Image: ´Priestess´ By Leticiabanegas
I remember a late march evening back in 2014, deep in counsel with my spirit guides about whether or not I had the emotional energy, time, and space in my life to begin priestess mystery school. I felt like I was ready to invite the sacred into my practice in a structured way and in community with other practitioners, but at the same time, I was already balancing a tumultuous life that was literally bursting at the seams with obligation. I wanted to be sure that the investment and commitment of time and energy could be made and kept, with joy. I wanted to honor where I was at in my life, as well as honor all who was sharing my life with me. Resources like time and energy were so scarce those days, and my partner and I were already locked into fierce competition over any scrap of free time we could find, and I had to be sure that there would be enough left over to feed this commitment.
I had spent the several days prior, posing questions and calling in divination and clarity on my path. The divination I received was that my emotional energy was being called to support some other critical work that I had been neglecting for too long, and my counsel could not give me blessing until I had done this work first. I cringed at the work that I was being counseled to prioritize, and tried to bargain with the counsel for more than a week. In the end, they withheld their blessing and insisted that before I could commit my emotional energy to anything else, I must prioritize my trauma work. It was insisted that by bypassing this work, I was committing a serious disservice to myself, as well as to all the souls I was and would one day be in relationship with. I spent a solid couple of weeks feeling rejected by the sacred, deemed unfit to walk the path, feeling as ornery a teenager being asked to wash the dishes. "But I didn't make this mess, why do I always get stuck having to clean up other people's messes?!", and, "I am in therapy, and have been in therapy for the better part of two fucking years now. What more do you want from me?!" I even neglected my morning divination practice for a few days when it became clear that I was not gonna get the blessing I wanted. Eventually, one evening several weeks later, under the canopy of my hawthorn tree, I surrendered and accepted the counsel, because what else can a witch do?
I remember the glow of my backyard sanctuary, and how the light from the dozens of candles helped me to sit with the heaviness and darkness of the path that I was about to commit to for the next year. I made ritual and ceremony, and declared my intentions to dedicate my emotional energy for a solid year, to the work of opening up my rotted, festering, bleeding all over the place trauma wounds. I committed to stop being content with half assing my therapy work and wasting time with practitioners who I knew would never take me to the depths of all the places I needed to go, and calling it good. I committed to finding a way, no matter what, to learn how to give words to my trauma and create a narrative so that I could finally start to peice together what the fuck had happened to me since I crash landed into this body 31 years earlier. I committed myself to enduring and sitting with all the tides of crashing emotion that I knew where gonna come gushing out once I opened the door. I committed myself to one year of intensive trauma therapy, and to the work of integrating all the fragmented pieces of me into a cohesive narrative. I committed to learning how to know the difference between what was trauma memory and what was "current reality." The word terrified comes to mind to describe my comfort level with this work. I was terrified of what I would find in all of those dark and long buried places.
To put all of this into context, I had been diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder a year earlier by my talk therapist. I would like to note here that I resist being diagnosed as having a disorder, or being disordered. I believe that it is our culture that is severely disordered, and that my response to the trauma is within what we can expect from humans who have endured lifetimes of socially constructed oppressions, and traumas sourced in violent systems of class and gender. All the same, the diagnosis was helpful in helping me connect the chronic traumas I had endured, to my present way of moving about the world. It became clear to me that my adaptive coping mechanism was to develop a tenacious ferocity, and a toughness that would allow me to survive under the impossible life circumstances that I so often found myself in. To maintain this toughness and not crack under the weight of it all, I had to isolate and compartmentalize all the painful memories and experiences. I had to bury them deep, deep down in my subconscious and refuse them to surface in my consciousness. Decades went by and these experiences went unspoken, unseen, and unheard. Even when they raged and pounded at the door. It was completely maladaptive, but this was the emotional cost that I had no choice but to pay, for my survival. For the ability to keep showing up for another day.
