So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for being here.
So something happened to you.
And I do not need to know what it was.
It might have been one thing on one day.
That split your life into a before and an after.
It might have been ears of something.
A house,
A person,
A situation,
You could not leave.
And that went on for so long,
It stopped feeling like an event and started feeling like the climate.
At the time it did not damage you let us be accurate at the time it took you apart There was a period where you were not functioning.
Where the person you had been was simply not available.
You may have gone somewhere very low.
Some of you went as low as a person goes and are here now listening to this,
Which is not nothing.
And then,
Because this is what happens,
Time passed.
You got up.
You went back to work.
Or you found different work.
You rebuild something.
From the outside you are fine.
You are in a great many measurable ways actually fine.
But you have never been the same.
And this is the sentence I want to sit on because I think it is the truest one in this whole area and nobody is allowed to say it out loud.
You did not come out of that unchanged.
You're not going to.
And there is no version of this where you get your old self back.
It still comes up.
Years later,
Decades later for some of you.
Not constantly.
And that is the confusing part.
There are long stretches where it is nowhere to be seen,
Where you would tell somebody you were completely over it and you mean it as well.
And then there is a Tuesday,
Something entirely ordinary happens,
And there it is,
Full volume,
As though no time had passed at all.
And then you think,
I thought I had dealt with this.
So let's talk about that,
About the wound that does not close and about what actually becomes possible,
Which is not what you were promised.
But I think is considerably better and more realistic.
So,
What you have has a name.
Let me give you a clinical picture first because a lot of people carrying this have never seen it laid out and there is actual relief in finding out that your particular mess has a shape and that somebody has already described it.
Most people know about post-traumatic stress disorder.
Most of the people I meet in my practice,
They are well-read,
Well-researched,
And they understand trauma really,
Really well.
Flashbacks,
Nightmares,
Avoiding reminders,
A system that stays on alert.
That framework was built largely around single,
Discrete events.
A crash,
An assault,
Or,
I don't know,
Combat exposure.
But a lot of what damages people is not the single event.
It is repeated and it is prolonged.
It happens inside a relationship you cannot leave.
Often when you were young,
Often at the hands of somebody who was supposed to be safe and keep you safe.
And what that produces looks very different.
It has now been formally recognized.
The International Diagnostic System added Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as its own category now.
And the way they defined it is very useful.
It actually has everything that ordinary post-traumatic stress has.
And then it has three more things.
Which are grouped under a phrase A phrase that I really like.
Disturbances in self-organization.
Disturbances in self-organization.
So the first is difficulty regulating emotion.
Reactions that arrive faster and larger than the situation calls for.
And then there is the other end of this,
Which is the opposite.
Going numb.
Feeling nothing when you should feel something.
Second is a persistent negative view of yourself.
And I don't mean low self-esteem in an ordinary way.
This is very structural.
A unquestioned sense of being diminished,
Defeated,
Always at fault.
A shame that feels like fact rather than feeling.
And the last one,
Which you might have experienced,
Difficulty in relationships.
Finding closeness hard to sustain or finding it hard to feel close at all.
Even to people you love and who love you.
And I lay those out because of what happens when people hear them.
Most people carrying this have not been thinking of it as an inquiry.
They have been thinking of it as a personality.
They believe they are somebody who overreacts.
They are somebody who don't feel emotions in a relationship.
They are somebody who are not good enough.
And they might have been carrying this character assessment for 20 years.
It is not character assessment.
It is a described consequence of what happened to you.
It appears in a diagnostic manual.
And it appears there because enough people presented with exactly this pattern.
And that pattern needed a name.
So the clinicians caught up.
So you are not badly made.
You are accurately shaped by something.
Now the mechanics of the ache,
Because understanding this changes how you interpret it.
When it comes back,
The sudden drop,
The reaction out of nowhere,
And the day that goes wrong for no reason you can name,
You are not remembering,
That is the crucial thing.
See,
A memory is something you have.
You can hold it,
Turn it,
Put it down.
What happens here is very different.
