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I grew up among geniuses and artists in the 1960s. My father was a writer and an amateur inventor, my mother and sister Kimberly were amazingly skilled visual artists, my brothers, Michael and Matthew, were musical composers and trivia kings, my brother Matthew was a math and language prodigy, and my sister Jennifer was a genius at training animals. At that time, society saw genius as a merely intellectual quality, but in the oasis of our home, intellectual, linguistic, musical, mathematical, and artistic genius had equal value. My brothers and sisters and I grew up immersed in art and wordplay, in math and painting, in trivia and logic, and in movies, music, and comedy. Our family always had a comfortable relationship with the idea of “genius.” Most of us were intellectual geniuses (as measured by the Standford-Binet IQ test), but through my mother’s influence, we also worked toward artistic genius, musical genius, genius with animals, genius with cooking—you name it. We commandeered the idea of genius and used it wherever and however we liked.
We laughed about my dad’s snoring genius, my mom’s forgetfulness genius, and Jennifer’s genius at making up bizarre new punch lines to jokes we all thought we knew. My brothers invented a silly phrase—“emotional genius”—and it always made us laugh. None of us could envision an emotional person—a sloppy, weeping, raging, fearful person—as a genius. The two words seemed to fight each other in the most ridiculous way, which is why I came back to them throughout my life. Was it possible, I wondered, for people to be as brilliant in their emotional lives as they were in their intellectual and artistic lives? Could people ever learn to move beyond the polarized modes of repression or expression of emotion and into a life-expanding understanding of the function of emotion itself? Questions like these have always fascinated me.
In the third year of my life, everything changed. Along with my younger sister and many of the girls in our neighborhood, I was repeatedly molested by the father of the family that lived across the street. That experience threw me headlong into categories of genius my family would never have wanted to consider and certainly would never have wished upon their toddler daughters. That experience also threw me headlong into the tumultuous realm of fierce emotions and uncontrolled empathy.
(A note for sensitive people: empathy makes me deeply aware of the way words and images affect us. Though I will recount dark moments and I will describe fierce emotions, I won’t relate graphic accounts of the traumas I or others have experienced. I will be very careful with your sensibilities, because there is no reason—there is no excuse—to traumatize you with stories of horror. I will maintain my privacy and respect your dignity by telling my stories in a gentle and nonspecific manner.)
At the time when most children are beginning to back away from their empathic skills in deference to the more accepted (and safer) realm of spoken language, I was brought into full-body contact with human evil. Instead of moving further away from my nonverbal skills as children normally do, I moved further into them in response to the assaults. The path of my development shifted in startling ways; language (along with many other things) became very troublesome for me. I developed a stutter, forgot simple words, and became mildly dyslexic and very hyperactive. I began to rely on empathy when words failed or when I couldn’t understand people, but this reliance created terrible upheavals around and inside me.
Through my empathic ability, I was able to feel what others were feeling, whether they wanted me to or not. I knew when my family members were fighting or lying, even when no one else could tell. I knew when other kids didn’t like me, and why. I knew when teachers didn’t know their subject matter and when principals didn’t like children. I also knew when my molester was on the prowl: I was able to steer clear of him or choose to enter his house so the younger girls wouldn’t be attacked that day. I picked up far too much information, but I had no coherent or acceptable way to bring it out into the open. Most people can hardly bear hearing the truth from a close adult friend; almost no one wants to hear the truth from a child. I learned that the hard way. I could sense the real feelings underneath the social masks and react to the truth of whatever situation I witnessed. I would blurt out the true (but unwanted) words, point to the actual situation under the social banter, find the absurdity beneath the seeming normality—in short, I stirred up everything and everyone around me.
Though my family didn’t discover the molestation for two long years, they did protect me in some ways. They treated my unusual skills and deficits as valid parts of my individual nature. Though tests and medications were urged, my family shielded me from the further indignities of pharmaceutical and psychological typecasting. (Unlike the present day, when there is tremendous help for abused, learning disabled, and hyperactive children, the 1960s were a wasteland.) With my family’s support, I was able to grow as an iconoclastic and unusual child in a family full of outsiders. There, in that realm of art and genius, I was surrounded by music and culture, comedy and drama, and plenty of love. I was able to channel many of my feelings into art or music, I was able to let my imagination soar, and I was able to talk in some measure about the things I saw and felt.
