Running head: TILL WE HAVE VOICES TILL WE HAVE VOICES: A FEMINIST-RELATIONAL APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING THE PROCESS OF HEALING AND BECOMING WHOLE THROUGH LIFESPAN INTEGRATION THERAPY by ELIZABETH JANE CHAN A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES GRADUATE COUNSELLING PSYCHOLOGY PROGRAM We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard .................................................................... Janelle Kwee, Psy.D., Thesis Superviso .................................................................... Marvin McDonald, Ph.D., Second Reader .................................................................... Mihaela Launeanu, Ph.D., Third Reader TRINITY WESTERN UNIVERSITY © Elizabeth Chan 2017 TILL WE HAVE VOICES ii Abstract This study was designed to open up avenues for exploring the dismembering effects of trauma and the “re-membering” process of healing. Six research participants were selected for inclusion based on their experience of trauma, their exposure to Lifespan Integration therapy in working through trauma-related issues, and their identification of felt shifts in therapy. Participants were engaged in a 60- to 90-minute semi-structured interview modelled after Elliot’s (2010) Change Interview. To foster the emerging truth of participants’ experience in a natural way, the research team and I utilized the Listening Guide, a feminist-relational approach to research praxis, through which we identified voices speaking about trauma and recovery. The voices were grouped into three categories: the voices of trauma’s dismembering effects, the voices of turning towards the pain, and the voices of healing. Among the voices of trauma’s dismembering effects were disconnection, dissociation, impasse, and pain. Voices of turning towards the pain included the voices of active acceptance and of mourning. Finally, voices of healing included the voices of personal essence, integration, astonishment, agency, and calm and peace. Examining these various voices and categories of voices, we traced a pattern of shifting from fragmentation, aloneness, and numbness to wholeness, connection, and presence. This progression highlights the fulfilled potential of personhood through the transformational process of healing in therapy. By arresting the transient and timid inclinations of a self that has been dismembered, we see that individuals are granted more permanent access to a range of embodied emotional, psychological even spiritual textures that they might otherwise experience only accidentally and occasionally. They are thereby able to grasp the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous sides of their character, and they become available to a way of living which honours the fullness of human experience. The clinical, academic, and sociocultural implications of these findings centre TILL WE HAVE VOICES iii around lessening the oppressive sense within a person that their trauma is qualitatively symptombased; they speak to us of a helpful vision for healing—one that encompasses the very principles of human architecture which has its origins in the notion that we are meant to be at home within ourselves. Keywords: Trauma; healing; wholeness; Lifespan Integration therapy (LI); Listening Guide (LG) TILL WE HAVE VOICES iv Table of Contents Abstract........................................................................................................................................... ii   Table of Contents ...........................................................................................................................iv   Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................... viii   Chapter 1: Introduction.................................................................................................................... 2   Chapter 2: Literature Review .......................................................................................................... 8   Historical Perspectives on Understanding Trauma ..................................................................... 9   A Transformative-Relational Framework for Surveying Trauma ............................................. 11   Dismemberment......................................................................................................................... 14   Embodiment and Voice ............................................................................................................. 20   Trauma and Voice ..................................................................................................................... 23   Towards Re-membering: Lifespan Integration Therapy ........................................................... 24   What is Lifespan Integration therapy?: An overview............................................................ 25   Conceptual underpinnings of LI therapy. .............................................................................. 28   About the components of LI therapy. .................................................................................... 30   Empirical Research on LI Effectiveness. .............................................................................. 35   The role of LI in re-membering: Resourcing and reconnecting. ........................................... 38   Summary.................................................................................................................................... 39   Rationale of the Present Study................................................................................................... 39   The implicated researcher...................................................................................................... 41   Purpose of the study and research question. .......................................................................... 45   Chapter 3: Method ......................................................................................................................... 46   Research Paradigm .................................................................................................................... 46   TILL WE HAVE VOICES v Qualitative Inquiries into Client Experiences of Therapy: A Review ....................................... 49   Research Methodology .............................................................................................................. 51   Rationale for choosing the Listening Guide. ......................................................................... 52   Applying the Listening Guide. .............................................................................................. 53   Analysis of the “adapted” Change Interview using the Listening Guide. ............................. 57   Sampling and Recruitment ........................................................................................................ 58   Participants. ........................................................................................................................... 59   Exclusion and Inclusion Criteria ............................................................................................... 59   Experiences of trauma. .......................................................................................................... 59   Exposure to LI therapy. ......................................................................................................... 60   Self-identified shifts in therapy. ............................................................................................ 60   Sampling Strategies ................................................................................................................... 61   Recruitment Stages .................................................................................................................... 62   Informed consent and confidentiality. ................................................................................... 63   Data Collection .......................................................................................................................... 64   The Research Team ................................................................................................................... 65   Data Analysis ............................................................................................................................. 65   Transcription.......................................................................................................................... 65   Coding. .................................................................................................................................. 66   Member checks. ..................................................................................................................... 67   Methodological Rigour .............................................................................................................. 67   Chapter 4: Results.......................................................................................................................... 73   Individual Analysis Summaries ................................................................................................. 73   TILL WE HAVE VOICES vi Rachelle. ................................................................................................................................ 75   Kara. ...................................................................................................................................... 79   Tage. ...................................................................................................................................... 86   J. P. ........................................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.   Sarah. ..................................................................................................................................... 95   Deborah. ................................................................................................................................ 98   Voices ...................................................................................................................................... 100   Voices of trauma’s dismembering effects. .......................................................................... 102   Voices of turning towards the pain. ..................................................................................... 125   Voices of healing. ................................................................................................................ 139   Chapter 5: Discussion .................................................................................................................. 172   Strengths and Limitations ........................................................................................................ 175   Exploration of Findings ........................................................................................................... 