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Fibromyalgia is a pain disorder, with symptoms ranging from muscle pain and numbness in the extremities to sleep disorders. Inflammation and the body’s response to stress through complex inte…

Unraveling the roots of this debilitating disorder has been a journey back to childhood development.

What My Heart Did Chapter 5, Episode 3

Thawing from Below

Present Writing always seems to get harder for a time once I uncover a new element of deeply embedded truth. Since all the discoveries about my grandfather’s murder trial and how that trauma has passed down through the generations, I’ve been numb to the stories that until now have been so important to recovery. Nearly a year has passed. My mother died in January, and my father is in a nursing home. It’s almost as if my mind and body have needed to put all the facts of my ancestry aside and place any realizations into hibernation or a dormant state until I am able to adjust and understand.

Spring is slowly unfolding again in the Shenandoah Valley. As I watch the bulbs burst from the ground and the leaves and blossoms timidly emerge from the barren limbs of flowering trees and oaks, I think back to winter’s rough hand. How do trees and plants weather ice storms, snow cover, and frozen ground to faithfully reemerge each spring? What is their defense against the difficulties they are handed each and every season?

So, like any curious gardener or naturalist would do, I looked it up. I wanted to remind myself of the process I probably learned in 7th grade, and maybe glean some insight into how we as humans can be more resilient. I found an explanation by Gary Watson, head researcher from The Morton Arboretum in Illinois that struck me.

“Plants from climates with cold winters have evolved to survive winter by going dormant. That means not just dropping leaves and slowing or stopping growth, but also reducing the amount of water in branch and root tissues. The lowered concentration of water in a plant's tissue acts like a natural antifreeze: It means it takes deeper cold to form ice inside them.”

"There's always warmth in the earth," Watson says. "The soil may be freezing from the surface, but it's always thawing from below."

Throughout the winter, he says, plants are adapting constantly to the changes. The biggest danger to plants is a sudden deep freeze. "As long as they have time to adjust, they're OK," he says. "It's when change happens suddenly that it can cause trouble."

As I let that description of how plants adapt to the challenges of winter sink in, the correlation to my own life emerges. “There’s always warmth in the earth,” throbs in my heart like a drumbeat.

2014-2017 Dismantling my “busyness” took some time to settle into. First it required shutting down one business, stepping down from a non-profit board, and figuring out how to be more present with a family that was 750 miles away. The road was a bit bumpy to say the least. I considered moving closer to my family, but given my business was just starting to earn me a decent living, I didn’t think about that long. So instead I traveled and tried to keep up with the work on the road. I quickly saw that if I was going to eventually relocate, I would need to reposition my business in the new town. And while I wasn’t technically opening a “new” business, the expansion to a new market wasn’t much different. For two years I shuttled back and forth between Virginia and Florida, networking, teaching classes, and taking on new clients in both locations. Busyness took on a whole new meaning. But I rationalized the effort was “focused.”

Soon there was a second grandchild on the way. As rewarding as it was to spend time with my new granddaughter and anticipate the arrival of #2, the trips were exhausting and expensive for someone chronically ill and financially strapped. Despite my efforts towards self-care, in addition to the bouts of fibromyalgia and gastrointestinal maladies, I caught more bugs that lasted longer and had less and less energy for other parts of my life. Friends and social activities were infrequent, and I dragged myself from task to task with a gritty determination that held my fractured pieces together like glue drizzled over a pile of straw. I knew I was hanging by a thread, but the realizations of how family trauma is passed on and my intuition about how to stop the cycle kept me driving forward. I couldn’t undo what had happened to me, but I might be able to contribute to greater understanding, support, and love in subsequent generations. Quitting wasn’t an option.

What I didn’t realize was how fragile my recovery still was. Spring and summer turned to fall, and the stones I thought I was turning to reveal a saner life just uncovered another cloudy puddle of fear. Being part of the more animated, vocal family that my son married into set off all kinds of triggers. I had to practice boundary setting again and again in order to keep myself from splitting apart, and I wasn’t sure anyone understood my challeges. More intimate contact with other people’s unhappiness and passionate disagreements reminded me just how ill-equipped I was to be a grounding force within a family. Despite how far I’d come, I had a long way to go.

By early 2017 I found myself dismantling again, but in a much more dramatic way. During a trip the previous fall where I met with multiple clients, did the whole family fall activities thing, and tried to fit a visit with a friend from high school into the mix, I literally went blind. I was fighting off yet another cold, and prior to an early flight out, had booked a room at a small lake resort near the airport hoping to get some much needed recovery time. When I arrived at the hotel, I noticed my eyes were tired and cloudy, but went about having dinner and enjoying some time by the water watching the sun set. By the time I went to bed, my eyes were quite bloodshot and red, but I passed it off as fatigue and decided a good night’s rest would help.

In the morning my eyes were glued completely shut. Somewhere I had contracted a nasty case of conjunctivitis. How was I going to get my rental car back to the airport and catch my flight? I felt my way to the sink to bathe my eyes. Warm water helped, but I looked a fright and there was no time to make other arrangements. So, like every other time in my life when the going got tough, I went. Donned my sunglasses, loaded up my bags, and got safely to the airport, on the plane, and home from the airport without incident, all the while conscious of not spreading the horrific eye crud to anyone else.