I did try to fit in with the gang of kids in my neighborhood, but I wasn’t very skilled at dealing with people. I was too honest and too strange. I always talked about things no one wanted to discuss (like why their parents pretended not to hate each other, or why they lied to our teacher about their homework, or why they wouldn’t admit they were crushed when someone insulted them), I had serious control issues, and I had a hair-trigger temper. I ended up spending much of my early childhood with animals because they were easier to be with. I didn’t have to hide my empathic skills—I didn’t have to pretend not to see or understand my furry friends. Domesticated animals love to be seen and understood, and they love to be in close relationships with people. Most important, animals don’t lie about their feelings, so they didn’t require me to lie about my own. I didn’t need to be in control of my animal friends because they were in control of their own behavior. It was a tremendous relief. I had found my people; it didn’t matter that they were clothed in cat or dog suits. I even found a guardian angel.
During the turbulent years of the molestations, my mother would send me out each morning—stuttering and agitated—to play in the front yard, but she didn’t yet know that our yard was in direct line of sight to my molester’s house. I took to watering the lawn with the fear and nausea I felt when I was in our front yard. I’d grasp the hose tightly, stick out my tongue, bug out my eyes a little, and shake all over as the water poured out and nearly drowned the lawn. My family and other kids would laugh (in fairness, I did look ridiculous), which isolated me even more. After a few days of this, a long-haired tangerine tabby cat named Tommy Tiger poked his nose through our hedge. To the great relief of our lawn, my morning watering ended, and my relationship with Tommy began.
Tommy was an absolute original—wise and self-assured, but willing to be silly; fierce and protective, but infinitely patient and gentle with me. I’ve known many excellent cats since then, but never anyone like Tommy. He was my protector, my teacher, and my closest friend. He made everything safe; he chased away bad dogs and eased bad memories. Tommy and I curled up on the lawn each morning, and I’d whisper all my secrets—all of them—into his silky orange fur, and because I spent so much time with him, I began to see the world through his eyes. I could feel his full-body experience of lounging on a soft lawn in a puddle of sunshine, I learned exactly where to pet him for the best purrs, and I understood the angry growl that came from the pit of his stomach when he had to guard his territory against the numbskull neighborhood dogs who had no manners. I don’t remember when I stopped whispering to Tommy, but soon I was happy just to lie there with him in a silence that was filled with honest emotions. Communicating with him in this way was a massive improvement on (ugh) spoken language.
When I was with Tommy, I had the security and quiet I needed to think about humans and their bizarre behaviors. I’d think about people being terrible, and then an emotional picture would come into my mind to warn me about the danger of not trusting anyone. I’d think about my parents’ and siblings’ constant, noisy busyness—no one had time for me—and then I’d see fleeting images of their fatigue and despair and anxiety. Lying there with Tommy, I began to learn how to empathize with humans once again. With Tommy’s help, I was able to survive that time. Those years were wrenchingly painful and often terrifying, yet I have come to regard them as a profound blessing. My wounding took me out of the normal world and gave me the opportunity to view humankind and human interactions in a unique way.
The author and mythologist Michael Meade has said in lectures that sexual assault is an initiation—done at the wrong time, in the wrong way, by the wrong person, with the wrong intent—but nevertheless, it is an initiation; it’s a separation from the regular world, and a wounding that changes the initiate forever. My childhood ended in a split second, and I aged a thousand years in one afternoon. I learned by the age of three about brutality and weakness, about love and horror, about anger and forgiveness, and about the kinds of monsters people create out of their own unlived emotions. I saw the ugliest parts of human nature, but I had Tommy and my other animals, my art and music, my family, and my empathic skills to rely upon during all of it. My initiation into the heart of human evil did not end, as so many similar stories do, in drug addiction, insanity, illness, imprisonment, or suicide. No, my initiation dropped me into the underbelly of the human soul, where I learned to understand desperate torment—and strangely enough, heartbreaking beauty—firsthand. My empathic skills, instead of driving me crazy, helped me pilot my way through my childhood.
