Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  Lissa nailed it with her comments on applying self-tenderness toward ourselves and our lives as we move forward. As I’m finishing this chapter, I find myself missing my ex-wife and stepdaughter in ways I haven’t in a while. That’s life, right? Things ebb and flow, but in this moment, I can hold myself and these feelings of sadness and distance in self-tenderness. It’s quite beautiful and comforting. (The flip side is that I’m holding myself in said tenderness while listening to Bloodlet, an exceptionally brutal hardcore band, so I guess it all balances out, right?)

  PRACTICE

  From Fear to Freedom

  After we spoke, Lissa sent me an excerpt from her book The Fear Cure that she said could be the foundation for a practice:

  When we’re willing to view life as the teacher, even in the midst of uncertainty, a journey begins. This journey—some might call it the spiritual path—challenges us to shift from fear of uncertainty to trusting life in the face of that which we can’t know and don’t understand. After interviewing many people about what they’d learned on their own spiritual journeys, I discovered that the journey from fear to freedom, which is all about coming into right relationship with uncertainty, is a predictable journey, one that many have traveled before you and many will travel after you. . . . It is a map of sorts and can help you assess where you are on your path.

  Here are Lissa’s five phases:

  1. Unconscious Fear of Uncertainty: “Better safe than sorry.”

  2. Conscious Fear of Uncertainty: “The only thing certain in life is uncertainty.”

  3. Uncertainty Limbo: “I’m curious about the unknown, but I have my reservations.”

  4. Uncertainty Seduction: “The flip side of the fear of uncertainty is the excitement of possibility.”

  5. Surrender: “The only way to experience life’s richness is to surrender to the unknown.”

  Here’s how I navigated these phases when I began my divorce:

  1. I became aware of my unconscious fear of uncertainty about my relationship when I thought about my experience with addiction and relapse and how that could create insecurity for my ex-wife and her daughter. I dug into how I tend to cling to safety and certainty in a relationship and questioned whether this relationship had been working for me.

  2. This helped me touch my conscious fear of uncertainty and recognize how my need to be sure limited my possibilities, generating a predisposition toward what that exactly needs to look like in my life, especially when it came to my relationship with my ex-wife. I tried to get to a place of self-compassion.

  3. As I engaged in the uncertainty limbo, I looked at this situation and my fears and doubts with curiosity. I tried my best not to judge or “know” the answers, but it wasn’t easy! There’s a natural inclination to squirm away from the discomfort of the unknown.

  4. By being aware of the uncertainty seduction, I could avoid stumbling, and discriminate between reasonable fear and experiencing the unknown with integrity—except in this instance, that wasn’t the case. I hadn’t utilized Lissa’s From Fear to Freedom Practice. (Let this be a lesson for you kids . . .)

  5. Surrender was the part of this practice I couldn’t commit to. I would shove the feelings of uncertainty, fear, loneliness, and lack of self-worth deep down as they arose. I’d worked with surrender practices in other areas of my life prior to this, and since then, even using Lissa’s formula, but this time around I chose not to, and the results, well . . . you read the preface to this book.

  Lissa reminded me that it’s a process! “You may leap forward from one phase to the next, only to find that you regress in times of loss or trauma. Because we’re often more comfortable with uncertainty in some areas of our lives than in others, you may not be in the same phase in all aspects of your life. There is no right or wrong phase, and you should trust your own timing. The reason to identify where you are in your development is not to trigger your ‘not good enough’ story, but simply to help guide you as you walk your own path. Be extra gentle and compassionate with yourself as you navigate from fear to faith. Trust the process!”

  4

  DRINKING, DRUGGING, OVERSPENDING, AND SEXCAPADES

  CONVERSATION WITH ANNE DAVIN

  Lissa Rankin turned me on to Anne Davin, an incredible woman! Anne spent several years living on a Native American reservation in New Mexico, and her later work with Southeast Asian Indochinese refugees inspired her exploration of the intersection of psyche, culture, and the marginalized voice of the feminine. She is a licensed psychotherapist and the cofounder of the Imagin-NATION Academy, offering a pathway to wisdom and healing using the ancient tools and practices of earth-based indigenous cultures.

  Anne’s background in depth psychology is based on an understanding that the world itself is “ensouled,” or inclusive of the cosmos, the natural world, and the unseen forces beyond what is visible. “The pervasive symptoms of dis-ease—depression, anxiety, and addictions—are an invitation to deeper inquiry and a remembering of ourselves as who we are. When we find the courage to look closely and inhabit our whole self, meaning, joy, and coming home to our highest purpose become abundantly available.” See what I mean about incredible?

  When we spoke, I shared the story of my relapse. I told her about sitting on that long bus ride back to Ottawa and taking the pills that led to the wine that led to the vodka, all within several hours, and how it ultimately left me intubated in the hospital while knocking on heaven’s door. (Or hell . . . who knows?) I asked Anne what we can do when we struggle not to pick up that drink, not to eat that second piece of cake, or not to buy yet another pair of sneakers we don’t need.

