8
Emotions alert us to specific trouble, and they do so without any subterfuge. If we’re aware enough to listen to them—if our attention is focused and our minds are centered—our emotions will be able to contribute exactly what we need to move into and then out of any trouble imaginable. When we become able to hear and respond to our emotions effectively, we become able to understand the deepest language of our souls. With the support of our fully awakened emotions, those unceasing and abundant energies, we’ll be adequate to any situation, any issue, or any trauma.
There is a wonderful Taoist proverb that tells us: “The glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall.” If we see life as glorious only when everything is perfect and untroubling, then we’ll be totally inadequate to the process of living in the real world; we’ll actually be traumatized by the turbulence of life itself. If we want to be able to meet life on its own terms, we’ve got to have whole and adequate psyches from which to work. We’ve also got to have access to all of our emotions—not just the peaceful ones.
When we view trauma from a fully resourced perspective, we can understand balance and equilibrium as flowing and malleable things that respond to their environment. Instead of pathologizing each of the uncomfortable or miserable symptoms of unhealed trauma (the rages and panics, the flashbacks, the self- or other-abuse, the nightmares, the depressions, the eating disorders, and so on), we can listen closely to each one. We can understand that healing cannot occur until the original wound has been addressed to the satisfaction of the soul. From this knowledge, we’ll understand that a dissociated person’s panicky sense of danger all around is factual rather than pathological, because a person without a good connection to his or her body is endangered in every waking moment. We can then view the behaviors that spring from that dissociation in an entirely new light. We can see the constant eruptions and disruptions in the psyche not as signs of illness, but as the psyche’s valiant attempt to bring severe imbalance into conscious awareness. With a full-bodied understanding of the situation, we won’t attempt to erase those disruptive responses; instead, we’ll follow their tracks to the heart of the trouble. When we can do that, the symptoms will decrease naturally, because they will have been heard and attended to in a fully resourced way. We’ll be able to break the trancelike cycling between stages one and two and move decidedly and triumphantly to stage three. No matter how the trauma began, the end will be beautiful.
This beautiful movement is not any kind of avoidance technique. It is also not an antiseptic or dainty process; it’s an oceanic, fiery, muddy, windblown process that creates not mere survivors, but fully initiated soul warriors. This is why it is so unusual in our culture; it doesn’t look or sound like what we call healing. It isn’t peaceful, anesthetized, or predictable. This movement to stage three is a vibrant and utterly singular process, which is why our access to the full village inside us is so vital to the outcome. When the psyche is moving out of the first two stages of dissociation and trauma, it shakes and jerks and kicks—just as animals do when they come back from dissociative trauma. The body shakes off its memories, the mind shakes off its trauma-centered beliefs, the spirit unshackles itself from horror and dissociative practices, and the emotions flow and surge in response to the healing movements throughout the psyche. Everything begins to move again, not in the distracted way our culture moves, but into a deepening process that brings all previously lost parts of the psyche together into an integrated whole. In an integrated psyche, the body does not imprison, the intellect does not chatter, the spirit does not pontificate or hallucinate, and the emotions do not torment; instead, each element and intelligence offers its specific information and abilities so that true healing can occur. When there is an awakened self at the center of all this flow, it can welcome, work with, and channel all of it—without selfcriticism or avoidance behaviors.
The first emotions that usually arise when people begin healing from distractions, avoidance behaviors, addictions, or traumatic dissociations are the various mood states of anger and fear. Both emotions have been utterly pathologized, which is a tragedy, because they are intrinsic to the process of coming back to wholeness. Anger restores the boundaries we lose during trauma (and after we distract and dissociate), and fear restores the focus and intuition we lose when our instincts are overwhelmed. Together, anger and fear set the container or sacred space from which we can retrieve our honorable, intuitive, resilient core selves. When anger arises, whether it takes the form of rage, fury, hatred, envy, jealousy, apathy, or shame, it signals that real healing is underway. The channeling task for any of these angers is to use their intensity to restore the boundary around the psyche and create a sacred ritual space in which true healing can occur.