Though I’ve learned to work with them, let me state emphatically that my empathic skills weren’t any kind of gift at first. Had I been given a choice, I would have asked to be far less sensitive, far less empathic. However, I didn’t have a choice, because those repeated assaults removed any functional boundaries or sense of safety that I had. I lost my sense of self; I lost the “skin” most people have around their psyches. I lost many normal skills, and I was dangerously open to the commotion and clamor of the world, which is why the protection of anger was so necessary for me. The tantrums I had throughout childhood were not only a signal that something damaging had occurred, they were also a stopgap way to create an emergency boundary around my dangerously exposed little self.
In short, my empathic aptitude was an ingenious survival response. I see now that my empathy came forward protectively in response to the trauma, but before I learned to work with my empathic skills, they were not protective at all. I endured full-blown, full-body contact with others that made me see and feel their emotions as if they were real, physical things. My own and other people’s emotions would often knock me down. You may have experienced something like this yourself.
Certainly, your own emotions have enveloped you, startled you, embarrassed you, strengthened you, or hit you like a ton of bricks. If you’re sensitive to nonverbal cues and body language, other people’s emotions, even hidden ones, may have affected you in the same way. We all know what it’s like to be near an angry parent, a depressed friend, an excited child, or a frightened animal—the feelings of others can travel. Of course, much of the effect other people’s emotions have on us comes from our ability to act out other people’s pain or joy because we’ve experienced it ourselves. That’s a perfectly logical explanation, but many of us have picked up the emotions of others even when no facial or social cues have been present. We see and feel the emotions as if they’re our own.
There was no help for me. Emotional imbalances such as the ones I exhibited were called hyperactivity, brain damage, or whatever else, none of which were curable or explainable. No one thought to ask why I had so many emotions flying through me so much of the time. One neurologist saw that I had no social or sensory filters, but couldn’t offer any advice beyond suggesting that I spend time alone in darkened rooms. Of course, Ritalin was urged, but my mother said a strong “No!” to that. Her sense was that if I had that much energy, I must need that much energy, and instead of drugging it away, I should learn to deal with and marshal it. She was probably right in the long run, but being hyper made my school years (and most of my childhood) a sort of waking nightmare. I saw so much, I heard so much, and I felt so many people’s feelings—I was just on fire most of the time. I tried to process all the emotional content, but I worked almost completely in the dark because I didn’t know how to explain my perceptions to others. I didn’t know how to tell people that their unlived and dishonored emotions were affecting me. In that time, as in this one, emotions were not seen as real things.
But emotions are real. Emotions carry distinct and diverse messages that can be distinguished with absolute certainty—I knew that beyond doubt. The emotions were completely distinct and obvious to me—yet I found support nowhere, I found information nowhere, and I was completely alone (with humans, anyway) in my perceptions. I realized early on that my relationship with emotions could not be solved in the everyday world. My solutions would have to come from another place altogether.
During my years as a molestation victim, I learned how to dissociate—to leave my body and take my awareness away from the abuses that were visited upon me. I learned to send my imagination and attention away from what was occurring in the room. Many accident or trauma victims report a similar sense of dissociation during their ordeals, perhaps a floating feeling or a sense of being numbed or removed from the ordeal in some way. It’s a very natural thing—a protective neural response—to dissociate in response to overwhelming stimuli, but when the overwhelming stimulus is repeated, dissociation can become a repetitive act that ensures survival. Dissociation, which is often a child’s only defense, therefore becomes a dependable and comforting escape route. Many repeatedly traumatized children become masters of dissociation and imaginative travel.
In many cases, survivors of repeated trauma learn to use dissociation not just as a survival skill, but as a life skill, as a powerful stress reliever in many situations. For me, dissociation wasn’t just an emergency survival tool; it was a great reliever and moderator of my empathic skills. I learned to simply disconnect when too many unlived emotions were oozing from the people around me. When I could no longer function in social situations, I created a form of privacy by leaving my body and my life far behind. In fact, I remember almost none of my childhood. Even into my high school years and beyond, I have only sketchy and incomplete memories. I really wasn’t there.
