Chapter 6

Gaining the Courage to Feel

We can spend our entire lives running away from certain memories, trying to avoid the pain they trigger. We commit vast amounts of energy and effort to trying to forget our painful past, but in reality, the pain associated with avoiding these feelings is usually far greater than the pain of confronting them. This avoidance can also manifest as something else in our future, something that doesn’t support us in leading a healthy, fulfilled life.

A few years ago, my dearest girlfriend lost her precious husband — a big, bold, and brilliant man, the father of her four children — in a farming accident. His sudden departure ripped their world apart, and their grief was torture to witness. During my visit, I overheard a friend of my girlfriend giving her some advice: “Come on. Be strong. You can’t let the kids see you falling apart.” I had to hold my tongue — I knew her friend had the best of intentions, but her advice was terribly misguided.

Later that day I explained to my beautiful friend that it was really important and healthy to express all of her pain and grief, and that by doing so she would be giving her children permission to express whatever they needed to, to move through their own grief. I explained that if they didn’t allow these vital healing emotions to arise and come out, their unexpressed pain and sadness would find another way out, perhaps much later in life. It might present itself as an inability to create trusting relationships, or unwarranted anger with a child of their own, perhaps as an unexplained detachment with a spouse, or as a variety of other “unexplained” outbursts. What we don’t deal with now will almost certainly come back to visit us later.

We all have something from our past that shakes our center and puts a spin on how we see the world. It’s a story that we define ourselves by; a story that we allow to influence everything in our life. The question is: does it have to control our life forever? No!

We cannot change the past, and we cannot change anything that has happened to us. However, we do have the power to change our perceptions of these events and our responses to them, and that can affect our present and our future. It’s about redefining our memories so they serve us well for all the todays and all the tomorrows we still have left to live.

When we relive the past as if it’s still happening, we react with the same intense feelings as if we were back in the experience all over again. We revisit the same hurtful memories as if, by some miracle, this time we’ll feel differently. But that won’t happen unless we’re willing to remember it differently — and that takes courage, contemplation, and, perhaps, forgiveness. When we’ve reached the point where we’ve cried enough, hurt enough, been angry enough, or grieved enough, it becomes time for us to move forward without the weight of these past experiences.

I really want to stress how important it is to make the decision to want to let it go. Old harmful memories don’t make us feel good, but their familiarity keeps us going back to them. Until we decide to let them go, everything that I’m about to say will seem either too simple or too frivolous.

The strategy for releasing or redesigning our past memories so that they serve us for our future is relatively easy to understand. Actually undertaking the process can be more challenging.

The place to start is accepting that it is neither the experiences nor the people in our lives that cause us pain; it is the meaning we have placed on these experiences that creates our anguish. Please understand that I’m not trivializing the pain we feel at the time nor the trauma we may feel when we remember these past events, whether another person inflicted them or it’s from a regret we still cling to. And I’m not saying that with a single effort we can make all of our pain disappear. I just want you to consider the possibility that we continue to carry the pain because of how we now perceive it, and that there is a way to set down the burden of our past and reap the learning that can set us free. That’s my wish here — that we no longer stay wrapped in the chains of memories that keep us sad, fearful, closed, resentful, guilty, remorseful, bitter, or persecuted.

So if we are to dare to make our way down this path of releasing our pain, I invite you to courageously consider this statement: Our past does not hurt us. The pain comes from the meaning we ascribe to the experience, and this creates the hurt we feel in the present as well. If we can change the way we perceive these experiences (and thus change the meaning we have given them), we have a very good chance of being able to change the feelings we have created about these past experiences. When we change our perceptions, our brain responds to those changes biologically, and our feelings change as a result.

How Thoughts Become Real

In their book Words Can Change Your Brain, Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Waldman talk about the role of the thalamus in influencing our physiological response to our perceptions.

In the center of our brain there’s a walnut-shaped structure called the thalamus. It relays sensory information about the outside world to the other parts of the brain. When we imagine something, this information is also sent to the thalamus. Our research suggests that the thalamus treats these thoughts and fantasies in the same way it processes sounds, smells, tastes, images, and touch. And it doesn’t distinguish between inner and outer realities. Thus, if you think you are safe, the rest of your brain assumes that you are safe. But if you ruminate on imaginary fears or self-doubt, your brain presumes that there may be a real threat in the outside world. Our language-based thoughts shape our consciousness, and consciousness shapes the reality we perceive. So choose your words wisely, because they become as real as the ground on which you stand.

