Clues
part three of a blog series on trauma, relational compassion, and my new book Parrot Flower.
The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically
breaks down the door, to be heard.
Annie Rogers
When I was a kid, I loved to play any game that involved finding clues and solving a problem/mystery. Who knew then that I’d spend much of my adult life doing the same, but with real problems and a real psycho-emotional mystery? I had no idea memories of being assaulted at age eight would rush into my mid-thirties and leave pieces of trauma scattered literally everywhere so that I had to search for them or encounter them in the most random moments and try to make sense of the fractured reality they portrayed.
And, I had no idea that a long-term domestic violence situation would further shatter my psyche to the point of a severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis; and that the words stress and disorder wouldn’t even begin to describe the random system overload I experience when something sets off my survival brain flinging open every file until I crash, puzzle pieces everywhere and no energy to arrange them.
“When fragments of past trauma play out inside us,” says Mark Wolynn in It Didn’t Start With You, “these fragments leave behind clues in the form of emotionally charged words and sentences that often lead us back to unresolved traumas.” Those words and sentences are the puzzle pieces, scattered, drawing my attention to a past story needing resolution.
The truth is whatever lurks in the shadowed areas of our mind will eventually demand to be considered. No matter how hard we try to deny its existence, it remains, as Annie Rogers says in Tbe Unsayable, “breaking down the door.” One way or another our traumas will manifest and ask for attention.
Repression of these traumas in the first place, has everything to do with our associations—cultural and social associations. If certain parts of human experience, emotion, pain, etc. are deemed undesirable, too disturbing, and/or shameful by the predominant culture those parts slink into the shadows of our individual psyches and there, by default, we name them dark because they are shrouded in mystery.
Nevertheless, they are there. They are as much a living part of our souls as anything else deemed desirable and acceptable in common culture and society. And they continue to demand attention as living parts of our souls even if we continue to repress them.
In Parrot Flower these traumas most certainly demand attention. The poems themselves are constructed of fragments: words, dialogues, phrases, pieces of letters, questions, and short scenes that all bespeak the fractured dark. They fall like petals into a long narrative about a couple equally plagued my memories of childhood assault. Their child selves, lurking in shadows, try to find sympathy in the other even as they embrace distractions—both mundane and destructive—to avoid feeling.
Still, feeling comes. And still, they reach for whatever temporary mechanism they can find to soothe and appease the traumatized self in secret, coaxing it back into its shadowed place.
When reading this book, I see all of these fragments as clues; just as, when experiencing episodes of PTSD, I find these clues scattered about me. Typically, that’s when I write. Getting curious about these fragments, I begin constructing the anatomy of the self that has been lurking in shadow.
That’s how I wrote Parrot Flower. The woman in the story is, in many ways (though not all ways), me. Her fractured psyche is me. Her pain, terror, need for acceptance, discomfort, and dissociation are all my own even if all her ways of coping with these things do not directly mirror my choices. In her, and in myself, I discover the voices of many survivors; and, over time, our shared pain and appearance become more visible to me.
To be honest--like so many survivors--when my shadowed self surfaces, I often fear her and turn her away. She does not fit well into the predominant culture or my present social circle—so I deny her any space. I repress. Avoid. Cope.
But sometimes, instead of reaching for something to soothe and coax her away, I begin to ask her questions—learning her terrors, insecurities, dogmas, and perceived failures. Writing her story, hearing her speak through it, answering her with something that maybe mirrors love—showing compassion to this flawed shadowed self.
Drawing her out into the light and trusting that there is a similar desire in all of us, no matter how much we deny it, to be seen.
Parrot Flower comes out with Glass Poetry Press in January of 2021. This is the third of a series of blogs I will write on trauma, coping, and relational compassion—the hope that comes from taking the time to sit with others in their darkness and learn from them. But “what value is learning,” asks thirteenth-century theologian Anthony of Padua, “that does not lead to love?” Let’s learn and be led to more love.