We know from the empathic exercises we did chapter 3 that free-flowing fear is our focused intuition and our instincts. When fear arises in any of its mood states—as fear, worry, anxiety, confusion, panic, or terror—it signals that new instincts are flowing into the psyche. The channeling task for the fears is to make conscious movements that restore a sense of focus, resiliency, resourcefulness, and intuition. Even panic—that despised emotion—has a vital role in the resolution of trauma. Panic arises in order to return the psyche to the shock phase of stage one. If it is welcomed and channeled properly, panic will utilize its massive store of energy to end the desperate cycling between stages one and two. When anger and fear, in whatever forms they choose, are openly welcomed and channeled in the whole self, the movement to stage-three healing can truly begin. When boundaries have been restored and instincts are once again available, a surprisingly powerful (and humorous!) level of resourcefulness I call “Jackie Chan” energy awakens and begins to perform a kind of martial arts cleanup of the trouble in the soul. When this emotional revitalization occurs, the rest of the emotions can then perform their own sacred healing tasks.
Sadness in any of its mood states—whether despair, dejection, or despondence—can then come forward to help release unworkable attachments and rejuvenate the psyche. Depression can come forward and report on aspects of the self that have been lost, squandered, or shoved away. Grief can come forward when profound loss has occurred; it can revive the entire self by moving it into and through the deepest waters of the soul. Shame and guilt can pinpoint boundary violations created from the inside (either from the behavior of a poorly managed personality, or from engagement in destructive relationships), and help break those agreements once and for all. The suicidal urge—when it is brought forward in a reintegrated psyche that is properly restored and resourced with anger and fear—can release the soul from torment by illuminating and exterminating the soul-killing stances being nurtured in the psyche. If the suicidal urge can be honored in a grounded ceremonial manner, it will contribute its brilliant, death-defying certainty to the absolute restoration of the soul.
Each emotion, when it is welcomed in the full village of a resourced psyche, can signal the presence of imbalance. Then, each properly channeled emotion will contribute the specific information and intensity needed to alleviate that imbalance and heal the psyche. Once the healing has been achieved, the emotion will move on, as all emotions should. When the emotions are welcomed and their messages can be translated in honorable ways, they are no longer dangerously primal; instead, they become brilliant and unceasing energies with which true healing and enlightenment can be achieved. When anger and fear are allowed to come forward and create the psyche’s container, all emotional work (and indeed all healing) can proceed.
The problem is this: anger and fear are probably the most reviled emotions we have. There is certainly good reason for this revulsion in a world where emotions are only repressed or expressed; both emotions are so powerful and disruptive that we all have horror stories about them, and we’ve had no option but to force them into the shadow. However, when another option exists—when the fully awakened village inside us knows how to properly channel these two emotions—their power becomes a healing force. As we move into Part II, we’ll speak to and honor these two noble emotions that make true healing possible. But while we’re in the territory of trauma, it’s important to stop for a moment and focus ourselves empathically on anger.
There’s a belief that all anger is bad, which does a terrible disservice to people trying to heal from dissociative traumas or avoidance behaviors. The healing tasks of anger have been all but forgotten, and this ignorance endangers every one of us. In its free-flowing state, anger helps us create, maintain, and restore our boundaries and the boundaries of others. And what is missing most seriously in dissociated and distracted people is a clear, powerful, anger-supported boundary wherein the work of true healing can occur. When we tell angry people to drop their real emotions and behave in more manageable ways, we in essence ask them not to restore their boundaries. In so doing, we make the work of legitimately angry people nearly impossible.
Our troubles with anger have prompted us to shove anger into the shadow while we glorify its supposed opposite: forgiveness. Though forgiveness may seem to be much better than anger (and it can be, if anger is merely being repressed or expressed), forgiveness can actually trap people in the first two stages of trauma. When anger is not brought forward honorably, the movement to stage three cannot occur, because there will be no container or boundary wherein that sacred movement can occur. Forgiveness is a beautiful and necessary movement, but it has to be arrived at honestly, and it has to come about emotively. We can’t throw anger out the window and don forgiveness as if were a costume.
The simplified relationship between anger and forgiveness goes like this: anger is bad and forgiveness is good. That’s the simpleminded essence of it. If you forgive your traumatizer, you’re good. If you’re angry at your traumatizer, you’re bad. Forgive and forget, and you’ll be healed. Stay angry, and you’ll be sick. So forgiveness and anger are set up as opposing forces—good and bad, right and wrong. However, if we look at the relationship between anger and forgiveness in a fully resourced way, we find something infinitely more complex. In practice, anger and forgiveness actually work together (and often at the same time) in any real healing process. Though anger and forgiveness may seem to be opposing forces, they are in truth completely equal partners in the journey to stage three. Each has its place, and each can only proceed with the support of the other.