179   Implications ............................................................................................................................. 180   Research. ............................................................................................................................. 180   Clinical. ............................................................................................................................... 185   Sociopolitical. ...................................................................................................................... 195   Recommendations for Future Research ................................................................................... 201   Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 203   References ................................................................................................................................... 206   Appendix A: Brochure for Advertising the Study ....................................................................... 224   Appendix B: Poster for Advertising the Study ............................................................................ 226   TILL WE HAVE VOICES vii Appendix C: Initial Information Sheet for Clients Who Have Formally Expressed Interest in the Study ............................................................................................................................................ 227   Appendix D: Informed Consent .................................................................................................. 228   Appendix E: Confidentiality Form for Members of the Research Team .................................... 231   Appendix F: Script for the Semi-Structured Telephone Screening Interview............................. 232   Appendix G: Pre-Interview Script ............................................................................................... 233   Appendix H: Interview Procedures as per the Adapted Change Interview ................................. 234   Appendix I: Debriefing Script Following the Interview ............................................................. 237   Appendix J: Thank You Letter with Local, Free or Low Cost Counselling Services ................. 238   Appendix K: Debriefing Script Following the Reviewing of the Analysis................................. 239   TILL WE HAVE VOICES viii Acknowledgments Firstly, I would like to thank each of the participants – Rachelle, Kara, Tage, J. P., Sarah and Deborah – whose lived experiences are at the very heart of this project. You have contributed so much of your time and emotional energy to share the powerful and affecting stories of your journeys toward hope, healing, and restoration. I have been deeply impacted, and your stories continue to ring in my ears with tones of courage, depth, and honesty. I owe profound thanks to the team of individuals who have been partners and collaborators in this project from its inception. To the members of the research team, Abigail, Jen, Lisa, Maddy, Kate, Ryan, and Stephen, thank you for your meticulous and critical readings and for your remarkably creative contributions to this project. Your astute and compelling insights captured the wealth of your experiences and work which, in turn, provided both the intellectual and personal sustenance for the moving and challenging task of plotting the landscape of struggle and hope in the aftermath of psychological trauma. My thanks also go to Danielle Broeren and Ya-Chun Chi for their very valuable suggestions and assistance at the onset of the analysis stage. I want to thank Joanne Desrosiers for her help with the transcriptions of the interviews for this project. To Gillian Drader and Lynne Nelson, I have been so privileged to have a ringside seat for how you engage in sacred and personal encounters which allow people to really open up and be with their tough stuff in safe and healing spaces. You have instructed me in the “wisdom of tenderness” through your practice of coming alongside others in their journeys to become more authentic and wholly present people on their paths. I am humbled and inspired by witnessing how you completely orient your lives around connection and presence, everything bent towards TILL WE HAVE VOICES ix envisioning health and wholeness, grounded in grace, with compassion and strength. You love and care beautifully. A sincere thank you to Leah-Rose Hartman, who with great patience and generosity, taught me so much of what I know about wholeness. Her scrupulous and imaginative vision for all her clients in the work of recovery never ceases to inspire me and guide me. To Brenda Devries, I have often said that I do not really have heroes because people are always changing and I do not think labels like that are helpful. Nonetheless, I do find certain spirits to be life-giving, affirming, expansive and electric. I have inspirations. Brenda, the truth is that you inspire me to the utmost. Thank you for taking such keen interest in this project. It is a true treat, a dream of epic proportions to have your input and be able to incorporate your many insights into my writing. To Mihaela Launeanu, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When my soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense” (Rumi, A Great Wagon). Your presence is bound to the fabric of this project, Mihaela. Thank you for remaining reliably devoted, not only to the process of this research but also to me. Because of you, I never came adrift from what I have always judged to be my true self. To Janelle Kwee, it is amid our conversations that I can, in a profound sense, return home. I feel such comfortable belonging in your gravity and kindness. I derive courage from the honest, loving and supportive nature of your presence. In our time together, you have succeeded in making more consistently available to me the important truths which the wider world oft ignores and which my distracted and irresolute self has trouble holding on to. Your bold, wise and deeply moral approach to research encourages and enforces the aspirations within TILL WE HAVE VOICES x me, giving me ambitions and reasons to feel spirited and hopeful. Thank you not only for amplifying and solidifying those essential values underlying this project, but most of all for your generous and unflagging support of the process involved in producing this work. I have likened it to a wrestling match. It is just over when it is over. Thank you for trusting me to get through it. Along the way, you have wielded your guidance in such a generative capacity. You have provided me with hospitality, rich and compassionate feedback, as well as a hardy belief in my abilities even when my enthusiasm and confidence lagged. Without you and your unwavering pronouncement regarding the “goodness” of this project, I may have faltered. Now, together, we can say of this research and of the stories which constitute it, “Gukora ni bwiza” – the work is good. To Marvin McDonald (“Mac”), your fierce passion for this project served to direct me beyond that which is preternaturally cerebral and towards the preternaturally visceral and embodied. Your contributions were marked by integrity and vitality; they spoke to me of the highest hopes I can have for this project and through this, I felt inwardly liberated. Indeed, your insights helped align me to prescient and transcendental versions of this work and connect me to the most important, evanescent sides of myself. To Janelle Drisner, my colleague, my friend, my Anam Cara – in order to engage this process I needed to as, as van Manen wrote, “enter the dark, the space of the text, in the hope of seeing what cannot really be seen, hearing what cannot really be heard, touching what cannot really be touched. [Indeed], darkness [was] the method.” Thank you a million, million times over for entering into those dark places with me, for holding the flashlight over my shoulder as we rolled out the map for navigating this great big sea of endless and beautiful paradoxes. Without your endless investment and encouragement, this project would not have seen the light TILL WE HAVE VOICES xi of day. I really haven’t the words to articulate such full-hearted gratitude, but here I am making an effort to. I trust you to believe it. To Chelsea Beyer, thank you for your impressive and invigorating perspectives in crucial moments. I would also like to express tremendous gratitude to Willow Glasier and Melissa Epp for being my backbone when I so desperately needed it. I think we could all do with being held more often. Finally, I would like to thank my family members–Dad, Mom, Michael and Sarah–for their forbearance, love and support in the midst of this dramatic season. I am blessed beyond measure to be nestled in among such all-loving, all-accepting, empathetic human beings. Indeed, all of my achievements are ours. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 2 Chapter 1: Introduction The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. . . . When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak openly, nor let us answer. Till that need can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? —C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces In colloquial speech, we oft use the phrase, “A part of me thinks/feels/wants/knows . . . while another part of me . . . .” We understand well what it feels to be split between multiple aspects of our selves, to experience what Kalsched (1996) calls the “inner symbolic space between various parts of the inner world” (p. 35). We are either not entirely aware or not very disconcerted by this idea of a multiplicity of selves as we go on in our daily lives attempting to wrangle parts of ourselves into cooperation regarding how we should act, what we should say or do, how we will choose between this or that, and whether we should pursue this endeavor or that one. Although this may be a part of our daily experience in many ways, the phenomenon of being “split” can become deeply problematic in more extreme cases. In trauma, the split is not only deep, but also severing. Trauma-related splitting is a cleaving of the internal self which then, in turn, gives rise to a felt sense of numbness and dissociation (Fisher, 2014). Trauma, which overwhelms our self-regulatory capacities and our capabilities for making sense of what is happening in our environment, drives us to depend on our abilities to alter consciousness when soothing is needed and on the body’s innate “fault lines” for compartmentalizing overwhelming TILL WE HAVE VOICES 3 experiences (van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2004, 2006). Continued alternations in consciousness and compartmentalization in the service of anxiety and avoidance can, over time, foster a profoundly disjointed sense of self (Fisher, 2014). We begin to feel deeply absent in our very presence. Soon, we are unfamiliar even to ourselves. Murakami (2002), in his novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, writes of this experience, this breakdown or dissolution of the self: I’m writing this letter