I’ve realized something about myself: Over the years, without my quite noticing it was happening, I’ve become more interested in self-healing than almost anything else. Healing – not physical healing but spiritual, psychological healing – has become an interest, almost a hobby, for me, something I want to do and plan to continue doing for the rest of my life. And I’ve realized something else too: Not everybody is interested in self-healing: On a major website where women bloggers can register their blogs and share them with others, there’s a category for health but there’s not one single sub-category that refers in any way to mental health. (I don’t know why this should come as a shock to me but it does. It left me with the feeling that people have hardly even heard of psychological and spiritual healing. But that can’t be right, can it?) I’ve also come to realize that even people who are interested in healing in the way I’m talking about often don’t look at it the way I do -- as something you do because you want to, something you’ll probably keep doing for the rest of your life because you want to. Most people, I’ve learned, think of self-healing as something you pursue because you’re hurting or you’re broken, and as soon as you stop hurting to an acceptable degree you’ll stop going to therapists, stop considering how to heal, and get on with your life (which you haven’t gotten on with before because you were too broken.) I think I used to feel that way myself, and I don’t know when I stopped feeling that way and made the transition to where I am now.
Anyway, as someone for whom self-healing is a kind of hobby, something I do because I want to and like to, I pay a lot of attention to how I feel. In particular, I pay a lot of attention to those moments when I feel good, when I feel that some noticeable healing has happened inside me, or is happening. (I don’t think it probably ever happens once and for all but only in fits and starts; it’s something that goes on and continues to go on the more you work on it, the way getting into shape at the gym goes on over time and goes on as much as you work on it.)
All of this is leading up to saying that this morning, as I was sitting there doing my meditation and thinking instead of meditating, I hit on something that made me feel noticeably better.
It was related to a kind of therapy I’ve been doing lately which combines Internal Family Systems therapy with EMDR. In IFS therapy you become aware of all the different parts of yourself – for example, there’s a part of me who’s a terrified child, another part who feels like an outsider, one I call Daddy’s Helper, etc. My counselor friend and I (see my last blog) have been doing EMDR therapy in which we find whatever one of those parts is coming forward in our situation of the moment, and work with her. Not all, or even most, internal family systems therapy takes place during EMDR, but my friend and I tried IFS during EMDR and the two things seem to go together perfectly. I keep saying that doing IFS during EMDR is like planting a seed in the ground (I picture the unconscious as deep rich soft soil) instead of laying a seed on top of the ground.
My friend recently forwarded me an article which talks about the power of integrating the practice of mindfulness into therapy, where instead of trying to change what you learn about yourself you just observe it and accept it and then it changes on its own. The article also said that one of the ways IFS therapy works is that the healing takes place when you notice rather than blend with some wounded part of yourself.
So I was sitting there during my meditation thinking about all of that, and I suddenly clicked into some adult part of myself: the author, instead of the terrified child. (My current challenge is approaching agents and publishers with a new book without letting my terror of rejection – i.e., my old fear of rejection by my mother -- color the whole experience.) I knew that the terrified child was still inside me but suddenly she wasn’t me. There was space on either side of her, and I was in that space. I felt good, solid, completely different than I’ve ever felt before when I’ve thought about risking rejection. I felt like an adult in the face of potential rejection instead of like a terrified child, perhaps for the first time in my life.
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