The Alchemy of Hope: Healing Post Traumatic Stress and Catastrophic Grief

THE ALCHEMY OF HOPE:

HEALING POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

AND CATASTROPHIC GRIEF

RiverVoices Press

Summit, Oregon

97326

Peg Elliott Mayo

Copyright 2008/2013©

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Feedback welcome:

uncommonideas@rivervoices.com

Subject line: alchemy

DEDICATION

For Patrick-he'd be so surprised!

And for Katie, Stan and Peter, they lived it too.

David Feinstein

the dearest of friends for over 40 years.

Don Pauls, the Shy Guy

has protected and nurtured

my creativity over thirty years

in our life in the country.

I am grateful beyond words to the multitude

of people who have shared their secrets, struggles and successes over the years.

TABLE of CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Shades of Sorrow, Visions of Fulfillment

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE: THE PAIRED INEVITABILITIES: DESPAIR AND HOPE

Ritual One: Preparation

Ritual Two: Your Temperament

Ritual Three: A Fresh Vision

Cause and Effect: Understanding the Wound

Who Gets It and How

What Is It?

CHAPTER TWO: THE NATURE OF SUFFERING

Chuck

Ritual Four: Inspiration

Marianna

Transformation

Expressive Grief Work

Condition or Process?

Ritual Five: Condition or Process

Moving from a Condition to a Process

Ritual Six: Moving Energy

Wounds

Ritual Seven: Your Experiences of Loss

The Wounded Healer

Ritual Eight: Looking for Teachers

The Emotions Associated with Sorrow

Ritual Nine: Losses

Ritual Ten: The Components of Sorrow

The Elements of Pleasure

CHAPTER THREE: THE ALCHEMY OF HOPE

IN THE LIVES OF THE WOUNDED

Alchemy

The Need for a Personal Philosopher's Stone

Loss as Alchemical Fire

Ritual Eleven: Defining an Intention

The Bennett Family Creatively Addresses Sorrow

Transforming Energy: Creating Life

The Hero's Journey

A Spiritual Context

Altered Consciousness

Ritual Twelve: Inviting Awareness

CHAPTER FOUR: OLD SOLDIERS, OLD WOUNDS

YOUNG SOLDIERS, FRESH WOUNDS

Steve

Jerry Boyd

Mike Chase

Bobby

Mike Demaio

CHAPTER FIVE: LOSS OF CONNECTION:

THE SOURCE OF SORROW

Secondary PTSD-CG

Dustin, Nancy and Richard

Separation from Self

Body

Ritual Thirteen: Finding Your Body

Mind

Ritual Fourteen: Rediscovering Your Mind

Separation from Others

Ritual Fifteen: Introvert or Extrovert?

Helene

Separation from the Familiar

Ritual Sixteen: Thanking the Familiar

Separation from Illusions

Ritual Seventeen: Facing Illusions

Separation from the Sacred

Ritual Eighteen: Inviting the Sacred

Ordinary People and PTSD-CG

Ruby

DD

Jay and His Family

Essential Separations

CHAPTER SIX: SOUL WOUNDS

Jaime

Wendi

Diane

Jimmy: Exorcising Demons

CHAPTER SEVEN: A HUMAN CONDITION

Mike A.

Peg Elliott Mayo

What Comes Next

CHAPTER EIGHT: EXPRESSIVE GRIEF WORKRitual Nineteen: Commitment to Heal

Paths Through the Flames

Creative Visualization

Ritual Twenty: Pleasurable Expectations

Ritual Twenty-One: Action

Meditation

Ritual Twenty-Two: Meditation

Mantra

Ritual Twenty-Three: Affirmation Mantra

Movement

Ritual Twenty-Four: Hand Dancing

Ritual Twenty-Five: More Movement

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINE: RITUALS OF RELEASE

Giving Voice

Ritual Twenty-Six: Making Sound

Breath

Moving Ahead

Ritual Twenty-Seven: Lamentation

Ritual Twenty-Eight: Sighing and Yawning

Ritual Twenty-Nine: Singing

Ritual Thirty: Chanting

Ritual Thirty-One: Toning

CHAPTER TEN: CREATIVE PROJECTION

Ritual Thirty-Two: Creative Projection Dialogue

Journal Work

Ritual Thirty-Three: Journaling

Auditory Drawing

Ritual Thirty-four: Auditory Drawing

Working with the Shadow

Reframing

Ritual Thirty-Five: Reframing

CHAPTER ELEVEN: RITUALS OF GOODBYE

Four Phases

Ritual Thirty-six: Resentments and Regrets

Ritual Thirty-Seven: Appreciations

Ritual Thirty-Eight: Remembering and Learning

Ritual Thirty-Nine: Goodbye

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE REBIRTH OF PLEASURE

Ritual Forty: Welcoming Pleasure back.

