Pandora's Box Cannot Be Resealed...Period

Saturday, June 14, 2014

I have often raved about the benefit of EMDR treatment in this blog.  I suspect I will continue to do so.  But I think it might be a bit of a misnomer to attribute so much of my transformation to EMDR therapy alone.  I am sure the shamanic journey work I did with Mary Rutherford was also of immense help.  These experiences plus all the healthy habits I practice have made such an extraordinary difference.  And yet even with all the improvement it seems to me that I am still wading through such an immense quagmire of grief.  I suppose I can chalk that up to being somewhat metaphorically ‘asleep at the wheel’ for so long.  And I didn’t think I was.

It seems to me that the potential for deep healing is inextricably tied up with the quality of humility.  To acknowledge your own wounds is essentially necessary to be able to tend to them.  We cannot heal what we will not confront.  Put more bluntly the surest way not to solve your problems is…to not solve your problems.  Avoidance can prove highly toxic.  Avoiding problems is how individuals, companies and entire nation states find themselves eventually collapsing into oblivion…or at least irrelevance.

I feel that the treatment I embarked upon in the last year essentially opened my personal version of Pandora’s Box.  What has unfolded is simply not reversible.  I cannot put the genie of change back in the bottle so to speak.  It popped out and now I must attend to the consequences.  And I realize that I want a profoundly different life.  I am sure I will write more about that in coming days, weeks and months.

Something I have not brought up in therapy recently is the fact that I still feel as if I am in a bit of shock.  Yes, it’s been essentially a year now since my latest eventful adventure began but that entire year of time has not yet led me to emerge completely from the state of shock I first felt last summer when I first reentered therapy.  The shock is wearing off.  But I still feel it.  How long will it last?  I do not know.

I learned of a job opportunity this week that I am going to apply for.  It is based in the Monterey Bay area of California where I once attended school between 2009 and 2011.  I have some mixed feelings about applying.  My ambivalence has very little to do with the job prospect itself.  As I read through the job description I was able to relatively easily imagine myself in the role.  No, my bigger concern quite honestly is my health insurance. 

As it gradually became clear that the imprint of the trauma of my earliest years of life had still not been effectively erased by treatment I had received prior to last June I began to feel a much deeper appreciation for the value of my health insurance.  I do not want to do anything to put my present and future health at needlessly high risk.  I thus feel very cautious about doing anything that could undermine my health.  Living without health insurance feels like an exceptionally risky proposition.  Because the job in question would provide me no health insurance I would have to seek out a policy on the private market.  And I am not sure what I could get in California.

And then there is the reality that I would effectively be throwing myself a big speed bump if I were to relocate for a job.  Though I am so much better than I was last summer I still feel it would be wise to do more therapy.  But moving for a job now and thus finding it necessary to find a new therapist would be another big task to take on.  Do I really want to take the risk of leaving behind what I have laboriously worked with such immense diligence to build?  That is another question I might be asking myself in the near future if I am offered the job.

The quality of my life is now so much better than it was for such a long time.  I would say it took me about two full years to descend into what seemed to be utter oblivion last summer.  If it takes an equal amount of time to climb out of this dark hole I was in then I am already half-way there.  I would be out of the pit by the summer of 2015.

As you may have guessed I can be a highly analytical person.  But I have lived long enough to come to believe that healing is not a fundamentally linear process.  Whole months can pass in which it may appear the person on a journey of healing seems to make no progress forward towards significant goals.  And then other moments we can experience incredible insight and growth spurts like what teenagers experience as puberty.

I do feel the momentum of my recovery is still positive.  I am not moving backwards.  I am not regressing.  Instead I am wanting to take a bit of a rest break and appreciate how far I have come.  We all need time to rest and recuperate.

The Summer Solstice is only a week away.  It’s amazing how far I have come.  I want to believe there is still immense possibility for the future of my life.  Patience, diligence and trust are qualities of being I still feel the need to earnestly cultivate.