During my own therapy process, therapists notice that my system seems stable and well connected. We have strong inner bonds, we pace ourselves better than anyone from the outside could do it, and even trauma processing is kind of smooth and safe. We do have something like a secret recipe for that and I will share it but it is not something that could be used as an exercise or tool and it might not replicate easily. I still believe that it could give you hints at what is useful. Consider this article an act of private storytelling and not some kind of teaching or education.
Chosen ones
Healing for our system started when our host got in contact with a new kind of teaching about relationships. It taught her that she has free will and she can choose things. Instead of letting the storm happen to her, she shall from now on happen to the storm. She realized that she can choose to love and choose that something matters to her and nobody could stop her from that because it is her choice alone. She cannot be controlled by fear or suffering. Even with pain and suffering, she can still choose to care and choose to act on it. And she chose us. Every single part, the way they are, with all the potential and the pain.
Being a Chosen One changes people. There is an intention behind the relationship, it didn’t just happen. Someone meant Us when they chose us. And they did it with purpose, knowing that it will come with difficulties and knowing that it won’t be easy. And still, someone chose us. And that someone is not changing their mind because they decided to happen to the storm no matter what. There is no bullying them out of it. So we live as Chosen Ones who are chosen daily and from moment to moment and it does something to us. (More about earned secure attachment)
It creates a sense of stability. This person is going nowhere, no matter how awfully terrible I am and how messed up. They cannot be controlled and we can’t make them feel differently about us. There is this steady stream of care, openness, understanding and grace with all things wounded. I don’t know what it would take to resist being chosen like that because I couldn’t. It is an invitation into a safe relationship where we are allowed to be, even before we are more healed and presentable. Even when we don’t function well and create harm for others. Being chosen changes things.
It is true that we are stuck with each other, no matter what. It still makes a world of a difference when we choose this life together.
This is something very private. Other people cannot expect to get chosen the same way we choose our own parts. If we ever choose someone else like that, it will be a spouse or our own children.
The way of tears
Choosing others will always come with suffering. They are different, they act against our own needs, they sometimes cause very real harm. Choosing others means opening up oneself to being hurt and doing it anyway because there is something more important and meaningful than being free from suffering. It is one of the few moments when mindfulness really makes a difference. The pain can be felt and experienced and then it passes and other more stable things remain. Care for someone and understanding for their situation can last through and beyond the suffering. When we choose connection we know that we choose it in the face of human messiness. If we can’t handle that, we actually don’t know how to love. This is the way of tears because it breaks the heart, over and over again, until things get better and we see change. Yet, we can’t choose others expecting the change to come and make it easier. We choose the way of tears, expecting and accepting that nothing will ever change and who we are choosing will stay that way forever. And then we still choose that they are part of our inner circle and who we are as an inner family and they belong here with us. Not avoiding the pain that comes with being so close to other parts is an almost super-human experience. We know that it will hurt to reach out and we do it anyway. We know that they hate us and we choose them anyway. Neither fear nor suffering can control us, and we become the storm.
This does not turn anyone into a saint or a better person. Mostly, it turns us into someone sad who is very much aware of not being perfect and messing up. But it does come with a willingness to skip our own fight response to protect us from others and lean into the tragedy of things. We give up fighting for our life to keep it separate and safe. This is different from our usual search for control. We know we can’t make everything be the way we want to, need to. We show up anyway.
It is frankly completely untypical for hosts to act this way and overcome their avoidance of others like that. I personally never do it without complaining and lamenting. There is a power in lamentation that helps to cope with the expected and experienced suffering. Still, ANPs are notorious for avoiding inner contact and it is this avoidance that keeps the structural dissociation stable and the healing out of reach. It takes a lot to act against these instincts, over and over again, every day. Ok, we get rest days, otherwise it would be utterly unrealistic, but you get what I mean. In some ways it helps to understand that the avoidance is the big obstacle that needs to be overcome to make any recovery possible and to release the pain. It helps to understand that other parts are parts of us, this is all us, and they have incredibly good reasons for being the way they are. It is all part of our collective survival. It really helps to understand how behavior is a form of coping and how dysregulated other parts are. And then this can still not be enough to convince us to open ourselves up to so much suffering when we could just keep avoiding it. We need a way to deal with this amount of pain and suffering that we will encounter.
In therapy, there are attempts to manage the suffering with mindful meditations, breathing or imagery. Some find release in difficult sports, creativity or very close relationships. There is still a level of suffering that cannot be reached with these methods. It is were spirituality starts to replace other options because it can do different things.
The help of the spirit
[talks about spirituality in general and more explicitly about christian faith outside organized religion]
Every good spirituality holds answers to topics like death, suffering, loss, how to deal with evil and guilt, existential hope and transcendence. These are things that go beyond the natural capacity of the mind and we cannot think our way through it. It is why humans need a form of spirituality and the more suffering they experience, the more they need something that goes beyond the physical. We know we have found the real deal when it is an experience and not just an empty practice, when it is able to hold our suffering safely and bring ease to our heavy hearts and when it creates a sense of strength and hope in us that helps us to keep going and move on.
