbling about extra expense. Left now with boxes of them. Many pre-sharpened. Popping out of clear plastic containers smelling of pencil. Wood wound around graphite. Odor lingering in our collective noses from early on. From beginnings of formal schooling.

Along with sounds of manual pencil sharpeners found in every classroom. Near the door in the front. Drilled into cinder block walls, drywall, or ancient plaster. Leveled at a certain height. Increasing with grade. For standing in front of. Glimpsing the  world outside enclosed space. Teacher eyes waiting possible escape or eruption. But doorway blocked by budding sense of internal boundaries for many. Most turning back toward sharpener. Adjusting hole’s size. Sticking pencil in. Pushing crank. In circular motion. Away from self. Hearing grind. Wondering how pencil will come out. Broken tip or point?

IMG-2109Electric sharpeners buzzing with own sounds, vibrations, issues. Too quick for the lingering, dreaming school child needing small break. Have one of these machines packed away somewhere. Lost in boxes of what was and is no longer. Instead rummage each morning in kitchen junk drawer. For small plastic, pastel colored pencil sharpeners with dulling blades. The kind put in zipped up pencil bags for school.

This fall, new pencil entered my life. A Palomino Blackwing 602. A birthday gift christening another year lived. Marking healing, love, future, me-as-a-writer, another’s belief in me. Pencil, slate grey. Quote written in italicised, gold lettering. “HALF THE PRESSURE, TWICE THE SPEED.”

IMG-2133Topped with gold erasure cup. Not green. Holding flat, rectangular, pink erasure. For erasing on the horizontal instead of in a spiral.  Gift accompanied by utilitarian sharpener. Small with two holes. One to sharpen. Another to fine tune the point. Small door for emptying shavings.

Discover new pencil’s feel on page different. Softer. Smoother. Words gliding instead of stumbling. Flow like a felt-tip marker. Easy. Simple. Color sitting on top of paper like velvet. Not ground in, etched, or engraved.

IMG-2210A few weeks ago, a seminary friend gave me a pencil. Unsharpened. Along with a smile. Full of shared knowing. About life’s desire for tactile experiences. Our senses, in seminary, needing release from heavy frontal lobe exercising. Our emotional brains, the place where we feel God, crying out for attention, movement, freedom. My new pencil, a PALOMINO ForestChoice 2.

Pencils different than blank books of bound paper. Both necessary equipment. Paper, a receiving tool. Pencil, an active instrument. Paper, the noun. Pencil, the verb. A delivery system creating conduit through which emotions and thoughts merge into words. Uniquely placed on paper forming voice, my voice. Pencil point sailing over page. Blankness filling with lines, curls, dots, and shapes.  At morning’s dawn. Pencils containing memories, stories, healings, hopes. Ticonderogas, discovery of myself as writer. School days for sons. Life in a different community. Late husband’s work. Writing to breathe. ForestChoice, life in seminary in fellowship with others saying “yes” to God’s call. Blackwings, new beginnings after years of therapy expanding self, love, and future.

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Three pencils sitting on empty pages. Staring up at me. Welcoming. Reminding me of life’s trajectory. Movement mapped in pencils. Writing, my constant in never-ending change.

 

 

 

 

Healing, Healing meditation, Trauma, Trauma recovery

Trauma Meditation: Bargaining

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

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“The words of Job are ended.” (31:40)

 

Life amiss, off-kilter, teetering. Very much so. So much so. Tragically so. Even with Job’s best intentions for a righteous, safe life. Crossing all his T’s. Dotting each one of his I’s. Smoothing life’s sharp edges. The ones ready to cut, maim, and hurt. Job asks “Does not calamity befall the unrighteous, and disaster the workers of iniquity?” (31: 3)

More questions. To God. Friends. Again and again. Searching. Queries unrelenting like pain’s throbs. Entreating others sixteen times. Each time willing to bear possible repercussions if found unjust.

