Space Analogies & Our Healing Journeys

As a young girl, the first thing I remember wanted to be was an astronaut, so I’ve always had a fascination with space. Now as a therapist, I totally geek out over the amazing metaphors for healing found in the exploration of our universe. As we wrap up laying the foundation for upcoming content around childhood trauma, I present you with two amazing analogies to keep in mind in the coming months.

Supernovas vs. Black Holes:

The first recorded observation of a supernova was by Chinese astronomers in 185 A.D. The explosion of light that took place in the final stages of death of the supermassive star (later named SN 1054) was easily visible with the naked eye—the telescope won’t be invented until the early 17th century. In 1054 A.D. another supernova was so exceptionally bright—four times brighter than Venus—that it was visible in the daytime for 23 days and in the night sky for over a year. Supernovas, like “headline harm” in our stories, are dramatic, eventful, easily visible if we are looking for them and are accompanied by searing white hot heat.

In contrast, it wasn’t until April of 2019, after two years of combining and analyzing data, that global astronomers constructed the first ever image of a black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope Team (named after the term for the edge of a black hole that is the gravitational place of no escape) brought together eight radio telescopes stationed at different points across the planet and synced by powerful atomic clocks.

As I learned more about this miraculous event, I was struck by the similarities between a black hole and the subtle, almost impossible to name, darkness that inhabits many people’s stories.

• I grew up in a good Christian home.

• My parents were never divorced.

• I always had everything I needed.

• There wasn’t any abuse in my family.

• My siblings and I loved each other.

These statements can all be true even as an adult struggles deeply with issues that make them feel crazy. We all have unnamed places of darkness in our lives, and I believe speaking our untold stories in community requires a great cloud of witnesses (maybe even eight!) to see the way well-disguised harm has robbed our lives of light.

Evil by its very nature is invisible. The more subtle evil is, the harder it is to capture on film. The most important photos of our lives are ones where there is no light. But how do we take a picture of something that doesn’t emit light? How do we see a void?

As you watch the video below, you can imagine how difficult it is to capture the voids of protection, care, comfort and nurturance in our stories.

The Gemini Space Program:

I’m in the middle of Jeffrey Kluger’s book Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story which explores the US space program of the 1960’s that bridged the Mercury missions that first propelled an American into space and the Apollo missions that took a man to the moon. Standing in my local bookstore, I was captured by the back cover’s synopsis:

It was no easy jump from manned missions in low-Earth orbit to a successful moon landing, and the ten-flight, twenty-month celestial story of the Gemini program is an extraordinary one. There was unavoidable darkness in the program—the deaths and near-deaths that defined it, and the blood feud with the Soviet Union that animated it. But there were undeniable and previously inconceivable successes. Against all odds, the remarkable scientists and astronauts behind the project persevered, and their efforts paid off. Later, with the knowledge gained from the Gemini flights, NASA would launch the legendary Apollo program.

Kluger could just as easily be talking about our journeys of healing. The middle grueling years between realizing historic pain is limiting our emotional lives and the alleviation of shame that allows us to come home to ourselves in way we’ve never known is an arduous journey.

The Gemini Program was designed to test equipment and mission procedures in Earth’s orbit and to train astronauts and ground crews for future Apollo missions. The two-man Gemini spacecraft was larger and more sophisticated than its Mercury predecessor. The progress was slow, but its key victories were establishing endurance for a 14-day mission, mastering orbital rendezvous and docking, executing the first U.S. spacewalks and demonstrating precise reentry and landing control.

These are some of the same elements I am wanting to help us build through my upcoming publications:

• Larger and more sophisticated thinking about our stories

• Building our endurance for sustained living on our journeys toward healing

• Experiences of rendezvousing and docking with other survivors for encouragement and sharing wisdom

• Learning how to enter and return from the hard work of grieving that often feels like a G force launch into a thin atmosphere and the “controlled plunge” back into the gravitational pull of our lives

Unfortunately, the Gemini program did not eliminate all danger, but it did prepare NASA for the 238,900-mile journey from earth’s orbit to the surface of the moon.

On Jan 27, 1967, three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 launch pad disaster. Among them was “Gus” Grissom who uttered this famous quote before perishing. “If we die, we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” The next Apollo mission would be named Apollo 4, skipping the identifiers of Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 to honor the three lives lost.