at an outdoor café on a side street in Rome, sipping espresso as thick as the devil’s sweat, and I have this strange feeling that I’m not myself anymore. It’s hard to put into words, but I guess it’s like I was fast asleep, and somebody came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling . . . . My eyes tell me I’m the same old me, but something’s different from usual. Not that I can clearly recall what “usual” was. Ever since I stepped off the plane I can’t shake this very real, deconstructive illusion. (p. 71) According to the structural dissociation model (van der Hart et al., 2004, 2006), symptoms of fragmentation, depersonalization, out of body experiences, failures of integration, and internal conflict between parts of the self are all to be expected as a legacy of traumatic experience in addition to the more common intrusive, numbing, and autonomic symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD; Fisher, 2014). As a result, the core impediments to resolution for individuals who have suffered serious trauma centre around not only known PTSD symptoms, but also manifestations of internal splitting; for example, functioning highly at work while regressing in therapy, alternately idealizing and devaluing significant others or even the therapist, high intelligence coupled with poor judgment, and so forth. These individuals may also show patterns of indecision or self-sabotage reflecting internal struggles between parts. This may be exemplified in an inability to make small everyday decisions, difficulty committing to TILL WE HAVE VOICES 4 significant others, frequent job or career changes, success in life alternating with failure or disability, high-functioning alternating with decompensation, hard-working in therapy but selfdestructive outside of it, and so forth. (Fisher, 2014). This research operates on the understanding that trauma dismembers – it dismembers what is whole in ourselves and in our relationships with others and with the world (Längle, 2015). Trauma “tears at the fabrics of our life and can shatter our perceptions of reality” (METIV, n.d., para. 1). To “re-member” is to move towards an embodied and felt sense of wholeness. In re-membering, we seek to transcend the split experienced as a result of trauma and to resist the abstraction of the embodied experience in the sense of reduced or distorted interoceptive awareness. We reach across the gaping disconnect of “I” as subject and “me” as object (James, 1980) in an attempt to regain the privileged access we typically have to our own inner states, but which, for individuals who have suffered trauma, had been eroded in the context of autonomic dysregulation, dissociative switching between internal parts, alterations in consciousness (spacing out, numbing, and disconnection) and intense struggles between parts (Fisher, 2014). At the heart of this project are the narratives of individuals who have done just that – reached across the abyss and found that there was, in fact, something to touch, to feel, and to connect to – themselves. These individuals are those who have endured the ordeals of trauma and now emerge, not only having grappled with the devastating toll of their traumatic experiences but also having confronted the pervasive inhibitions that had kept them from living a fully embodied life. They sought to overcome the dismembering effects of trauma and, utilizing a body-based therapy that combines active imagination, the juxtaposition of ego states in time, and a visual time line of memories (Pace, 2012), have come to experience a more embodied and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 5 felt sense of internal coherence and integration as well as rapid healing. These individuals speak to the reestablished ability to meaningfully experience their own internal states in such a way that establishes congruent connections between various aspects of the self. Their stories attest to the experience of re-membering in the process of undergoing therapy. For these participants, therapy seemed to help regenerate their ability to engage in an “embodied reflexivity.” This, in turn, provided them the psychological technology that was needed to reflexively locate and interrogate the impact of their felt experience of therapy on the process of re-membering. Each of the six individuals whom I1 interviewed for the purposes of this study spoke astutely, insightfully, and beautifully about their experience of overcoming the towering odds which stood before them as each of them sought to reclaim her2 unique sense of self and her ability to experience herself as really being in life. Thus, each of their stories lends itself to a compelling analysis of trauma and the process of healing. Using the Listening Guide method, the research team and I sought to identify emergent voices of healing in the participants’ narratives. Voice, in feminist scholarship, is regarded as a metaphor for the embodied sense of self. It seemed 11 I intentionally utilize first-person pronouns to indicate my own voice in the research. In accordance with the relational, voice-centred approach of the Listening Guide method, I embrace the passionate subjectivity of personally engaging with the research in full awareness that my experiences, beliefs, knowledge, opinions, and proclivities in terms of scholarship interest predispose me to view phenomena and to interpret information in a certain way. As a researcher, I am implicated in how I view research. Rather than avoiding what I am seeing and feeling and turning away from the emerging questions, I allow myself to be moved by the research; rather than silencing myself in the experience of relationship with the individuals whom I will interview, I reflexively distinguish my voice from that of the other person; rather than ignoring the psychological struggles I am hearing and feeling in listening to the participants in this study, I become aware of how they might affect the conversation. 2 Because the methodology used in this study is in the feminist tradition, and because various collaborators of this project, including myself, my supervisor, and various members of the research team are women, I have chosen to use feminine pronouns. This is in no way meant to be exclusive or sexist (in fact, not all participants in this study were women); rather, it is meant to shape the text to be as fitting and relevant as possible to this study. It is my intention that the tone of the text reflects the voices of those who made this project what it is. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 6 appropriate to utilize this method given this study’s focus on the embodied experience of remembering. I conducted this study with the intent of eliciting the experience of individuals who have struggled to find healing and wholeness in the aftermath of trauma – a move that entailed analysis as well as the recording of stories. I believe that the purpose of this study was to honour, value, and draw lessons regarding human strength and resilience from the narratives of the participants, for, as Ackermann (2003) puts it, “it is in stories that the validity of a host of very diverse experiences is found” (p. xvi). Though one of the hallmarks of trauma is a feeling of “inescapable shock” which renders individuals who have endured trauma less (if at all) able to speak of their experiences, the participants in this study entered into therapy expectantly, grasping the possible and refusing to disengage. Like Jacob from the Bible, wresting and refusing to let go until something sacred and revitalizing occurred (see Genesis 32:22-31), they grappled with their experience until, in the end, they were able to feel, touch, and fully embody that deep sense of their reconstituted selves. Faced with the experiential repercussions of trauma, these participants sought, with great courage and perseverance, to engage therapy as a means of rebelling against that painful sense of self-alienation and a felt disconnection to the world and others. In so doing, they have been able to regain an elaborated and integrated sense of self. Their gift to us is the stories they each tell about their subjective and embodied experience of being in therapy, overcoming trauma, and reconnecting to the full potential of their personhood. Having laboured, like Jacob, to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of their souls, which they had, over the course of enduring, grappling with, and, finally, overcoming trauma, been saying over and over, these individuals now speak their stories which resound with the fierce TILL WE HAVE VOICES 7 élan vital of Dylan Thomas’ renowned poem, equal parts demanding and heartening: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Thomas, 1952, p. 18). As suggested by Lewis (1985) in his retelling of the classic myth of Cupid and Psyche, we cannot encounter life and the lived experience, nor can we truly see what is, till we have faces. In this study, “faces” was the participants’ embodied sense of self; and their voice, regained in the process of therapy, was the metaphor intended to indicate their capacity to connect to this embodied sense of self, meaningfully engage with this embodied sense of self, and then communicate this sense of self to others. Till we have voices, our capacity to encounter one another in the fullness of both our own and others’ personhood is improbable if not impossible. How do we engage one another, in embodied conversation, till we have voices? The emphasis of this study was to encounter these individuals and to hear and understand their embodied, lived experience of re-membering by listening to their voices. I end this section with an excerpt from Shane Koyczan’s rousing poem to remind himself of his own capacity to speak and be heard: Dear me, there will be another breath. Dear me, silence is not a song you should know all the words to. Dear me, this is you, me, side step calamity like a matador taking on a bullet. Rise. (2014, p. 16) TILL WE HAVE VOICES 8 Chapter 2: Literature Review Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood. —C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 1985 In order to provide appropriate context for this study, I will review the relevant literature and draw connections between trauma, the felt experience of violent destruction, disempowerment and disconnection, the process of re-embodiment and reconnection, and the use of Lifespan Integration therapy with clients who have experienced healing and restoration. I will begin by providing a brief overview of historical perspectives on the definition of trauma. I will continue by expounding trauma from a transformative-relational perspective vis-à-vis Herman’s (1992) work on highlighting the disempowering and disconnective aspects of traumatic experiences. Next, I will discuss the “dismembering” effects of trauma, which overwhelm and disorganize the human system and incapacitate the synthesizing function of the mind. Following this, I will describe the “lived experience” of trauma and highlight how the overwhelming