When you’re integrated and fully resourced, your anger will alert you to boundary violations. If you can channel anger properly, you can restore your boundaries and your sense of self—without hurting anyone. When your psyche is properly protected again, you can then forgive the person or situation that damaged you, because you’ll have moved to stage three. You’ll have identified the wounding, dealt with your emotional responses, and restored your psyche to wholeness. The other person might not have changed, and the original situation might not have either, but you will have changed. Your anger will have completed the cycle and moved you into a new position of strength from which you truly can forgive. However, if you try to move to forgiveness before your boundaries are restored, your forgiveness will be incomplete. You’ll still be walking around with holes in your psyche; therefore, you’ll still be in stages one and two. And the rule in the psyche is firm and clear: stages one and two must repeat themselves until stage three occurs. Forgiving from stages one and two—before your boundaries have been restored—will backfire, because it has to.
Forgiveness is not an emotion, and it can’t take the place of one. It is a decision made by your whole self after your true emotional work has been done. You can’t move to forgiveness until your emotions move you consciously through stages one and two, because your emotions are the only things in your psyche that can move energies, memories, and imbalances into your awareness. Your body can hold your pain, and your mind and spirit can remember your pain, but until you know how you feel about your pain, you won’t be able to unearth it. If your pain is tucked very deeply into your unconscious (as traumas usually are), only strong and urgent emotions will be able to dislodge it. Therefore, the movement to the true forgiveness available in stage three often requires not just anger, but rage and fury; not just fear, but terror and panic; not just sadness, but despair and suicidal urges. Real forgiveness is not a dainty or delicate process—it’s a visceral and deeply emotive awakening from a trancelike state. It is, in essence, a return from the dead. Real, foundational forgiveness is a messy, loud, thrashing process of coming back from death into life. It looks on an empathic level like those animals I helped heal as a child. There’s shaking, kicking, grunting, trembling, and spitting—and then it’s done.
Real forgiveness isn’t a polite and teary gesture, made with a bowed head and demurely folded hands. Real forgiveness would never, ever say, “I see that you were doing the best you knew how, and I forgive you.” No! Real forgiveness has an entirely different take on the subject. Real forgiveness does not make excuses for other people’s improper behavior. Real forgiveness does not tell itself that everyone always does the best they know how, because that’s preposterous. Do you always do your best? Do I? Of course not! We all make mistakes, and we all do things we’re not proud of. Real forgiveness knows this; it doesn’t set itself up as an advocate for the tormentors in your life. It doesn’t make excuses for the disruptive behavior of others—because that sort of nonsense only increases your cycling between stages one and two.
Real forgiveness says, “I see that you were doing what worked for you at the time, but it never, ever worked for me!” Real forgiveness knows that real wounding took place; therefore, real fingers have to be pointed so that real movement through the underworld of suffering can occur. When that real movement has been made, real forgiveness raises you up off the ground, wipes off the spit, pulls the twigs out of your hair, and testifies, “You can’t hurt me anymore! It’s over and I’m free! You have no power in my life!” Real forgiveness is a process that creates true separations from torment and tormentors, and true separations require the proper application of boundary-restoring anger, or they won’t mean a thing. When your anger-supported boundaries are restored again, forgiveness will be as easy as falling off a log. Forgiveness naturally follows the honorable restoration of your sense of self. Anger and forgiveness are not opposing forces; they are completely equal partners in the true healing of your soul.
When people hear that forgiveness is good and anger is bad, they generally do that first kind of demure, head-bowing forgiveness. It looks very evolved and saintly on the outside, but it has very bad effects in the inner world. Forgiveness performed from the unconscious position of stages one and two does two things: it excuses the behavior of others, and it reduces our ability to be conscious and present with the pain we truly feel. When we rush to forgiveness, we lose our connection to our original wounds. Forgiving before we’ve fully engaged with our wounding only short-circuits the healing process. We tell ourselves we’re done because we’ve forgiven, but the wound and all of its attendant emotions only moves into the shadow. The pain goes underground—and then it goes haywire.
