Working with Trauma and Crisis Intervention

A Personal Experience in the Training Process

Birth Not Yet Groaned

inside a woman................giving birth..........inside a woman...........not yet born.

Unknown Man

deep in the dark tomb.......of the men's room.

The man left behind ................seeks a door..............and it turns to stone.

Near the edge of craziness.................he talks to himself............man to man, and finds

in the dark..............there are no edges.

Leaving the womb..............moving forward from the nothing..............of which he is a celebration

into the space...............where is no man.

I wrote these two poems the morning after a five day residential which I attended as part of my psychotherapy training. The theme of the five days had been "Working with trauma", and included crisis intervention.

The two poems were where I ended up and seemed to me to stand for my inner sense of my "feminine" or "anima" (yin), and "masculine" (animus, yang, whatever ). Both arose from experiences I had ,or witnessed. Speculating on the connection or the labyrinth which took me from trauma to these inner selves in this way, I thought about the constant traumatising and re-traumatising in our society as we still threaten our collective feminine with predatory forces, inner and outer, physical and psychic. I know that dynamic in my own inner world, (in Gestalt it is the Topdog/Underdog system), and I constantly return to a sense of being as yet unborn as a woman. Whenever I encounter this fear I connect it with separation from my mother and the struggle to create a different "feminine", which is neither in the "women's" world of home and children, nor the patriarchal system of institutions and workplaces. There's very little reflecting back of this place , from the world, although I believe many of us....women and men, are inhabiting it. I'm constantly reaching back deep into myself searching for the woman I am, sometimes in isolation and despair, sometimes with excitement richness, creativity, and all the places in between. Step by step on a path which sometimes seems to be invisible. Finding allies, in music, poetry, books, is one of the joys.

Synchronistically, I picked up and began reading a book I bought two years ago, and made lots of connections with my emerging process. "To become an individual, a woman in our culture must separate from her mother, who carries a patriarchal identification, and reconnect to a source of feminine value that exists in her mother's heritage. Paradoxically, completion of the second task often leads her to a reunion with her mother on different terms, different ground. Like Persephone, she brings a new identity back from the underworld, an identity revitalised by her feminine history.....often this task has to be accomplished in the face of a negative relationship back through the generations between her mother and her maternal grandmother and her great-grandmother. To begin to address this multi-generational woundedness requires tremendous courage, persistence and patience, but it can be done".

Yesterday I met with a colleague to plan a weekend workshop in July. We worked very organically and finally arrived at a title for the weekend. "Moving Beyond Our Mothers". We had decided to spend some time moving before we talked and I had picked up Toni Child's latest album "The Woman's Boat", as I left the house. I've had it for a while and hadn't yet listened to it properly. Intuitively I felt I needed to give it a real listening -from-the-heart space. As so often, when I follow those "casual" impulses I find the right thing to support me. We used the music that afternoon to move to and I realised it does really parallel where I am and puts into words some of my thoughts and images. There's lots of tiny writing on the cover, which almost needs a magnifying glass to be read (the cassette version anyway), and an easily miscible sentence at the end of the credits which says; "This record is dedicated to the female spirit in every living thing. I believe we are poised for an opening, a new birth, a new way of thinking. I dream there is a new daughter born into the world, a new daughter born into the psyche of each man and woman. She has the courage to acknowledge what is felt and become visible, unveiling and discharging the inner predatory voices, the old fears of being crushed and breathing finally in the safety and balance that is all our birthright".

Throughout the first months of this year I have had a sense of working within myself to bring together twos, to integrate polarities. I've been having singing lessons for the first time and in that context I felt an uncanny separation of my breath and my body, breath and movement, breath and sound. I imagined my breath as the wind in a desert landscape and the sound of my voice as a rock. I felt as though in order for that sound to emerge the wind needed to lift the rock and carry it, get it airborne. I've had glimpses of that happening! Then I began to experience moments of an imaginal coming together of inner female and male in the form of brother and sister and the birth of a new strength, desire and sense of erotic female power..... Perhaps the beginning of a journey from trauma to wholeness, reparation, to be travelled back and forth many times I imagine.

Gospel of St Thomas-

They said to Him: Shall we, being children

enter the kingdom? Jesus said to them:

When you make the two one, and

when you make the inner as the outer

and the outer as the inner and the above

as the below, and when

you make the male and the female into a single one,

then shall you enter the kingdom.

Moving Beyond Our Mothers. July 22nd 23rd 1995.