So, here I was, committing to finally taking a look at all these things, and I was terrified of how I would manage life after moving into this work. Terrified of how I would simultaneously allow my heart to break, and stand strong. Terrified that I would fall into a rabbit hole that I would never ever find a way to climb out of. Terrified of surrendering the only thing that had kept me alive; disassociation. But I moved forward anyways, not despite these fears, but because of them.
I found a trauma worker whose practice incorporated as much of my criteria as I could find, which wasn't easy and in the end was still a compromise from what I knew I really needed. But hey, that's capitalism, doing what it does. Creating barriers to access of quality mental health care for the people who need the resources the most.
Regardless, I showed up ready, willing, and fucking eager to do the work with the best trauma worker that a sliding scale could buy. And, it was mutherfucking HARD. We met once a week, and frankly, it felt like getting my guts ripped out of my body every sunday afternoon. It really was so dreadfully painful and awful that I developed a considerable amount of anxiety surrounding impending sessions. Terrified of the monsters that were gonna come out this week, and how the fuck I was gonna reign them back in after our hour was up. Comfortable and slow Sunday mornings became excruciatingly uncomfortable as my anxiety over having to go to trauma therapy seeped into my family dynamics in a variety of ways. I came to to my trauma work with traumas that were so sensitive to the touch, that they would begin to ooze at just the slightest mention of them. I would become flooded with all the images and long unprocessed memories. All the sensory and physiological sensations, and all the pain and hurt was so heavy that I doubted my capacity to carry it all. In between sessions I felt like I was walking around with my guts hanging out of my body. My heart hurt, I was always on the verge of emotional collapse, and there were a few occasions that the task of dressing myself for the day became so overwhelming that I would sob like a toddler who was just denied a cookie. I couldn't be counted on to remember important dates, things I had committed to take care of, and whole conversations would be eclipsed by other, more intruding thoughts. It was emotionally exhausting, for me, and for my partner. I tried my very best to push back the fear and anxiety that came up as a result, but I often just wasn't able to.
Reflecting back, what I really wanted and needed was an ally and partner who could see and honor the work I had committed myself to, and the amount of emotional energy that I needed to be able to focus on my trauma work. I needed someone to say, "Hey, I'll take care of breakfast and kids this morning. Do you want to go take a bath, or a walk, or some other activity that will ground you and help you prepare for your session today? I love you. You got this." But I never got that. Not even anything close to it. What I got was "Stop freaking out", and, "Maybe you shouldn't do trauma work if every sunday morning is gonna be like this." The negative and unsupportive feedback from the person who was supposed to be my partner and ally in life had a compounding effect on my anxiety. Not only did I have to carry the weight of my own feelings surrounding my trauma work, but now I had to carry the weight of my partners feelings around my anxiety in relation to my trauma work. To say the least, things got real wonky for me for a spell.
I began to feel a lot of pressure to not "freak out" as my partner called it, when I became emotionally overwhelmed by having to navigate adult life alongside the very painful and laborious work of processing and integrating 30 plus years worth of untouched and unspoken trauma. Now, I know that him telling me to "stop freaking out" was just his way of saying "your emotional process makes me uncomfortable and I am unwilling to be a supportive ally to you through this." But at the time, I genuinely and thoroughly internalized his morbid fear of the full spectrum of human emotional expression. I began to feel a lot of shame around my process and the emotional states that I couldn't control anymore since opening the door to my trauma. Emotional states such as grief, sadness, anxiousness, and anger. My shadow work become a source of shame, and emotional expression in his presence became a thing to fear in and of itself. Nevertheless, I kept with my commitment to trauma therapy, and of course the emotional responses kept flowing. As they do, and as they should. However, it wasn't long before the shame and fear bloomed into a full blown and intense bout with depression.