I don’t want you to think that dissociation is some special or frightening skill. It’s not at all. We all jump in and out of our focused awareness every day. Daydreaming is a common dissociative experience, and repetitive tasks like driving can send you into dissociation, too. Have you ever gotten home, or arrived at work, with no memory of making turns or changing lanes? Your body skillfully drove the car and shifted gears, but your attention was someplace else. That’s what it’s like to be dissociated and out of your body. Dissociation is perfectly mundane. It’s simply a condition where your bodily instincts take over, and your mind goes off on a tangent for a while—it’s no big deal. However, for many traumatized people, the tangent goes on and on. There’s very little connection to life in the everyday world. Dissociated people live in the future, in the past, and in fantasy. They have a hard time getting down to earth. They may be functional and brilliant, they may run corporations (they’re not helpless), but major portions of their selves remain untouchable and impervious to the world around them.
When I dissociated, I could leave this world of suffering. Nothing could hurt me, and no one could find me, because I was gone. In those blissful times, I felt a sense of lightness and peace, and I met angels and guides who lived in an alternate, deeply meaningful spiritual world just beside this one. Many trauma survivors feel nothing but blankness in their dissociative episodes, but I had a definite sense of stepping into a real and separate place. Perhaps my empathic abilities, which helped me to see under the surface of regular life, also helped me create another reality in the altered state of dissociation. Through my empathic and dissociative abilities, I learned to live with a foot in both worlds: the world of my everyday in-body life—family, school, eating, and all that—and the world of my floating, energetic, visionary, out-of-body life. While I still related somewhat to the oasis of my family, the repeated assaults—and the fact that no one rescued me—taught me that human beings were pretty much a waste of oxygen. I stayed out of my life and out of this world a great deal of the time. I became an observer of human beings. I wasn’t one of them.
Though most of the kids in the neighborhood didn’t understand me, they did find a way for me to fit in, bless their hearts. I became known as the animal girl—the one who could go up to fierce dogs and pet them. By the age of seven, I had learned to use my empathic skills to calm and comfort injured animals, so I became a kind of neighborhood triage veterinarian. The kids would bring disoriented birds, mauled cats, or sick puppies to me, and I’d try to figure out what was wrong. Often, when I’d touch traumatized animals, I got the sense that their emotional selves were faint and faraway; there would be a whisper of a feeling, but that was all. My sense was that their selves weren’t really near their injured bodies. I knew about that!
With the help of these animals, I began to learn what the dissociative out-of-body state was all about—for them and for me. In that atmosphere of being needed, I was able to reassociate and stay focused in my body, and I was able to create an atmosphere of calm and quiet for the animal. I’d take the fierce, hyperactive energy that was always available to me, and turn it into heat and stillness. I’d emanate heat from my hands or from my torso and sort of envelop the animal’s body in that heat. I’d create a container for the animal’s severed self, a quiet, warm, and welcoming place to return to.
At first, many of the injured animals just took a deep, slow breath and died. I thought I’d killed them, but my mom pointed out that they were dying already, and that I’d created a safe and peaceful place for them to do so. I learned to be quieter and more still and to let the living or the dying happen on its own. I learned that the only thing up to me was the creation of the atmosphere. If the animals were going to come back, they would often startle into consciousness and then shake, tremble, kick, and jerk back to life. It didn’t take very long for them to return, but the process of coming back from trauma to a fully in-body life was always dramatic and emotive. I learned to be calm and patient and to wait until the animals came back before I did anything about their injuries. When the animals had reassociated, I could dress their wounds or create a sickbed and begin the convalescence. I watched the process at that age—I understood it at that age—but I couldn’t yet translate it into my own dissociated state and my own traumatic injuries. That would come later.
When I was ten years old, my mother became quite ill with arthritic symptoms and was headed for a wheelchair. Conventional medicine of the day could do nothing but chart her symptoms and offer ineffectual drugs, so she refocused her search elsewhere. She found yoga and changed her thoughts, her diet, her attitudes, and her health—all for the better. Our family followed along with her studies; we learned about spirituality, alternative health care, meditation, and healing modalities of all kinds. Mom got so healthy that she taught yoga for many years. I’d go to her classes and notice that, like me, many of the people doing yoga were not fully in their bodies either. There was something about the yoga that seemed to ask (or make it easy for) people to dissociate, and I liked finding a place where my own dissociated state was seen as a sign of spiritual attainment! While other people had to struggle to reach altered states, my dissociative skills allowed me to jump back and forth between states at will. I spent quite a few years in the branch of spirituality that celebrates out-of-body states, because I wasn’t a broken or damaged person in that world. My dissociative abilities made me an advanced being and a member of a human “in” crowd for the first time. I liked that very much.