But the pink eye did me in. Despite my careful attempts to manage the infection, it moved from one eye to the other and back. Even with treatment, I was unable to see for several weeks, and stumbled through limited work. Three eye doctors and several months later, I was left with a twitch and a clue that perhaps I wasn’t seeing my life clearly. By May I had shut down the Florida business operation and was regrouping once again, wondering if I would ever find my way out of the fog of trauma. The frustration of never quite finding the path to healing was driving me mad.

Present Today I woke to a cool spring morning, Easter in fact, and the metaphor of resurrection isn’t lost on me. I noticed the oak tree that groaned and shattered so violently during the winter’s first ice storm has, in spite of its scarred limbs, begun to rise to spring’s call with a splash of brilliant green.

I feel as though I’ve risen from the dead more times than most people could fathom, but these old trees give me pause. The season has turned again, and I’m cautiously optimistic that I can too.

Holidays bring mostly painful memories for me – but this Easter I’m focused on the fun parts that did and do exist. The waking to eggs hidden in the house. An Easter basket and a new dress or shoes for church. A new tradition of funny bunny ear photos.

And as I relive and enjoy the good parts, I see that the legacy of childhood abuse and how it passes down through generations is a lot like the hardness of winter. Just when we think we’ve recovered and created eternal summer in our hearts - just when we think the storm has passed - winter comes around again in a blinding snowstorm or coating of ice, freezing the soil and forcing us into hibernation. And each time the winter of our pain recurs, it’s easy to despair and believe the ravages of those traumas will never heal. But remembering there’s always warmth in the earth, thawing us from below, can help us keep going. Accepting we may never “heal,” just like accepting that winter will come again, is a sweet surrender to a truth that can settle the restless heart of a trauma survivor. Somehow, even through generations of all kinds of human trauma and pain, just like plants, we too can wake from difficulties of winter and rise again to a new season. And perhaps that’s all the healing we really need.

Read previous episodes of What My Heart Did HERE.

What My Heart Did Chapter 5, Episode 2

Deep Beneath the Surface

Present

We’ve recently had an unusual stretch of rain here in the Shenandoah Valley, with what seemed like only minor breaks of sunshine between downpours. The sun has finally been shining for a few days, but the long days of rain and the surprises the ground has given up as a result got me thinking about what lurks beneath the surface of things, and what it means when those unseen things erupt into our awareness. Through the course of trauma recovery, I’ve learned that what’s beneath the surface matters more than we want to admit.

This year I’ve planted a small garden at my place in the country, my first since relocating to Virginia in 2006. I’m attempting to make friends with the varieties of wildlife present here in the hopes of some harmonious coexistence. My garden is an echo of my own belief that seeing and controlling our environment with understanding, natural processes, and symbiotic relationships rather than annihilation is preferable whenever possible. Bringing the birds, butterflies, and bees appropriately closer, yet keeping the deer, squirrels, and groundhogs happily at a safe distance from tender growing plants has been the focus of this year’s efforts. But for now, I’m also contending with what comes in on the rain, and what the rain can unexpectedly coax from beneath the ground.

I first became aware of a subtle eruption of the unseen in the raised bed I had carefully prepared with goat and chicken manure and what I thought was sterile garden soil. At first it sprouted an unusually large number of volunteer plants. Squash. Tomatoes. Unknowns. I methodically plucked them out only to next discover an abundance of fungus growing in the garden, seemingly overnight. Many were strange entities I had never seen before. I researched and removed each explosion, hoping to ensure the longevity of what I had purposely planted by removing the things I had not. Even then, as the rain continued I noticed some plants were struggling. Despite efforts to remove and revive, the volunteers and fungus, and now slugs and moths and plant diseases began to win. I continued to support the ecosystem in ways I knew how and watched for clues on bringing balance to the space. Somehow, I knew the sun would bring answers.

The process of gardening has always been a strong metaphor in my life, and these latest attempts to find harmony within the garden environment got me thinking about how it applies to my struggle with the fallout of childhood abuse and its impacts on mental and physical health so many years later. I wondered if, just like the recent assumption that I had created clean soil from which my garden could grow, I had made assumptions about how the “soil” of my own heart and soul had been prepared and managed. I wondered how the ingredients and environmental conditions that made up my early life had contributed to my ability to grow what I really wanted in life, and not to succumb to was unwittingly lying dormant beneath the surface. Do we come into this life a “clean slate” upon which the relationships and experiences and conditions of our growth write the story of our existence? Or are there seeds and spores of some unknown reality lurking beneath the surface to impact our roots and ability to be nourished? More importantly, how can we to uncover these elements of our lives that we don’t see or hear or feel before they have choked out what we purposely plant?