Ritual Forty-One: Bringing Creativity (Back) into Your Life

Ritual Forty-Two: Conscious Choosing

Ritual Forty-Three: Smiling

Ritual Forty-Four: Being of Pleasurable Service

Ritual Forty-Five: Learning for Pleasure

Ritual Forty-Six: Bodily Delights

Ritual Forty-Seven: Getting It All Together

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A MENU, NOT A PRESCRIPTION

What's on the Menu?

Appetizers: Practitioners

Salad: Mainstream Practices

Entrée: Alternative, Integrative

and Traditional Approaches

Dessert: Reading and Viewing

After Dinner Refreshment

INTRODUCTION:

Healing the Wound

This book is a User’s Manual, written for in-the-trenches therapists as well as survivors of both primary and secondary Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: PTSD. The information and personal stories are based on a long lifetime of counseling experience with the wounded.

Wounded has special importance. Their suffering dysfunction is not an infection nor is it genetic. Something caused harm. Repeated something’s deepened the damage. A broken leg is a wound. So is participating in a wrenching event, being overpowered by a malignant force or being double-bound by competing powers. To be double-bound is to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. A pacifist is faced with great physical threat: does she fight or yield? Does deciding wound her? There’s high probability.

Common thought is the military creates battalions of PTSD-scarred veterans. It does. So does childhood abuse, domestic violence and shattering sights.

The American Psychiatric Association has a system of diagnosis for emotional-physical-intellectual-social problems. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used almost universally in professional settings for distinguishing between conditions and for insurance claim processing. It is a dreary listing of dozens of disorders and dysfunctions. Each is assigned a code number. PTSD is 309.81 and is grouped with Anxiety Disorders. There is a lengthy list of conditions that indicate the diagnoses. Further, in this cold sorting of human experiences, there are other axis that may be identified i.e. alcohol abuse (303.9) or major depression (296.3x).

Giving an additional illusion that it is possible to diagram a human being is the GAF (Global Assessment of Function) scale, which tries to quantify a person’s ability to live in the world. On the customary one to 100 scale, 100-90 indicates superior functioning in a wide range of activities, life’s problems never seem to get out of hand, is sought out by others because of his or her many positive qualities. No symptoms. Amazing. I have never met this asymptomatic person for whom everything is manageable. Sadly, 10 ― 1 is described thus: Persistent danger of severely hurting self or others (e.g. recurrent violence) OR persistent inability to maintain minimal personal hygiene OR serious suicidal act with clear expectation of death." This could be a plan for basic military training.

DSM diagnosis’s are useful the way an anatomical chart is by providing a flat landscape of the territory. It doesn’t allow for inescapable individual differences or the third dimension which is life. PTSD is a useful shorthand, no more.

What DSM doesn’t mention ― it unfortunately not being part of medical terminology ― is soul sickness. Many PTSD survivors describe feeling possessed, as by a demon or they feel lost in familiar places. A summary of DSM on PTSD is in Appendix I.

Though I use the term PTSD throughout this book, my working definition is personal, nuanced and fluid.

Trauma: wounds occur when a unique individual is required to perform actions repugnant to a personal ethical/moral code or sensibilities and/or body has been violated. A human being who has been tested to and beyond physical/emotional limits is wounded. Someone confused by conflicting training/values/instincts in moments of vulnerability and with life-threatening consequences is hurt. Repetition, sleep deprivation and hostile environment reinforces the trauma.

Reaction: This singular person may experience the wound, after the moments of trauma, in a variety of ways: anger, panic, hyper-vigilance, withdrawal, amnesia of the event, guilt. S/he may suffer nightmares, flashbacks and hallucinations. There may be parallel physical symptoms as the body somatizes and manifests psychic disruption.

Triggers: Certain mechanisms activate symptoms. Triggers are sensory cues to the individual there is extreme, annihilating threat present. The response by-passes rational thought and the person is in full fight or flight response, an adrenaline stew.

Results: There are wounds received by the nervous system that take on the characteristics of reflexes. The mind is frequently overwhelmed by the physiological impulse to action. Emotions are primal, lacking nuance and empathy. Personal and social circumstances exacerbate or sooth the frequency, intensity and nature of the disorder.

