If we understand trauma as painful experiences in life that our soul is not able to hold, then every person has experienced trauma, especially in their childhood. This means that every person who comes to your church or counselling office is experiencing the effects of trauma in some way. Knowing this, how do we as spiritual caregivers hold our client's experiences, including traumatic ones, so that our client opens themselves to the movements of God's spirit within their painful experiences? The Common Experience of Trauma We experience trauma far more in our childhood then people realize. Let me provide an example. As a young child, we couldn’t sleep and so we keep coming out of our bedroom looking for attention and comfort from our parents. Unexpectedly, one evening our tired impatient parent yells at us to get back into bed. This anger scares us and we begin to cry. These tears anger our parent even more. We are told to stop our crying, to “shut up, quit being a cry baby!” This shocks us and we cry even more. These heavy sobs push our parent beyond their limits that night. They grab us firmly, spank us, and drag us to bed. We quickly stop our crying, but we are full of pain inside, pain we can no longer express, but the energy around this pain has to be processed in some way. For some children, they learn to numb themselves by contracting their physical bodies. Others split off their painful experiences and they become unconscious memories. Still others cope by spending more time in their heads; this allows them to disconnect from the painful experience held in their heart and body. Trauma is not near as painful when experienced from the head then from the body. However, unresolved experiences always seek resolution; they keep arising into our awareness. Furthermore, we will encounter future experiences that will tap into these repressed memories causing us to re-experience this trauma over and over again. This means that these traumatic experiences will keep rising into our awareness unless we develop ongoing coping and pain management strategies that keep this from happening. The more deeply we are traumatized the more powerful our ego defense mechanisms have to be. Due to these coping mechanisms, we develop many beliefs about pain and trauma. We come to believe that tears and vulnerability are bad, maybe even dangerous due to that childhood traumatic experience. We learn to shut down our tears and we do everything we can to keep ourselves from being vulnerable. When tears do arise, we quickly berate ourselves for our weakness. In other words, we retraumatize ourselves; we treat ourselves the way our parents treated us during that painful childhood experience. There are another consequences to a childhood trauma experience. When someone does something that hurts us, we naturally cry but three other experiences also naturally arise within us. One, we have a strong desire to speak our truth, to state that what is happening to us is wrong. Two, we experience feelings of anger that express our desire to protect ourselves through establishing boundaries of protection. And, three, if we feel our lives threatened, we will naturally experience hate that expresses our desire to annihilate that which is threatening our existence. Now what would happen to us as a child if, in the midst of inappropriate parenting, we expressed our truth, informing our parents that what they were doing to us was hurtful and wrong? Chances are that such statements of truth would lead to further trauma and so we, as a child, would soon learn that speaking our truth was painful. What would happen if we got angry at our parents for being spanked? We would probably get spanked even harder and so we would not only learn to manage our tears, we would also learn to manage our anger. Finally, you can imagine what would happen if we expressed our feelings of hate and contempt toward our parents around the trauma. This means that not only are tears the victim of childhood trauma, but also the experiences of truth, anger, and hate. What happens if a child grows up believing that it cannot trust its own experiences of truth? it will look outside for its truth and find itself living someone else’s truth rather than its own truth. What happens with all the powerful energy associated with the experiences of anger and hate, energy that is necessary for a child to develop its strength and power? All of this powerful energy goes deep into the unconscious of the child and then its disowned anger and hate gets projected onto the world or on itself. People often struggle with anger toward our world that they feel powerless to change or they are filled with self-hatred due to their frequent experiences of weakness and powerlessness. What I have described is what happens to us, as a child, if we didn’t get the holding environment we needed in our childhood to hold our tears, truth, anger, or hate. We experience trauma, to a lesser or greater degree, and this trauma follows us into our adulthood shaping every aspect of life. Spiritual Direction as Creating a Nonjudgmental Holding Environment When people come into my spiritual direction office, they are bringing this traumatic past with them. In fact, they may not know it but this traumatic past is a major reason why they are seeking spiritual direction. They have a longing for more in life, more energy, meaning, grace, passion, peacefulness, strength, power, value, joy, gratitude, etc. As a student of the Diamond Approach for 11 years now, I bring this framework into my spiritual direction practice. In many ways, my goal as a spiritual director is to create a holding environment with my directee that they didn’t receive as a child. In other words, I seek to create a safe loving setting where they can share anything from their experience without any fear of judgement. I seek to be fully present to their experience that is unfolding in my office. (Please see previous blog about what it means to be present to a client’s experience. It is more than awareness). As a directee experiences this nonjudgement presence, they begin to hold their own experiences in the same gracious way of Presence which is really the goal of spiritual direction. As the directee holds their own experience in this loving way, their soul begins to naturally open up and reveal its contents, just as a rose opens up as it experiences the warmth and light of the sun and reveals its aroma and beauty. I have highlighted earlier that four core experiences of life are victimized and thus distorted by our experience of trauma: tears, truth, anger, and hate. Normally, when we are traumatized, we have many management strategies that contain these experiences but also distort them. Within the Diamond Approach, all of these pain coping strategies (beliefs, projections, object relations, unconscious memories, behaviour patterns, emotional management strategies, body armour, roles, identities, inner critic, etc.) are known as ego structures and make up our personality. What would these experiences of tears, truth, anger and hate become if we could experience these moments free of any ego management or distortion? Here is where the teachings of the Diamond Approach become insightful and useful. When we, as a spiritual director, help a directee bring a presence of grace to their experiences of tears, truth, anger, and hate, what happens? Lets explore briefly each experience to see what occurs. The Experience of Compassion When it comes to tears, people either struggle to express tears and sadness or they become lost in their tears and pain. However, there is a natural connection between the experience of pain and the emotions of sadness, tears, tenderness, and softness of