The correlation of “below the surface” gardening realities to what I’ve been recounting in this sequel to my memoir “What My Heart Saw” suddenly became crystal clear while contemplating the writing of this episode. In my attempts to get to the source of years of body pain and exhaustion, I have been researching the relationship between genetics, trauma, physical symptoms, repetition, and recovery. Part of the detective work has included genealogy research. My hope was that in filling in the blanks of relationships and family ties that had been strangely unavailable to me growing up, I would find a solution to the ongoing ailments that traditional and alternative medicine have not been able to successfully treat. Even though I have been able to uncover many of the psychological reasons for years of mental and physical challenges, and have found temporary relief for many of them, the inability to find better explanations or solutions to the chronic pain and exhaustion I experience daily has me still digging. I’m unwilling to accept that all that I’ve done to clean up, reframe, and redo the underlying causes of my own personal ailments has not had more of an impact.

During my research, I stumbled on the work of Mark Wolynn and his 2016 book “It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle.” In it, he recounts how the roots of many persistent and unexplained health problems may lie in the stories of our families and how their experiences are passed down, not only in family interactions, traits, and behaviors, but in our DNA. He goes on to explain that uncovering the stories and language surrounding our ancestral traumas may inform healing for generations hence. This interview between neurologist David Perlmutter, MD and Wolynn reveals a growing scientific understanding that not only can we consciously make changes in how our brain is wired, but that by shaking our family tree for incomplete or unrevealed stories of trauma, we can find explanations and ultimately solutions for physical and mental health issues we’ve been unable to treat.

“We’re walking around with this idea that we are the problem and we’re not making the link to… these traumatic events that most of the time have remained in secret or unresolved or unhealed. We think that if we keep the past tightly sealed, and we do this of course by not talking and keeping our lips sealed that we are immunizing our children from the effects of what took place before, but the opposite seems to be true. The less we know, the more a parent keeps quiet…the more the children seem to continue these traumas.”

The genealogical and scientific research paired with observations in the garden have confirmed what I have wondered all along. Family stories buried deep beneath the surface have been impeding my ability to grow beyond my own traumas, and examination is the only way to stop the cycle.

A story about my paternal grandfather that I’ve only recently been able to complete illustrates this perfectly.

I never met either of my paternal grandparents, both of whom died before I was born. And because our family lived a distance from the remaining siblings and their families, there were few interactions over the years to facilitate the sharing of stories about the extended family. My father never talked much about his childhood or the other family members, although it was clear through their “round robin” letters stuffed with pictures and notes that there was a strong connection among the siblings. I met two of my aunts during rare visits they made to see us over the years, but the family history is a faded snapshot of farming, church activities, and family gatherings I was never a part of. I was aware however, that the defining moment for the Wagner family of Battle Creek, Michigan was their father’s murder trial, although the details I’m about to share were never made known to me until I recently uncovered digitized newspaper accounts.

In August of 1940, Calvin Wagner was arrested for the murder of the widowed owner of the farm he managed. He initially confessed to killing her with a piece of lumber during a heated argument, but later recanted and passed a lie detector test. There was extensive newspaper coverage of the trial, the validity of the lie detector test, and the feasibility of his ultimate claim that they were arguing near the road and she was killed by a hit-and-run driver. He said he panicked and hid the body because he felt he would be accused of murdering her. A mental evaluation was ordered, and he was declared sane at the time of the incident.

He was convicted in October 1940, and the community lobbied for leniency based on his reputation and history in the community. The sentence was 7.5-15 years, but I was never able to determine how much time he served.

The only part of this story my father told was that his dad “made an error in judgement when the accident occurred and was wrongly accused.” The details of the case recounted in newspaper accounts certainly point to a bigger story. What that might be, we’ll likely never know. But I learned something very important about my father in finally reading the details of my grandfather’s story. My dad shouldered a large burden of shame and disappointment from an early age, and his subsequent behavior played out those emotions throughout his lifetime without a conscious awareness of their existence or the consequences. Just as he couldn’t see the full picture about what his father may have done or not done and how that changed everyone’s lives as a result, he could not clearly see the impacts of traumatic occurrences around him as his life went on. His ability to forgive and forget was almost pathological. His complete acceptance of the human capacity for errors blotted out his awareness of the suffering that such errors can inflict. By retelling just part of the story, he negated normal human emotions of anger, loss, and grief. What he didn’t understand is that going straight to forgiveness without allowing the reactions to bubble to surface exacts a price. Bypassing the pain now only buries it to resurface later – most often in the lives of our children.

Case in point, when confronted years later with the details of years of abuse and terror that my sister and I had faced at the hands of a man who had been our pastor, a family friend, and the scoundrel with whom my mother had a long-term affair, my father’s response to me was “We all make mistakes.”

At the time, the response hurt me more than I could possibly understand. How could my father not care that someone had trespassed on all our lives so horrifically? Now I know that his response was not because he didn’t care what had happened to me. His response came from deep from beneath the surface of a troubled life. Now I know that the pain I felt in that moment, the pain that I have tried and tried again to resolve, was the pain my father and grandfather were unable to bear, unable to speak, unable to resolve. And in order to keep it from passing along again, the story must be told.

2013 -2014

Life after publishing the memoir was an existence of almost desperate survival. The sense of relief and of helping others I thought I would have in publishing the book was tiny in comparison to what soon began to overtake my body. The book sold modestly, and responses from people around me, particularly those who had experienced some type of trauma were positive. I made small attempts to promote it, but the struggles of my life behind the scenes deepened, and the pain lodged deep below the surface began to rise to the surface. Keeping up the appearance of functional recovery became more difficult. My world became an endless cycle of sleepless nights, random body pain, digestive issues, more periods of panic attacks. The rounds to doctors and alternative therapy treatments intensified.

