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I would guess that many people who find their way to this blog know what therapy is from the inside of the process.  My first toe-wetting experience with therapy happened in 1980 right after my 29th birthday.  I did not enter that stream willingly.  I entered therapy only after I realized something was terribly wrong inside of me and I needed help.  Where else could I go to for THAT?

I spent the decade of the 80s in one kind of therapy session or another.  The therapy I am thinking about today was conducted by a wonderful man named Stephen Bergstrom.  I don’t believe it is possible for anyone to care more than he did, to believe in the powers of healing more than he did, or to be so devastated when circumstances turned themselves against him.

Bergstrom was an addiction expert who understood the need for healing the deepest wounds to the soul through horrors especially of severe and prolonged child abuse.  His clientele depended upon insurance to pay for the services they desperately needed.  I last spoke to this wise, kind, dedicated man on the telephone in 1998.  I urged him to write some kind of a manual to help other therapists understand the work that he did so that they could do their own work better.

Bergstrom was perhaps stubborn, perhaps too busy, perhaps too stubborn.  He never wrote that manual.  In that telephone conversation Berstrom explained to me that state regulations for insurance payment for ‘treatment’ were locking out any mention of God or of spirituality.  He told me he could not continue his work with his voice silenced.  I heard very shortly thereafter that Bergstrom had died during a gall bladder operation.  I think this friend of mine chose not to live without his work.

I also think about some therapy sessions I went through with him as he had me ‘place Mother in a chair’ so I could talk to her.  This morning I realize that in spite of how well-intentioned this technique was, it didn’t/couldn’t really work for me because the essential element of Duck Tape was missing.

Well, I do have to refine my image here.  I have always been a big fan of Duck Tape.  Years ago when I was taking college art courses I heard someone say, “Give a woman a roll of Duck Tape and she can fix and repair anything.”  I recently discovered that the newest version of the fantastic product has been ruined.  The sticky isn’t sticky and the backing has less strength to it than does a generic small band-aid.  Now I would have to say, “Use Gorilla Tape.”  But my mind’s image still involves tape with feathers rather than fur.

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The recipe seems to go like this:  Take one abuser and as many rolls of tape as needed.  Tape mouth shut.  Arms behind back, tape hands together, tape as far up the arms as you need to.  (Don’t hurt the abuser.  That’s not required.)  Tape abuser’s ankles together.  Tape legs together.  You get the image.

Now, to a little person such a trussed-up abuser would not be so mean.  Had Bergstrom let me use this process, I bet there is a lot more I could have said to Mother.

I think this could be like a sourdough starter recipe.  I think I can use this image to silence anyone who would like to make me feel there is something wrong with me because I have a trauma-source story to tell and I tell it.  Maybe we survivors could invest together to buy stock of whichever tape company we select to get our product from.  I’m all for that.

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Some people are carriers of story.  We are challenged by our life to transmit that story we carry.  When the thought first hit me last night that I am a ‘carrier’ of something that demands to be ‘transmitted’ I felt an icky kind of fear as if what I have is some kind of disease.  Well, truth is, it is exactly a story of dis-ease that I do have to transmit.  That fact does not taint me.  That fact does not mean I am flawed, contaminated.

I ask this early morning, “What pressures do I receive from the culture I live within that would make me first feel that carrying a story that I am deeply moved to transmit makes me ‘less than’?”

I have written all over this blog that I believe trauma does not let go of humanity until we learn its lessons about how to keep that kind of trauma from ever happening to anyone among us again.  I believe that as the story contained within any experience of trauma is both told and listened to with care so that a resolution for that trauma can be found, the trauma will resolve itself.  The trauma will heal.

For severe early abusive trauma survivors the portion of healing we can experience by telling the story we carry is realistically limited in many ways.  Our body on all levels including our brain has been ‘tampered with’ by trauma that changed how we physiologically developed.  There is no magic in this world that will restore our body-brain back to what it SHOULD have been had trauma not grabbed us into its ‘awe-full’ talons when we were born.

Which leads me to tell of the image I ‘feel’ inside my body this morning:  This story I have to tell sits inside of me like a waiting eagle.  As I give the story words that eagle stretches out its wings and rises from its perch of rest to soar so high I can no longer see it soaring.

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I mentioned something someone I name Q emailed to me recently:  “The point is, I don’t wish to be involved in your book writing process…. I have a full life and do not wish to be involved with the process – whatever it is.  If, on the other hand you ever have anything positive to say about anyone do not hesitate to write me.”

Perhaps if I did not have to justify to myself that I am a carrier of a story that demands I transmit it, I would not have been bothered in the least by what this person had to say.  In my next post I will have more to say about “Duct tape for the soul.”  That image comes into my thoughts here because I know that my culture struggles with what version of ‘the truth’ we want to hear, want to pay attention to, want to honor, want to listen to, want to learn from.  Our culture distracts us or stops us from telling stories it does not want to hear.

At the back-end of a story is an audience.  Separating the telling of a story from the reactions of the audience can be a difficult process.  At the front-end of a story is the teller-writer.  If the story is like this eagle perched within, all I need to do is free the eagle to soar where it will.  I do not direct its flight.

It takes courage to let a teaching story out.  In my own self-image of the story I carry I draw upon the courage that exists in the story itself.  This story I carry comes complete with the courage it takes to tell it.  We accompany one another.  We are a part of one another.  It is my job to set that story free.

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There has to be as many reasons for writing a book as there are writers who write them.  As I sit alone on this New Year’s day with my children thousands of miles away from me, as yet another day dawns with my precious grandsons also being nearly two thousand miles away from me up there in the frozen north, I think about what would set me free.

It is not the final telling of the saga I did not choose to become a part of as abuse targeted me out of the six possible choices my mother had in our family that would free me.  It would also be some money coming into our family that would give me a freedom I do not have.  My oldest daughter told me the other day as she spent time with the youngest of my grandsons that his newest ability to laugh and laugh and laugh made her laugh so hard that her cheeks hurt.  I want to be a part of that joy!

I want to be a part, now and then, of the goodness that is flowing along in the river of my family’s life. 

Oh well.  Another day of patience, of trust that the book publishing process is taking whatever time it needs to get itself done – and to get itself done right.

Meanwhile, I focus in my thoughts on this sunny morning as the frost melts and drips from the world outside toward the continued work of creating a title for this first book.  If I ever thought that naming a newborn was a difficult job, I am finding that task pales in comparison to naming a book!

An unanticipated difficulty for me…….

So today I think about the greatest common thread between my mother’s childhood of abuse and my own:  We were both the child in our family chosen for abuse.

The choice was made by our mothers.

That choice and its consequences changed my mother’s life, and her same choice regarding her abuse of me changed mine.

Maybe on its most essential level this is the essence of what my book, ‘Story Without Words’, is about.  I was going to use the word ‘chooses’ — but at this moment that choice feels like ‘targets’.

A choice is a choice, but targeting someone for abuse conveys more of the actual reality of what such a choice is about, what it is meant to do, what it does.

I am the kind of person who always begins a project and works through that project until it is done.  Then I move on to the next project.  Being in limbo in the midst of a project is obviously very difficult for me, primarily because I am not the one who can complete it!  And yet a book stuck without a subtitle does involve me.  It’s my book.  I SHOULD know what the dang thing has for a title!

But I don’t.  And I want the day to come soon when I DO know!  Is today that day?

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