At the time, I thought it bizarre to find so many dissociated people in one place—nice for me, but bizarre. In the ensuing decades, I’ve seen that many forms of spiritualism and metaphysics exert a strong pull on dissociated trauma survivors, who form a significant part of our population. Dissociative, out-of-body spiritual practices can be very attractive to trauma survivors (whose in-body experiences were miserable). Also, many of the psychological markers typical in trauma survivors—their overbearing sense of responsibility combined with many kinds of magical thinking, their extreme sensitivity to emotional undercurrents, and their dissociative abilities—are supported and even encouraged in some spiritual groups. Many metaphysical and spiritual groups actually seem to preferentially select for trauma survivors. In many cases, these groups offer the only sense of community, belonging, or healing that trauma survivors can find.
The problem is this: Many of these groups don’t understand their positions as de facto critical-care facilities for often dissociated trauma survivors, many of whom are empaths. This lack of awareness and sensitivity leads to a great deal of unnecessary turmoil and retraumatization for people who can least afford it. Other examples of dissociative teachings are astral travel, energy work, channeling, and some forms of meditation and breath work. In these teachings, the body is often considered an imprisoning vessel for a spirit that wants its freedom. As I piloted my way through these kinds of spiritual practices, I saw that some trauma survivors, when taught to leave their bodies in these ways, would often be destabilized to the point of being thrown into dissociation so severe that it looked like a nervous breakdown—because when already dissociated people move their attention further from their everyday lives, they often can’t find their way back home again.
I learned by the age of sixteen how to help people get reassociated into their bodies, and that became the focus of my healing practice. I knew what to do; it wasn’t any different from the work I did with traumatized cats, dogs, and birds. I’d create a safe, warm, quiet atmosphere—a secure place to come back to—and I’d stay with people until they were reintegrated. These breakdowns always seemed to surprise people in spiritual groups, but they were common. There’s no surprise at all if you think about it. If you train people to dissociate—which is an emergency survival tool in the psyche—you can trigger psychiatric emergencies. Dissociation is a powerful tool; therefore, it has powerful effects.
As my understanding of human dissociation grew, I began to see that people needed focused awareness and strong grounding in order to stay integrated. They needed to become safe containers, and they needed to develop their own skills. I learned, and soon taught, how to create boundaries and how to support people in reintegrating themselves. Eventually, I was also able to bring in the information I learned in my work with animals. I was able to recall that the emotions are not bad and scary things, but signs that the psyche is trying to heal itself. I learned to see emotions as necessary expressions of what were perhaps unspeakable inner truths, but it took a while because my view of emotions had become very skewed indeed.
My early metaphysical training, along with my childhood trauma, taught me to view emotions of any kind as signs of imbalance, of incorrect thinking patterns, of insufficient detachment, and of improper spiritual development. The idea of emotions as imbalance made perfect sense because I knew people whose emotions had twisted them into pathetic fiends. I came to believe that emotions were the root of all evil.
In order to be more spiritual, I struggled and strained to be emotionless and nonjudgmental—to have only joy in my heart—but I wasn’t very good at it. My emotional state became very unbalanced, and I experienced constant dissociative episodes. Luckily, my healing career let me see firsthand that other metaphysical students (even those with less complicated childhoods) weren’t doing any better in their emotionless states than I was; everyone was losing this battle with emotions. I began to understand that emotions were unavoidable, so I tried to live with them. I pretended to be peppy and happy, but I secretly let my emotions (especially anger) run through me when they needed to—it was all I could think to do. I had no role models or mentors to show me any other methods.
As I struggled with my own powerful emotions, I continued to learn about healing. My healing practice brought me into contact with many trauma survivors. I helped these people rebuild the outer boundaries of their personal space and connect themselves to the earth with a process called grounding. As I worked, though, I saw a pattern that frightened me. Once these survivors were reassociated, they’d often be overtaken by anger, anxiety, or depression. I completely stopped healing—obviously, I was hurting people, right? “Spiritual” meant emotionless, so I was making people worse, right?
