I love the man who wrote How to Do Drugs for Healing and Spiritual Growth While Your Kids are at School for Tasshin’s Share Your Knowledge! Essay Contest. He was trying so, so hard to be good, to do good, to spread good. He had so much information to share that had helped him (me) so much (classic Enneagram 5 behaviour).
Over two years have passed, and I have too much too update since then. This essay is built on the bones of several failed attempts that tried to do too much. I have too much to say, so I will say too little instead.
I am so, so grateful to that past self. It’s important to say this because he was also so wrong in so many ways that I want to publicly correct. I am so grateful to him. I might be dead today if he hadn’t been willing to try.
Nobody will get to where they want to go in their healing journey with solo therapy alone. I said no such thing explicitly in my previous piece, because I knew it wasn’t true. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted to heal my relationships without needing to do so relationally. I talked a lot about Stan Grof’s “inner healing intelligence” as if it operated asocially. I desperately wanted to heal without needing to learn to trust people.
And trusting people is hard for people with complex/developmental trauma. That’s the whole deal. One way to look at trauma is that past danger makes present safety still feel unsafe. To put it another way, trauma makes every thing/one feel threatening, even when they aren’t. Situations, people, and/or therapies that might help, can and will still feel like nope.
I reached a stagnation point in the benefits of my trips shortly after my last post. For a year, every trip, the same theme would come up: I needed to work with someone, anyone. There were no shortage of candidates, but I always had a trump card: I wanted to work in person. There is a vibe field that is impossible to replicate online, even over a video call. This was both correct, and an excuse.
But then I discovered that Doug Tataryn of Bio-Emotive Framework fame was in my backyard. I made contact (after not a little hemming and hawing) and our slightly more than a year of working together has taken me places I could never have gotten to alone.
You’re not going to get any therapeutic voyeurism today. But I’ll mention some of the broad outlines in the sake of helping people who may be stuck in similar places.
In IFS, there’s a concept of “polarized parts.” What this means is that there are two Parts that vie for supremacy and consider each other the enemy to be vanquished. Neither Part is able to maintain its ascendency for long, being a fixed, rigid strategy for relating to self and world that’s inadequate to life’s real issues. Each Part is a reaction to the other Part’s failings.
But my problem is that I had never experienced one of those Parts as a Part, because it had developed so early in my life that I couldn’t remember any experience prior to it. This is typical of complex trauma: the coping strategies get locked in so early that we mistake a Part for Self.
It took a witness, an other, an emotionally literate therapist like Doug who would stop me time and again as I narrated some traumatic memory or current bewildering shutdown: “feel that in the body.” Stop telling aversive stories, start feeling emotions.
I already knew about my Freeze Part, it was responsible for my dissociating so hard that I was in danger of losing everything most dear to me (wife, job, children). This is the Part that I was trying to get rid of, to get past. I want to be alive, dammit! But more than that, I wanted to be good. The Part that I mistook for myself wanted to be so good, because that was my earliest strategy of appeasing my narcissist mother: be her good, sweet, little boy. This part was a textbook expression of the Fawn response: it’s only safe if I’m unthreatening and appeasing. I’ll make sure you love me, because nothing else is safe.
And this Fawn Part was driving most of my solo therapeutic process, trying to Be Good (again) once and for all. If only I (the Fawn Part that I mistook for my Self) could get rid of this stupid awful Freeze Part, I would be saved.
This is called a “Self-like Part” in IFS: a Part that masquerades as Self. I saw that my entire life has been a see-saw between my Fawn and Freeze Parts. Wanting to be impossibly Good so badly that it hurt, eventually hurting so much that my Freeze Part would take over, promoting apathy and dissociation as a cure. I started my psychedelic journey as a way to break out of my Freeze Part’s dominance. That worked, but it took working with Doug to see that I was just on the other side of the see-saw, and I was starting to swing back around, again.
My Fawn Part is not happy with how non-comprehensive and fragmentary this essay is. If I were Good, I would be utterly comprehensive here. You can see how that impulse made my previous essay unwieldy in its attempt to write the Definitive Guide to Working Solo with Psychedelics.
But it also hasn’t just been Doug. It’s been my wife and kids. They’re the reason I started on this healing journey, because I wanted to love them like they deserved, like I wanted to love them and yet so often couldn’t. Their love itself, especially my wife’s, in its constancy, was more healing than I can ever express.
So this piece will remain incomplete and fragmentary, like me, like all of us. Until next time, hopefully sooner than last time. I have a lot more to say that was blocked on saying this.