A perfect example of this is when a child tells herself there is a monster in her closet. She starts to panic, her heart races, and she may even cry. But as soon as she opens the closet door and finds there are no monsters to be seen, she immediately begins to calm down and relax. Her heartbeat returns to normal and her tears dry up.

Now, if you think this sounds way too easy, let me explain. Think about a difficult situation in your past. Every time you recall that memory, do you experience a painful emotion? Is it grief? Embarrassment? Shame? Guilt? Betrayal? Disappointment? Regret? Disgust? Dismay? Fear? Sadness? Anger? Resentment? Revenge? Bitterness? Pity?

Of course, in the initial stages of an experience, or during the grieving or healing process, certain emotions are vital. We need to feel all of our emotions initially before we can move on to finding the gifts of wisdom. But why is it that when we recall a particular incident from years, sometimes decades, past, we still have the same intensity of feeling as we felt at the time it happened? Why do we keep believing the “monster” is still in our closet?

We can get so locked in, so addicted to the emotion of an incident, that we can spend our lifetime replaying the event — and the feeling. We don’t move on to experience wisdom. We can spend a lifetime getting over something that happened to us for ten minutes when we were five years old. Sometimes we also allow these events to negatively affect our decisions in the present, keeping those around us hostage to something we are afraid of or haven’t managed to deal with. Instead of bringing forward wisdom, we carry forward the pain and hurt.

Two men in jail, looking through the bars; one sees mud, and the other sees the stars.

This usually happens because we are in an associated state when we recall the memory. When we are in an associated state, we imagine ourselves to be in the actual experience; it’s as if we are right back there in the moment, and we have the same feelings. We relive that past event as if it is actually happening right now, in the present.

What if you were to change the way you perceive a painful situation from your past? We can do this through dissociation. When we are dissociated, we can release the emotional attachment. Therefore the feeling is more of a detached sensation, and over time the emotion can dissipate or even disappear.

The easiest way to do this is to imagine you’re looking at yourself on a movie screen and the particular event is playing out before your eyes. You are watching yourself and hearing all the dialogue, yet you feel detached (or dissociated). We do this all the time when we watch a movie, at home or at the cinema. We are seeing it in the third person, so we get to see the entire picture, not just what it looks like through the eyes of one character. This exercise gives us a chance to see the big picture, and we are just one of the characters that make up the entire movie. This counteracts the “poor me” story we tell ourselves and gives us a far more empowering and freeing experience of it.

This can be an extremely healing exercise. It can support us in finding the wisdom from these painful events. As you watch yourself in this event on the imaginary screen, see if you can detach yourself from it. At first this may seem impossible, because we can be so attached to our familiar reactions to the event. Some of us have spent many years compounding our response to the painful memory, so at first we may resist allowing ourselves to see it in the third person.

Sometimes we may also think that by doing this exercise we are somehow condoning the action. I can’t stress too much that this is not the case at all. We are simply looking at it from a different angle, a more empowering angle. Nothing is going to change the event, but how we perceive it could change everything internally.

A woman once shared with me that she had been aggressively raped by her father for many years, and when she first started to do this exercise, she didn’t know how to be detached because she was so used to her highly charged reaction. She had even stopped herself from thinking about it because of the pain she felt every time. But she persisted with the exercise, and slowly, over time, she was able to look at the event in the third person. She was able to “see” that she wasn’t at fault and that she was just a little girl who had learned how to function extremely well regardless of what had happened to her. She was able to realize that she had developed great courage and compassion for others in similar situations.

For the first time, she saw her father as “a pitiful victim of his own childhood abuse” and not the monster that had continued to haunt her all these years later. She continued to be estranged from him, but her feeling of personal empowerment changed completely. For me, the most profound moment in her story was when she said, “Terry, I no longer waste any more of my life on those memories of my life. I feel free.” She gave me the courage to keep redesigning my memories and rewriting my stories — especially the ones that I had become really addicted to.

If you, too, find this process difficult at first, and you experience an intense emotional reaction, I strongly urge you to journal your thoughts. Start writing about your feelings and what comes to your mind. Keep writing until you’re empty of thoughts. Then take a break, go for a walk, have a rest, have a cry, and after you’ve given yourself some space, reread the journal as if you were reading a story about someone else’s life. This may help you to become dissociated. If you find both exercises too overwhelming, give yourself another break and realize that you are one step closer to being able to dissociate.

It can also be of benefit to discuss some of our more painful issues with a counselor or therapist. Having a neutral sounding board can be highly beneficial; it can help us to hold the situation outside of ourselves for long enough to “look” at it.