Part of your system re-enters a state.
Not the story of it,
The physiology of it.
Same heart rate,
Same posture,
Same age.
And that can be extremely disorienting.
Because you are in a real sense,
Briefly operating in the wrong tense.
And it does not need the reminder to be obvious.
It is not usually the anniversary or the photograph.
It might be a smell.
It might be a tone of voice.
Or a particular corridor of light in a hallway.
Somebody closes the door in a certain way and there it is.
The system stored the conditions,
Not the narrative.
And it recognizes these conditions with extraordinary speed.
And often there is no explanation.
Which produces a very specific frustration that you know well.
It arrives and you cannot say why.
Then you feel unstable because it seems to have come from nowhere.
So,
It did not come from nowhere.
It came from something too fast and too subtle for you to catch.
Then there is the rhythm of it,
Which I think is the least discussed part.
It is not constant,
It is dormant,
And then it is not.
Apply this to any situation,
To your own life.
There are months where you are really genuinely well.
And then there is a season,
Or a week,
Or a Tuesday.
Anniversaries do it,
And often the body knows the date before the mind does.
People report a slump in early November for years,
Without connecting it to anything until somebody asks.
Big live events also do it.
Ordinary tiredness does it too,
Because a depleted system has less capacity to keep anything content.
So the dormancy is real and the flair is real.
And neither one is the truth about where you are.
And here is where cruelty comes in.
Because a person in a good stretch will often conclude or like to conclude,
Oh,
I've dealt with it,
I processed it,
I finished it.
Which means every flare that arrives is not just then pain it is evidence of failure and i hear it again and again and again i thought i had dealt with it i thought i had processed it and it's here again you're back you're not back at the start you are in a flare and the flare's end.
Now,
The phase I suspect most of you have lived through or are living through and I want to describe it accurately.
There is a long period,
Years usually,
And I've been through this myself,
Where the entire project is eradication.
You are not trying to live with this.
You are trying to make it not have happened.
I want to reach a state where it no longer affects me.
Where you could tell the story flatly in a normal voice and feel nothing.
And that's proof that you are finally free.
So you work,
Genuinely,
Seriously,
With a great deal of effort.
You read everything.
You understand your own history.
You find a trauma therapist.
You start to do fancy techniques.
You may have done years of therapies,
Trainings,
Courses,
Journals.
And on a retreat,
Something big happened also on a Saturday for you.
But it had faded by Wednesday.
You look for the technique,
The modality,
The thing that will finally clear it.
And there is always another one.
Because there is an entire industry now organized around this promise.
And the promise has the same shape,
That you will come out of this stronger,
The universe gave this to you for a reason,
This is a life lesson,
You are resilient,
This will all make sense,
One day you will be grateful for it.
I slow down and here is the difficulty with that project.
It is not that you are not working hard enough.
I think the struggle to eradicate itself is part of what keeps it alive.
I'll say this once more,
The struggle to eradicate itself is part of what keeps it alive.
Now,
This is a well-established idea and it has a name also.
It's called experiential avoidance.
The effort that you put to not have an internal experience,
To suppress it,
To argue with it and to outrun it,
Is a very reliable predictor of that experience persisting and intensifying.
Not because feelings are magic,
Because avoidance requires constant vigilance towards the thing you're avoiding.
You cannot successfully not look at something without checking where it is.
Now,
The Buddhist traditions got there considerably earlier than the clinicians and they put it better actually.
They talk about two arrows.
The first arrow is the pain itself.
Something happened,
It destroyed you and the ache arrives whenever it wants to.
That one lands and you do not get a say in it.
And then there is the second arrow is what we do about it.
The resistance,
The rays that it is still there,
The story that it should have gone by now,
And then the interrogation of ourselves for not having finished.
The second arrow does more damage than the first one,
Over a lifetime,
By a wide margin.
And almost everybody I sit with,
And I also talk from my personal experience,
Exhausted from the second arrow.
And they think they are exhausted from the first.
If it is not eradication.
Because I am not here to tell you nothing improves.