I fought back like I’d never fought before.

But instead of stepping back and focusing on building my business and taking care of my health, I threw myself into opening a second business, community work, and building a non-profit organization. I buried the internal chaos with busyness. I tried to convince myself that I was doing everything I could to heal, but life must go on. Truth was, all the activity I layered on top merely postponed the inevitable. By 2014, I had decided I had to figure out how to just let whatever was beneath the surface come out or I was going to explode into a million pieces. I was sicker than ever, and desperately grasping for answers.

Then in late 2014, a shift happened. Following the birth of my first grandchild, the reality of how buried trauma repeats itself throughout generations hit me like a bolt of lightning. While I had been cognizant that the work I was doing to get better may only heal the damage done to my own child by setting an example of support, awareness and persistence, I began to ask myself how could I keep the fallout of trauma from touching this beautiful, innocent child? How is the cycle truly and permanently subverted?

With that question firmly rooted in my heart, I began to dismantle the parts of my life that had become distractions, so I could really begin to get below the surface of things. I wanted to know that I was doing everything in my power to stop the cycle of trauma and suffering. I needed to turn every stone.

And as soon as I made that vow to turn the stones rather than to bury them, it began to rain.

Present

Today is Father’s Day, and the subject of fathers has been a part of each waking moment for days now. I talked about finding ways to celebrate a difficult mother on Mother’s Day in an earlier episode of this sequel. Now nearly two years later, I am thinking about distant, enigmatic fathers.

I finally have enough information to really talk about how to celebrate our wounded and imperfect fathers. Given the story about my grandfather’s murder trial and my father’s subsequent inability to stand up to the people that perpetrated sexual violence against our family, looking beneath the surface has given me fresh insight. Sure, I still have lots of questions about how these men who gave me life came to the decisions that have so profoundly impacted their progeny, but the truth is that beneath all the shortcomings or failures to protect or love, lie men struggling with traumas of their own. Some cover them with anger or violence or infidelity or substance abuse or workaholism. Some turn the other cheek again and again when standing up to wrongdoing is what really is needed. And thankfully, others are able to rise above personal and ancestral traumas to simply be good dads.

This Father’s Day, despite the wounded and imperfect fathers behind me, I am extremely lucky to have one father in my life that has risen above. As I watch my son make his way through young adulthood and now deep in the throes of parenting two beautiful children with a third coming any day now, yes, there is a powerful sense of pride that he has overcome a challenging upbringing to become a loving, wonderful father. But for me personally, it’s so much more than that.

The fact that even though he comes from a long history of painful occurrences, instead of choosing to cover up or bury the difficulties, some of which he only feels rather than knows, he chooses to simply be a good dad. An imperfect, but in-the-thick-of-it dad. And choosing to craft a safer, more balanced life for his children rather than denying or covering it up when the going gets tough, is a testament to his strength of character. As I anticipate another child entering this flawed line of bad choices and weak parenting, my son’s ability to be a good dad gives me hope for the future.

The lesson I take away this Father’s Day is that getting a generational perspective on our lives is often the only way to begin to heal from the patterns of trauma and suffering. Getting under the surface matters, and is ultimately, the best gift any of us can ever offer our children.

Read previous episodes of What My Heart Did HERE.

If you or a family member is experiencing unexplained depression, anxiety, phobias or symptoms - shake the family tree for family secrets that have been hidden. Ignoring the past can haunt us, if we explore it, we don’t have to repeat it.

Chronic pain often has no physical cause. Psychotherapy can reduce the suffering.

What My Heart Did

Chapter 5, Episode 1 The Power of Full Circle

Present

It’s been six months since I was standing on the roof of a building in downtown Staunton I called home for six years, gazing at a spring full moon. It was the morning of the Buddhist New Year, and the activities of the day seemed precisely planned. But they weren’t. I was moving out that very day, and as I basked in the moonlight, the symbolism wasn’t lost on me. New year celebrations, moons, and moving may seem routine and insignificant occurrences to some, but in the context of my personal journey, changes such as these are laced with meaning. The seemingly random symbols of larger cycles that have punctuated the passages in my life are what I’ve come to call “The Power of Full Circle.”

We sometimes overlook the cycles in our lives that have tremendous importance, and as I stood staring up at the same moon rising above the tree line in front of my new home just two nights later, I was keenly aware I had truly come around to the beginning in one of mine. This place isn’t far from my old downtown digs—just a few miles north – but despite a great love for living in the country and a strong intellectual sense of safety, as soon as the sun set that first night, my body went on high alert. For no logical reason, I was frightened and anxious in ways I had never felt living in the city. Being immersed again in a rural setting triggered a whole range of difficult memories and reactions. Terror. Isolation. Despair. And even though the dangers of those memories are no longer present, my body, being the evolutionary machine that it is, automatically responded with the mechanisms it developed to protect me all those years ago. Hypervigilance. Sweating. Nausea. Sleeplessness. Nightmares.