  Anne had four responses to my question, each focused on a facet of the whole person. That’s because Anne’s perspective is to look at an individual as an amalgam of four different bodies. “There’s the spiritual body, the emotional body, the physical body, and the mental body.”

  She started with the spiritual. “In relation to the spiritual body, the cycle of addiction is a crisis of imagination and faith. If we look at the metaphor, there’s a reason why alcohol is called spirits. We’re embodying a substance that can put us in a state of alternative consciousness. In a historical context, this was done to reach states of rapture. When you’re in a cultural context in which there is a creation mythology that gives value and meaning to an organized, highly constructed environment, where substances are used to personify the spirit within the human form and to connect with other forms of intelligences and realities that surround us in a quantum universe, you can see what a substance like a bottle of vodka or a gram of cocaine in the traditional indigenous sense would have looked like. Ayahuasca and other kinds of sacred herbs or substances would have been ritually harvested, cultivated, prayed for, and then embodied in a conscious way to achieve a specific outcome. That heritage is in our spiritual DNA.

  “When we experience states of extreme suffering—whether that suffering is not knowing our sense of purpose in the world, not feeling loved and located in our marriage, or feeling displaced in our own physical body because we can’t control something—these modern-day realities impress upon a spiritual DNA metric that’s inside of us. This spiritual DNA understands what it is to be located, what it feels like to be embodied in our aliveness as souls having a human experience where it is safe to move in the environment via its understanding of the natural world. When, spiritually speaking, we become separated from that, we can see it manifesting in our desire to caffeinate ourselves to get out of bed, to slow ourselves down at night through a permissive culture of addiction, where three glasses of wine for a woman at night as she’s relaxing is considered okay.

  “Our modern suffering and our ancient spiritual DNA go hand in hand. Therefore, it was possible for me to live in an indigenous community where there were actual traditional spiritual practices occurring alongside some of the highest addiction and death rates due to addiction in the nation. There was a huge trauma that had occurred to the spiritual culture, and even tho
se people who are living what’s left of an indigenous tradition are suffering this same dis-ease of the soul as those who don’t know anything about that. In other words, a Western person moving around in our culture with their own sense of indigenousness usually will not know what or how to manage that.” That was her perspective of the spiritual body—the modern pain yearning for the ancient healing.

  Next came the emotional body. “There are very specific life events that help shape our brains. It starts with early childhood experiences that shape the brain, which then creates a flood of hormones into the body based on the event that’s happening. These are transmitted into the body through neural pathways developed in response to the environment. Inside each of us is a whole neural network that’s been formed as an imprint in response to the social environment that influenced us in our developmental years. Those tracks inside of us start to change when we start to ask those larger questions as we become young adults: Who am I? Why do I get angry every time a person does this? Why am I responding to my wife in this way and sounding just like my father? It’s when we start to make those associations, asking those deeper questions, that we discover that we are our past in the present.”

  I found that fascinating, as it’s something I’ve contemplated at great length, especially when it came to my experience of addiction. By this I mean everything I’ve experienced in my life—including those goddamn psych wards and dingy basement detoxes—has culminated in the person I am today, just as my actions today will create the person I am tomorrow, ad infinitum. That’s why teachings such as Ram Dass’s “Be here now” are crucial. They help take us off autopilot and enable us to live a more conscious and skillful life, resulting in a better tomorrow not only for ourselves but for our loved ones and the entire planet as well.

  The roots of this are deep. As Anne went on to say, “If you’ve had early childhood trauma, how do you restore your body, the nervous system, if it’s in the subtle body? How can you be effective in healing what may cause an addiction now that’s related to something that happened to you when you were sexually abused as a child? We know that women are more likely to become addicts if they have experienced sexual assault or domestic violence, or were abused as children.1 There have been many studies that have demonstrated we end up self-medicating later in life because we don’t know how to manage trauma in the body.2 That’s one area to attend to from the emotional body. What were those early childhood experiences that are now guiding and informing a person’s life as an adult? What needs to be tended to in the nervous system? Was the person sexually abused? Were they hit? Were they forgotten on the side of the road? Did they experience an alcoholic parent? All those things impress not only into the feeling state but also into the physical state of the body. We know now because of all the research in brain elasticity that this can be changed.”

  Anne turned me on to a remarkable methodology called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). “What this does is help remove a traumatic event from the part of the brain that has the stress response. Generally, it helps to relocate it to the part of the brain that has the relaxation response in the body. If one of the ways in which a person is triggered is that they were hit as a child and therefore they have a difficult time trusting that they won’t be at risk of being hurt in an intimate relationship, when they get into an intimate relationship, they experience a lot of anxiety and symptoms. Their drinking might increase or they might get strung out. But an EMDR therapist will analyze and ask questions: What happened? How did it feel in your body?