Some kinds of spirituality have better solutions for all this than others. There are approaches out there that make no sense to me or that seem to play into dissociation from the world and suffering instead of meeting it. I personally follow a christian form of spirituality because it comes with a God who knows human suffering, who did not remove himself from it. He jumped right into it, actually dying from it, so that we don’t have to feel alone with it. While the suffering does not usually just cease to exist, this kind of spirituality comes with a sense of not being alone with it, of being held and supported through it. Whatever spirituality can do that for us, will help us navigate the reality of choosing traumatized parts. We mirror this transcendent relationship of being chosen by something greater than ourselves (we are the traumatized part here in comparison with the depth of spirituality) and we reflect it back in our relationship with other parts. That way, we don’t have to carry that burden alone.
When we asked our T things like ‘how in all the world can we cope with so much abandonment and suffering caused by evil’ she did not pull out an easy CBT tool to shape our mind in a certain way to make us more capable. She dropped the topic of psychology altogether because it does not have the answers for every human experience. She asked us about our faith. Research into resilience shows us that spirituality does make a difference.
Approaching the spiritual
You will see the topic of faith come up in a lot of the books on extreme trauma. There are different ways to approach it and one is not more valid than the other. What they have in common is that they don’t speak about organized religion with empty routines. While lighting a candle can mean something to us and help with a sense of comfort, just lighting a candle does nothing but burn a candle. It needs an additional element that can be hard to grasp. The first step to most spirituality is to create a difference to the mundane and then to become quiet and stop running around, numbing ourselves. Then we can invite presence and connection. My own prayer is ‘I am here, Holy Spirit, please meet me here’. And then I lay open the pain and suffering that I brought in a vulnerable gesture in the hope of meeting a spiritual power that will see, know and share it with me. A deep-felt sense of being known and not being left alone with the mess I am. It is where I am starting to learn about grace with the human condition. The Holy Spirit is called the Comforter for a reason and can sometimes be easier to approach because we weren’t taught false concepts of religion about it.
Other kinds of spirituality will do things differently but it shouldn’t be hard. If relief from suffering and a place of connection and hope needs 10 years of study and another decade of practice, that is not what we are looking for. When the Bible tells us that ‘the Kingdom of God (read as: a spiritual encounter) is near’ it means right here next to us. Spiritual connection is not that far away and if we were not conditioned against it, it comes kind of naturally when we look for it. Seek and you shall find. The way emotions are happening in a slightly different dimension than thoughts, spiritual experiences are somewhere right next to that. The whole world is full of people with faith in a spiritual reality because that is how humans function when it comes to the big topics that are otherwise hard to bear. There is an experience out there that people across all beliefs seem to share when they tap into it.
This too does not make anyone a good person. It makes us less alone with our pain. Those are very different things. It is easy to be angry with spiritual people for not being any better than others. If anything, we gain a greater depth in knowing we are flawed humans and not sudden divinity. It helps to focus on our own inner realities and allow others to figure themselves out at their own pace.
While I think that it is probably possible to choose traumatized parts and be there for them, even when it hurts, I believe that it is exponentially easier when we have a spiritual experience that has our back in all of this. I cannot imagine how to cope with it while having nowhere to go with the suffering. So, in a way, I am cheating when it comes to overcoming avoidance and facing the storm. I got me some extra support there. It would be unfair to just tell people to face trauma parts head on and take all the suffering without including the fact that doing so needs more help than psychology can easily offer. Our Ts and other people can support us through some of it but if we have no additional way to cope with suffering, it’s going to hurt real bad and not feel like anything we can possibly choose. Humans by themselves are not made to choose suffering like that. It becomes possible when we have a place to go with it, the chance to say ‘come meet me here’ when we bring our burdens. We probably can’t do it alone. It is why we list spirituality under necessary self-care, at least in my understanding of the world. Everything we write on this platform is a piece of the puzzle of how we understand the world and trauma healing and this is one of the pieces outside of psychology. People sometimes wonder about our gentle tone when we talk about inner exchanges. This is where it comes from.
This article is not a useful step by step guide. I can tell you that choosing parts and eventually choosing each other inside makes a tremendous difference and that it comes with suffering and tears. I can also tell you that this amount of suffering needs to be supported in some way so it won’t crack us and psychology as a science does not have all the answers. Other people can be supportive and they also have rather painful limitations in how they can follow us in our pain. Spirituality overcomes these limitations in a close and intimate experience that creates strength, stability and hope. A spirituality like that does not have to be bound to religion. My own prayer is ‘come, meet me here’ and then I wait in silence.