“If I walked with falsehood…” (31:5)

“If my heart has been enticed…” (31:9)

“If I have withheld anything that the poor desired…” (31:16)

“If I have raised my hand against the orphan…” (31:21)

“If I have rejoiced because my wealth was great…” (31:25)

“If I have rejoiced at the ruin of those who hate me…” (31:29)

“If my land has cried out against me, and its furrows have wept together…let thorns grow instead of wheat, and foul weeds instead of barley.” (31:38,40)

Resolve mounts with each oath. Pulsing through Job’s veins. Others’ theories almost capturing innocent soul into falsehood’s net. Job’s inner goodness never leaving. Integrity present, whole, complete, intact. Pledge to God, made long ago, endures. Job remains the “blameless and upright man who…turns away from evil.” (1:8b)

Air falls silent. Friends’ babbling halts. What can they say? “…These three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes.” (32:1)

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Healing Activity: Litany’s List

Writing a list of things we wished we did differently before, during, after our traumas pulls. Guilt’s evils perpetuating skewed thinking. Like Job’s friends. As if we hold exhaustive liability for our traumas. Full accountability laid at entrance of inner ashes. Onus cloaking us when we are blameless like Job.

Some traumas catch us in dysfunction’s sticky web. Hold us in continuous, adhesive loop of confusion. Despite who we once were before brought low by others’ unhealed crap. We thrash at both solid and invisible walls until something within rends, allowing escape.

But evil haunts. Tailing us in continuous coil of spinning thoughts. Cemented words releasing others’ involvement. Demanding we take entire burden on like a caught perpetrator.

There’s another litany worth writing. List asking what we did and do well. Each petition beginning with the small yet powerful word “I.” Not if you could have, should have done something differently. But what you did well. From my own trauma recovery litany I share,

I listened to my gut.

I walked toward.

I called out for help.

I didn’t always answer the doorbell.

I listened to Pastor Peter’s advice.

I went to therapy every week, sometimes twice.

I made home a safe space.

I kept trying to love.

I unpacked my own strength from deep within, like Job.

I forgave myself.

 

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Prayer

God, your creation is wild. Remind me I cannot control every minute of my world. Keeping vigil over life, wasted energy. Guarding my every move and moves of others, little use. God, magnify your hearing. Listen to my woes. Answer my questionings with calm and alleviating actions. Restore my trust in you and in myself. Turn me toward healing instead of commanding myself, others, and your creation. Amen.

 

~This healing meditation is created to accompany trauma recovery along side working with a state licensed, certified trauma mental health professional and should not take the place of clinical healing. 

~~Please form this healing activity to fit your needs. And please share with me your creative ways of refining the experience for yourself.

~~~Scriptural quotes, NRSV

~~~~First photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash. Suffering man sculpture was in Tony’s, office. My late husband kept a small collection of similar pieces as reminders of trauma’s pain he bore witness to daily. Tree of Life image by Michael Gaida from Pixabay.  

 

Faith, Grief, Healing, Healing meditation, Trauma, Trauma recovery

Trauma Minimized: A Healing Meditation

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

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“For my sighing comes like my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes.” Job 3:24-26 (NRSV)

Meditation

Torment escapes from deep within Job’s body on breath’s exhale. Agony flees inner captivity on long streams of air. Wind erupts in animalistic sounds showing injuries’ truths: dread, disquiet, dis-ease, anxious anticipation. All unseen damage from suffering’s somatic experiences.

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar hear Job’s pain. Come in consoling comfort. Observe immense heartbreak. Sit with him in silence. Witness loss, illness, grief, and trauma. No words spoken. Saints sitting with sinful natures.

Until these bystanders can stand Job’s pain no longer. Something spins within. Filling each friend with verbal masses rolling into wounding words. Words interrupting air. Stinging silence. Tearing further into wounded flesh and internal organs. Each feeling sanctioned by God or each other to deem worthiness or un-right-ness. Blame Job in entitled convenience. Forgetting life’s immeasurable unknowns. Making small Job’s collective human losses with narrow visions of the Divine. Asking in word and deed, “’Why should God have time’ for you in all your iniquities?”*

Job’s groaning unmasks these carefully constructed faces of others. Uncovers deeply buried wounds. Unhealed lacerations still oozing with infection. Bacteria to be shared. Using Job as a new host. As these speakers hide behind royal judgments. Old pain towering over recently rendered and suffering peasant.

 

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We who live in trauma’s truth sit with Job in a different way. In shared experience of life after trauma. We learn along with Job that our worlds at home, work, community, and extended family minimize trauma. Our trauma. Their trauma. Anyone’s trauma. Others diminishing it when we are weak in our inabilities to cope or heal. Trivializing trauma’s ravages. Asking in verbal, nonverbal, subtle ways for us to move on. Act healed. Use our trauma for the greater good of a broken world. Because surrounding witnesses name us now as damage experts needing to be sent out on patrol.