emotional states of individuals who have experienced trauma can instigate a dissociation reaction to protect against unbearable pain. I will then go on to discuss the need to “come back” from this dissociative state of being which, ultimately, deprives an individual of opportunities for successful coping. Subsequently, I will outline the concept of embodiment and the potential positive effects of reconnecting to one’s sense of self, to one’s body, to one’s felt experience of living and being alive, and to one’s relationship with others and the world. I will also outline the concept of “voice.” I will address voice in the context of one’s embodied sense of self and describe how voice impacts one’s felt relationship to self and to others. Following this, I will highlight the literature on Lifespan Integration therapy, a relatively new psychotherapy approach TILL WE HAVE VOICES 9 aimed at the reintegration of ego states or “self-concepts,” and will note its pertinence to research at the intersection of trauma, integration, re-embodiment, and healing. Finally, I will offer a summary and provide a rationale and purpose for this study. Historical Perspectives on Understanding Trauma Peter Levine (1997), in his seminal work, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, observes the prevalence of trauma and states that “many people . . . have at some point in their lives experienced [the] inexplicable [effects of trauma] or observed something similar in a person close to them” (p. 23). Perhaps because of the disconcerting, often confusing, presentation of traumatic reactions, “the ‘helping’ professions [have tended] to describe trauma in terms of the event that caused it, instead of defining it in its own terms” (Levine, 1997, p. 23). Although it has been seriously suggested by the lead developer of DSM-III, Gerald Rosen (2008), that PTSD no longer be defined by the initiating event, the reality is that PTSD was created as a result of popular pressure and its expansion has been for the same reason. In the United States, the diagnosis of PTSD was part of an attempt to make sense of, and ultimately politicize, the psychological damage done to veterans of the Vietnam War. Indeed, “the task force that designed the new diagnostic category . . . was comprised of psychiatrists who were particularly sensitive to the problems afflicting Vietnam veterans” (Fassin & Rechtman, 2009, p. 88). The task force included Robert Jay Lifton (1973), who had written a book, Home from the War, recounting the psychopathological effects of serving in this dreadful, filthy, unnecessary war. Key to developing a psychiatric category for capturing the symptoms of veterans returning from the Vietnam war was highlighting that “rather than a sign of cowardice or the consequence of prior mental illness, PTSD was the result of average men being thrown into a situation in which every rustle in the leaves could indicate the presence of death, where the encounter with TILL WE HAVE VOICES 10 mutilated bodies was an everyday occurrence, and where the feeling of being surrounded by invisible enemies was a reality, not paranoia” (Calford, 2015, para. 8; see also Fassin & Rechtman, 2009). Since its inception, PTSD continues to be “at the center of public as well as professional discussion” (American Psychological Association [APA], 2013, para. 1). In more recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), there seems to be movement, albeit not much change, in the diagnosis of PTSD. In DSM-5, PTSD is no longer a fear or anxiety disorder. Intriguingly, PTSD has moved toward the category of a dissociative disorder. Although the move has not yet been completed, Friedman (2013) points out that locating trauma and stress related disorders next to dissociative disorders in the DSM metastructure is no accident. The thinking of many seems to be that in the future they will be more closely related. “This may be an attempt to come to terms with Chronic-PTSD, or DESNOS (disorders of extreme stress not otherwise specified), championed by Judith Herman, Bessel van Kolk, and others” (Calford, 2015, para. 3). As Friedman (2013) puts it, “I recall overhearing a comment after my . . . presentation in 2011 on DSM-5, that the PTSD criteria were becoming more ‘DESNOS-ish’” (p. 524). In the midst of parsing out the diagnostic criteria for and categorization of PTSD, Levine argues that we still do not have a way to accurately define trauma. As such, it can be exceedingly difficult to recognize. Levine (1997) states that “the healing of trauma depends upon the recognition of its symptoms. Because traumatic symptoms are largely the result of primitive responses, they are often difficult to recognize. People don’t need a definition of trauma; we need an experiential sense of how it feels” (p. 24) Though it has been, and continues to be, important that we seek to understand trauma in a way that allows us to care for people suffering from the psychopathological effects of trauma–which often manifest as the symptoms outlined in TILL WE HAVE VOICES 11 the DSM–symptoms are not a good way to define a disorder, much less, contrary to the definition in DSM-III, a very real and often distressing element within the spectrum of human experience. We now turn to a body of research on psychological traumatization which provides a transformative-relational perspective for understanding the lived experience of trauma. A Transformative-Relational Framework for Surveying Trauma In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman (1992) writes that, “the core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others” (p. 133). When trauma occurs, there is a violent obliteration of an integral whole – one’s sense of self, feelings of safety, and trust in herself, in others and in the world (Längle, 2015). There is a felt destruction of something dear and/or vitally important, the sensation of something being torn apart or annihilated, a sensation that one’s basic foundations for living and existing are being split. Trauma, by its nature, overwhelms the human capacity to maintain the integrity of the self during prolonged agonizing experiences (Morse & Mitcham, 1998). Sustained trauma can produce profound alternations in the victim’s identity; “all the psychological structures of self – the image of the body, the internalized images of others, and the values and ideals that lend a person a sense of coherence and purpose – have been invaded and systematically broken down” (Herman, 1992, p. 93). There is a sense of loss or impairment, thereafter, which pervades one’s lived experience (Längle, 2008). Herman describes this felt destruction, and the feeling of one’s identity being torn apart or annihilated, in her discussion of survivors who were once held captive in concentration camps: Even after release from captivity, the victim cannot assume her former identity. Whatever new identity she develops in freedom must include the memory of her enslaved self. Her image of her body must include a body that can be controlled and violated. Her image of TILL WE HAVE VOICES 12 herself in relation to others must include a person who can lose and be lost to others. And her moral ideals must coexist with knowledge of the capacity for evil, both within others and within herself. If, under duress, she has betrayed her own principles or has sacrificed her other people, she now has to live with the image of herself as an accomplice of the perpetrator, a “broken” person. The result, for most victims, is a contaminated identity. (1992, p. 93-94) In the face of staggering psychological losses, a lasting imprint of the traumatic event comes to be indelibly etched, a ghostly trace that generates its own haunting. Feelings of guilt, fear, and impotence are common in the aftermath of trauma; however it is the intolerable effect of shame that most often perpetuates inner devastation (Straker, Watson, & Robinson, 2002). Shame is a response to helplessness, to the violation, in some cases, of basic bodily integrity, and to the indignity suffered at the moment of trauma (Lewis, 1971). It points to the invasion, injury, and defilement of the individual’s sense of self, and to a felt destruction of her fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of self, and the meaningful order of creation (Herman, 1992). People who have experienced trauma feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. A traumatic event then is likely, at a subjective level, to register as an oppressive and distressing experience reflecting personal, social, ideological, and/or spiritual disintegration and fragmentation (Straker, Watson, & Robinson, 2002). A sense of radical distrust seeps into every relationship, from the individual’s felt relationship to herself, to the most intimate familial bonds, to even the more abstract affiliations of community and religion (Herman, 1992). Ultimately, trauma “destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others” (Herman, 1992, p. 53). There is a rupture, a sense of alienation and disconnection. The psychological TILL WE HAVE VOICES 13 faculties, which were formed and sustained in the context of human relationships, are damaged and deformed by traumatic experiences. These faculties include one’s basic capacities for trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy (Herman, 1992). Although the damage to relational life had once been thought of as a secondary effect of trauma, practitioners and scholars are coming to see that “traumatic events have primary effects not only on the psychological structures of the self, but also on the systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community” (Herman, 1992, p. 51). Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships, and according to Herman (1992), “recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation” (p. 133). Similarly, Jack (1991) points out that interpersonal intimacy, not separation, is the profound organizer of one’s lived experience, particularly for women. Indeed, she contends that patterns of self-censorship and anger resulting in the absence of intimacy can lead to a stifling of impulses and a disconnection from one’s authentic selves which, in turn, undermines the potential for healing connection and relationships. Herman (1992) propones that it is by enacting renewed connections in a social context, with other people, that a survivor of trauma rebuilds a sense of trust in herself, in others, and in the world, and experiences the sense of human community which trauma destroyed. Trauma can be difficult to overcome, however, as the effects of a traumatic experience are often extensive and enduring. Moreover, memories associated to a traumatic experience have several unusual characteristics that render these memories deeply problematic, unbearably painful to encounter, and highly resistant to integration and assimilation. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 14 Dismemberment Traumatic memories are not encoded like ordinary memories. They are predominantly comprised of imagery and bodily sensation, and they are characterized by the absence of a verbal, linear narrative (van der Kolk, 1988). There is a frozen and wordless quality to traumatic memories which Doris Lessing (1975) captures in her portrait of her father, a World War I combat veteran: “His childhood and young man’s memories, kept fluid, were added to, grew, as living memories do. But his war memories were congealed in stories that he told again and again, with the same words and gestures, in stereotyped phrases . . . . This dark region in him, fateruled, where nothing was true but horror, was expressed inarticulately, in brief, bitter exclamations of rage, incredulity, betrayal” (p. 87). Exposure to trauma places individuals in circumstances of overwhelming terror which, in turn, seems to mobilize a highly visual and enactive form of memory (Herman, 1992). Traumatic memories are, therefore, encoded as vivid sensations and images. Robert Jay Lifton (1980), who studied survivors of Hiroshima, civilian disasters, and combat, describes these traumatic memories as “indelible images” or “death imprints.” These imprints of the traumatic moment, often crystalized in a particular set of images, will often “break spontaneously into consciousness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep” (Herman, 1992, p. 37). Lifton (1980) calls this the “ultimate horror” (p. 48). The intense, unwanted intrusion of fragmentary sensations and images without context give the traumatic memory a heightened reality (Herman, 1992). Tim O’Brien (1990), a combat veteran of the Vietnam War describes this: “I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember the pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and [it] stays with me” (p. 89). TILL WE HAVE VOICES 15 These unusual features of traumatic memories appear to be based in alternations in the neurophysiological system. Because of asymmetrical deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (the part of the brain associated with executive functioning), individuals who have endured trauma cannot analyze their experiences of trauma and associate them other areas of knowledge (Davidson & Parker, 2001; van der Kolk, 2006; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995; van der Kolk et al., 1996). It appears that it is precisely this inability to transform and integrate the particular emotions, images, sensations, and muscular reactions related to a trauma that leaves these individuals experiencing their traumas over and over again without appreciable decreases in their distress for months, years, and even decades after the actual event occurred (Janet, 1889, 1894; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995; van der Kolk, Hopper, & Osterman, 2001; van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1991). Long after the danger is past, people who have experienced trauma are dominated by this “idée fixe.” Their memories of the traumatic event are recapitulated continuously without assimilation into an ongoing life story. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can evoke memories of the traumatic incident, which often return with all the vividness and emotional intensity of the original event (Herman, 1992). Mardi Horowitz (1986) suggests that unassimilated traumatic experiences are stored in a kind of “active memory,” which has an “intrinsic tendency to repeat the representation of contents . . . . The trauma is resolved only when the survivor develops a new mental ‘schema’ for understanding what has happened” (p. 93-94). “Normal memory, like all psychological phenomena, is an action; essentially . . . the action of telling a story” (Janet, 1919/1925, p. 661). In the case of traumatic memories, however, intense emotional reactions overwhelm the individual’s capacity for concerted, coordinated and purposeful activity. Janet (1919/1925) explains: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 16 A situation has not been satisfactorily liquidated . . . until we have achieved, not merely an outward reaction through our movements, but also an inward reaction through the words we address to ourselves, through the organization of the recital of the event to others and to ourselves, and through the putting of this recital in its places as one of the chapters in our personal history . . . . Strictly speaking, then, one who retains a fixed idea of a happening cannot be said to have a “memory” . . . it is only for convenience that we speak of it as a “traumatic memory.” (p. 661-663) Most theorists have speculated that the repetitive reliving of the traumatic experience represents a “spontaneous, unsuccessful attempt at healing” (Herman, 1992, p. 41). In this, the person who has undergone trauma “remains confronted by a difficult situation, one in which [she] has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which [her] adaptation has been imperfect, so that [she] continues to make efforts at adaptation” (Janet, 1919/1925, p. 603). This repetitive intrusion of the traumatic event and the persistent attempts to recreate moments of the event in order to diminish the distress of intractable pain is described by Kardiner and Spiegel (1947) as a “fixation on the trauma” (p. 201). There is a need to assimilate or “liquidate” the traumatic experience, yet the unwelcome intrusion of the event, over time, evokes “a feeling of indifference, emotional detachment, and profound passivity in which the person relinquishes all initiative and struggle” (Herman, 1992, p. 43). A continuing encounter with the intense emotional reactions associated with the traumatic event can overwhelm and incapacitate the synthesizing function of the mind (Janet, 1889). “The whole apparatus for concerted, coordinated and purposeful activity is smashed” (Kardiner & Spiegel, 1947, p. 186). The person who has suffered trauma experiences a “kind of fragmentation, whereby the trauma tears apart of complex system of self-protection that normally functions in an integrated fashion” (Herman, TILL WE HAVE VOICES 17 1992, p. 34). In his conceptualization of the intrusion phenomena, Janet implicitly recognizes that “helplessness constitutes the essential insult of trauma, and that restitution requires the restoration of a sense of efficacy and power” (Herman, 1992, p. 41). Herman (1992) highlights the manner in which psychoanalyst Paul Russell “conceptualizes the emotional rather than the cognitive experience of the trauma as the driving force of the repetition compulsion” (p. 41). In revisiting the “site” (i.e., the memory) of the traumatic experience, the person hopes to relive and, effectively, master the overwhelming feelings of the traumatic moment (Russell, 1990). What is reproduced in the repetition compulsion is “what the person needs to feel in order to repair the injury” (Russell, 1990). Although reliving a trauma may offer an opportunity for mastery, survivors of trauma more often experience intense emotional distress when confronted with aspects of their traumatic experience, whether in the form of intrusive memories, dreams, or actions. This is because, as Herman (1992) explains, “reliving a traumatic experience carries with it the emotional intensity of the original event” (p. 42). In the face of unresolved feelings of terror, helpless rage, or simply the “undifferentiated adrenaline rush of mortal danger” (Herman, 1992, p. 42), the individual who has undergone trauma is continually buffeted by high intensity emotions that are outside the range of ordinary emotional experience. An individual reliving her experience of trauma is inundated with a terror and rage that are qualitatively different than ordinary fear and anger (Herman, 1992). These emotions overwhelm the ordinary capacity to bear feelings, and they can be utterly debilitating. Because reliving a traumatic experience can evoke such unbearable pain, people will go to great lengths in order to avoid it. According to Herman (1992), “the ordinary human response to danger is a complex, integrated system of reactions, encompassing both body and mind” (p. 34). Traumatic events are TILL WE HAVE VOICES 18 extraordinary, however, in the sense that they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Whether the traumatic event involves being taken by surprised, being trapped, or being exposed to the point of exhaustion, or whether it includes violation or injury, exposure to extreme violence, or witnessing grotesque death, the salient characteristic of trauma is its proclivity to inspire helplessness and terror. In the face of trauma, person feeling helpless and terrified must escape her situation not by action in the real world, but by altering her state of consciousness. This is often called dissociation. Events continue to register in her awareness, but the person undergoes a “surrender of voluntary action, suspension of initiative and critical judgment, subjective detachment or calm, enhanced perception of imagery, altered sensation, including numbness and analgesia, and distortion of reality, including depersonalization, derealization, and change in the sense of time” (Hilgard, as cited in Herman, 1992, p. 43). Although this serves as a protection from unbearable pain during the occurrence of the traumatic event, continued dissociative reactions to memories of the trauma deprive individuals of opportunities for successful coping that might mitigate the effects of the traumatic experience (Janet, 1911). In fact, the constrictive effects of dissociation apply not only to thoughts, memories, and states of consciousness; they apply to one’s entire capacity for purposeful action and initiative. In this way, dissociation can narrow and deplete one’s quality of life and can, ultimately, perpetuate the effects of the traumatic experience (Kardiner & Spiegel, 1947). Virginia Woolf (1975), in her classic portrait of a shell-shocked veteran, depicts the alienation and inner deadness experienced by an individual who has suffered trauma: “Beautiful,” [his wife] would murmur, nudging Septimus that he might see. But beauty was behind a pane of glass. Even taste (Rezia liked ices, chocolates, sweet things) had no relish to him. He put down his cup on the little marble table. He looked at people outside; TILL WE HAVE VOICES 19 happy they seemed, collecting in the middle of the street, shouting, laughing, squabbling over nothing. But he could not taste, he could not feel. In the tea-shop among the tables and the clattering waiters the appalling fear came over him – he could not feel. (p. 132133) As the individual seeks to gain a felt sense of reparation and restoration while “caught between the extremes of amnesia or of reliving the trauma, between floods of intense, overwhelming feeling and arid states of no feeling at all, between irritable, impulsive action and complete inhibition of action” (Herman, 1992, p. 47), there is a need to reorient around a present-ness, an immediate felt sense of being grounded in the here and now in one’s own body, becoming reconnected to a felt meaning in one’s lived experience (Längle, 2015). If trauma produces the phenomenological sense of