A great deal improves and I would not be doing this work if it did not.
So,
What I have watched over and over and over is a sequence.
And it is not the sequence anybody is sold.
I am also not selling anything to you.
The first stage is the one we just described.
I am trying to make something go away.
And that stage can last 20 years.
And remember,
It's not wasted.
You learn an enormous amount in that.
And some of that learning actually makes the next stage possible.
The second stage is recognition,
And it is quieter than it sounds.
It is the point where you can see it coming.
Where you notice sometimes in the moment,
Sometimes an hour later,
Which still counts.
This is the old thing arriving in the present.
This is the old thing arriving in the present.
It's just wearing today's clothes.
This is not a small achievement.
Now,
Before this,
You simply became the state.
After it,
There is a silver of space between you and the reaction.
And everything else is built in that silver.
So third stage then now that i can see that something old comes up it's not me of the here and now it's something else in me that's reacting i'm keeping it very simple jargon free then comes coexistence the third stage and this is the one that sounds like defeat to the conscious mind and it is actually not It is the point at which you stop organizing your life around getting rid of it and start organizing your life living well with it in the present.
You know your patterns now.
You know November is hard for you.
You know the exact tone of voice that puts you in a spiral.
You plan around it.
The way a person with a bad knee plans around stairs,
Not tragically,
It's just you being practical,
So the knee can heal.
You build a life that has room in it for the facts of your life.
And the ache is still there.
It doesn't go away.
Some days it is loud.
Some days you forget about it.
Both are normal and neither is a verdict.
And then,
The fourth stage,
Which I think is the real destination,
Is permission.
The day you stop requiring yourself to be fine.
The day you stop requiring yourself to be fine.
The day that a bad one arrives and you do not add anything to it.
You do not interrogate yourself about why after all this therapy,
After all this time,
It's happening again.
You do not conclude that you've gone backwards.
You simply think,
It is one of those days.
I know this one,
And it will pass by Thursday.
This is where the suffering softens.
I am not saying it goes away.
It softens.
Not when the ache goes away.
It may never fully go in this life.
But when you stop being at war with the fact of it.
So the first arrow is not always in your gift,
But the second one is.
Now,
I will say this much and no more,
Because the details are not useful at all.
There is a thing in my life that changed me.
And it happened.
It took a long time.
And I absolutely did not come out of it as the same person who went into it.
And I spent years trying to get back to who I was before.
And that was the entire project.
I did not know it was a project because I thought I was healing.
I was in fact attempting restoration and restoration was never on the table.
So what changed was not that it stopped hurting.
It still comes up.
There are particular weeks in the year where I am not my best.
There are particular people,
Places,
Situations,
Conversations around which something comes up.
I just know those a little bit better now.
What changed is that I stopped treating its presence as evidence that I had failed at something.
And this was not a breakthrough I had in a breathwork class or in an expensive retreat.
There was no one moment that I woke up and said,
This is happening.
The realization drops very very slowly over a long period of time.
And I only noticed it in retrospect.
The way you notice one day in March that the evenings have been getting longer for weeks.
So,
If you are waiting for that moment,
I would gently let that go.
In my experience,
It does not come as a moment.
It is a process that I'm in which is a gradual reduction in the amount of energy you spend arguing with your life.
And then another layer of this very important piece here is closure.
Because as human beings we are wired for closure.
I want to know why.
I want closure.
Why did I have that breakup?
Why did this thing happen?
Why did that happen?
I want to say something about the word closure.
Because it does real harm and it is not even a clinical term.
It is a word from a courtroom and an insurance file.
A case closes.
A matter is concluded and filed.
It escaped into emotional life somewhere in the last few decades.
And it has been telling people ever since that there is a door which shuts.
Let me tell you this,
There is no door.
The grief literature worked this out some time ago and quietly changed its whole model.
For the most of 20th century the theory was detachment.
Healthy grieving means letting go.
Breaking the bond and moving on.
And then researchers actually asked bereaved people what had happened over the years.
And they found something else entirely.
That people carry it forward.