  “Then the therapist will create a different experience for the body. They will ask a client if there was someone in their environment who was a wise person, a protector, someone who stood up for them. Was there someone in their environment who loved them and created a sense of warmth? When the patient speaks about the traumatic event, while it’s alive in their nervous system, the EMDR therapist has them think about and meditate on one of those restorative figures. In effect, they’re dosing the body with the relaxation response we get when we think about that nurturing figure and how protected and safe we felt.”

  Using a bilateral stimulation device, the “therapist will create a bilateral stimulation in the ears with a beeping sound that goes from the right to the left ear. Often they’ll put electrical vibrators in your hands that you’ll also feel going left to right, right to left. And sometimes the EMDR therapist will have you tap it left to right on certain points of your body. What all that sort of mad science does is to start to move your experience out of trauma into the relaxation response, because you’re messing with all those neural pathways. The trigger becomes less intense and less frequent, and you’re able to manage it better. This is an example of the mind-body connection that science is tracking. It’s not just a bunch of woo-woo—there’s something happening with the biochemistry of the body.”

  This sounds incredible, but a lot of my friends and the people I work with—myself included—don’t have insurance that covers therapy or specialists such as those who facilitate EMDR. I would love to try EMDR with a trained professional, but it’s not an option for me. What do people without insurance or the money to pay out of pocket do to explore therapies such as this? I asked Anne if she had an alternative practice or method she could suggest.

  Fortunately, she did. “The wonderful thing about all the restorative therapies modern science is now pointing us toward is that we were doing them in ancient times—when we were running around in villages and tribes. Science is catching up with timeless indigenous traditions that don’t cost a dime. There’s a practice I do if I have anxiety. Maybe I have a speaking engagement and I’m having performance anxiety that is linked to when I was a child and had a negative experience of being bullied by other children. I have all that operating. I have normal performance anxiety, and it’s being amplified by the fact that I was bullied as a child. What I’ll do is take a walk around the block in a meditation, swinging my arms and repeating, ‘I am safe. I am loved. I am safe. I am loved.’ I’ll repeat that over and over for up to an hour if I need to. What happens is that I create a bilateral motion in my body by swinging my right arm and swinging my left arm, and I’m effectively mimicking what EMDR does with the bilateral simulation of the ears and the energy in the hands. It’s my way to dose my nervous system with the energy of ‘I am safe. I am loved.’ Usually my anxiety is lessened, and I’m more able to be in possession of myself and feel more comfortable and relaxed going into my presentation. I do that practice a lot, because I have a lot of generalized anxiety.

  “Another way that people can do this is through movement—something like Nia cardio-dance or another form of structured movement. These kinds of exercises are brilliant articulations of what we used to do when we were in ritual or ceremony, which is moving and allowing our nervous system to align with the music, the motion, and the direction of the room. If we choose to hold on to a positive intention in our minds, just as I was doing on my walk, we can begin to soothe the nervous system through motion.”

  I could relate to this fully. Even though I’m currently not formally in a band, I’ve played drums for many bands throughout my life, and even when I wasn’t part of a group per se, I’d often sit down at the kit and relax into the rhythmic relation that naturally occurs while playing. (As a matter of fact, I was feeling a little stressed while working on this chapter, and you can bet your ass I took a twenty-minute drum break to work through the stress and frustration I was holding. I feel much better now.)

  The techniques Anne shared connected the emotional body directly to the physical body, and she brought it back to my original question about relapse and addiction. “Everything is all tangled up with one another. In addition to that, there’s all the neuroscience that talks about the brain structure and everything that gets set into motion when we become habituated to a substance. There’s substance abuse—what used to be called addiction—and all the research around what happens to our brains when we develop a
habit that becomes a dependency. There’s a biological corollary, and when we stop doing that, there are very specific things that go on within the biology that manifest in cravings. Those things create a rumination in the form of obsessive thoughts. It’s as if our biology begins to drive what’s going on in the mind, and then our mind starts to have a conversation with the body. Soon we end up back in front of a bottle.”

  That brought us to the mental body. “When someone has experienced early childhood trauma and the neural pathways in the brain imprint on that, it’s not just a feeling experience that gets stuck there, it’s also supported by a mental decision that the child made in that moment—a decision about themselves and the world. That negative core belief starts running in the background like a CD that’s on replay, and it stays on replay for that person’s entire life. It’s usually buried in the unconscious. I have read—and I have no idea how scientists measure this—that we have something like sixty thousand unconscious beliefs in a twenty-four-hour period. How do they even know that? Most of those unconscious beliefs are coming from the limbic brain, which is the part of our brain that is the fight-or-flight response. The reason that they’re firing those images is because the limbic brain is trying to keep us safe from a real or perceived threat. When we have a negative experience as a child, that message goes right into that sound wave. Unless we’re conscious of it, we can unconsciously organize our life around that negative belief. We can choose people, places, and things that will create an emotional environment in which that belief can stay intact. Our inner life will start to picture itself in our outer reality until we start to take steps to change that—whether that’s to read a great self-help book, have a deep conversation with a friend, or get sober and start engaging in a restorative community. All those things contribute to spiritual, emotional, and physical change.”