If you were able to complete the earlier movie exercise, ask yourself: “What did I learn from this experience? If I were to tell the person on the screen what was gained from this experience, what would I say to him or her? What did I learn as a result?” When we open ourselves up to the possibility of allowing our great inner wisdom to surface, we see how these events present us with the opportunity to connect with the greatness that has grown within us as a result. These gifts of wisdom come in many forms and can include the following:

Compassion

Forgiveness

Courage

Insight

Patience

Respect

Integrity

Humility

Sensitivity

Understanding

Love

Surrender

Gratitude

Tenderness

A better way to handle the problem

Empathy

Humor

When we visualize the place in our past that offers us the learning from that painful experience, we can see that regardless of the pain, this experience has provided us with an increased depth of wisdom and understanding.

Furthermore, as we reassess its meaning, we will notice our feelings about the event changing over time. Some will notice a shift in their reaction in that very moment. The more committed we are to redesigning the memory, the more significant and long-lasting the change will be at a cellular level. Even though we still may be affected by these memories, we no longer allow our emotions to paralyze and restrain us from moving forward.

I realize that reviewing painful events in this way can feel like something we’d want to avoid at first. While we may find ourselves stuck in those past events, we certainly don’t want to be, and most of us do not relish revisiting unpleasant emotions. To find the benefit, we have to face the obstacle. I remember a scene in a war movie: immediately before going into battle, a soldier confessed to his superior officer, “I don’t think I should be telling you this, but I’m terrified.” The officer wisely replied, “Oh, did they forget to tell you at boot camp? Courage only comes after you have faced the fear.” The courage doesn’t come first.

Over the years I have been blessed to have many of my workshop participants share their stories with me. One lady in particular — a very gentle, soft-spoken woman — came up to me and told me how her adult son had been sexually abused at the age of nine. Instantly, my heart ached for her and for her boy. She then told me her greatest personal pain was that she, too, had been abused as a child, and not even this awareness had helped her protect her son.

Her greatest anguish came from not safeguarding the most precious part of her child’s life, his innocence. She went on to tell me that although they experienced much pain and sadness together, they also shared a feeling of freedom and bonding. Her son’s honesty allowed her to share with him her “dark” past (as she put it). This opening up of truth allowed mother and son to begin their healing process together. After they had moved through the painful yet necessary grieving process, they then were able to look at their experiences in a dissociated state.

It’s important to note that this exercise is not intended as a replacement for grief. When we try to do that, we are simply pushing down our feelings, as we discussed earlier, and that’s the last thing you want to do. One of the most enriching acts we can do for ourselves is to feel all of our feelings — fully. Then we can move into the phase of receiving the gifts of wisdom. I think we’ve established a false concept of how long it takes to heal from emotional events. I’m not saying that certain losses, such as the death of a child or a spouse, won’t have an effect on us forever, but too often I’ve seen the surviving parent or spouse “die” as well. They spend the rest of their lives in a grieving state, somehow thinking that perhaps this will show the one they lost that they haven’t forgotten them.

I knew of a woman who lost her beautiful eighteen-month-old baby girl to leukemia. I can’t imagine the grief and sorrow that filled this young family. But now, ten years on, she still grieves as if it happened yesterday, and her two other beautiful children are stifled by her overprotective fear that they, too, will lose their lives. She has this emptiness about her, and her gorgeous kids get only half a mother. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, and God forbid I ever have to, but I do know what loss is like. An eight-year-old girl described it to me beautifully one day. She said, “Terry, I am scared that if I don’t stay sad about my pony dying, people will think I don’t love him anymore, so that’s why I need to stay sad.” We have to give ourselves permission to move on — not to stop loving, but to open our heart to love again. Can you imagine how it would make those lost loved ones feel if they knew that not only had their life ended, but so had ours? The greatest respect we can pay to those who have passed is to live a full and passionate life, to give up the guilt and celebrate what we have. I’m sure if this lovely mother were able to dissociate just for a while to watch the movie of her life, she would see how she is shortchanging herself and all three of her beautiful children.

These aren’t just words on a page; I’ve had to live with my own personal challenges as well. I know how hard it can be. One of the personal challenges in my life was experiencing sexual abuse many times as a young child. For many years I allowed myself to feel shattered by those incidents, along with many other traumatic experiences that life thrust upon me. Each time I revisited those memories, I clung to the pain they had brought me. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t the physical aspect that affected me the most; it was the betrayal of trust, the deep confusion and shame I felt, and the longing for it to have been different.

As I have mentioned, I have two beautiful sons, Harison and Jackson. Shortly before Harison’s birth, I heard someone speaking about how changing the meaning of a situation will change our feelings about it.