Four months into my year long commitment to trauma work, I became so exhausted and depleted by the work, and by the impacts that the work was having on my relationship that I went to see another trusted practicioner. I had learned a lot about trauma from Lydia Bartholow, and had been impressed by their capacity to hold both an awareness of the social conditions that contribute to "mental illness", as well as a clinical perspective on treatment. I felt safe in knowing that any suggestions she made would reflect a careful consideration of both perspectives. In our clinical appointment, I shared the story of where I was in my trauma work, and how the task of putting cloths on my body and leaving the house was literally too overwhelming for me on some mornings. I told her of how the thought of doing the normal adult things like paying the electric bill or going grocery shopping, or fixing my flat bike tire made my brain want to melt. After assessing my emotional state, and taking into consideration the insights that I had given her, she suggested that I consider taking a prescription medication called Lexapro for my anxiety and depression.
This was a difficult suggestion for me to swallow as I had a lot of resistance to being medicated. My years in academia had given me a critical analysis of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. Further and more complex reasons for my resistance to being medicated were sourced in my family of origin and how prescription medications were abused by all of my nuclear family members until each one of them self destructed in fatal and permanent ways. How could I trust that my story would be any different, and goddamit I NEEDED my story to be different. This was the whole reason I was here in the first place. Medicating myself just felt too much like living out the stories of the dead, and I wanted to fucking live. I NEEDED to fucking live. By the end of our appointment we agreed that I would fill the prescription for 5mg of Lexapro and that I would keep it on hand in the case that my depression and anxiety became life threatening. I followed through by filling the prescription and stuffing it behind my tinctures on my medicine shelf. Behind the California Poppy, St. Johns Wort, Skullcap, Valerian, Blue Vervain, Kava Kava, and every other plant ally I was calling on daily to get me through the muck, to no avail. There it sat, out of sight but not out of mind, until there came a Sunday morning in which my partner and I had a major blow out, again stemming from my unwieldy anxiety over having to go to my Sunday trauma session. Again, rather than feeling supported, validated, or understood by my partner, the conflict left me feeling shamed, blamed, and judged. I couldn't find a way to articulate to him what I was experiencing and he couldn't find a way to open up his heart and hear me. I felt miserably alone in my experience and trauma, and began to consider his suggestions of not going to therapy anymore. I began to break under the pressure to keep my emotional processing to myself. I felt as stuck as I had ever felt in my whole life. I knew that if I stopped my trauma work, that nothing would ever get better. Not ever. Especially now that I had opened the door. I knew that I could not stop the work now any more than you can stop a surgery mid process. Yet I felt that by continuing with it I was jeopardizing the stability of my home and family.
As a survivor of suicide a few times over, self destruction was never an option for me and yet I really truly was having an incredibly difficult time managing life. It was a real mind fuck, and I have an incredible amount of lingering anger and rage over being put in such a position by my partner. I feel angry and resentful over never fucking once getting so much as a "You're doing a great job" or I see you and how hard it is right now. Thank you for doing this work. It will get better." Nope, never. Just the constant reminder that I was in fact just "freaking out" and that my emotions had no grounding in anything. Never mind the fact that I was showing up week after dreaded week to unpack and give voice to early childhood horrors, being birthed to a teen mom in poverty and becoming a teen mom in poverty, the loss of every member of my nuclear family to mental illness and suicide, the personal apocalypses, the decades of gendered violence which included physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Let's just dismiss all of that and stick with a narrative that forces me to internalize someones else's discomfort with emotional processing.
It is within the context of all of this that I finally caved and medicated myself with the Lexapro that I had been prescribed several weeks earlier. Let me just say that the anxiety I felt over taking a medication for anxiety, was fucking strong, but not stronger than the anxiety and shame I was feeling in response to my partner's unsupportive and demeaning way of engaging with me through all of this. I know now that the ableism and disconnection in my relationship is what drove me to medicate, not the emotions themselves. I really bought the whole bit about being too emotionally ungrounded and my process being the cause of all of our relationship friction. I completely lost sight of how the absence of an emotionally supportive partnership, along with an absence in allyship from those we love while we process intensely painful experiences, would cause a morbid mental meltdown in just about any human. I lost sight of how we can get through anything, really anything, if our hurts and pains are validated, mirrored, and nurtured. Nothing unreasonable you know, just all the things that we humans need in order to get through our deep delve into trauma and shadow work, intact. Things like an unsolicited affectionate hug every once in a while, someone else cooking the fucking dinner without having to be begged, or volunteering to get up with the kids, being asked how you are doing, and such.