The relationship changes form and continues,
And the ones who do that are not the stuck ones.
They are frequently the ones doing their best.
The same is true here.
You do not finish with it.
You carry it in a different way.
And the different way is what people mean when they say somebody has healed.
You carry it in a different way.
And the different ways what people mean when they say somebody has healed.
And the image I find most useful is the most literal one.
Scar tissue.
A serious wound does not become skin again.
Never.
It becomes a scar,
Which is real tissue and it's functional.
It is also different.
It is less elastic.
It does not sweat the same way.
It is more sensitive to some things and less sensitive to others.
And it aches in a certain weather.
And this is not a metaphor either.
People with old injuries genuinely report more pain when the pressure drops.
And it is not imagination.
And nobody thinks it means the injury has reopened.
This is what you have Not an open wound.
Not skin.
Scar tissue.
Holding the thing together and doing its job and simply reporting on the weather.
And you will notice that nobody says to a person with an old surgical scar,
It has been 11 years,
Why is it still there?
And maybe you say it to yourself weekly or daily.
I did.
One more thing before we practice,
Because I think the older stories are more honest about this than anything modern.
There is a passage in the Hebrew scriptures where a man wrestles all night with something he cannot name.
And he does not lose.
He holds on until dawn and then He demands to receive a blessing.
And then he walks away with a limp,
Permanently.
The text is very clear about it.
The hip is put out and it stays out.
And he goes forward into the rest of his life with the blessing and the injury together.
And neither cancels the other.
Now I find that unbearably accurate.
It is a story about a person who wins and is still marked.
Nobody in that account suggests that the limp indicates the blessing was incomplete.
And then the Christian story does something similar and stranger.
In the resurrection accounts,
The wounds are still there.
The body has come through the worst thing available.
And the marks have not been erased.
They are in fact the identifying feature,
The thing by which He is recognized.
Now,
Whatever you make of it,
Notice the theology here.
The wounds are not removed from the restored body,
They are carried into it.
Then there is the older figure of the wounded healer,
This is going back to the Greeks,
Who could heal others but he could not heal himself.
Who carried an injury that would not close.
And became the teacher he was because of it,
Not despite it.
So every one of those stories declines the ending we want.
None of them says full restoration.
All of them offer the same message that you go forward marked and the mark is not a failure of the process.
It actually in some cases becomes the thing you give to the world then.
I am definitely not telling you that your suffering had a purpose and I absolutely don't believe the universe gave it to you to make you strong.
I do not believe that and I would not say that to you.
Some things damage you and they mean nothing.
Some things are simply damaged and they mean absolutely nothing.
But you may find in time.
That you now are unusually good at sitting with people in the dark.
And it's not a justification.
It is just something that turns out to be true for people who have been there.
I understand.
Now,
After all this talking,
Let us practice the thing we have been talking about and let me be clear about what it is not.
So,
We are not going to go into the story.
We are not going to hear what happened.
If something starts coming,
Let it stay in the doorway rather than in the room.
We are not trying to make anything smaller tonight.
Nothing is being resolved.
If you finish this and it aches exactly as much,
Then the practice worked.
What we are practicing is being in the same room as it is without fighting it.
No right or wrong way to do this.
Simply bringing our awareness to our bodies for a few minutes before we close.
Let my words guide you.
Settle now.
Wherever you are.
Eyes open is fine.
And let's start with this.
Let your eyes Travel the room slowly.
The corners,
The light,
And whatever is it at the edges.
If you're lying down,
If there is darkness in the room,
You can simply look up at the ceiling.
Whatever,
Just let your eyes find the space around you.
Now find one thing.
That could only exist now.
Something from this decade.
Your system carries a quiet question about what year it is.
And an object answer is better than an argument.
Find for me a place in your body that is not any troublesome.
And it might be very small.
The weight of your back against something,
Warmth of your hands,
Heels on the floor.
It doesn't have to be the calmest place you can imagine.
It might be very small.
One place in my body that is not trouble.
Most ordinary place.
And just stay here now for a few moments.