The reaction upended me for the first few weeks, my mind trying to logically walk through the response. How were the panic attacks back again? I had worked so hard, developed the tools, and still I couldn’t shake the response. I felt betrayed by my own body. Was there something I was missing?

I tried to focus on the beauty of my new window on the world. The trees were beginning to burst with life. My office window view of the sun rising may not be a spectacular as the views from the sixth floor, but there are bird calls and sweet smells to accompany, and I can step outside and wiggle my toes in the grass without navigating stairs and elevators and city streets. The trade-off seems more than fair.

Some would try to pass of my panic as a natural fear of being alone and vulnerable in my new digs. Many have told me they could never live the way I have – they would never feel safe. A few have asked why I don’t own a gun. They asked the same when I lived in the city. I always thought that was an odd question, and now I know why. Granted, I am fully aware that I have chosen a more solitary life than most. Some would call me a loner, and people often ask me if I’m afraid to do the things I do. Living alone in spooky old buildings or rural places, traveling, camping, adventuring, being an entrepreneur, reinventing myself. I’m not what I would call a huge risk-taker, but I am confident in my ability to take care of myself. I don’t shy away from many things. My fears are not of being attacked or targeted by strangers or criminals because I am a woman alone. No, my fears are of anyone I consciously allow inside the perimeter. They can do, and have done, the most harm. In this solitary space that I have carefully closed off to any known “internal” threats, I am initially perplexed by the reemerging anxiety.

But after a few weeks of working with the problem, I began to get it. What I hadn’t considered when making the move back to the country was that I was returning to an environment similar to the one where the original abuse, memory loss, and subsequent malfunctions of childhood trauma had happened for me. And even though I’ve methodically worked at untangling the mess of depression, anxiety, and physical symptoms that occurred from the mishandling of a developing brain I described in the first book of this series, What My Heart Saw, the memories and reactions are still deeply embedded in my body as if the danger is still eminent. Each night, it relives the terror as if to convince me that this place, this scenario, this circumstance is critical to avoid so that it all won’t happen again. My brain is trying to force me to run.

The difference, however, on this repeat of the cycle, is that I am aware and armed with great emotional tools. I am aware of how hardwired we are for survival and how what we learn as children and young adults is so darned difficult to rewire. And I am equipped with strategies for combating the effects of my trauma-remembering body.

2013

The heady euphoria of holding the print version of my first, and to date, only book, back in late 2012 was not what most people imagine. I wrote this on my blog that day:

“The panic is back. After a six-year effort to write this message of healing and recovery, I’m now looking at a box of 100 copies, afraid to open it. Pandora’s box. Everyone keeps saying “HOW EXCITING!” Well, not really. I’m terrified. Mortified. So afraid people will think I’m a freak. A friend told me upon looking at the proof (which I hold here, because I can’t open the box) that I made a rookie mistake in the formatting. Ouch. What else is terribly flawed about this attempt to get this story told? Too late to worry about that now. I got the first “this happened to me too” email yesterday.”

By early 2013, I am in full freak out mode. Again. The recovery and sense of relief I thought would come with finally telling the story has into an elevated sense of failure and vulnerability. To combat the anxiety, I threw myself into work. Shortly prior to publishing the book, I quit my job and launched full-time into my consulting business, which had morphed quickly into responsibilities for two businesses and a small non-profit. I was drowning, but the idea of failing after putting the raw reality of traumatic stress out in the open made me drive all the harder towards some sort of “normality.” Surrounded by people, I felt so disconnected from everything and everyone I could hardly breathe.

The year rushed on with business-building activities. Events, networking, talks, meetings. I was mustering all the creative energy I could to succeed, and every night going home exhausted and increasingly racked with physical pain I didn’t understand. The busyness kept the panic at bay, but it did not solve the nights. I spent many of them doubled over in pain, sobbing, pacing the floor, unable to eat or sleep. Soon I was immobilized with body pain. A hip that would not stay in place. Horrific pain in my legs that radiated and pulsated throughout my body. I couldn’t sit or walk or lie down without significant discomfort. Some days I rolled myself off the bed and crawled until I could slowly stand, then barely walk. The volcano of bile and anger and sadness I had capped off all those years ago began to erupt in ways I had never imagined possible. The toxic waste of my early life was working itself out of my body.

I spent months trying to get a diagnosis or some sort of help for the physical difficulties. There were tests and medicines. Special diets. Physical therapy. More psychological counseling and alternative therapies. Eventually the doctors called it stress- and lifestyle-related irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux disease, and anxiety, and sent me on my way to manage it as I could. Thankfully there was no systemic disease, but the lack of real answers made it all the more difficult to manage. I worried, after all the work I had done to recover and revive my life, I would still fail because my body would give up.

People told me to relax. Don’t take things so seriously. Stop worrying about money so much. Sure, I was struggling in that undercapitalized and confusing place that most entrepreneurs find themselves during years 1-3 of a business. But in my heart, I knew it was more than that. The deeply embedded shards of childhood trauma were still speaking to me. My body was blossoming into a veritable megaphone of symptomatic storytelling. I knew I would be compelled to tell the story of how mental trauma inevitably become physical, and clearly, sometimes many years later. But first I had to understand the process.