Remedy: Healing comes where there is recognition of the trauma’s effect and effort is directed to breaking deleterious patterns of thought and action. The tools are physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

Healing is not curing. Curing would mean there was no scar nor evidence of injury. Healing is reconciling all the parts of an individual, in all his complexity for maximum function and feeling. The result is the ability to creatively live and take responsibility for personal choices. That’s what this book is about.

PTSD is not limited to combatants. Firemen, police, EMTS, abuse survivors and bystanders to horrors are also affected and effected. We who saw the World Trade Towers collapse from a distance are haunted. Consider the effect on those who watched hand-in-hand jumpers from the upper stories, got last phone calls, breathed the cement-asbestos dust or dug remains out of the rubble. There is enough suffering to go around.

The PTSD wounded do not live in isolation. They are our young, our brave, our courageous fellow citizens. Some retreat to self medication. Some just retreat. Their wounds are not necessarily visible or identifiable. Many are silent about the nightmares, defensiveness, triggers and dread, believing to admit them is to be weak.

Some seek professional or spiritual help and find relief with skilled intervention. Others apply their intellectual-spiritual-emotional power for creative transformation. Many pooh-pooh talk since it was action, explosion, skull-shattering experience that altered their vision of the world. Let me be clear: tools do exist to address the wounds. Scars, of course, remain, but may become more background than urgent.

Rarely addressed are the secondary victims: wives, children, parents, comrades, associates of PTSD-afflicted people. I knew a good woman, a tender woman, who deeply loved her partner. She was despicably abused by a stepfather in childhood. However much she cared about Bob, she was triggered into panic by the sound of a zipper. For years, he dressed in the bathroom and was exceedingly cautious in approaching intimacy with her. He suffered with secondary PTSD, hers was primary: both were wounded. If a child resists a father’s instructions and Dad responds out of all proportion from his PTSD reflex, the child becomes a secondary PTSD afflicted person.

Wars generate their own language for these injuries. In the Civil War it was the staggers. World War I, shell shock and World War II, battle fatigue. I suppose survivors of the ancient wars of Greece and Rome had their versions.

The condition of being emotional-spiritual wounded does not just go away in time. Given terrifyingly dangerous and morally reprehensible circumstance, manipulated by training and naïve loyalty, the suffering is unremitting, though often below the conscious horizon. The commonest strategy is to repress or ignore the symptoms. Don’t talk about it. Have a few drinks or a fistful of pills. Discharge immediate tension in a blind fury of road rage. Don’t tell, though: if people know, they’ll think you’re a lightweight. Just handle it.

That is a technique for wallpapering over the cockroaches. Doesn’t work: those suckers keep moving. The scars and reflexes set up by intolerable experiences often override self-control, despite courageous attempts.

There many volumes on the subject. Some are personal accounts, others clinical research, applied therapies and doctorial dissertations. A sampling are listed at back of the book in Resources.

This book is based on true stories of people met over many years. Those with secondary PTSD are given their voices through in-depth interviews. Every event occurred. A few people described are composites. Care has been taken to assure no one other than myself and my husband can be identified.

Further, this book looks at unconventional approaches such as Energy Medicine, Buddhist methods and shamanic practice, explores the shadowy country where consciousness meets the unconscious and offers direction to those groping their way without a guide.

When someone offers themselves as a guide, it is wise to ascertain if they’ve been over the trail before and how well equipped they are for contingencies. I was a therapist for forty years. Much of my energy has gone to working and learning with PTSD survivors.

Little troubles me as much as sweeping, doctrinaire, mechanistic approaches to working with human suffering. I am an innovator and I admire a fresh approach while valuing proven methods. A parallel theme is appreciation of the divine restlessness of creative process and its healing properties. This will become apparent in interactions with clients. Humor, irreverence and hope are not light-weight forces. Attitude matters. I am also a PTSD survivor, married to one.

Finally, as a credential for this work, I am a person who lives modestly in the forest on the bank of a salmon-bearing river. My guide is nature and the immense intricacy of her design.

Michael Toms, on New Dimensions radio, says, It is only through a change in consciousness the world will be transformed. I believe this. This book offers tools and pathways toward that transformation. It is a hopeful book, though events precipitating the traumas are raw, disturbing accounts. It can’t be helped: to change consciousness awareness we must exist to examine the forces that made us.

To the end of personalizing and making principles applicable, a number of exercises are provided. The book is most useful if the reader takes time to do them. For the primary and secondary PTSD wounded the healing takes personal effort and focus: the exercises support this intention.