All the same, to relieve some of the pressure, I started my daily medication regimen of 5mg of Lexapro, and things did improve. Another strategy I had employed was to change my weekly therapy session from a weekend day, to a weekday so that my partner didn't have to deal with my pre-session anxiety and I didn't have to deal with my own feelings of resentment that came up from not feeling supported. After about six months of feeling stable, I decided to discontinue the Lexapro due to my fear of living life medicated indefinitely. I felt that I was doing well as the anxiety had tapered down to a manageable level, and emotional regulation (or shall we call it emotional suppression) was easy again despite continuing with my weekly trauma work. However, I made this decision on my own without consultation with my prescriber, and without educating myself on what to expect when you discontinue an SSRI cold turkey.
We shall just say that things blew out big as my brain and body went through the transition of being medicated to not being medicated, and there was irreperable emotional damage inflicted, on both our parts, during a notable conflict that triggered a full blown panic attack. I have only ever had two panic attacks in my life, and in each of them I lost the capacity to emotionally regulate. The first one came during a therapy session in which my therapist thought that EMDR would be a good thing for us to try. A few minutes into the session, she spoke out loud my previous partners name, a name that I had been unable to speak out loud for more than two years. I am not so clear on all the things that happened next, and just remember being crushed under a wave of unbearable emotion. I sobbed some things and had what the ER doctor called, a dissociative seizure. When I came back from blackout, my therapist was on the phone with 911, justifiably concerned for me and my late term pregnant body. We didn't do EMDR no more after that.
When this second panic attack hit in the middle of a conflict with my partner, it looked a lot different, and for sure my partner was unable to register what was happening for me. I don't remember all that was exchanged, but I am told that I dished out some pretty hurtful words, and I choose to believe him that I did. While I don't remember all the words or chain of events, I do remember the sensory and emotional feeling of being uncontrollably filled with rage, fury, hate, and hurt for all the ways that he refused to be any ally and supportive partner. I remember the way my body shook with unshed sobs, or maybe I was sobbing. I don't know. Shortly after this incident, I decided to go back on the Lexapro and have been on it since.
I think that things were never quite the same between us after that, and nowadays, when his memory pops up, all I can think of is fuck that dude. Fuck him and all his attempts to erode and suppress my very normal processing of a lifetime of complex trauma. Fuck him and his incapacity to offer even one once of empathy for what I was experiencing. Fuck that dude and his morbid discomfort with emotion. But never mind him. This is not about him.
Recently, it occurred to me that perhaps now that my home has been reclaimed and blessed as a sacred healing sanctuary where my emotional processing won't be shut down, that I might be able to try discontinuation of the Lexapro again. So I read, I consulted, and made the decision to discontinue. It has been two, almost three weeks. I am doing okay and am well supported by the very skilled trauma stewards at the Integrative Trauma Treatment Center, who are finally are able to accept my state insurance. They tell me all the things I need to hear. Things like "You got this", "You are doing great", I know it hurts and I am so proud of you and the work you are doing to integrate your trauma", and I am beyond thankful.
This process is uncomfortable, but not unbearable. I am feeling a lot of things, as is expected, but you know what I don't feel? I don't feel shame, blame, guilt, shut down, ignored, trivialized, pressured to minimize, or oppressed by ableism in my own home. And without having to confront these every fucking day, I can rest easy and know that I got this.
Coming full circle, I have had to go back and offer my gratitude for the counsel that my spirit guides gave me on that dark and late mid march evening a few years back. They were right, my trauma work did need to be prioritized above all else. Funny thing though, that I could only have ever known after finding my way through the dark, is that my trauma work and my priestess training are not separate paths. All along they were one and the same. I am deeply humbled by the graces that can hold all the truths of past, present, and future, in a way that my human mind will never be able to. May I always, in all ways, honor the divine that seeks to work through all of us, if we open our selves up to being in service.
Blessed be,
Elmira