In September 2013, I started this sequel. Here’s what I wrote:

“It’s the first cool morning of fall. As a coffee lover preferring the dark taste of a strong brew upon waking, I’m not thrilled to be nursing a cup of ginger tea as the sun turns the corner of the quirky penthouse apartment I occupy in downtown Staunton, Virginia. But my disturbed gut demands the herbal substitute. The old wood frame windows are fogging up as the morning tiptoes between red brick, alleys and black and silver roofs. As I watch it set the autumn colors afire on the hillsides of Mary Gray and Sears Hill, I let the burn of the spicy ginger slide down my throat. The irony that something innately spicy is supposed to soothe a disturbed gut raises the edges of my mouth in a slight smirk as does the silhouette of the giant neon Stonewall Jackson Hotel sign rising above the carefully restored historic buildings of this storybook town tucked in the mountains of the Shenandoah Valley. Perhaps that’s why I’m such a fan of this place. It cradles a sweet irony that makes the details of my life a little less difficult to swallow.

The odd fact that more than eight years since my flight from a life I am just beginning to see clearly, I once again live in an enormous building filled with history and intrigue and errant energies that jostle and soothe me. I began a loosely autobiographical novel about that first experience in the bed and breakfast in Florida not long after moving to Virginia, hoping that I could purge my demons with fiction. It sits waiting for an ending. The urge to tell the rest of this story, one of history and intrigue and ghostly whisperers that have prodded me along through a troubled life remains. So I try again. Here.

I attempt to savor the aroma of the tea, allow it to do its work on my second brain—that mysterious destination of food, swallowed emotions, tightly held beliefs, energetic entanglements. I was flipping the channels on the car radio yesterday and landed on a NPR story about how scientists are just beginning to discover the real impact of intestinal bacteria on our moods. Like my personal discoveries about the power of the unconscious to make decisions without our awareness, I realize I have also intuitively discovered the direct relationship of gut to brain. If one is out of balance, the other isn’t far behind. My path to recovery has led from brain to heart to gut.

As the city begins to vibrate with sunlight, I feel myself tighten at the thought of writing about this. I breathe into my abdomen, feeling my heart ache with pressure and discomfort. My belly clenches. As with the writing of my first book, the prospects of throwing myself out there so openly still hurts. I don’t want people to know how broken I’ve been. But the commitment to letting the light of recovery to shine out from this tale is greater than the fear of revealing. The irony of ginger tea, neon and old buildings and the core of personal happiness being dependent on very basic bodily functions is not lost on me.

We are, after all, a tangle of contradictions with moments of clarity that burst upon us like a crisp fall day. The sunlight and color is brilliant. But the leaves can make a mess. It’s taken me some time to understand messes are an inherent and beautiful part of life.”

I didn’t know before I started this chapter that it has been almost exactly four years ago that I began. But given the topic of this segment, the synchronicity of the cycle is clear. The power and growth that comes from “full circle” examinations can be palpable. When we return to old patterns, especially when the repetition seems like total failure, slowing down and stepping back to see what’s really happening is invaluable. Next steps of mindful action that can make a real difference cannot be formulated without considering where we started.

Looking back now, yes, in some ways the return of the panic attacks was me circling back to the beginning of this story. But the tale has progressed. I’ve mostly healed my gut. The body pain is still here, but it’s a small part of my life. I just celebrated my fifth year in business and am pulling ahead financially. I came through the latest series of panic attacks with less distress and more insight. The physical fallout of the attacks was a fraction of what has happened in the past. I have taught my trauma-driven brain and deeply troubled body to see and react differently.

Today I’m watching the sun rise just beyond the ridge on the conservation easement across the street from my new home. Fall has arrived with a subtle touch of crisp air and transitioning color. There’s a mist coating the lawn with cool wetness. Rain is eminent, and I think about the spate of hurricanes that have traversed the country this year from Houston to Florida to Puerto Rico. I think about the families dealing with the losses of our most recent and most deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas, and of those that escaped the bullets. I think about the second torch-lit march of white supremacists in Charlottesville just months after a young woman is run over in a clash of similar hate demonstrations and counter-protests in the same town. I wonder how the thousands of victims of natural disaster trauma and deranged terror attacks navigate their experiences post danger.

I remember from my research for What My Heart Saw how a secure and well-supported child is more likely to overcome difficult developmental challenges than a child without a safe place to process the trauma, and wonder if the loss of family, the deterioration of communities, the slip of our society into what many people describe as a disconnected and impersonal existence, will cause events like these to create more long-lasting scars than they have in the past. I wonder how we will deal with a growing population touched by trauma that have no safe place to talk about the losses and recover.

The leaves falling from the massive oak trees are creating a slippery mess down the sloping bank of the front lawn. I make a mental note to avoid them when venturing out for a walk. I’m not quite ready to rake. The quiet is punctuated with the call of crickets and crows. I am thankful that the fear reaction my body produced months ago is long gone. A remembering of a new kind has taken its place. It’s the memory that just like nature, even when ravaged and torn by trauma, we can come full circle. Changed, yes, and hopefully wiser and kinder and more compassionate to ourselves and others, but ultimately equipped with the ability to shed our withered leaves, drop deep into the dark nights and hard sleep of winter, then rise again with fresh, new growth.