But this shrinking behavior of others in the story of Job and in our lives today is not an act of God or earthly king. It is a “that’s their stuff,” moment. An alert to something unhealed in others. Resulting in distancing or dissociating behavior of the supposed helper from our lived, daily, experienced pain. Trauma’s evil alive in others hurling in secondary waves through our hearts, minds, and bodies. Sinner outweighing saint.

We cannot force others to unbury and heal their pain. But we can ask ourselves if we too minimize our own traumas. Wonder if we make smaller what really was. Or hide our traumas away so others don’t feel uncomfortable. Absorb these evils further into our bodies. Send messages out into the world such as “It’s in the past,” and “What’s done is done,” and “It is what it is.”

 

Healing Action

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Fill a piece of paper of any size with one large circle. Leave a little space at the corners of the paper. Inside the circle draw a large heart. Along the outline of the heart write “God, God, God,” over and over again in a chain of words.

Write your name inside the heart. If other people living in your immediate family share your trauma (such as children) write their names on the heart as well.

Between the heart and the outline of the circle write names of people who try to not minimize what happened. They are not perfect or one hundred percent. But consistent in making an effort.

Outside the circle write names of people who are not dependable for you now. They may try. But when they do their unhealed pain lives like a big box of heavy bricks between them and you. “Help me hold my box,” they ask you again and again.

In the farthest corner of the page write names of people or organizations who exited or need to exit your life because of your traumas. These entities add lesions to your internal injuries. Creating circles of additional traumas around you with pricks, pokes, and stabs.

Look at your work. What demands your attention? Are your friends better at being with you than your extended family? Or is it the other way around? A mix? Who surprises you with their ability to not judge or minimize? Where are most of your people, inside or outside your circle?

If you need to, cut away the outside-of-the-circle names for now. Crumple up the scraps. Throw them in the recycling bin. You do not need these people or organizations right now. You don’t need their stuff, crap, or pain. Fire them. Forever. Temporarily. Lay them off. Whatever you need this day. You are in charge.

Lay a finger, one by one, on all remaining names including your own. Breathe as you do so.

Prayer

God holding close my pain, surround me with emotionally fearless people. People whose presence and actions bring healing to me and others. Send them God, quickly. Open my eyes in recognition when these healers come into my world. Help me accept their love. Amen.

_______

*Quote from J.B. by Archibald MacLeish. Published by Houghton Mifflin (1986). Page 119.

~This healing meditation is created to accompany trauma recovery along side working with a state licensed, certified trauma mental health professional and should not take the place of clinical healing. 