being disconnected from a previously familiar experience, whether of the world or of the body/self, and gives rise to a feeling of derealisation or depersonalization respectively (Noy, 1979), then recovery must involve a reconnection to one’s self, to values and ambitions once contained and exercised in and through oneself, and to erstwhile cherished ideological and spiritual beliefs which can provide a felt sense of philosophical ease where trauma once proliferated a sense of meaningless, injustice and arbitrariness in life (Längle, 2015; see also Brothers, 1995; Straker, Watson, & Robinson, 2002;). Re-embodiment and reconnection are being outlined here as core tenets of a recovery that promotes the empowerment of the survivor, a restitution of her sense of self, and the re-creation of the psychological faculties that were damaged and deformed by the traumatic experience. In the next section, I will briefly outline the concept of embodiment, and how this relates to reestablishing one’s felt sense of connection to self, others, and the world. I will also outline the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 20 concept of voice as demarcated by feminist theory in counselling psychology, focusing on the ways in which voice is an expression of personhood and agency in a relational context. Embodiment and Voice “Internal experiences and their physical expression are unbreakably united. ‘The first fact . . . is that the elements of the human soul and the particles of a human body are indivisible’” (Moore, 1984, p. 17). Similarly, Shibutani (1961) notes that “all somatic experiences are somehow related to one’s conception of [herself] and there is continuity in [her] life to the extent that [she] can organize them into some kind of unit. Thus, one’s body becomes the nexus of the various experiences that enable [her] to identify [herself] as a person of a particular sort” (p. 222; see also Synnott, 1993). The “ground” for a person’s sense of self, both in terms of the somatic sense but also in terms of the symbolic sense, is negotiated, made sense of, and then expressed through the body (Ladkin, 2010). Drawing from both Ginsberg’s (1984) and Wilson’s (1988) writings, Ladkin (2010) proposes that “the embodiment of one’s ‘true self’ demands the interaction of an inner-informed somatic sense of the body with symbolically mediated sensemaking processes informed by the external context” (p. 10; see also Damasio, 1994). The key point about knowing and enacting one’s self is that a sense of “being with oneself” or embodying one’s sense of self mediates the relationship between an internal personal realm and the external world in which the self operates (see Csordas, 1994; Farnell, 1999; Jacobson-Widding, 1991; Kwee & Längle, 2013; Längle, 2003; Lock, 1993; Marcoulatos, 2001). Consistent with a conceptualization of the embodied self in terms of its possibility to be in the world and express itself through its being, both with its bodily presence and through its dialogical encounter with the world, Brown and Gilligan (1992) speak of embedding one’s voice in the body, in experience, and in the realities of relationship, of time and of place. Our voices TILL WE HAVE VOICES 21 are grounded in their physicality – their sounds, resonances, vibrations – and the re-sounding of our voices is impacted by the physics of relationship and is affected by the relational acoustics surrounding us: whether we feel heard or not heard, and how our feelings and thoughts, brought out into the open, are received by others and responded to by ourselves and by other people. In struggling to speak and to be listened to, heard, and at least partially understood, we seek to underscore the realities of our lived experience. Our speaking carries with it the polyphony of voice, the complexities of the lived experience, as well as the “ever-changing or movingthrough-time quality of the sense of self and the experience of relationship” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 23). With our voices, we convey the multifaceted actuality of our lived experience, and with our voices we make known what it means to be us, what it feels like, what comes up for us, how we are impacted. Maintaining voice has embodied significance which, for Bourdieu (1990a, 1990b) and Merleau-Ponty (1962), is the characteristic mode of living and being in psycho-corporeal existence. Voice, as a channel of psychic expression, is polyphonic and complex. In voice, “the nonlinear, recursive, nontransparent, play, interplay, and orchestration of feelings and thoughts” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 23) are revealed. When speaking, we grapple with the ability (or inability) to communicate, convey, describe our felt sense and our lived experiences; speaking brings to bear our bodies, our experiences of relationships and how we tell those stories at a particular time, in our societal positions, and with our cultural grounding (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). As we speak, we press into our very beings and ask ourselves, “Can I or can I not be whole and embodied? Am I or am I not allowed the ability to speak my experience in my relationships? Am I or am I not allowed to move freely in the world?” With our voices, we move in and out of relationships; we enact our relational struggles; we embody (or in the case of TILL WE HAVE VOICES 22 silencing, dissociate from) our lived experiences (Gilligan, 2002). When listening for voice, then, we must attune our ears to the voice of the person as a distinct voice – a voice worth listening to. We also listen for the relational story being told. We listen for societal and cultural frameworks and inquire into differences that are psychologically meaningful (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). These differences shape our lived experiences which, in turn, gives rise to our voices. Voice is central to the human way of working – it is our channel of connection, both within ourselves and without, “a pathway that brings the inner psychic world of feelings and thoughts out into the open air of relationship where it can be heard by oneself and by other people” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 20). Moreover, “voice is inherently relational – one does not require a mirror to hear oneself – yet the sounds of one’s voice change in resonance depending on the relational acoustics: whether one is heard or not heard, how one is responded to (by oneself and by other people)” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 20). With freedom and safety, we speak our voices and, in so doing, we enter into relationships; conversely, when we mute our voices and conceal the thoughts and emotions embedded in our voices, we compromise relationships. Gilligan (2002) writes of a seventeen-year-old girl named Iris who struggles to speak her voice: “If I were to say what I was feeling and thinking, no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud” (p.24). In response, Gilligan (2002) asks Iris, “But if you are not saying what you are feeling and thinking, then where are you in these relationships?” (p.24). Gilligan notes a paradox here: Iris has given up relationship to have relationship, muting her voice and concealing herself so that “she” could be with other people. Gilligan (2002) writes: “Her pleasure in these relationships is compromised by her awareness of having sacrificed herself, [becoming] divorced from . . . the pleasure of being a soul in a body living in connection with others” (p. 24). To endure this kind of silencing, to engage in way of speaking or seeing TILL WE HAVE VOICES 23 that is disembodied and outside of relationship, is to sit with the extremely loud, but hollow echoes of one’s no-voice voice (Gilligan, 2002); therefore, our efforts to find ways of speaking about our experiences are characterized, not only by what we say, but also by what we do not say. What is unvoiced or unspoken, because it is out of relationship, tends to get out of perspective and to dominate psychic life (Gilligan, 2011). As Shakespeare (trans. 1977, 4.3.211212) writes in Macbeth, “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’erfraught heart, and bids it break.” The silenced person is inundated with feelings of helplessness and, perhaps, terror; however, unable to speak of it, she must very deliberately attempt to avoid it. These attempts, which are self-protective in intent, become a powerful, but extremely costly way of ensuring the soul’s survival (Gilligan, 2002). Dissociation and disconnection from oneself, others, and the world too often result “in a narrowing of consciousness, a withdrawal from engagement with others, and an impoverished life” (Herman, 1992, p. 42). Trauma and Voice Being injured or hurt is one aspect of human reality. We often deal with this aspect of reality in a silent way. We need to endorse the ability to speak about what is hurting and/or painful. In the face of trauma, however, we are often at a loss of response (Längle, 2015). The embodied sense of self, represented in feminist scholarship as “voice,” is devastated by trauma. According to Bessel van der Kolk (2002a), a number of alterations occur in the brain as a result of trauma. Broca’s area (the part of the brain associated with speech production) does not function properly, and the amygdala (the part of the brain associated with emotional reactions) increases in activity (Rausch et al., 1996). This, in turn, elicits a sense of “speechless terror” in a person who is being triggered into a traumatic memory (Bradshaw, 2002, p. 2). The person is TILL WE HAVE VOICES 24 unable to adequately express the essence of her experiences and emotional reactions associated with the trauma. Instead, she is plagued with the imprint of the traumatic experience which consists of sensations and perceptions that may have no verbal equivalents. The survivor of a traumatic experience(s) feels that she is knee-deep in a muddled conglomeration of disorientating feelings and uncomfortable bodily sensations, and she must struggle against all odds to make sense of a terror and distress that go beyond words. According to Gilligan, “loss of voice is the psychological marker of trauma” (Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009, para. 62). Speaking and listening can be likened to breathing out and breathing in, and psychological troubles come when people start holding their breath, when they cannot take in what others are saying or “let out” what they are feeling and thinking. Gilligan states: “Voice is an instrument of relationship, and in losing voice, one loses relationship. This is what makes trauma so devastating, so isolating” (Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009, para. 66). Towards Re-membering: Lifespan Integration Therapy In the face of trauma, a speechless terror, a felt sense of disembodiment, and the subsequent withdrawal from life and the lived experience, how do we achieve, as Herman (1992) prescribes, a recovery that is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and upon