At first, I was angry to hear these dismissive words. How could anyone speak so flippantly and suggest that I could change how I felt about a situation simply by changing the way I thought about it? Didn’t they know the pain I had endured? Didn’t they know the repercussions of such events and how they had tainted nearly every part of my life? Something was stinging inside (the truth!), so I knew some issue had surfaced for me. It was time to pay attention. It was time to really listen. As those words rang in my ears, I decided to ponder this new concept.

What if I did change the meaning I had placed on those experiences?

What if I were to look at them differently and detach myself from my usual highly charged reaction?

I thought about my new baby, soon to come into the world, and then I thought about the advice I would have given to that little girl who was me, all those years ago. I thought about how I could turn the painful memories into powerful learning experiences. I forced myself to give up the anger and resentment so that I could find the wisdom. I decided to redesign my memories around those events. I learned to avoid perpetuating the negative feelings that resulted from the abuse by now saying that I had “experienced” it, not that I had “suffered” or “survived.”

I learned that we are all victims of victims, and that people who are hurting in turn hurt other people. Empathy allowed me to see that. Not agree with it, but see!

I learned that I had an opportunity to teach my children how to protect their bodies; I had the chance to stop the cycle of abuse.

I learned that we have to get past our own discomfort with having these uncomfortable conversations and love our kids enough to help them be aware.

I learned that children need to first be able to recognize a potentially dangerous situation, and then, if they are ever placed in one, to respond automatically — a defense that definitely would have helped me. It’s ridiculous to say to kids, “Don’t talk to strangers,” because we make them talk to strangers every day (“Say hello to Mrs. Smith”). And “Don’t accept a lift from someone you don’t know” isn’t totally foolproof advice, because abusers are very clever at tricking children into trusting them.

We have to give our children responses that we calmly, persistently drill into them so that, should they ever find themselves in such a situation, they are not powerless. Again, that certainly would have helped me. No one told me that it was OK for me to stand up to people who were going to do “bad” things to me. I was so young that I didn’t even know they were bad at first, let alone recognize that I was in danger. But even very young children may get a “funny feeling,” and if they do, it’s this feeling that could save them from a predator. You can’t expect children to get this feeling or to act on it; hence the need to prepare them and to follow up.

So I decided to change the meaning I had placed on my sexual abuse experiences. I changed my outlook from “victimhood” to “empowerment.” I realized that those experiences of abuse had given me the insight to teach my children how to protect themselves and how to trust and act on that “funny feeling.”

I am also very grateful that I was able to move through the pain to reach the other side, where I could be in a position to teach them what to say and do if they were ever placed in that awful predicament. My children were drilled every week: “If someone tries to touch you or your penis, what do you say and do?” In a really loud, strong voice, they would yell, “No! Go away! I don’t know you!” And then they would know to run to me or another woman and tell them what had happened. (Only a very small percentage of child sexual abusers are women.)

My abusers were trusted people in my life, so just limiting this education to cautions about strangers was not enough. I was also adamant about teaching my boys that they had “NO GO” zones on their body, and that absolutely no one could touch them there. I explained to them that even people we know can do bad things to us and then tell us to keep it a secret, but the biggest secret of all is that kids can tell their mothers anything — even secrets. I made sure that we kept having this conversation even as they got older, to make sure they maintained their awareness of their right to protect their body. Pedophiles test, establish trust, and gain their victims’ confidence before any inappropriate touching, and then they proceed very gradually. This is called “grooming,” and it can happen any time, anywhere, with people you might never suspect. When our children can recognize that certain behavior is not acceptable — from anyone — they have a much better chance of protecting themselves. We must give them the resources to take action before they are harmed, not just after. We must give them an instant, default response. This is not just for potential abuse situations, of course; by age three-and-a-half, my boys could say their name, address, phone number, and their doctor’s name. They would recite it over and over. It’s amazing how many five-year-olds don’t even know their own phone number.

So through some very painful personal experiences, I learned something of value that I was able to pass on to my children. There is great wisdom in every experience if we just look for it. I want all of us to let go of the shame and negativity that paralyzes us into waiting to be great. I want us to celebrate the insights gleaned from the journey that has brought us to where we are today.

I didn’t want to continue giving my life away to the past, and I wanted to stop feeling like I was “damaged goods” and less than others because of all that had happened to me. My version of hell is getting to the end of my life and someone saying, “This is the life you were supposed to live! This is what you could have done had you not been so stuck in your pain!” I didn’t want to waste another moment of my life, and if that meant redesigning how I perceived those events, then so be it! When we realize that no one is broken, no one is damaged, and no one is dysfunctional, we start to accept that our path, whatever it may be and however painful it may have been, has been a great teacher, guiding us to our most wise and connected self.