Wrong. A series of events and visions led me to see a little bit of what such strong emotions were for: they provided protection, deep cleansing, and strengthening of the psyche, and they increased people’s ability to stay focused in their own bodies. I soon discovered the special relationship between anger and the successful healing of personal boundaries (there is a specific boundary-building ability inside anger) and the absolute necessity of fear in a healthy psyche (fear in its flowing state is intuition). I also saw a connection between strong emotions and reintegration in dissociated people. Though I was still brainwashed against the emotions, that animal-girl knowledge was coming back to me. I began to see the upwelling of powerful emotions as the human version of the kicking, trembling, and struggling animals do when they come back to their bodies after a trauma. Gingerly, I began to include the furies, depressions, griefs, and exhilarations in my work, and I watched in awe as people became whole again. The emotions taught me more than anyone or anything else ever has or could.
I learned that emotions help us protect and heal ourselves at all times—including before, during, and especially after trauma—and that they create vital, connecting links throughout the psyche. They help people reassociate, certainly, but they also help people think more deeply and more clearly and become physically secure and aware. I learned that emotions exist to help us survive and navigate our way through life. Emotions are fluid, ever-changing, and extremely versatile. Emotions move, and they carry massive amounts of information with them. They’re often deeply perceptive (if sometimes painfully so) and profoundly healing, as long as we approach them correctly, interpret them honorably, and treat them with respect.
When I learned to combine the messages of the emotions with the useful techniques I learned in my metaphysical studies, I was able to begin to heal myself (and to teach others to heal themselves). Over two decades, I worked with emotions in my healing practice, and from 1997 to 2003, I produced a series of books and tapes on down-to-earth, emotionally intelligent spiritual healing. I specialized in healing dissociative trauma, and I found safe and coherent ways to use meditative skills without disturbing people’s ability to remain grounded in their own bodies and their own lives.
Most important, I learned to manage my own empathic skills and dissociative abilities so that I’m no longer tormented by them. I’ve learned to keep my attention focused in my body, even during difficulties and trauma. I’ve also learned to regulate my empathy; I’ve learned to give people and animals their privacy, and to pay deep attention to others only when necessary.
In 2003, I left my healing career, partially because I could no longer watch people get so hurt and confused by all the irresponsible information, and partially in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, where so many people, Americans included, used their spiritual beliefs and resulting emotions in horrific and wholly unacceptable ways. I needed to get completely out of the spiritual community in order to question everything I had ever done or thought about spirituality, about emotions, about social movements, about true believers, about alternative healing, about judgment and the intellect, about religion—about everything. I returned to school to study human society and social structures in the exquisite field of sociology. I studied cults, lethal violence, the sociology of emotions, the sociology of religion, neurology, cognitive and social psychology, criminology, the social construction of murder, and the inner workings of cliques in elite academic communities. I also taught art and singing in maximum-security prisons, edited academic books, performed sociological studies, and evaluated the canon of the skeptical community, who vociferously deny the existence of the soul, the aura, the chakras, psychic abilities, and almost everything else I ever believed in.[2]
Leaving my career was a painful but extremely valuable experience because it helped me continue to heal a psyche that had been split apart in childhood. I had worked in my early life to integrate my body and my awareness, I had delved deeply into the world of spirituality, I had studied each of the emotions, but I had not yet focused on my intellect with the same intensity. Now I have, and I can come back to this work—to my work—with new information, new awareness, and new focus. I am no longer working in the metaphysical realm, and I have let go of most of my magical thinking, but I have returned to my work with the emotions because their language is still completely foreign to so many of us.
However, my work is not just about the emotions because each of us is a physical being, an intellectual being, an intuitive being, and an emotional being; therefore, we must bring all parts of ourselves to this process, or indeed to any important process. When we can stand balanced and upright at the center of our lives—at the center of our well-considered thoughts, our well-cared-for bodies, our honored emotions, and our far-reaching vision—we won’t be merely intelligent about emotions, and we won’t simply bring balance to our psyches. We will be ingenious, inquiring explorers who can bring new awareness to our deepest issues, new commitment to each of our relationships, and new dedication to a waiting world.