The power of full circle is remembering that even though we are wired for survival in sometimes the most troubling and horrible ways, we are also wired for the possibilities of rebirth and growth. Just when we think we’re hopelessly repeating history, the opportunities to see and act differently are at our fingertips. There are solutions to the ravages of trauma. Personally, culturally, historically. They begin with understanding we quite often come full circle. Just because we haven’t vanquished the pain or the hate or the fear, and find ourselves facing down things we thought had long been removed, doesn’t mean we haven’t grown and evolved along the way. It just means we need to roll up our sleeves and get right back to the important work of healing ourselves, our world, and each other.

***

What My Heart Did is a sequel to my 2012 memoir, What My Heart Saw. It is being written in episodes, published here first, raw and unedited. You can read previous episodes HERE.

Thankfully, someone talking about this finally.

A growing body of evidence suggests that environmental stresses can cause changes in gene expression that are transmitted from parents to their offspring, making "epigenetics" a hot topic. Epigenetic modifications do not affect the DNA sequence of genes, but change how the DNA is packaged and how genes are expressed. Now, a study by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows how epigenetic memory can be passed across generations and from cell to cell during development.

I met my first savant 52 years ago and have been intrigued with that remarkable condition ever since. One of the most striking and consistent things in the many savants I have seen is that that they clearly know things they never learned.

The most important set of genetic instructions we all get comes from our DNA , passed down through generations. But the environment we live in can make genetic changes , too.

A reason to the rhyme and riddle of “where did this come from?”

What My Heart Did

Chapter 4, Episode 3 Discovering the Light within the Darkness

Present

"...discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness…the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends.” -Carl Jung

Darkness and light have been a recurring theme for me since the beginning of this new year. In the past, my thinking about darkness and light has been a distinct observation of the coming of the light to dispel darkness, or vice versa, how the darkness creeps in and suddenly seems to extinguish the light.

So far this year it’s become a meditation on the thought that light and darkness are not mutually exclusive phenomenon, but simply inverted expressions of the same energy. It’s been a difficult understanding to articulate, and given the seeming polarities that ebb and flow in and around us as human beings, an awareness I’ve long searched for a proper metaphor to help describe. Religions and philosophy attempt to address it through the concepts of duality (or dualism) and non-duality, but for me it seems there’s got to be a simpler explanation. For me it boils down to this: Our existence is not graced with certainty of mind. Only our hearts are equipped to see with certainty, and we don’t give our hearts much credit for that. We continue to believe our minds are more accurate.

This has been a particularly enlightening awareness as I have worked through the next chapter of rewriting my “trauma” story. One of the major difficulties of working with a trauma story that is fragmented and rooted in early childhood development can be the frequent plunges into darkness and confusion that are caused by poorly formed memories, unreliable safety mechanisms, and, in some cases, amnesia. The darkness is not only frightening-- the lack of continuity of life experience is profoundly unsettling. The sense of being disconnected from your own life creates an ongoing existential crisis. Direction, purpose and meaning are frequently unreachable. Without a narrative, we are characters in a random set of circumstances, and our brains know it. So even when the bits and pieces are not clear to us, even when the methods of self-protection are not effective, the brain works under the surface to create a story to support our existence. Problem is, that story is not rooted in facts or well-examined choices. It is built on partial and often faulty impressions. I used to think that bringing light to the darkness of this unconscious jumble of impressions was the answer. Now I know that sussing out Jung’s “light of the darkness itself” is a more accurate description of what must be done. It is more than awareness. It is training myself to see from the heart.

I have had so many people ask me why I can’t just “leave it alone” and move on with my life. They ask why it matters that I “remember” and revise the narrative. My answer is always the same. Even if I cannot remember precisely what occurred, the body and mind’s ongoing response to the trauma remains. The experiences and how my undeveloped mind randomly organized them continue to run like a silent movie under the surface of my consciousness. That silent movie still informs the decisions I make, the emotions I feel, and the direction my health may go even if I refuse to acknowledge its existence.

But the most important reason to openly discuss this ongoing effort is to show others going through the same struggles they are not alone.

Faulty impressions, neuroscience and a basic misunderstanding of how we process information have been at the forefront of not only the volatile workings of my own heart and mind, but curiously enough, at the center of the political firestorm of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. As I have observed the ways in which people have responded to a perceived darkness of thought and speech and action, the brain’s imperfect capabilities are glaringly apparent. The shortcomings of our mind’s ability to navigate such a complex landscape are illuminated in the rhetoric on both sides of the issues. Whether it is a sense of certainty in rational arguments laced with facts or a sense of moral high ground shored up with emotion, the clash is an ongoing misinterpretation of our mental abilities as human beings.

So how are the struggles of a single individual to be less influenced by an inefficient brain and the misperceptions of our mental abilities on more expansive national stage related? I read two articles that begin to approach the crux of the problem. We think we know what we know and that we are in complete control of our thoughts and decisions.

The first article was about the long-reaching effects of childhood trauma and how it impacts many individuals throughout most of their lives. I am certainly no exception to this discovery. At nearly 60 years old, I am aware that the reverberations of a troubled young child remain my greatest health challenge. Chronic pain, depression, anxiety and the impacts of risky behaviors of my youth are undoubtedly recurrent and entrenched because of those early experiences, not just because of subsequent choices I consciously made, but because of the brain’s mechanisms for coping with the trauma. There were many choices that were NOT conscious, and are now the most difficult to change.

