Sh*t Happens: Paradox, Perspective and Healing By Pat Heavren
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hen a client, an artist, came to me suffering from PTSD after a terrible car accident, his life was shattered. To make matters worse, the experience provoked earlier traumas to rise back to the surface to the extent that all the ordeals merged into one solid state of suffering. No amount of talking about it was going to reorder his world or help him forget what happened. No amount of relaxation technique would enable him to let it go. I knew from the start that I needed to help him engage the memory of the event from another perspective. The Key to Restoring Health As he described the story of waking up bruised and broken, covered in bloodied fragments of what was once a windshield, I understood that I couldn’t support him in moving toward the new perspective without bringing along the old one in a repurposed form. He couldn’t leave the past behind, because it lived with him in the present. The same was true of the future he 32
Natural Nutmeg - October 2020
longed for, the one free from the constantly recurring memories of the terrible upheavals he’d experienced. He couldn’t face his painful past in the present. He couldn’t move past the present pain into a pain-free future. Whether the focus is an individual, joint, or collective healing; the ability to embrace and hold contradictions and opposites is the key to restoring health and wellness. What gives us the ability to do that, to engage extreme hardship and all the associated feelings that we naturally want to reject? The answer is perspective. For my client, my listening was essential. He needed me to hear what he could not. He needed me to identify the opposite of what was present in his own words and story, then offer it back to him in a way that might allow him to make an ally of the incident that had become his enemy. He couldn’t paste a smiley face on a tragic picture, avoid his powerful feelings
and emotions, or make an intellectual leap to simply reframe in his mind the automobile accident he’d been through. Doing so, or even trying to, would only increase the chance of his thoughts continuing to intrude and his pain being recurrent, because he would be leaving something behind in the process. Every time we cut something off or out without repurposing it, it will chase us into the future, looking for our eventual attention in another circumstance. Finding a Fresh Perspective In order to turn this enemy into a friend, we had to find a way for him to have a fresh perspective of what was as it was, so something new could unfold, something that allowed him to integrate the horror of the experience in a digestible form. In my experience with so many others like him, I knew it had to come from the words in his own story. Ultimately, we had to tap his well-established nature as an artist, so he could use this new vision of “stained glass,” the bloodied windshield of
