by Pete Walker
People vary in the amount of active listening they find helpful. Please be open to giving and receiving feedback about how much you or the other person would like.
In order to establish safety and build trust, begin with a commitment to refrain from advice giving, criticism or any kind of unsolicited feedback except active listening. If and when the desire for feedback comes up, it is best to let the counselee determine when, what kind and how much they want. Feedback is best given from a take-it or leave-it perspective
Do not give any feedback unless it is clearly asked for. The counselee often does well to be specific about the type of feedback desired, or the desire to not have any feedback; e.g., “I’d like to just verbally ventilate about my relationship, but don’t really want any feedback about it other than active listening.” At another point the counselee might like to say: “This is something I would actually like some feedback on. I’d like to know whether it seems that I’m perceiving my boss clearly.”
With enough grace, luck, respect, practice and compassion, mutual trust may eventually come so far that you both agree to change the structure to allow for spontaneous feedback at certain times in the session. Don’t rush to get there, and always reserve permission to invoke the no-feedback guideline for any given issue, session or indefinite number of sessions.
In this vein, my wife or I might say to each other: “I think I’d just like active listening today. I’d like to just extensively free associate on and explore this anxious feeling in my chest without getting any input about it.”
Practice therapeutic confidentiality. Let what is said in a session stay in the session.
I also recommend that both partners read Toolbox 4 in chapter 13, and the section above on the four key qualities of relational healing prior to commencing a co-counseling relationship.
FORGIVENESS: BEGIN WITH THE SELF
This chapter is a reworking of an article of mine that was published in Recovering, November 1991. I wrote it because I was appalled at how much pressure my clients were getting to just forgive and forget. Consequently, many of them were diving right back into denial, and minimizing all the trauma that they had endured. Their recovery processes then, screeched to a halt as their inner critics denigrated them for being so unforgiving.
Because this article was helpful to my clients and because I received so much positive feedback from the recovery community, I was motivated to write my first book, The Tao of Fully Feeling, Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame. This book explores the complex subject of forgiving past abusers in considerable depth. In this vein, it asserts that some parents were so destructive to us, that they are not forgivable.
There is a lot of shaming, dangerous and inaccurate “guidance” put out about forgiveness in both the recovery community and in many spiritual teachings. Many survivors of dysfunctional families have been injured by the simplistic, black-and-white advice that they must embrace a position of being totally and permanently forgiving in order to recover.
Unfortunately, those who take the advice to forgive abuses that they have not fully grieved, abuses that are still occurring, and/or abuses so heinous they should and could never be forgiven, often find themselves getting nowhere in their recovery process.
In fact, the possibility of attaining real feelings of forgiveness is usually lost when there is a premature, cognitive decision to forgive. This is because premature forgiveness mimics the defenses of denial and repression. It keeps unprocessed feelings of anger and hurt about childhood trauma out of awareness.
Real forgiveness is quite distinct from premature forgiveness. It is almost always a byproduct of effective grieving and no amount of thought, intention or belief can bring it into being without a great deal of emotional work.
Conversely, belief systems that are not open to the possibility of forgiveness sometimes block our access to forgiving feelings, even when such feelings are present.
It might be that the healthiest cognitive position concerning forgiveness is an attitude that allows for the possibility of its occurrence on the other side of extensive grieving. This attitude works best if it includes the condition that feelings of forgiveness will not be forced or falsely invoked to cover up any unresolved feelings of hurt or anger.
In this vein, it is crucial to understand that certain types of abuse are so extreme and damaging to the victim that forgiveness is simply not an option. Examples of this include sociopathy, conscious cruelty, and many forms of scapegoating and parental incest.
When forgiveness has substance, it is felt palpably in the heart, and is usually an expansion of the emotion of compassion. Compassion is certainly not always the same thing as forgiveness, but it is usually the experience within which forgiveness is born. Often this happens via an intermediate process, where having grieved our childhood losses substantially, we occasionally find ourselves considering the extenuating circumstances that contributed to our parents raising us in neglectful or abusive ways.
Most commonly these extenuating circumstances revolve around two issues. First, our parents often parented us in ways that blindly replicated the ways that they were parented. And second, they were often supported in their dysfunctional parenting by the social norms and values of their times.
Nonetheless, it is once again vitally important that we do not jump into considering their mitigating circumstances until we have significantly worked through the traumatic consequences that their abuse and abandonment had on us.
When considering our parents extenuating circumstances, we may sometimes “get” that our parents were also quite victimized, and we may consequently find ourselves on occasion feeling sorry (sorrow) for them.