I have spoken many times with a wonderfully gifted speaker and truly great man, Li Cunxin, the author of Mao’s Last Dancer. Li was born into utter poverty in Mao’s communist China, and at the age of eleven he was selected to train in Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy. During his time there he suffered great emotional and physical pain. I recall Li sharing a story from his childhood. One of his mentors told him, “When the heart is breaking with sorrow for what it has lost, the soul is singing with joy for what it has gained.” That is a profound insight, and sometimes when I’m feeling great pity for myself, I remind myself of this healing wisdom. It takes great courage to sit in such a place and allow ourselves to get the great learnings from our pain.

Other Ways to Change Perceptions

By changing the meaning we place on situations, we can start to see a way into our wisdom, to peace and to release. We might choose to seek counsel so that we can “see” our past differently. We might also choose to spend time with someone who has experienced a similar problem, as it can help open our eyes to a different perception.

We all have a lot to share, and there are so many opportunities for us to help while healing:

If you experienced sexual abuse, become a hospital volunteer with children who have been sexually abused

If you were physically, mentally, or intellectually abused, go work with disadvantaged youth.

If you hated the poverty of your past, serve at a soup kitchen one day a month, or hand out dignity packs to those who have found themselves homeless.

If you hated your parents’ working, go work at an orphanage.

When we step outside of the picture of our own past and see firsthand someone playing the cards they were dealt in a positive way, we begin to understand that our past doesn’t have to be the life sentence we have turned it into. I recall a conversation with a participant in one of my programs many years ago, a compassionate young woman with whom I had worked a year or so before. Little did I realize that throughout the first program she’d held a shocking secret. Our conversation went something like this:

“Terry, I’ve really gained a lot from doing volunteer work. It’s helped me to get over the pain of what happened to me.”

“What happened to you?”

“Two years ago, I was abducted by a group of young men, kept in the trunk of their car, and continuously raped for a week.”

I still get a chill when I recall that conversation. I don’t think many of us could even comprehend such a terrifying experience, let alone move on with our life to help those less fortunate. I am reminded of Isaac Newton’s observation, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” By overcoming her past, this wonderful girl became a giant for us all. She didn’t allow the trauma of that terrible experience to paralyze her. She grieved, she ached, she cried for a long time, she did lots of healing, and then she moved to a place in her soul that could help her to ease other people’s pain.

Is this hard to fathom? Some may think, “It can’t be that easy.” A woman in one of my training sessions held that view. “It’s not that easy to let go!” she remarked quite angrily, and another participant replied, “Well, you must be hanging on too tight!” How’s that for wisdom?

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
— Isaac Newton.

Knowing Why Isn’t Enough

It is one thing to find the wisdom from our pain; it is another thing altogether to use that wisdom to create a new way of living. Woody Allen once said, “I’ve spent thirty years in therapy, and I can tell you every disorder I have. I just don’t know how to change them!”

It can be seductively easy to get caught up in the energy of the event rather than finding the core issues and changing the associated ineffective behaviors, thoughts, and/or attitudes.

Most of us can connect our past to why we are the way we are, yet we continue to replicate the same pattern of negativity. Discovering the why is just the first part of the journey. Most of us get to this stage and stop. We don’t do anything with it. We don’t continue into the challenging arena of changing the way we do our lives.

It’s not enough to change just our perception of our painful memories. The only way for us to live a different life is to learn from what we have experienced and, more important, to take action — to change our behaviors in order to get a different result in the future. There’s no easy way through it; we just have to do the work.

Let me give you an example. A man once told me that he had always felt ridiculed by one of his parents when growing up. This criticism was quite cruel and often presented in the presence of others. As a result, he had spent much of his childhood feeling insecure, with a low self-worth. Years later, he had grown into a very confident, self-assured adult with healthy self-esteem, but even with this empowerment, he continued to allow that parent to judge him, doing nothing to protect himself from the barrage of criticism.

Why? Because of — as he said — fear. He didn’t take the affirmative action of having the tough conversation with this parent because he feared that it would be too uncomfortable — not just for the parent, but more so for himself.

We often live our lives in the guise of false humility. “I just didn’t want to hurt their feelings” is an excuse that many of us have used to hide the fact that it was our own fear that prevented us from being honest. I’m not saying that we have to be brutally frank, but those other people we claim to fear won’t get the opportunity to modify their behavior if they don’t even know there’s a problem in the first place! As the wonderful saying goes, “If nothing changes, nothing changes,” and feedback can be one of the greatest teachers of all.