The one small place,
My anchor,
My safety.
I am just noticing that small thing and everything else can stay exactly as it is.
Nothing has to go anywhere.
Nothing has to be any different.
I just want you to notice.
Where is the ache present today in your body?
Do I feel a warmth,
Cold,
Tightness,
Sensation,
Any other information from my body right now?
Where is the egg present tonight?
Now something may or may not be present with you.
Both are fine.
Both are useful information.
If it is dormant tonight,
Do not go looking for it.
That is the actual goal and it would be strange if we try to interrupt it.
But if something is present today,
Where is it in the body?
Not in the history,
Not in the story,
Not in what happened.
If something is present,
Where is it in the body?
The chest,
The throat,
The stomach,
Or somewhere else.
Locate it,
But do not enter it.
And now the move which is the whole practice.
Instead of pushing against it.
See whether you can make the space around it slightly larger.
The space around it slightly larger.
The egg stays exactly the size it is,
But the container gets bigger.
Now let your awareness include that ache,
Also your feet,
Also the room,
Also the sound outside,
Also my voice.
And also the fact that you are a person sitting somewhere with a whole life around them.
The egg did not shrink.
You get roomier.
That is available.
Now something that you say or just receive my words.
You may stay.
I am not going to fight you tonight.
You may stay.
I am not going to fight you tonight.
And just see what happens in the body when you say that.
There might be a softening.
There might be a release.
This is the second arrow being put down just for today.
You may stay.
I am not going to fight you tonight.
Now you stay here.
Until.
.
.
You come back to a neutral place.
The heels,
The back and the hands.
The heels,
The back,
And the hands.
The heels,
The back,
And the hands.
Put a hand now somewhere on yourself.
Chest,
Belly,
Wherever.
Put a hand somewhere on yourself.
Now before we close,
And give yourself this permission.
I am allowed to still be affected by this.
There is no date by which I was supposed to be finished.
I am allowed to have bad days about this.
For the rest of my life,
If that is how it goes.
I am allowed to still be affected by this?
There is no date by which I was supposed to be finished.
I am allowed to have bad days about this.
For the rest of my life,
If that is how it goes.
This is just a part of me in pain.
This is just a part of me in pain.
This is just a part of me.
In pain.
Now let it all go Feet on the floor Eyes around the room.
And let the ordinary space come back to you.
Feet on the floor,
Eyes around the room,
Let the ordinary space come back to you.
If you want to stay here a little bit longer,
You're welcome to pause this recording.
Some things to carry.
Stop measuring by whether it is gone.
That is the wrong instrument and it will only ever tell you that you're failing.
Second,
Learn your calendar.
If there are days in the week.
If there are weeks in the year that are hard,
Mark them.
Not to praise them,
But to stop being ambushed by them.
There is a great deal of difference between everything is falling apart and I feel unsafe in XYZ situations,
On XYZ days,
With XYZ people,
With XYZ conversations.
And last,
Tell somebody about the bad weeks in advance.
Not the story.
I am not usually great around this time of the year.
I am not usually great around this time of the year.
And that single sentence turns an unexplained withdrawal into something a person can stand beside you in.
Last night when you brought up that topic,
I was reminded of something.
And I withdrew.
No explanations,
But just making people aware that it was something else that came up.
It was a state that your body fell into.
And now the correction,
Which I think matters more than anything else I've said tonight.
Coexistence is not the same as managing alone,
And nothing is this talk is against getting any treatment.
Complex trauma responds to proper treatment,
Genuinely and substantially.
The flares get less frequent,
Less intense,
And shorter.
The recognition arrives faster,
The relationship difficulties ease,
And the self-concept shifts.
You did not come out of that unchanged.
Nobody does.
Nobody ever did.
And every honest story we have ever told about this says the same thing.
You went through the night and you came out with a limp.
The limp is not the failure.
It is the evidence that you were there and then you came back and you're still walking.
So,
Please go gently,
Especially on the days that it aches.
Thank you very much for joining and listening,
If you're still here.
Namaste.
