Casting Out the Darkness: Healing Journey

My healing journey & the controversial necessity of embodying a victim state

(This past Thursday, midday, my bedroom):

What was that?! An almost liquid sensation of purity, warmth, truth, and deep delight washes down on me from head to toe as I grip the dresser and stare into the mirror, blankly at first, as vision returns to my dizzy body. Where I normally see my own face come back to focus (and feel indifference, curiosity, or disappointment at its reflection) this time, accompanied with the feeling, I see who is really looking out from these eyes, a brief ecstatic flash, my soul as it connects to God. Oh, angelic realm!

I am stunned. Where did this come from? Astonishing what a glimpse of the divine mystery can do! I feel so much concentrated love and motivation run through me, I have to share it. More startlingly, what absolute miracle has replaced the dread that these dizzy spells normally conjure, have done so for years? Upon standing, especially from lying down, I often get a rush to the head and the room starts to go dark for several seconds. I clutch the wall ‘til it passes, but in those moments of ‘near syncope’ as my medical chart reads, I sometimes feel a wave of horror, as if I realize I am about to suddenly die or have been drugged. A purely somatic flashback of sorts. The headiness of it feels like the PTSD dissociation I struggled with my whole life. If you don’t know the feeling, I experience it as if the top of my head opens up and the real me drifts up and out like a kite. It’s hard to talk much, I’m somewhere else, in a vague distracted trance. When I snap back, I’m foggy and irritable.

This pang of horror sometimes accompanying my lightheadedness has been one of the few lingering, but hopefully impermanent, symptoms of C-PTSD (compound post traumatic stress disorder, when trauma occurs over a period of time) that I still experience in the last decade. Others like hyper vigilance have become a part of who I am and will likely always be the chip on my shoulder, so I am told. These quick yet deep flashback episodes are infrequent enough that I don’t think much about them, and try to shake it off when it happens, but it has been picking up as of the last few months. I don’t know why. Maybe an internal urgency is back with a vengeance (and a mission?), this time not in the form of a disturbing foreign voice, but of the trigger that I won’t address, perhaps until I feel forced to in its growing frequency.

For the record, I don’t identify as a victim anymore. Writing this likely final chapter of my trauma & healing story isn’t something I enjoy doing; it feels like putting on an old, ugly, ill-fitting outfit and walking out in public to have my photo taken. I find it important to share anyway. It’s been awhile since I’ve done intentional heavy lifting in the realm of self-help. The most impactful healing work I undertook was back in 2015, five years after accidentally ‘unzipping myself’ and facing the truth of my suppression/repression. It was necessary then to admit that I was in a victimized position; you can’t write a map without naming the badlands. Surrendering to the process entirely. Victim with a capital V, that was me. But now my true North is clear and I have a choice about how I see myself and what may need tweaking in my mental health maintenance. In an effort to rid myself of these ongoing & distracting remnants of the past, I had outlined a plan to uproot the issue that involved a few different psychedelic journeys, meditation, regular sauna, finally (!) launching my writing career where I can speak brave and free, and setting up a session for EMDR with my long time therapist.

Eye movement desensitization & reprocessing (EMDR) is a therapy technique that attempts to alleviate the distress surrounding traumatic memories and flashbacks that accompany PTSD. It traditionally involves moving the eyes side to side and recalling a flashback while receiving guidance from an experienced therapist that can ‘reprocess’ the memory with the client and lessen or remove its emotional charge. Regardless of some criticism that the bilateral stimulation is completely superfluous, the therapy modality immediately took me further than I had been able to go in the prior decade plus with an embarrassing number of therapists and professionals.

The mind is a deeply fascinating and still relatively unknown place in science. I feel similarly about my own, especially the subconscious, a realm to explore in dreams and altered states including meditation. There’s much I’ve walled off there for protection throughout my life, but a necessarily hasty job with jagged bits sticking out to haunt my (now rare) nightmares and inform my sense of safety. It’s harder to bury things that happen closer to the completion of the mature brain, but for the young child abuse can be like a fever: intense, disorienting, essentially uninhabitable, yet stored in the cells to drive the programming even if blocked by the conscious mind.