heart. This is why children always cry when they experience hurt. When pain or hurt happens, sadness and tears naturally arise. In the Diamond Approach, this essential quality that naturally arises around pain, hurt, and suffering is called Compassion. When this compassion arises, it softens our heart and soothes the pain we are experiencing. As a Christian, I see this as God’s spirit of Compassion ministering to the pain in our soul. When we, as friends and family, find ourselves tearing up at a funeral visitation or when visiting some we loved who is sick or in pain, these tears are Divine Compassion emerging in us. When our loved one sees our tears, it helps them connect with the essential compassion that is trying to flow within them. When we, as a spiritual director, allow our Divine Compassion to flow into our sessions through tenderness, empathy and through the presence of our tears, it supports our directee entering the field of compassion present in the session. Any time I see a tear in my directee’s eye or sense a tenderness in my directee, I slow down the session by reflecting back what I am seeing in them and inviting them to breathe into what they experiencing. Even when people are overwhelmed with sadness and tears, I will hold their sadness without judgement and encourage them to breathe so they can become more fully present to their experience. Becoming present is often a calming experience for the directee. As people become very present to their tears and sadness, they can begin to name the truth of their experience, a truth that they often were not able to utter when they were young. As the directee names their truth, often other feelings beyond sadness begin to arise, a common one being anger. The Experience of Strength In the Diamond Approach, this experience of anger has at its core the essential aspect of Strength. This strength energy arises naturally causing us to become stronger, harder, firmer, and more determined. This strength makes it possible for people to establish a boundary of safety between them and what/who is hurting them. This strength gives us the ability to assert ourselves, to say “NO”, to tell people to “stop!” and “back off!” If this “no” is not honoured, then this strength will naturally intensify into actions of “fight or flight.” As a Christian, I see this essential strength as the strength of God flowing in our body/soul, the spiritual fruit of Strength. As people own the pain and hurt they have experienced, they will often begin to experience anger, maybe even rage, at the people who have hurt them. Again, like sadness, people often struggle to be present to their anger, especially anger at the very people they thought loved them. Instead, they shut their anger down or they get lost in their rage losing their ability to be truly present to their anger. Again, as with sadness, I help them stay connected to their bodies by holding and validating their anger, something that happened rarely when they were young. It is in this place of anger that they can speak most clearly the truth they experienced when they were young. As people become present to their anger and strength, the unfolding process often goes deeper. People begin to feel what they missed from their parents who couldn’t hold their pain and anger in the way they needed as a child. They begin to get in touch with their wounded child in a deeper way, that little boy or girl who wanted a mommy or daddy to love them unconditionally without any judgement. They begin to name this deeper truth tied to their pain. This awareness often naturally causes the directee to move back into a place of profound sadness and Divine Compassion. In this pace, they are deeply aware of what they wanted but didn’t get. Again, my role as a directee is to simply help my directee be graciously present so they can hold their deeper experiences of sadness and compassion. I have found, in the spiritual unfolding process, that there is often a “back-and-forthness” between the experience of sadness/compassion and anger/strength. As a person experiences compassion more deeply within the soul, it allows more unconscious pains and truths to arise to the surface. As the truth of this pain is realized, this often leads to more experiences of anger toward those who have hurt them. As that anger and truth is fully held, then compassion arises again as people see even more clearly how they have been hurt. Sometimes, this awareness flows into having compassion toward their parents for the own parents. The Experience of Power There is one more core experience that often affects people who have been traumatized…namely hatred. Traumatized people often feel a lot of self hatred or hatred toward those who they judged as evil. Again, the Diamond Approach has a helpful perspective of hatred. Hatred is seen as essential power distorted. When we look at the root of hatred, we see that this feeling naturally arises when our sense of being or survival is threatened. This hate-like energy has at its core what the Diamond Approach calls essential Power, the power to simply be, to be fully oneself. When we are in touch with this power, we can act or not act, speak or not speak. Our mind is clear, undivided, and peaceful, free of all chatter, and thus we can see life and reality with clarity. When we are in this place of power, we have the sense that no one can mess with us. This means that when we become fully present to hatred, we get in touch with Divine Power.
We have already mentioned that people find sadness and anger hard to be present to. This discomfort is even truer with the experience of hatred. As a result, most people repressed their experience of hatred. However, this powerful energy simply goes underground in our unconscious but then becomes expressed through our black and white projections. We hate those we judged as our enemies and if this judgement turns inward, we find ourselves with an inner critic voice that often spews out thoughts of self-hatred toward us. As a spiritual director, my goal is to hold and validate my directee’s feelings of hatred, again becoming a holding environment that few people experience. In holding my directee’s hatred, it allows them to learn how to become present to this intense energy, without acting on it or projecting these feelings onto others or themselves. As people learn to hold their hatred feelings, they discover experientially what it means to simply be themselves rather than be at the mercy and control of these emotions. As people learn to be with their experiences of hatred and power, they discover that these painful memories will begin to naturally unfold moving into deeper experiences of pain and suffering that are found beneath their experience of hatred. As this transformational process unfolds, our directee will experience other aspects of Being that bring awareness and healing to other parts of her soul and body. Conclusion As a spiritual director, my goal is to create a gracious holding environment with my directees so that they are able to be with all their experiences, including their experiences of trauma. People who have been traumatized wrestled with four core experiences, many which were often rejected in their childhood’s holding environment, that is experiences of sadness, truth, anger, and hatred. As directees share of these traumatic moments in their life with a director, they will encounter the essential aspects of Being emerging in their souls including compassion, truth, strength, and power. As people experience these spiritual fruits, an unfolding process of soul transformation begins to occur for them leading to healing and greater wholeness. Questions:
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