The healing journey we are on does not always feel safe and often comes at a high cost, and yet is a worthy risk if we will continue to choose courageous self-care and self-compassion.

Reflection Questions:

When in your story did you feel the gravitational pull of darkness? How did the light of who you are disappear into it for a time?Who is in your Event Horizon Team that helps you bring together these elusively invisible images to see the reality of what was missing for you growing up?

When you think about the “Gemini years” of your own healing journey, what support and resources do you most need to continue? What do you sense you are learning even in the grueling and costly stage of naming the harm you have survived?

Surviving Through Betrayal

In the coming months, I’m going to tackle four extremely intense, yet crucial, arenas of trauma that need to be understood by those who grew up with emotionally unwell caregivers:

• How children survive feeling both afraid of and attached to those who raise them

• The sexualization of the parent child relationships when rage is unleashed

• The tyrannical nature of the patriarchal family model

• Unwell mothers and the violation that happens when they need their children to provide for them.

All these topics will require a high level of courage in unmasking and naming harm. I will assert some uncomfortable theories, not because I’m right about everything but because more strength is needed in exposing covert forms of abuse if every childhood trauma survivor is going to find a path forward towards healing.

And before I do all of that I must, must, must be clear…

Humans are never the source of evil. Abuse occurs because a person is surviving the oppression they are experiencing by betraying another person. It’s not necessarily conscious or intentional, but survival is often accomplished by violently ruling over those with less power in exchange for relief under a larger oppressive presence. There are stories of those who consciously and willingly inflict pain because they have become conduits of evil, but I do not believe that is where their story began. When a human experiences pleasure in the suffering of others we are in the realm of psychosis and not merely survival. These stories often began as a person seeking power in powerlessness, and the amount of darkness their personhood embodies decades later places them among those historic figures we consider inhumane.

Theologian Parker Palmer says it this way: “Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”

In his book The Inner World of Trauma, Donald Kalsched explains the concept under our word diabolical. The Greek word dia means across while the root word ballein means to throw. When something is diabolical it means “to throw across or apart.” Harm’s greatest tactic is to target one entity and tempt it to survive by turning on its own kind. Creation is literally thrown apart. The clearest historical example is from World War 2 concentration camps.

Kapos (also spelled Capos) were WW2 concentration camp prisoners (mostly Jewish) appointed by the SS guards to oversee their fellow prisoners. In exchange for terrorizing subordinate Jews, they were often given warm clothing, enough to eat and lived in sections removed from the prison barracks. Their role, as the face of the SS’s power, was to supervise housing units, oversee work gangs, transport victims to the ovens, clean the chambers of human excrement and blood and shave the heads of those going to be gassed. They received special privileges for their willingness to be an instrument of humiliation in the camp regime. All of this was to ultimately guard against revolution among prisoners.

This brilliant, insidious tactic to maintain power through violence is neither new nor rare. In the past several years since learning about Kapos, it’s been sobering to see this theme of using “insiders to betray their own” manifested in many trauma contexts.

During the Roman Empire, Jewish tax collectors were the most hated among their countrymen. In exchange for being spared the cruelty of punishment for unpaid taxes, these men carried out the demands of the emperor, often profiting greatly themselves.

The most haunting scene of the movie Twelve Years a Slave is when the main character, Solomon Northrup, is ordered to whip Patsey, a fellow slave and sexual interest of their Master. She comes back later than expected from an errand to get soap for bathing and is falsely accused by her irate Master of being “unfaithful” to him. While she is being tied to a post, Solomon is handed a heavy whip. Disoriented by the Master yelling commands to beat the girl and Patsey begging him to do it (knowing he will be more merciful than the Master) he begins the whipping. In his book on which the movie is based, Northrup wrote of that moment: “Nowhere that day, on the face of the whole earth, I venture to say, was there such a demonic exhibition witnessed as then ensued.” Using slave against slave meant two were punished rather than merely one. One is physically scarred, and one emotionally scarred by the anguish of participating in harm against his own kind.