“Childhood sexual abuse is just one type of early trauma that can affect one’s life for decades — even into middle age and beyond. Research has shown that childhood trauma, ranging from parents’ divorce to alcoholism in the home, increases the odds of heart disease, stroke, depression, suicide, diabetes, lung diseases, alcoholism and liver disease later in life. It also increases risky health behaviors like smoking and having a large number of sexual partners. And it contributes to “low life potential,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.”

The second article was about science’s discovery that new or contradictory facts don’t change our opinions or impressions about circumstances in our lives. Once we form a belief, even in the face of undisputed facts or circumstances, we still cling to originally formed opinions. “Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.” They believe this occurs for a number of reasons—both evolutionary and social—and the more advanced our technologies and information systems become, the more adamant our brains can become, even with incomplete information. Scientists content that the evolution of our environment has outpaced the evolution of our reasoning abilities. “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

So what does the brain’s inclination towards adopting certainty without all the necessary information mean in an increasingly complex information landscape, especially for people who have experienced the mental scarring of trauma? For me, it means taking a step back. It means taking the risk of acknowledging that our perceptions of the world are flawed. It means accepting that darkness and light just might be expressions of the same energy. It means realizing that what our brains do with the information we receive through our senses, store in our memory and prod us to discuss within our families and communities are just fragments stitched together in a brain that has not yet adapted to an increasingly complex narrative.

Admitting our cognitive shortcomings may seem counterintuitive to peace, whether internal or global. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the only hope for personal healing or societal reconciliation. “If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This… ‘may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.’”

Just as I’ve discovered that positive thinking or “spinning” a trauma story cannot change the impacts of the experiences on a deep unconscious level, I’m also learning that not clinging to facts and beliefs creates a sense of relief. It allows me to realize that the silent movie in the background is simply an impression. And in accepting this fluidity of perception, memory and translation of experience, something remarkable happens. I am able to discover the light within the darkness and accept the darkness that exists within the light. The juxtaposition of seeming opposites, the parallel story lines, the existence of intense betrayal and confused love begin to merge into a narrative that not only describes the selfish failures of adults that prey on children or politicians that create suffering, but encompasses the ultimate triumph of the human spirit to be better than the sum of our experiences. Albert Camus said it best:

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.” ― Albert Camus

2009-2012

Writing a memoir from a damaged memory during a period of scandal involving fake “misery memoirs” proved more terrifying than I imagined. The details of my abuse originally became “known” and independently confirmed to me during the era of the infamous McMartin trial and exposes on “false memories,” and I had already spent a great deal of time agonizing over what was true and what had been created by a fertile imagination. As I wrote, I worried a lot about being lumped in with the authors that had admitted sensationalizing their stories. I also worried the realities of millions of other trauma victims would be marginalized because of such perceptions. The notion that I could write anything that was factual or authentic haunted me as I tried to piece the story together, but as I researched and read about new neuroscientific discoveries that explained the brain’s inclination to bury trauma or patch bits and pieces of information together to form conclusions, I was able to address the presence of uncertainty. In fact, the manuscript became an examination of the fallibility of memory and the impact that has on recovery and how it perpetuates certain types of abuse.

The panic attacks deepened for a time. I would often end up in the office bathroom hyperventilating and sobbing for no apparent reason. The simplest tasks created long episodes of blind fear that I had to white knuckle through to keep anyone from seeing, and in some cases, seemed almost comical in the retelling, like the time I panicked because balloons I was distributing for an event became hopelessly tangled by a gust of wind or when I hid behind the funeral parlor so no one would see me crying during the staging of a downtown parade. What had started as an effort to heal escalated into more symptoms. The more I poked and prodded and challenged my spotty memory, the more drastic my emotional reactions to the world became. Nights were horrific journeys through random emerging snapshots and body responses I could not control. I feared that as my mind gave up the shattered pieces of those early terrors, the person I had so carefully constructed from the rubble would cease to be.

But somehow, I persevered. I got involved in the community. I did volunteer work. I started a business. I got back into therapy and continued to step farther and farther out of my comfort zone. I went to a shaman. I deepened my spiritual practices. I explored alternative healing modalities.

And I continued to write. The panic attacks stopped.

Over the course of four years of work to normalize my daily life and finish the first part of the story, I slowly began to embrace the fluidity of experience and memory. I began to believe that if I could strip the scar tissue from my battered brain, I would be able to find myself, the me I wanted to be, underneath. My life began to change. By mid-2012 I had a final version of What My Heart Saw that I was willing to self-publish as an e-book. By the end of the year it was available in print.

But when the panic attacks returned in early 2013 I knew there was more to be done. The memoir had just cracked the surface. Awareness and living in the light wasn’t enough. I needed to find the light within the darkness itself.

Read the previous episodes HERE.

There's a trillion-dollar underground economy hiding in plain sight, says Steven Kotler, and it can be measured in dopamine.

The “magic of maybe.”

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A neuroscientific approach to maintaining emotional well-being.

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