A Healing Journey (Original)

This was the original version of this page, more focused on the enlightenment experience. I refer you to the current version of this page if you want a less narrow view.

You can begin to free yourself from past trauma and dissociation. I am not a trained expert, I am merely a "patient" considered disorded for almost 20 years and diagnosed "multiple" for about as long. For those many years I was trapped. I was very highly functioning, but seemed to be stuck in my healing. Most of the time I would be unaware of what was going on beneath the surface. But this way of working wasn't sustainable. I simply could not free myself of past abuse trauma and its natural coping mechanism of dissociation. I am beginning the process of healing now and I hope this site helps you in your journey.

I am doing all of this purely based on my own intuition of what I know is the path I need to take and have indeed embarked upon, guided by an understanding and completely supporting treatment team. Take these words for what they are. This is my truth as I know it right now. It may not be yours. And, certainly, my views here will evolve. This main pages seems to change every couple months or so.

Post-traumatic stress is the body's natural response to a traumatic, and unnatural, event or events. Trauma can be anything from childhood abuse to war and terrorism to environmental disasters. We often call it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) when it involves overwhelming a person's ability to cope and disrupts functioning of mind and body. Related to PTSD is dissociation, which is a completely natural mental defense aimed at minimizing the effects of trauma on the brain. Similarly we often call dissociation a disorder when its disadvantages begin to outweigh its advantages.

Both PTSD and dissociation are on a continuum of severity and both interact with each other and almost always co-exist. So, PTSD can be mild in form and there is a large number of individuals in this world who have unresolved traumas that disrupt their lives but don't necessarily qualify as PTSD in the strictest sense. Similarly, there is a large number of individuals who use dissociation as a coping strategy and also do not qualify for diagnosis as a dissociative disorder. I am mainly writing from my experiences of disruptions in functioning that qualify for DSM-IV diagnoses because those are my experiences. However, I would be remiss not to say that I encounter a number of individuals who seem to live "happy" yet "dissociated" lives.

Everyone can benefit from learning to become more fully aware, not just those who need to because it gets in the way of daily functioning.

One of the first skills one learns in dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and dissociation is grounding. Grounding helps you orient yourself to reality and allows you to be more centered and in touch with your surroundings. It's helpful. To do it, you focus on the present by doing things like feeling the floor under your feet and using your senses of smell and touch.

The main buzzword you will also hear which is related to grounding is mindfulness. I guess it's a good word, but it's a little misleading, at least to me. Mindfulness is paying attention to what is going on inside you. Practicing mindfulness keeps you from dissociating or leaving your body. It's a wonderful skill to learn.

But there is a much more powerful skill which I would argue involves almost the opposite of grounding and mindfulness. When you feel yourself being dragged into a memory or part of yourself, what is really happening is that your mind is controlling you. It does you no good to allow yourself for this to continue, unless you are in a safe place specifically focused to process the memories or dissociated states. Grounding is, to me at least, the poor man's solution to this problem (and it's not a true solution only a band-aid). This greater skill involves freeing yourself from your mind (this is why I don't particularly like the word mindfulness). It's an amazingly deep meditative state in which you reach a higher level of consciousness. In it, you observe your thoughts without judgement and you completely liberate your senses. New worlds open up to you, new awareness, new feelings. You are enlightened. Imagine the experience you may get in a yoga class and magnify that by a trillion or a google!

All three of these skills (grounding, mindfulness, and enlightenment) are complementary. They are all points on a continuum. I think true healing involves learning to achieve them all.

The Consequences of Enlightenment

The ability to reach this new level of consciousness, which I call enlightenment but you may choose some other word, is what is guiding me and sustaining me on my healing journey as of late. Quite frankly I can deal with the intense emotional and physical pain by knowing that there is a place I can reach where there is no pain. When I reach this glorious state, I experience such vastness that cannot be described with words and a sense of calm that is deeper than anything I had ever thought possible, yet at the same time a sense of excitment. I open my mind to true consciousness and see the enormity of our existence and suddenly am able to access seemingly infinite knowledge. When I am in this state, I realize that there is the earth-bound world and there is real conscious awareness, a whole other aspect of the universe I had never realized existed that transcends physical reality.

What I am sometimes able to achieve has turned the tables on everything I believed to be true before. The Laws of Physics seem trivial now in comparison to what I now know. All scientific research on how the brain works seems trivial. Interpreting data, brain circuits understood in terms of math and models is simply a mirage or, at best, a metaphor. The brain is not math, it is not chemicals, it is a miracle. There is no amount of intellectual knowledge which will explain what the brain can do. And those who are studying the brain and looking at the details of biology probably do not realize what they are truly working with.

Einstein wrote:

Einstein was a very smart and creative man. He recognized that we can achieve great things when we allow ourselves to look beyond ourselves (and make use of the right side of our brains).