~~Please form this healing activity to fit your needs. And please share with me your creative ways of refining the experience for yourself.

~~~All images courtesy of Pixabay. 

 

 

Healing, Trauma, Trauma recovery

Trauma’s Sleepless Nights: A Healing Meditation

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez
astronomy cloud clouds cosmos
Photo by Joonas kääriäinen on Pexels.com

 

“So I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me. When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’ But the night is long and I am full of tossing until dawn.” Job 7: 3-6:

Meditation

Nights, when the world seems quiet, lengthen in trauma’s internal pain. Skies full of stars and moon and clouds watch our hearts racing without winning. Earth perceives perpetual pulsating sensations in our veins. Rivers, lakes, and oceans hear our repeating thoughts. Some with images. All stuck in minds’ auto replay.

In our beds, our bodies toss. This way. That. Left, right, back. Never finding comfort on couch, mattress, floor. Sheet, too cold. Blanket, too hot. Pillow hardening with weight of our head. Mattress not holding us as partner in rest’s work. Sleep, a bad dream with no escape. Night, endless. Never-ending. First light, a mirage. Dawn, not full of joy as the psalmist promised. Instead hazy with dread. Another day unfolding onto more pain.

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Image courtesy of Pixabay

Healing Activity

The next time tossing begins, when your mind spins with thoughts and images. And your body stiffens. Becomes harder than a board on a sweltering summer night. And you just have to move, change positions, find a cooler place on the sheets. Because if you don’t and even if you do, breath catches in your chest. Stiffening from chest to throat. Sending tremors traveling downward from stomach into limbs.

The next time, before you toss, breathe in deeply. No shallow breath. Deep from your hips. Take a few breaths in and out finding some sort bottomless breath. Then on the toss breathe out as you flip to your side or back or other side. Keep breathing out with each toss. Just breathe in and then out on the toss. Continue until you are tossed out.

Creation occurs on the exhale like “a wind from God.” (Genesis 1:2 NRSV) Your tosses? Small moments of creative healing waiting to happen in the middle of your night. Both sleep and sleep-less-ness asks life’s regenerating force into our nights. In inhales. Followed by exhales. Repeating over and over again. Healing occurring with each completed breath. God’s creative wind flowing around, over, under, out, and in. Even deep into our nights of pain.

Prayer

Spirit sailing through night and day, surround my sleepless tossing with your breath. Inhale my pain. Exhale healing within me. Amen.

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Image courtesy of Pixabay

 

*This healing meditation is created to accompany trauma recovery along side working with a state licensed, certified trauma mental health professional and should not take the place of clinical healing. 

**Please form this healing activity to fit your needs. And please share with me your creative ways of refining the experience for yourself

***All scripture quotes are NRSV.

Healing, Trauma, Trauma recovery

Trauma Meditation: Next Bad Thing

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

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The prophet Habakkuk prays. Asks God to return from being absent. “In our own time revive it; in our own time make it known;” (3:2b) Followed by acclamation. “His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise.” (3:3b)

God’s portrayal in Habakkuk’s prayer is often violent. God’s earthly activities ongoing. “…You split the earth with rivers.” (3:9b) A omnipotent superpower saving good guys from bad ones. “You crushed the head of the wicked house…” (3:13b)

Habakkuk’s words reveal multiple tragedies. Agitation anticipating next impending crushing. More devastation means wiping out enemies and attackers. Perhaps Habakkuk hopes he does not get caught in the ensuing panic.

“I hear, and I tremble within: my lips quiver at the sound. Rottenness enters into my bones, and my steps tremble beneath me. I wait quietly for the day of calamity to come upon the people who attack us.” (3: 16)

~~~

We in trauma wait for the next catastrophe like the prophet Habakkuk. From the outside we may look still. Barely breathing. Within we stand at the edge of an interior precipice. Waiting. For a push into caverns below. Thrust in by world’s cruelty. Found in the form of people, natural disasters, human made dictators, wars, and diseases. Uncontrollable foes attacking us or our loved ones.

We wait. Trembling within. Watching. Always alert. Skittish. Wary. No breaks. Exhausted by constant effort. Rotting in this hidden prison. Body held captive by what grows within us. Dictating our lives. Holding our bodies hostage. Trepidation becoming an angry energy like fuel.

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Healing Action

Look at your hands. Curve them in as if your hands hold something. Feel the weight of your hands. Observe the shape of curved fingers. The creases in your palms. Notice any scars, rings, tattoos.

Now cup your hands together. Allowing fingers and sides of upturned palms to touch. Forming a bowl.

Breathe in. Sigh out into your bowl. Repeat forming a steady beat of breathing in and breathing out with a sigh, silent or sung. Continue on if it feels good to you to do so.

Breath in again. This time on your next sighing, send your traumas into the bowl. Any trauma you hold in your body. Recent traumas. Trauma from a few years ago. Older traumas from youth and childhood.  Sigh all your life’s traumas into your cupped hands.

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Prayer

Lift your cupped hands up above your head. As far into the air above as you are able.

God, take these harms from me this day.

And tomorrow.

And all the days to come. Amen.

Push your hands farther up into the sky beyond. Open your hands with a final push. Send your traumas out into the world. When your hands are empty, slowly let your arms fall to your sides. For now, leave your traumas to the universe and to God.

~~~~~~~

*This healing meditation is created to accompany trauma recovery along side working with a state licensed, certified trauma mental health professional and should not take the place of clinical healing. 

**Please form this healing activity to fit your needs. And please share with me your creative ways of refining the experience for yourself. Some humble accommodation suggestions are: 

  • Use a bowl instead of hands.
  • Use a friend’s arms.
  • Use feet and legs instead of hands and arms. 
  • Move bowl outwards instead of upwards. 

 

***All scripture quotes are NRSV.

****Photos courtesy of Pixabay.