Today, in sex trafficking, the term is bottom bitch. A bottom bitch is a female prostitute who sits atop the hierarchy of prostitutes working for a particular pimp. She is usually the girl who has been working for him the longest and makes him the most money. As her “reward” she is given the job of overseeing the younger girls. She recruits them, trains them and collects the money. She has a sadistic dual role of playing surrogate mother one moment as she cooks and cleans for them and the next a dispenser of violence to keep them in line.

The concept of employing “insiders” of any system to betray “their own” is a brilliant strategy on the part of Evil to multiple harm and amplify pain. Choosing a substitutionary executor of abuse distracts the victims from focusing their righteous anger on the true source of harm. For those under a Kapos, tax collector, another slave or a bottom bitch, the face of cruelty is one that is literary like their own face. This makes it infinitely harder to separate themselves as victims rather than participants in a system. The line between “us” and “them” is blurred. For those fellow prisoners given a measure of control over others as a relief from their own pain, the shame of wielding power crushes their ability to see themselves as prisoners as well. They are beyond the guilt of participants; they are now coerced into the role of perpetrator.

​The scenes of your life are likely not as dramatic as those of a concentration camp, cotton plantation or brothel, but this tactic of darkness is often more alive in our stories than we realize. This dynamic is the seed for sibling rivalry in dysfunctional families, alliances in fractured communities, children who find worth through ruthless and competitive perfectionism, women sacrificing other women to hold power in male dominated spaces, and the persecution of people based on race, class and sexuality.

Naming the reality of “betrayal from within” offers all of us freedom from the shame of how we survive trauma. It also anchors us in the reality of our human condition as we focus on caregiver harm within families. I tell my clients often that my heart in narrative therapy is to boldly name the past harm they have experienced while never demonizing another person in their story. We are all born into the second act of a three act play where our ancestors, families and parents have been emotionally surviving in a fallen world for decades and the pain they pass on is because they haven’t yet known to do with their own suffering.

Reflection Questions:

When you think about the meaning of the word diabolical, who is someone you have felt “thrown apart from”? What harm outside of your relationship has compromised your closeness with this person?

How has Darkness worn someone else’s face in order to hide itself from your righteous anger? Who is someone who has harmed you? What would it mean to also see them as a prisoner struggling to survive?

What role did you play as a prisoner in your story? Did you survive by finding power at someone’s expense? Have you bought into the lie that you are a participant or perpetrator rather also a fellow survivor?

Sexual Harm & Healing Film Group

I’m so excited to share that a dear colleague, Coburn Childs, and I are offering this unique group experience beginning in March. Click on the link below to learn more details about how we’ll interact and the films we’ll discuss. Space is limited to 8-10 participants and is open to a wide range of people—those who are survivors wanting to take their next step in healing, souls who are unsure if they have experienced sexual harm, those supporting survivors and clinicians who want to expand their understanding of the complexity of this unique landscape of harm. Please reach out if you have specific questions and want to chat about whether this could be a great next step in your process!

Six Lane Highways

One of the hardest shifts to make in our healing journey is to allow intense words like trauma, abuse and neglect to have a wider meaning than we are comfortable with. It’s understandable that we prefer harm to mean one clear, obvious thing rather than a seemingly infinite sliding scale of possibilities. Much like when we hear that a mass public shooting was caused by one, mentally disturbed individual, a singular source of harm is a more soothing story. We find solace when the odds feel minimal that something tragic will find us next.

But what mental health professionals know is that narrow definitions of reality leave us stumbling around in dangerous territory without the ability to locate ourselves and validate the danger we feel. It’s like wandering in a minefield with a map of a 30 square yard area of land and being told there are only a few potential hazards to avoid, when the reality is that the dangerous zone is actually three-square acres, and the number of buried triggers is unknown. We would all traverse the ground very differently depending on which narrative we were believing.

The hard truth is that trauma, abuse and neglect are six, not single, lane highways. There is the fast lane on the far left where the reckless drivers and nice European cars speed at a neck breaking pace. Then there are the lanes in the middle where most people drive right above the speed limit, passing others more deliberately with a focus on getting to their destination on time. Then there is the second from right lane where the people who aren’t in a rush drive the speed limit, likely exiting in a few miles and not wanting to miss their turn. And then in the far-right lane are the people slowing down to get off the highway or in old vehicles or with elderly drivers not comfortable with the speed limit. Harm, trauma and abuse all have multiple speeds, not just one and knowing this means we can validate more of the pain that we feel and seek the help in healing we truly need.