Releasing Memories and the Role of Dissociation

When you live in a place of trauma-induced disorder of the mind, you do so because that is all you know. Struggling with whether memories of childhood trauma are "real" in truth means nothing. This is a stumbling block that holds so many people back. What matters is only your reality (as long as you aren't in a position to be going to court and prosecuting; then you will need to distinguish). What matters is your truth. Your experience. It does not matter if the "memories" you are experiencing are fear-based (implanted as a reflection or interpretation of what happened), inspired by fantasy also in response to what really happened, or whether they are an historical record of what was physically and emotionally done to you. The goal is to just accept your experiences without judgement. I know this is super hard to do, yet when you are able to accept, everything does become much easier. I don't at all stay in that place of complete acceptance (and sometimes I'm not even able to ground myself). It's a back and forth process. But I believe it's important to have a sense of what you can achieve.

In the beginning, when I got to experience this amazing state of enlightenment through meditation, I saw blackness and had this sense of a vast universe. Everything seemed to be put into proper perspective. I also saw the parts of my dissociated self. Eventually, new images appeared and I was taken to internal safe places that seem so real (kind of like wonderful fantasy places you see depicted in movies). The experiences I have are constantly evolving. But they share certain characteristics. There is always a sense of calm and acceptance and excitment.

A couple of days after my first experience with enlightenment through meditation, as I remained in a state of pure peace and perpetual bliss, I began to consider what its impact was on me. I saw its effects all around me. Everything was perceived differently. I felt and saw energy coming from all living things. I wanted to give myself to people. The world was completely new to me (and this is coming from someone who has spent a fair amount of time studying the world and looking for, photographing, and teaching about patterns in nature).

I understand well that our system of education teaches kids how to calculate and think and forces kids to live on the left side of their brains. How sad. How limiting. "Move to the right" and you begin to see what we are capable of. But we tell kids that thinking is "where it's at". All our tests are based on that belief.

Likewise, psychiatric medicine and trauma recovery work needs to shift from a continual assessment of thoughts and intellectual work towards yoga, meditation, and other forms of self-soothing as well as approaches that help bring you toward more conscious awareness, like art and music, often called expressive therapies. These are not just "extra" techniques to help you on your intellectual journey. They can and should be an integral part of the healing process. The problem is that while many clinicians will accept (or perhaps even applaud) these techniques, they don't, to a large extent, truly embrace them. They think that they are done separately or if you feel like it. This is just plain wrong. In order to have a chance to really heal from trauma and dissociative disorders, there needs to be a confluence of approaches. There cannot be a separation. Unfortunately, this is difficult to achieve because most clinicians cannot straddle these different ways of working. So medicine, along with education, is stuck. Stuck until mindful and creative approaches become truly accepted and part of clinical training of the next generation of healers and educators.

What does this mean in terms of dissociative disorders and Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder)? How can a dissociative disorder lead to enlightenment?

I thought my lifelong ability to separate out my mind into discrete parts must have something to do with these transformative experiences. But in what way? How?

When I had my first experience of full consciousness, a freeing of my senses from my mind, I realized that I was not alone. I was connected to all of humanity and this could be easily interpreted as "I am more than one".

Well, it is a fact that I have already lived a life of there being "more than one" inside of me.

I believe that the presence of dissociative states makes it easier to achieve enlightenment. It's a primer, so to speak. Crudely explained, "many minds" inside of you is a microcosm of all of human consciousness, where there are infinite minds all sharing the same infinite space. This is not at all, I believe, a necessary requirement, but it may make achieving enlightened states easier.

People who dissociate to an extreme are very familiar with large changes of state and awareness. If you are able to achieve debilitating states, then you also open the possibility of achieving enlightened states. There is a reward, then, for your suffering. This is the gift you get to have. Appreciate what I just said. You will find similar statements dispersed throughout the Bible.

If you can learn to free your mind and achieve a state of conscious awareness or some state approaching enlightenment, you can begin to break free of the disorders caused by trauma and dissociation. You will probably not be able to stay in this place. But for the time that you are there, you will be completely healed and transcend all that has plagued you for so long. These enlightened states can then become touchstones that keep you going through the difficult times.

This is what makes enlightenment extra special for those with dissociative disorders and long histories of abuse. Our internal landscape has been so chaotic and complex for so long. To free ourselves from those struggles is simply miraculous.

Where Can You Go From Here?

Now I've already told you that this state of complete conscious awareness has not lasted, in me at least, forever. As I wrote above, sometimes thoughts reassert themselves, sometimes I lose faith, sometimes I fall into my parts, sometimes I fall off the path.

I keep having to tell myself that it is a process.

But I do know that once you achieve the state of enlightenment and full conscious awareness, you open the door for the rest of your life! Yes I lost this fully conscious state where there was nothing but bliss, but it's still there and available to me. I know losing it is only temporary, as I continually achieve different levels of conscious awareness along the continuum.

I appreciate that while you may know the dictionary definition of each and every word on this page, you may not yet understand what the words mean when they are put together as sentences. That is okay. It's hard to put experiences like these into words. Maybe you need to come back to this, and eventually it will begin to have meaning for you. You will begin to know.

I wish you well on your healing journey and hope this site gives you hope.

Please feel free to write me if you have questions, comments, or suggestions. Send mail to: paul@mindparts.org.