I wish you well in healing and thriving.

MY EXPERIENCES WITH SORROW

AND PLEASURE AS PSYCHOTHERAPIST

For forty years, I was a clinical social worker in both public institutions and private practice being a privileged witness of the lives in intimate moments of suffering and of revitalization. One truth brilliantly stands out from the background of suffering. The human spirit is astoundingly, blessedly, resilient.

Certainly, there are those who lack the stamina or wherewithal to summon their forces and transform misery into a deeper understanding of life’s processes. We can only mourn them, for it is not given to anyone to make the decision to affirm life for another. We each do so personally.

Free will is our choice of attitude and behavior shaping response to the challenges of life. Imagine five people eat an identical meal in a restaurant and all become sick. There will be five different responses, dependent on the attitude and behavior of the individual. The first will bitterly decide to sue. The second will discern a conspiracy by agribusiness to degrade the food supply. The third will decide it is divine retribution for going off a prescribed diet. The fourth may decide never to eat a meal out again, it’s too dangerous. The fifth will say, That’s the breaks—this time the odds caught up with me.

This is not to say that we cannot or should not effectively and generously offer our skills, support, blessings, and energies to others. It is for them to use or refuse what is offered. I have often felt sorrow at this codicil on free will.

Having witnessed and, hopefully, sometimes catalyzed, stunning recoveries from daunting challenges gives me hope. I trust you, reader, will uncover the roots of your own sorrow, as prelude to transformation. For a triumph, there must be a challenge: the story of the Bennett family will be one theme. They are chosen over a thousand possibilities. The complexity of responses and final success in transforming a terrible situation with potentially dangerous ramifications is an odyssey of spirit from which all emerged enriched.

Dan Bennett, a child psychologist, was forty-four when diagnosed with liver cancer. Despite the pleadings and raging of his wife, Sylvia, a nurse, he refused the most common medical interventions of chemotherapy and radiation. The couple had two children, Michael, twelve, and Teddy, only three. Their crisis came in the midst of a delightful life involving sailing, crafts, writing, financial stability, professional success and a solid marriage. All was cast into dark perspective with the diagnosis.

It has long been my practice to tape record or keep a personal journal following the progress of my clients. The following is an excerpt from Dan’s initial disclosure as recorded in my journal.

He didn’t take long. I don’t think I’ll ever forget his words: Doctor MacAlbee has just told me I should plan on winding things up in the next four months—it seems I’ve got the ‘Big C.’" His voice was flat as Kansas and only the strange glitter in his eyes showed any emotion.

"I told him of my disbelief; all the while searching his face and body for clues. I had noticed he was losing weight, but anyone who works and plays as hard as Dan is likely to get a little gaunt once in a while. Now, I could see he looked sallow, holding his mouth stiffly as if he didn’t trust his self-control. It took me a minute to realize how awful it must be for him to have to persuade me he was dying

"He filled in the details of weird symptoms and Sylvia’s insistence on the medical workup . . . what it might mean financially and practically for his family. He had totally mobilized his intellect for dealing with the crisis—all his emotions, intuition and spontaneity were muffled. We sat there talking like mechanical people.

Then he came up with his mind-boggling idea. I want to record what he said as accurately as I can remember: Look, Peg, I’ve been a therapist for seventeen years. I know what this kind of thing does to a family. It brings out the weaknesses; it sometimes breaks people—not that I think that’ll happen here, but who knows? Anyhow, Teddy is just a baby and Mike is at a pretty critical stage of his development. I don’t want to mess up these last few months I’ve got left. Sylvia will take it hard, but will stiff-upper-lip it. What I want you to do is hang around close and be our friend and therapist.

Dan applied his best judgment and asked for help in his crisis. Typically, he thought of those dearest to him before himself. Some of this was, of course, a defense against the horror of his personal situation. Some things are very hard to bear and an inner wisdom allows us to come gradually into realization. John O’Donohue, was a compassionate philosopher who wrote and recorded Anam Cara—[Soul Friend] Wisdom from the Celtic World, speaks of how the soul naturally eases into realization, quite unlike the neon glare demanded by modern psychology.

This is not denial. Dan knew he had liver cancer. He knew quite well how few options he had and an intellectual understanding of the all-but-certain outcome. What he was buffering himself against in making arrangements was the emotional impact. That, we both knew, would come soon enough.