Before I continue, I want to be clear that my hope in this article is NOT to encourage us to be more hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is defined as a state of excessive alertness, where our nervous systems remain constantly on guard, scanning our environments for perceived threats or dangers, even in safe situations. It’s an exhausting survival mechanism that feels like being “on edge.” While a normal protective response to danger, it becomes problematic when it persists, causing significant distress and interfering with life.

As a trauma survivor, my growth path the past several years has included being less future oriented out of fear. Instead of being consumed by the possibilities of what people will do or how things will play out, I’ve worked hard to stay more regulated in my present and confident that I will be cared for (by myself, by my resources, by those who love me) in whatever occurs that is both impossible to predict or prepare for.

Honestly, the better I have become at being less hypervigilant the more fragile and lost I have felt at times. I thought, at first, turning away from hypervigilance would mean a more peaceful, confident existence. There is some freedom that comes from less anxiety, but as I have let my ability to “feel into the future” develop the rust of underuse, I have felt more vulnerable, not less.

My hope in asserting that words like trauma are wider and deeper than we want to believe is to encourage us to listen to ourselves rather than dismiss or turn away from the truth we intuitively know in our bodies. Our path towards greater rest and freedom is not to deny the evil and harm in the world but to affirm our detecting it and let that lead and shape how we live.

Let’s start with one big word that we often underestimate in its prevalence: trauma.

The definition of trauma includes three essential aspects. A great way to remember them are the 3 Es: event, experience and effect. Trauma is not only what happens to us but also what our experience is of that event and then the effect our experience has on us. There are, of course, some events that are widely considered traumatic because they would be dysregulating for almost every human on the planet. A tsunami would be an excellent example.

A person sunbathing on a beach who detects the eerily receding of waves and then sprints inland to safety will experience the event differently than a person in a helicopter hundreds of feet above the ocean’s surface. And the effect from the experience of those different vantage points will be different for each of them. A person who makes it safely to a shelter and survives, but then later will walk through a landscape floating with dead bodies will see a different effect than someone witnessing from above the first big seismic wave hitting the shore and killing hundreds of unaware people before flying off to land miles away from the carnage. These two tsunami stories would be an example of what trauma can and does look like in the fast lane.

Middle lane experiences of trauma that I have seen from a therapist chair include divorce in families, children of parents who went through long periods of depression or chronic illness, partners taking care of a spouse with dementia for decades, and food insecurity for families living below the poverty line. These are not “easier” things to deal with than a tsunami but they are more normally occurring events so we don’t quickly label them as traumatic because they are less physically intense or more prolonged.

And finally, the slow lane may include events like an introverted preteen moving to a foreign country for a parent’s job change and entering adolescence without a vital sense of belonging. Or a company promoting a young executive over an employee in their 50s because they can pay them less for a management role because they have less seniority. Or a highly driven young athlete losing a competition because of an erroneous call by an official. All these things we would say just happen every day and we know a hundred other examples in our lifetime of these types of stories so we easily dismiss the experience it is for a particular individual and the lasting effect it can leave on their lives.

In the coming months, we will look more specifically at the different forms of abuse and neglect we can encounter in our stories. We’ll look at what the defining elements are for these experiences and try to unmask the forms of abuse and neglect in the middle and slow lanes that can go unnamed, unaddressed and unhealed in our lives for years.

Reflective Exercise:

On a piece of paper (ideally in a journal or notebook) draw a picture of a six-lane highway. Begin a list of events you experienced in your story that carried different levels of intensity and write each in one of the six lanes. I encourage you to not spend too much time thinking about where to put it, but instead let a sense of how big it felt to you at the time it happened lead you to place it in a lane. Keep in mind the 3 Es of trauma—not only the event but also the experience it was for you and the effect it had on you. Can you give each event in a lane one word to describe the experience (overwhelming, confusing, shameful, heavy, disorienting, sad, etc.) and a phrase to describe the effect it had on you (insecure, afraid of strangers, out of place with my peers, started restricting food, expecting rejection from then on, etc.)?