Your Shit

Let's get right down to business.

Something awful has happened to you: maybe all at once, maybe over a course of years. Perhaps you were in combat, perhaps you were raped. You may have been robbed at gunpoint, you may have been dumped by a spouse you thought was your forever person. Maybe your house and all its contents were blown away in a storm. Maybe your child has died before you.




What will you do with your pile of shit?

We actually have some data to indicate that cognitive-behavioral psychology can help with things like shitpiles. Sometimes, for some people, medication can help - especially at first, when it feels like the walls are crashing in and it's hard to imagine anything, anything, anything but shit, shit, shit. When it's hard to eat or sleep, or you can't do anything but eat or sleep. The nightmares, the flashbacks.

It can be very difficult to navigate that part on your own, so I'm going to devote some time to it in a future post. If this is where you are right now, hang up and check out the internets for resources in your area for people who have a pile of shit just like yours. The VA, the rape crisis center, the domestic violence center, a church, a local counseling center. We'll look at some specific ideas in upcoming posts.

Right now, if you can, I'd like to start by getting very specific about your own personal pile of shit.

The cognitive-behavioral method in a nutshell: change how you think about something, and you can change how you feel about it. Well, duh. But easier said than done, no?

Even though poking into your pile of shit may be the last thing you want to do, it's important for a number of reasons.

1.  You have this pile of shit whether you do something with it or not. Five years from now, what do you want to look back and see that you did? Nothing? That's fine, it's your choice, but don't complain when you still have to carry around the same pile of shit.

It's never to late to start. Think of all the places where dried dung is used for fuel as it has been used for centuries. You can always make something useful out of your shitpile.

2.  A big part of shit management, as anyone who's ever had a baby around knows, is desensitization. Remember when you could not envision yourself dealing with all that disgusting poop? You get used to it. Desensitization, when it's a "positive" dynamic, helps you be less bothered by your shitpile. The scars from your trauma may never be completely eradicated, but they are scars - no longer those open, suppurating wounds they were at first.

(The not-so-great aspect of desensitization is not caring about something when we really should. Like exposure to violent sexuality in the media is known to be associated with people being less empathetic toward rape victims. So desensitization is a two-edged sword, but a very helpful tool when you use it to improve your life.)

3.  The more specific you are about your pile of shit, the better you can treat it. It is important to be able to look at what happened to you, all the who-what-where, all the injuries, all the scars. Paradoxically, this can become part of the letting-go process.

Besides - and this is part of desensitization - when you learn to handle your shit in a way that works for you, it becomes less powerful and less destructive. You can be less pissed off about it, less terrified of it. Now, if you choose to become that person who just runs around throwing shit at everyone who tries to get close to you, you need to be perfectly happy with being completely alone. Because who has time for that?

4.  It's YOUR shit. You get to do whatever you want with it. You get to do nothing with it, you get to write articles for Salon, you get to buy a sailboat and sail alone around the world with it if you want.

What would you like to do with your pile of shit?

5.  You have a great deal of power over your thoughts and feelings, whether you can believe that or not. An important element in getting over trauma is whether you feel heard and understood about what happened to you.

However, no one in this world will ever understand your pile of shit completely, and you have to be okay with that. People can empathize, people can support, people can be unbelievably helpful. But if you are looking for complete understanding, you're going to be disappointed.

Knowing your pile of shit can help you act gently toward yourself even if you are feeling misunderstood by others. In general, people scream and shout when they are not feeling heard or understood. It is essential to be able to console yourself when that happens, because running around screaming and shouting simply drives people away.

6.  A huge part of making the transition from victim to survivor is the ability to sit with extremely awful emotions. Desensitization helps with that. Here's one example of the process in action, in cognitive-behavioral terms. It may be one of those processes with which you would like professional help; if you find the very thought of doing something like this too terrifying, wait until you have someone to help you with it:

Let's say you are doing what is suggested here (!) and taking a good long look at your pile of shit, wide-eyed and looking from every angle. We would expect this to stir up some major feelings about whatever awful thing has happened to you.

In cognitive-behavoral world, you would be encouraged first to locate those feelings in your body. Do your hands sweat, fists clench, muscles tighten? Does your stomach hurt, your throat, your heart? Find the emotions in your body.

The exercise is this: meditate, going into the place in your body where the emotions seem strongest. "Walk around" in that landscape, look at it, develop a good clear picture of what that place looks like. This picture will inform and enhance your recovery, as you begin to turn images of that landscape into your healing. The desensitization part is this: the more you can walk around in that interior landscape, the less afraid/hurt/upset you will become.

This interior image will become part of your work with your shitpile. You may draw it, or sculpt it, or write about it. You may turn it into music, or a workshop for people with shitpiles, or you may paint a wall with its colors.

You will be able to meditate on this image to actively change it: if your interior landscape is on fire, you will meditate on what to do with the fire. If it is a moonscape with no one around to help you for thousands of miles, you will be able to imagine bringing someone you love into your loneliest place. You will be able to imagine blowing it up or blowing it away.

It may sound hokey and new-agey, but I'm telling you: a huge part of making your pile of shit into something you can live with is being able to work actively with the feelings associated with it. Current work in Post-traumatic Stress emphasizes walking toward what happened to you rather than running away from it.

7.  Develop a very specific picture of where you want to be vis-a-vis your shit a year from now, five years from now, ten. Be sure to make room in your picture for vestiges of your shitpile that will show up from time to time in the future through no fault of anyone's.

In my experience, trauma is one of those things that you can deal with like a champ only to have it reawaken at some surprising point in the future. It won't shock you if I say that something awful that happened when you were five can be dealt with just fine, but you may be a bit of a wreck when your child turns five. What?? You may not even make the connection on your own.

But if you have a good clear image of where you want to get to, it will be much easier to design and build your path.