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1. Therapy Matters
According to Jack Kornfield, PhD, psychologist and meditation teacher, there
are times when we need to bring unresolved issues into a therapeutic
relationship, and have help in unpacking the past. Even “meditation is not
always enough,” he says. Kornfield grew up with “the pain of living in a family
with a violent and abusive father, and the underlying fear” that comes with such
a childhood. Many teachers and students who come to meditation hold “a great
deal of unresolved grief, fear, woundedness, and unfinished business from the
past,” he says. Even meditation teachers can find that despite years of deep
practice, “major areas of our beings are unconscious, fearful, or disconnected”
and they are in need of “psychotherapy in order to deal with these issues.” There
are, says Kornfield, times when we need to get help from “a deep and
therapeutic relationship.” Kornfield found that he needed to combine his
meditation practice with working with “a skilled therapist who would call my
attention to movements or emotions that were unconscious to me.”
When you are in a therapeutic relationship with a skilled therapist and
experience something “old,” that memory is paired with the positive experience
of being seen by someone who attunes to you, sees you, and accepts you just as
you are, whatever your experience was—and you begin to heal. When you begin
to feel trust, perhaps for the first time in your life, and when this process is
repeated, you modify old circuits in the brain that tell you that you cannot trust.
You create new brain cells and connections that allow you to create new habits
and responses to other people. Indeed, part of the power of therapy is that one
can learn, finally, as an adult, to become attached to a safe person. You can
begin to feel safe in engaging, interacting, and bonding in a relationship. In this
way, a therapist’s unconditional acceptance rewires you so that you have a more
fully formed, healthier sense of self.
Therapy can also heal the underlying, cellular damage of traumatic stress on
DNA. Trauma patients show higher levels of damage to their DNA, but therapy
actually changes the integrity of DNA at the molecular level, even repairing
DNA. In one study, these changes remained in individuals even a year after their
therapy ended.
A fifty-eight-year-old patient of Dr. Vincent Felitti’s, whose story remains
anonymous in his work, but whom I refer to here as “Alice,” discovered the role
that her childhood ACEs played in her lifelong physical and emotional pain—
and the power of the therapeutic process. She writes that she was a thin,
compliant child with many health problems. She recalled only small bits of her
childhood: being spanked when she was seven, sleeping with a baseball bat
beside her bed, and being ill with frequent infections that dumbfounded her
pediatrician, who also worried over why her lips and fingernails often turned
blue. Surgeons removed her tonsils and adenoids, and irradiated her thymus. At
the age of twelve, Alice developed a heart murmur that her doctor could “hear
without a stethoscope.” Over the next thirty years, she endured a severe pelvic
inflammatory infection, breast infections, intense pain in her pelvic area, anxiety,
depression, and suicidal ideation. She often felt spacey and jumpy.
Alice later married and divorced, and while rearing two small children alone,
wanted to become healthier for her children’s sake. She decided to look for why
she had “extensive childhood amnesia” and always felt “so miserable.” She saw
a therapist, and told him of a nightmare that plagued her, “the sounds of the clink
of a belt buckle and the zip of a zipper.” After many sessions, Alice’s therapist
guided her to find her distraught seven-year-old self and talk to her about that
day when she was spanked. Alice relived the pain and terror of the event; over
the course of therapy she realized that it was her grandfather who had harmed
her, and filled in many of the blank places in her childhood. In a safe, therapeutic
environment, with a skilled professional, she began to feel the security she never
felt as a child and to heal.
When she went to her next annual cardiology examination, Alice’s doctor told
her that her heart murmur was gone. As she remembered the origin of her pain,
her physical pain and illness improved.
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