SOME OF MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

WITH SORROW AND PLEASURE

As I write, I am eighty-five years old. I am not a mild person and I have lived my life. By that, I mean life has not happened to me, but I have engaged and wrestled—often impotently and foolishly—with the array of events that have filled my days. I was blessed with ardor for creative expression, family nurturing it, a supportive profession and a multitude of engrossing avocations. I have felt and received much love, while living the horrors and wonders of the twentieth century.

There have been life-altering losses: my mother’s death from asthma when I was twelve, my husband’s and son’s suicides, Dad passing eleven years younger than I am now myself. I have lost status and role, place and vision, physical capacity and illusion, loved people and animals filling me with joy. But I have never lost hope.

Hope of what? is a fair question. Hope of learning and creating as well as hope of clearing my karma through right action. In often halting, derailed and clumsy movement toward individuation, I've required much help. The help has come by way of interventions by friends, sudden illuminations and a lot of personal pick-and-shovel emotional-spiritual work. Time alone in nature gives perspective on these processes.

Pleasure now comes easily. I savor a good book, the touch of a hand, creative time and a host of things both more dramatic and even simpler. It is a bit of a brag, but the truth is I have a gift for happiness, appreciation and spontaneous fun. This has not always been so and, I suppose, I will again experience my capacity to feel sorrow, fear, confusion and anger. So be it.

Consciousness requires choice. This is both blessing and burden. How often I’ve wished that someone, somehow, would make a decision for me. Will I live or die? Will I take revenge, become embittered or somehow transcend the present suffering? Possibilities abound and often confusion. The agency of free provides the goad to choose a path. Even procrastination or indecision is a choice to drift and stay in the suffering. Consciousness provides context.

KARMA AND INDIVIDUATION

Karma and individuation are important for in the context of this book. My father explained karma very simply. Life is a day in school. Study hard so you’ll be promoted next time around, not held back or demoted. The present moment—present life—precious as it is, is not all of existence. Acting wisely reminds there are consequences to our choices.

What is sown is what is reaped. What goes around, comes around. These concepts are roots of the Tree of Knowledge offering incentive to growth and fulfillment. Maturation is neither simple nor easy.

Individuation is humankind’s innate tropism to fill in our vacancies, to accumulate and to digest many experiences—to become all that our nature allows. It suggests we are equipped to change, grow, refine and thrive in a world of challenges. Those not stretching, exploring, risking and consciously choosing are sad souls locked in a prison. Individuation is the gift we give ourselves by willingness to integrate learning with experience and reflect. It is the Mount Everest of challenges.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT AND HOW TO USE IT

Here are the common themes of sorrow and how they may be wholesomely addressed. The purpose and goal is the rebirth of pleasure. Exercises or rituals gently challenge and guide the reader from the dark night of the soul to an enriched, wiser, more compassionate consciousness into which pleasure is integrated.

Resources within or otherwise accessible are employed to transform losses aching void to vitality and pleasurable engagement. There are examples of others making passage from profound unhappiness to living creatively. This is do-able work with diligence in guarding the flicker of hope and following the natural steps of transformation. That you are reading demonstrates hope. I suggest reading all the way through before doing the rituals and to work systematically for the greatest benefit.

THE RITUALS

I’ve chosen rituals for the activities found throughout Alchemy is a stronger concept than mundane exercises. Rituals are performed seriously—not to be confuse with somberly! They give respectful attention and hopeful focus.

You will do well to dedicate an hour several times a week to this life-enhancing process. Retreat to space where you will not be interrupted. I advise a special place with beautiful things while concentrating on transforming the sorrows of life to a creative engagement. Certainly, this requires an adaptation of your usual routine. Ritual calls for time apart from the ordinary routine demands of modern life. Engage in reordering perspective from bleak to fertile. An individualizing mission, worthy of heroic effort.

This work is personal, intimate, private. Be cautious about sharing. Avoid self-conscious censoring or posing for a sympathetic audience. If you open your work to another, choose carefully. Sometimes working with a therapist or trusted friend will support you in difficult moments or offer clarity when baffled. Be thoughtful not to distort your deepest experiences with concerns about the scrutiny and judgment of others.

I urge you to work sequentially with this material: the rituals are planned for cumulative effect. Some will take more courage than you knew you had, but that brings satisfaction. You will not be graded. The satisfaction of transformative change will be your reward.

THE CHALLENGE

You control the pace of change. Some are deliberate and thorough, taking a measured amount of time to accomplish difficult tasks. You may be a person quick and spontaneous in tackling fresh ideas. Neither style is better than the other, they are simply different.

An is consideration is your overall self-vision. We may act our pain like animals in a trap. Misery disorganizes thought and