I’ve seen, for example, people forgive their fathers from stages one and two and then distrust all authority figures, or create insanely close relationships with people who behave just as their fathers did. The anger moves off the father and then oozes unchecked through their psyche and the world. I’ve seen people forgive their grandmothers before they’ve moved to stage three and then hate all women or all signs of the mature feminine, or enter into relationships and jobs that mimic exactly the emotional atmosphere of their early lives. Again, the grandmother is protected to a certain extent, but the individual and the world he or she inhabits becomes utterly toxic. When we forgive before we’re done feeling the effects of our initiatory experiences, we artificially remove our gaze from the actual wounding event or person. We lose our connection to our emotional realities and to the wounds we carry, and then those wounds careen and lurch unchecked throughout our lives and our culture. Forgiving from stages one and two creates nothing but more wounding.
In true forgiveness, we return to the original stage-one initiatory moment (to that sense or feeling) with the help of our boundary-defining anger and our intuition-restoring fear. Both emotions move us through imbalance and into understanding, and then they contribute the energy we need to move to blessed resolution. Working with our strong emotions (by learning their language and channeling them, rather than expressing or repressing them) restores our focus and our equilibrium. With the help of our emotions, our wounds become not never-ending tragedies, but specific portals through which we can discover our true resilience. Channeling our emotions properly allows us to arrive whole at the very center of our psyches—and from that place of restored equilibrium, forgiveness is a natural and simple thing.
Jesus said we should forgive seventy times seven times, and I don’t think he meant that we should find 490 people to transgress against us. I think Jesus was trying to tell us that deep wounds require more than just one pass through forgiveness before they are truly healed. Forgiveness, then, becomes a practice in itself. First, we might forgive after a bout of properly channeled fury, and we’ll get our boundaries back—our authentic and honored anger will help us rediscover our strength and separateness. Next, we might forgive after a bout of consciously welcomed terror, and we’ll retrieve our instincts—our honest and welcomed fear will help us become safer and saner in each day. Then, we might forgive after a bout of deep despair, and in awakening our crushed and broken hearts, we’ll become able to love again—even through pain and betrayal.
I’ve seen this process unfold many times in survivors of childhood trauma, whose wounds seem to wrap themselves throughout their psyches. I always suggest that these people go to the library and find books about the developmental processes that were occurring at the time of their traumas (such as the Your Two-Year-Old or Your Five-Year-Old books).[6] It’s fascinating reading, because early trauma insinuates itself into the learning and socialization processes of survivors. Depending on their age at the time of the trauma, people might have trauma responses swirled into their language skills (as I did), their hand-eye coordination, their eating behaviors, or their ability to attach and belong. Trauma at an early age can also predispose the brain toward learning and behavioral disabilities, and even ongoing depressive or anxiety disorders. For childhood trauma survivors, the process of forgiveness is quite lengthy (just as Jesus said it would be), because the trauma grows up with them. There’s not one decisive forgiveness episode; instead, forgiveness is a gradual process of strengthening and unwinding, strengthening and unwinding further, and so on. This gradual process helps trauma survivors separate their innate selves from their traumatic behaviors. Their authentic emotions lead them into their real troubles, and then help them restore themselves to wholeness. Their bodies can safely recall the trauma, while their minds translate freely, their emotions flow unencumbered, and their visions are welcomed. Sometimes this healing process requires the help of therapeutic tribes, while at other times it is a solitary movement, but the process is always totally original, deeply emotive, and stunningly beautiful.
Real forgiveness is an intense healing journey with no shortcuts, no magical techniques, and no road map—it is a soul-making and culture-healing process that requires the fullness of a village inside you. Real forgiveness frees people and shoots them forward in consciousness, and that sort of movement only occurs in a resourced psyche where the body, the multiple intelligences, the visionary spirit, and all of the emotions are allowed to move freely. Real forgiveness can’t exist without true anger, true despair, true fear, and true emotional integrity. Anger and forgiveness are not bitterly warring enemies; they are essential and irreplaceable aspects of the process of fully healing and restoring the entire self, and this process can only be undertaken in a soulful, and therefore emotive, way.