Far too many women and men lack the luxury of merely intellectualizing trauma, talking about it like some far away feature of the pitiful. We try, oh, how we try to just give it lip service and move on. Hence, my insistence that one has to fully inhabit a victim state in order to eventually exit it. Allowing the ego to break down and be ‘weak,’ ‘defeated’ is humbling, feminine, and the difference between consciously allowing a process to occur and subconsciously being stuck in it. Being a victim in nearly any capacity beyond childhood and feeble old age is shamed by society at large. A society so masculine, one has to always be masquerading as a ‘winner,’ no matter the circumstances. Shameful is the adult who finds themselves a victim beyond a quick recourse from the distress that arises due to a traumatic moment, period, or life. How realistic is that? Do most people even know where to start? Can you undo the insurmountable dread and all of its panic in a day, weekend, month, or year? I personally couldn’t, and I don’t consider it a failure by any means. It’s survival to go at a pace that maintains life. It’s a highly personal, painful, and complicated journey. To judge someone for being stuck in ‘victimhood’ says more about the shadow of the juror than the judged. Some people just have negative personalities too, none of it is my business to stop and comment on! We must choose carefully who we want to be influenced by, yes, let’s leave it at that. But if we can be vulnerable enough to admit, deep down, how we were and are victimized, AND do the work of grieving, the messy stages, then we can eventually move on into greater days.

Healing is not linear either, and for me it caused other side effects like loss of relationships, jobs, near sanity at times. I understand why people resist it. I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have found the right help over the course of a decade. Being able to eradicate a lot of what weighs on the subconscious is a huge blessing and for me, a possibility that has been most effective through EMDR therapy.

What was it like? Well, would you open Pandora’s box on purpose? That’s what I experienced practicing with a therapist for the first time. Too dizzy and dissociated to maintain the actual eye movements, I found the hand ‘buzzers’ to be an effective replacement at cueing both sides of my brain. Once I knew what to expect, (the wrenching emotions served up front and center), I found myself breaking out in a cold sweat upon arriving for my next session, staggering toward the door, trembling like a bunny to a python. The humbling walk of a victim indeed.

As terrifying as it can feel to relive a horrible body memory, this does take courage, it offers the promise of moving on. A concept that may be completely foreign if one can’t recall a ‘before.’ I couldn’t fathom what this state was like prior to experiencing it. There is no ‘getting your life back’ if you’ve never experienced life without trauma. But for me, it was the feeling of starting over, if ever there was a ‘factory reset’ in life. A beginner’s mind is a beautiful thing to be re-inhabited. Being brand new as an adult, an intoxicating combination of shock, elation, optimism, personal power, and drive, was my hard won prize.

So back to my recent plan to remove flashbacks. Using ketamine with the intention to re-engage my psyche (which I’m privileged to have medical access to), was surprisingly intense and dark in a way I had rarely experienced. Not helpful at all, more like every deep crevice in my mind was rearing a hideous head at once. For an hour or so I wondered if I would be able to come back to the light, stuck in a cacophony of evil noise. All encompassing and corrupted, it was the opposite of why I’ve used the medicine periodically. Not a full psychotic break from reality, which I’ve experienced on other entheogens, but enough of a jolt and red light to make me pause my plan for tripping this thing out of me. I would disappointingly not be participating in an ayahuasca ceremony, this being the ten year anniversary of my first and only one, an incredibly powerful experience that changed me forever (I’ll save that story for another day).

I’ve finally been able to get to the sauna at my new gym regularly, a great place to meditate for me, the heat amplifying the sensations of my body to the point that I can get in them and stay in them fully to quiet down my mind. I’m also detoxing from mold exposure and love to imagine myself coming out of these sessions a little stronger, healthier, and clearer each time. And so it is! Visualization is a powerful tool for healing and manifesting, as elite athletes, professionals, spiritual gurus, and self actualized folk know. Embodying the emotional state you want to feel begets more of it, gratitude and peace.

Writing as part of my plan? It’s been my goal for so long. This collection of my stories that I’ve put forth into the world for a few people (so far) to see, seems to have brought me to my highest good. I pray for continued guidance and support with other qualities that don’t come as easily. I feel fully myself again for the first time since having children. The signs of synchronicity and other spiritual phenomena are increasing around me (I will also talk about this later!). I knew I wanted to be an author around age 8 or 9 when I stopped changing my mind about it (ballerina, no veterinarian, no paleontologist). Writing in school was most of what I would allow myself for the longest time. I received encouragement about it, but didn’t make connections with potential mentors. Bad poetry was a hallmark of the angst years. I experienced starts and stops attempting a book during what I think of as my finding freedom years (age 28-32). So I’m picking back up, and going where I want to go, letting ‘fun’ be the guide. Anything is possible.

I have an appointment for an EDMR session in a few weeks, but after Thursday’s startling 180 degree experience, I’m not convinced that I need it. I had never experienced that holy download from a dizzy spell. I went from having these ugly triggers growing to almost daily occurrences in the last few weeks, to that epiphany, that culmination several days ago and since then the ghosts just… disappeared. I’m still dizzy, but there’s no flashback. Silence. Calm. Control (in the limited ways we humans experience it). Holy shit, I did it! Words are spells, so I won’t doubt myself (and maybe shouldn’t swear? no clue). I put my ugly truths out there (here), did what I had always feared to do, and set myself free. The opposite of life is not death, it is chronic dissociation, living outside of one’s truth. I wish healing for all beings.