Sometimes this experience of feeling compassion for them becomes profound enough for us to comprehend how similarly awful and unfair their childhoods were. This feeling-based realization may on occasion morph into feeling some forgiveness for them.
However, unless this feeling of forgiveness for our parents is grounded in compassion for ourselves, the above process is an empty mental exercise. Even worse, it may become a great hindrance to doing the fundamental angering work of real recovery.
Premature forgiveness will prohibit us from showing the inner child that she had the right to be angry about her parents’ cold-hearted abandonment of her. It will stop us from helping her to express and release those old angry feelings.
Premature forgiveness will also inhibit the survivor from reconnecting with his instinctual self-protectiveness. He may never learn that he can now use his anger, if necessary, to stop present day unfairness.
As real forgiveness is primarily a feeling, it is - like all other feelings - ephemeral. It is never complete, never permanent, and never a done deal.
Forgiveness is governed by the dynamic nature of all human feeling experience. Our emotional experience is a frequently changing, unchoosable and unpredictable process of the psyche.
No emotional state can be induced to persist as a permanent experience. As sad as this may be, as much as we might like to deny it, as much as it continuingly frustrates us, and as much as we are pressured to control and pick our emotions, they are still by definition of the human condition, largely outside the province of our wills.
Forgiveness then, like love, remains a human feeling experience that is only temporarily ours. However, when we thoroughly vent our angry feelings about the past, feelings of forgiveness become more accessible. When we learn how to grieve ourselves out of abandonment flashbacks, we reemerge into a feeling of belonging to and loving the world.
Moreover, when we learn to effectively grieve through present day hurts, we quite naturally move back into loving feelings. As our emotional flexibility matures, lost feelings of love and forgiveness return so reliably that they can become consciously chosen values.
Thus, when I occasionally feel hurt by proven intimates, I may not be able to immediately invoke loving or forgiving feelings towards them, but I know that with sufficient communication and non-a
busive venting, I will eventually return to an appreciative experience of them.
As much as I can forgive myself, that much can I forgive others. What I often forgive in others is an old pain of mine, released from the disgust of self-hate. It is an old vulnerability of mine that I now love and welcome like a bird with a broken wing. Shame and self-hate did not start with me, but with all my heart, I deign that they will stop with me. I will do unto myself as I would have others do unto me.
Carol Ruth Knox wrote a poem about loving feelings and the hide-and-seek game they seem to play with us.
It comes and goes, doesn’t it?
Sometimes related
to people and how they
treat us, and sometimes not
Sometimes related
to the moon
to personal finances
to the questions of life
to nothingness
to everything
to the seasons, the time
to the food we ate
to. . . .
It would appear as if the art of loving is not whether you love or not (we all do in our present way) but whether you trust that when love leaves, it has a reason and it will return again. Always.
We humans are instruments for love by design.
(So is the whole universe!)
When love blows across us,
naturally we sing a love song.
And when there is no love wind to blow,
though it leaves us strange
and willow-like,
love has gone to an empty field where it fills its
wind sails again
so that it might return
and blow across our all too hungering instruments
one more time.
What shall we do while we wait?
We shall weep of course -
something as lovely as love
leaves a gaping hole when gone.
We shall remember love in our hearts and wait
tenderly and compassionately
with ourselves
as we wander in question
and doubt
until we remember,
“Love always returns.”
BIBLIOTHERAPY AND THE COMMUNITY OF BOOKS
Bibliotherapy is a term that describes the very real process of being positively and therapeutically influenced by what you read. As stated earlier, when it is at its most powerful, bibliotherapy is also relationally healing. It can rescue you from the common Cptsd feeling of abject isolation and alienation.
Bibliotherapy can play an enormous role in enhancing recovery from Cptsd. I usually find that my clients who make the most progress are those who augment their therapy sessions with reading homework [self-prescribed or recommended by me].
This is especially true of those who further augment their reading with journaling about their cognitive and emotional responses to what they have read. I believe that journaling helps build the new physiological and neuronal brain circuitry that occurs as we effectively meet our developmentally arrested childhood needs. [For more on Journaltherapy, read the section on verbal ventilating in chapter 5 of my first book].
Bibliotherapy is especially helpful for people like me who grew up in dangerous social environments replete with adults who offered little but criticism, intimidation and disgust. It equally serves those whose early lives were devoid of adults who could be looked to for safe support and guidance.
It was not until later in life, after I had quite a few years of group and individual therapy, that I realized that my journey of recovering had actually begun decades before my formal therapy. It began with all the therapeutic reading and writing I had instinctively gravitated to. I unconsciously sought the help of others in the many spiritual and psychological self-help books that I was intuitively drawn to.
Without really understanding it, I gained valuable insights about how to improve the way I treated myself and others. Just as importantly, I subliminally realized that there were a number of good, safe, wise and helpful adults out there who could be trusted and who had a great deal of wise and kind guidance to offer.
I remember my first deeply emotional experience of entering the community of books. I was in the library resentfully slogging through the poetry section trying to find a book for my homework in high school English.
I was up to “W “and had found nothing that remotely interested me when I came to an anthology with the picture of a very compelling looking old man on its cover. Walt Whitman! His epic poems Song of Myself and Song of the Open Road thrilled me and changed my life. He became my hero and the first adult role model that had something useful and important to teach me. His ideas became my raison d’être and gave me a hopeful plan for what I would do when I finally escaped my family.
Over time the authors in my community of books seemed like a small tribe of elders who I imagined as people who would have empathy for me if I were to meet them. Eventually when I achieved something of a critical mass of this awareness, I managed to take a frightening leap into the water of therapy. I lucked out and got a good enough therapist to help me take steps in my healing that I could not manage on my own.
So here are some authors [and their works] who have been especially helpful to me on my journey. These are the wise aunts and uncles I never biologically had.
ESPECIALLY RECOMMENDED READING
Alice Miller
The Drama of The Gifted Child {Great book for overcoming denial and understanding the profound impact of growing up poorly parented. Very relevant for fawn types.}
Gravitz & Bowden
Guide to Recovery {Great short, powerful overview of recovery. Oriented to recovering from having alcoholic parents, but very relevant to having traumatizing parents. Read this if you can only read one book.}
L. Davis & E. Bass
The Courage to Heal {Classic on recovering from sexual abuse.}
Jack Kornfield
A Path with Heart {Using meditation to increase self-compassion.}
Steven Levine
Who Dies {Mindfulness and radical self-acceptance.}
Sue Johnson
Hold Me Tight {The book, and especially the DVD of the same name, shows how she teaches real couples to use their emotional vulnerability to develop real intimacy and a healthy attachment bond.}
John Bradshaw
Healing The Shame That Binds {Brilliant book on recovering from toxic shame and growing up in a dysfunctional family.}
Judith Herman
Trauma and Recovery {The book in which Herman coins the term Complex PTSD. Last half of book more relevant to recovery.}
Susan Anderson
The Journey from Abandonment to Healing {Oriented toward recovering from divorce, but remarkably relevant to Cptsd recovery.}
J. Middleton-Moz
Children of Trauma {Excellent overall book on recovery.}
Beverly Engel
Healing Your Emotional Self {Advocates angering-at-the-critic work.}
Theodore Rubin
Compassion and Self-hate {Wonderful appeal to self-compassion.}
Susan Forward
Betrayal of Innocence { Good overall book on recovery.}
Byron Brown
Soul Without Shame {Inner critic shrinking with angering-at-the- critic and Mindfulness perspective.}
Susan Vaughan
The Talking Cure {How Therapy and Relational Healing works with very accessible neuroscientific evidence and an enlightened view of therapy.}
Lewis & Amini
A General Theory Of Love {Accessible poetic and scientific argument on the human need for love and attachment.}
Pat Love
The Emotional Incest Syndrome {Great book to heal from codependent entrapment with a narcissistic mother.}
Robin Norwood
Women Who Love Too Much {Early classic on Codependence.}
Gay Hendricks
Lucia Capacchione
Learning to Love Yourself Recovery of your In
ner Child {Great book on Journaltherapy.}
Cheri Huber
There is Nothing Wrong with You {Great book for overcoming shame and cultivating self-compassion.}
Christine Lawson
Understanding The Borderline Mother {Healing from having a borderline or narcissistic mother; explores 5 different types.}
Elan Golomb
Trapped in The Mirror {Healing from having a narcissistic parent.}
John Gottman
The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work
SELF-HELP TOOLS
This chapter is composed of six toolboxes, each with a set of tools to address different recovery issues. Nonetheless, I still value these lists as indispensable adjuncts to my own journey of recovering. I often hand out these lists to clients at appropriate times in their journey. I also give them to students who attend my classes. I have received a great deal of positive feedback about how helpful they have been to enhancing recovery.
My friends and clients whose recovery progresses at the greatest rate are those who supplement their therapy with self-help activities. Those who print out these lists, and carry them around or post them in a conspicuous place until they are deeply ingrained seem to take a quantum leap in their recovery.
I hope that you become immersed in these lists, and that they give you the healing support that I have seen so many others receive from them.
Here’s a poem that I found graffitied on a wall recently. It was signed “Hank”:
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank
submission.