the creation of new connections? Lifespan Integration (LI) therapy, a relatively new psychotherapy approach developed by Peggy Pace (2012), works to foster integration (i.e., a felt sense of re-membering). This thickens one’s experience in the brain-body and core (Pace, 2012). Reconnection to one’s sense of the embodied experience gives rise to voice. As LI is a proposed impetus for this process of re-membering, I begin this section by describing LI therapy. I will also provide a brief overview of its conceptual underpinnings and outline its various components. After then TILL WE HAVE VOICES 25 summarizing the current state of research on LI, I will speak to the ways in which LI has been shown to effectively and holistically address the dismembering effects of trauma. I will situate LI at the intersection of vitality, wholeness, and voice as a means of contextualizing the research study at hand. What is Lifespan Integration therapy?: An overview. Lifespan Integration is a relatively new mode of therapy which targets the neurophysiological processes affected by acute and developmental trauma (Pace, 2009). LI seeks to resolve enduring psychological distress, and it does so by relying on the innate ability of the body-mind to heal itself. The basic hypothesis of LI is conceptually grounded in interpersonal neuroscience (Siegel, 2012), though it makes use of several proven therapeutic factors and techniques, such as the attunement of the therapist to the client, neurological integration through repetition, internal attachment between ego states, and healing through habituation (Pace, 2009). In LI therapy, the goal is to help the client establish a more integrated and coherent sense of self and self’s experiences. This occurs through repetition of one’s timeline in the presence of an emotionally attuned therapist. This process is also said to facilitate the reparation of memory gaps and dissociation which have resulted from the presence of trauma and/or the absence of a stable, supportive attachment figure. LI is a unique form of therapy in several regards. First, it uses a timeline containing scenes from the client’s life, year by year. The therapist refers to this timeline to help the client bring up images of herself participating in these various events across time. This, in turn, creates a neurological map of the self which allows the client to see or herself as existing continuously through his or her entire lifespan. Through a process of repetitions of the timeline, the client is able to achieve higher levels of neural integration. Second, LI is not, at its essence, a form of “talk therapy.” Rather than encouraging clients to talk about the past, LI therapists make use of TILL WE HAVE VOICES 26 the mind-body affect bridge, which tracks somatic markers to locate past traumatic events. These events are “stored” in the body, but not integrated in the self system. Once the client is connected to the memory of a past traumatic event, she engages in a reconstruction of the autobiographical trauma narrative, using imagery and active imagination rather than a verbal narrative. Third, LI therapy seeks to help clients work through the effects of past traumas without re-traumatization. This is an important aspect of LI therapy. One central challenge in using talk therapy for resolving trauma-related psychological distress is lessening the continued trauma-related sensory input that an individual experiences in order to allow her to talk about the trauma and its associated emotions without re-experiencing it (van der Kolk, 2002a). LeDoux (2002) explains that re-experiencing extremely intense emotional states related to a past trauma overwhelms the self-system and causes flooding or dissociation. This can re-traumatize the system, and it does not contribute to healing. Peter Levine (1997), in reference to his work with clients who have experienced trauma, writes: I learned that it was unnecessary to dredge up old memories and relive their emotional pain to heal trauma. In fact, severe emotional pain can be re-traumatizing. What we need to do to be freed from our symptoms and fears is to arouse our deep physiological resources and consciously utilize them. If we remain ignorant of our power to change the course of our instinctual responses in a proactive rather than reactive way, we will continue being imprisoned and in pain. (p. 31) With LI processing, clients move quickly through the memories as they come up. Emotion-laden memories are “touched upon” for the purposes of “hooking into” relevant neural circuitry; however, clients are not expected to dwell in experiences that are overwhelming and terrifying. They are much less expected to talk about it and “process through it” for the purposes of “getting TILL WE HAVE VOICES 27 it all out.” Instead, they move through the timeline. Memories are viewed in quick succession, and over time, repeated “journeys” through the timeline help to organize and stabilize the client’s self system. “As patterns of relations among the components of [the] self-organizing system become increasingly interconnected and well-ordered, it is more capable of maintaining a coherence or organization in relation to variations in the environment” (Schore, 2003, p. 93). Preliminary findings suggest that after engaging the LI protocol by going through the timeline up to eight times in just one session, adult clients report a felt sense of integration, an ability to experience oneself more fully, and feelings of both exhaustion and relief (Thorpe, 2012; Pace, 2012). Indeed, over ten years of anecdotal evidence from LI practitioners in North America, Europe, and Africa suggest that it has promise to be a time-effective, “gentle” (i.e., non-invasive), and efficacious form of trauma therapy (Kwee & Hu, 2014). In her book The Success and Strategies of Lifespan Integration, Cathy Thorpe (2012), a proponent of LI therapy and a longtime practitioner of LI, notes that three outcomes consistently emerge as a result of LI therapy. First, repetition of the timeline reduces the distress of any remembered event. Second, repetition of the timeline successfully resolves unconscious, body-based memories. Third, client change their way of relating to others. Thorpe (2012) attributes these changes to integration taking place during LI therapy, and she suggests that the following three categories of change can be observed in and as a result of therapy: (a) the problem resolves, (b) clients increase their emotional and cognitive awareness, and/or (c) positive results begin to appear in areas that seem unrelated to the presenting issue. According to Thorpe (2012), the foundational hypothesis for change in LI therapy is twofold: (a) “earlier memories influence how the brain processes current events” (p. 27), and (b) “a client who is stuck in troubling thoughts, feelings, and behaviours can solve current situations by resolving earlier memories” (p. 27). TILL WE HAVE VOICES 28 Conceptual underpinnings of LI therapy. According to Pace (2012), “Lifespan Integration . . . is a new therapy which integrates neural structures and fired patterns throughout the body-mind, and across the lifespan. . . . [It] is based on the hypotheses that much psychological dysfunction results from insufficient neural organization” (p. 15-25). When developing LI therapy, Pace (2012) posed the following questions: “When working with adults who were traumatized during developmental stages, how can we best help them to repair neural systems that were damaged? How can we help them to integrate neural networks that remain isolated from each other?” (p. 20). Almost seemingly a direct response, Siegel (2012) remarks, “Regulation results from integration . . . . When the brain links its differentiated circuits to each other, the nervous system achieves homeostasis and develops new levels of intricacy in it functions” (p. 36). LI seeks to achieve integration through a linkage of differentiated parts; this, in turn, builds coherence and harmony, whereas a lack of or impairment to integration produces chaos and rigidity (Siegel, 2014). The processes of LI are influenced by contemporary research findings from attachment theory, and interpersonal neurobiology, which include aspects of neural integration and neuroplasticity, ego-state therapy, body-mind integration, and imagery guidance (Thorpe, 2012). From the attachment perspective, the therapist’s role in LI is to provide a holding environment by being attuned to the needs of the client on a moment-by-moment basis. The therapist must be able to tolerate the client’s various emotional states and be able to help facilitate helpful internal dialogue between the client and his or her child self. The therapist is, as Bowlby (1988) prescribes, “a trusted companion to provide support, encouragement, sympathy, and, on occasion, guidance” (p. 138). The therapist models attuned and compassionate behaviour in being with the client; this, in turn, helps the client to learn how she can tolerate and stay with TILL WE HAVE VOICES 29 herself through her dysregulated states. As the client learns to be with herself and can then enter into a past traumatic scene to be with the younger self as a supporter and helper, she develops a sense of internal attachment. Bowlby (1988) speaks to this phenomenon, albeit not directly nor specifically, when he says, “To remain within easy access of a familiar individual known to be ready and willing to come to our aid in an emergency is clearly a good insurance policy – whatever our age” (p. 27). This interaction between the two selves can be healing and restorative. When the current self “sits” with the younger self and, together, they witness, in quick succession, the various life events denoted by the client-created timeline, the gains are augmented. The timeline helps prove to the “younger self,” but more realistically, to the mindbody system as a whole, that the past traumatic event is over and that the younger self did, in fact, grow up to be the client’s current self. The experience of repeating the timeline over and over again also serves to “shape the function of neural activity in the moment, and can potentially shape the continually changing structure of the brain” (Siegel, 2001, p. 70). By means of timeline repetitions, LI therapy works to change the brain on a neurological level. This is the principle of neuroplasticity. According to Schwartz & Begley (2002), “there is no question that the brain remodels itself throughout life, and that it retains the capacity to change itself as the result not only of passively experienced factors such as enriched environments, but also of changes in the way we behave . . . and the ways we think (p. 253-254). Repetitions of the timeline work to link together, across time, what were a loosely connected series of neural networks. This is in line with Donald Hebb’s (1949) theory of what is now referred to as Hebb’s Law: neurons that fire together wire together. Similarly, Siegel (2012) writes that as various memory cues are activated together, parts of the brain “become ‘associated’ so that activity in one [part of the brain] facilitates activity in the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 30 other” (p. 49). This joint firing of neural networks stimulates “cooperation between brain systems which are involved in various states and experiences, [and links] these interaction through time” (Pace, 2012, p. 21). These links, which Siegel notes are mostly formed in the “associational areas of the neocortex, such as the prefrontal regions . . . form dynamic global maps or complex representations from the input of widely distributed regions in order to establish [an] . . . integration of the self across space and time” (cited in Pace, 2012, p. 21). Although “trauma or neglect experience during childhood can contribute to a lack of connectivity between isolated neural networks which represent separate selves and self-states” (Pace, 2012, p. 25), LI therapy builds the capacity for “self-integration [which], like the processes of the mind itself, is continually created by an interaction of internal neurophysiological processes and interpersonal relationship (Siegel, as cited in Pace, 2012 p. 314). About the components of LI therapy. In the section below, I will briefly outline the key components which comprise LI therapy and LI therapy procedures. Affect bridge. In order to achieve congruence and an integration of the various neural networks that make up the self (LeDoux, 2002), LI procedure begins with the use of an affect bridge to find a memory which is connected to the current problem. Thorpe (2012) defines the affect bridge this way: “The process in which a client identifies a current problem and its associated body feelings, and then follows the mind-body system to the appropriate neural networks associated with the problem” (p. 21). LI’s assumption that the body and mind are able to find problems this way is based on the idea that the mind and the body are an interconnected entity. Thorpe (2012) asserts that “the brain and body are one interrelated system considered the mind” (p. 31-32). Siegel (2014) adds similar thoughts: “Embodied means that the mind is more TILL WE HAVE VOICES 31 than simply what happens in your head—it extends to at least the whole of the body in which ‘you’ live” (para. 3). By engaging with one’s mind-body system, a client is guided through the process of imaginally revisiting a traumatic memory. This will be discussed next. Inner dialogue: Using imagery and active imagination. In LI, the client uses active imagination to intervene in the past. This entails repairing early life experiences and inserting positive imaginal interactions with a new attachment figure (i.e., the client’s adult/current self). The client is invited to “revisit” the past to work with her child self who is, in some ways, frozen or stuck there. The client’s child self does not have a broader vision of the total self system available to her. She is locked into a childhood time frame and is not aware of the changes that have occurred over time. She requires her adult self (i.e., the client’s current self) to do what is needed in order to help her. The LI therapist directs the adult client in the use of active imagination to engage with the child self. The therapist asks the client what is happening in that scene with her child self, how the child self seems to her, what she is doing, and so forth. When working with child states, the therapist acts as the competent adult, using therapeutic skills and a knowledge of children to determine the appropriate interventions that will help the client’s child self who is stuck in the trauma scene. The therapist coaches the adult client in ways to convey safety, support, and caring for her child self. The therapist also provides various suggestions regarding the adult client’s behaviours towards her child self, including ways that the adult client can protect, defend, and comfort the child. By using active imagination, the adult client (as coached by the therapist) can create the conditions of safety, attachment, and attunement as needed by her child self (Pace, 2012). Various studies on imaginal interventions have demonstrated that the use of active imagination to reconstruct the past produces positive and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 32 lasting change in the present (see Cozolino, 2014; Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 2002; Schwartz & Begley, 2002). Timeline. After the client has engaged in efforts to resolve the traumatic memory, the LI therapist reads the timeline aloud in order to bring the client from that event into the present. This timeline of memories and images proves to her body-mind system that time has passed and that life is different now. Over time, exposure to this “proof” through repeated “travels” across the timeline “rewrites” the life script more accurately, even at a deeper neural level. LI seeks to “reset” the neural system so that it is more in line with the current life situation. This, in turn, facilitates a reconnection, or integration, of ego states through time. During LI, clients who were experiencing memory gaps are eventually able to connect the pieces of their lives into a coherent whole. The process of repetitive exposure to the life events in the client’s timeline “presents” the client with “a panoramic view of [her] life across space and time. The client is thus able to see the patterns of decisions and choices [she] has made throughout [her] lifespan. The client is able to see how [she] has defended [herself] throughout [her] life against the perceived danger of the earlier trauma. [She] ‘sees’ that [she] is safe to make other choices now” (Pace, 2012, p. 38). Where talk therapy only helps to “override automatic physiological responses to traumatic reminders” (van der Kolk, 2002b, p. 383), LI therapy works at a neurological level in order to abolish those responses and “reconfigure [the] alarm systems of the brain” (van der Kolk, 2002b, p. 383). This rewiring of the brain at a neurological level works from a “bottom-up” approach so that shifts in the physiological brain structure than impact on psychological structures of the self, as well as on systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community. In essence, repetitions of the timeline seek to completely rewrite the client’s global map of self which spans time and space (Pace, 2012). Siegel explains that certain suboptimal experiences, especially in TILL WE HAVE VOICES 33 early childhood, can produce multiple, incoherent working models of the self, and they can also produce engrained and inflexible states of mind that “remain unintegrated across time within specialized and potentially dysfunctional self-states” (p. 306, as cited in Pace, 2012). Moreover, he states that “as we accumulated lived moments across time, we are capable of recalling not as one self, but as the many types of selves that have existed in the past. Narrative recollection, then, is the opportunity for those varied states to be created anew in the present” (Siegel, 2012, p. 89). The timeline helps clients to overcome the difficulties that they face in connecting their inner selves due to conflict and patterns of maladaptation by offering an opportunity to engage in a specific process that targets the integration of selves (i.e., various ego states) across time. Protocols. LI makes use of a variety of different protocols. Although all of the protocols are for integration, there are distinct protocols for specific presenting issues, such as for situations manifesting as “stuck-points” for clients, for issues related to insecure attachment and affect regulation, and for issues of trauma and PTSD. In general, Cathy Thorpe (personal communication, May 31, 2015) breaks down the protocols into two categories: (a) “structure building” protocols (i.e., standard protocol and Birth to Present [BP] protocol), and (b), the “trauma clearing” protocol (i.e., PTSD protocol). Structure building protocols, she states, “puts in the ‘good’” whereas the trauma clearing protocol “takes out the ‘bad’” (C. Thorpe, personal communication, May 31, 2015). A full explanation of the LI protocols and some of their potential neurobiological implications will not be discussed here; however, the reader is encouraged to see Pace (2009, 2012) for the LI protocols, and Thorpe (2012) for a review of theoretical and neurobiological rationales for the therapy. For the present study, it is important to delineate each of the LI protocols since it is this author’s intention to differentiate clients’ lived experiences across different protocols. The following section contains brief descriptions of TILL WE HAVE VOICES 34 the rationales and intended specialized purposes of the three main protocols (i.e., standard protocol, BP protocol, and PTSD protocol) of LI therapy. These will be informed by information gleaned from Peggy Pace’s (2012) book, Lifespan Integration: Connecting Ego States Through Time. Standard protocol. The purposes of the standard LI protocol (SP) is to help reorganize the self system and provide clients with a more coherent, embodied sense of self. Clients who have completed LI SP protocol report: “a newfound sense of competent, capable, lovable, and solid self; the ability to let go of archaic defensive strategies; an enhanced ability to enjoy life and intimate relationships; a much improved ability to regulated affect; and an expanded emotional repertoire” (Pace, 2012, p. 26). Birth to Present protocol. The BP protocol, though it has multiple applications, is used by LI therapist “for affect regulation, to clear birth trauma, to strengthen the core self, to increase self love, and to repair ruptures in attachment” (Pace, 2012, p. 51). Through this process, clients “learn” new neural patterning and establish more coherent self-systems over time. The intended effect, similar to the standard protocol, is for a deepened sense of body-mind coherence and an integrated self-system. PTSD protocol. The main purpose of the PTSD protocol is to prove to a client’s bodymind system that the trauma is over. The LI PTSD protocol is, in many ways, simply a more detailed and focused variation of the LI timeline. With this protocol, memory cues of the traumatic incident are visited very briefly so as not to flood the client with emotions. To clear the trauma and heal, clients must touch on each aspect of the trauma; however, clients are kept from remaining too long in any part of the trauma as this risks a level of activation which could lead to re-traumatization. Each subsequent cue moves the client along in her internal visual TILL WE HAVE VOICES 35 “narrative” of the trauma. The PTSD cues go in detail through each aspect of the traumatic memory, then slow through the days and weeks following the trauma, and then month by month to the present. Repetitions of this timeline help the body learn that it is no longer trapped in the traumatic situation. As this happens, breathing will deepen and other signs of bodily release and relaxation will be evident. The body begins to recognize that the traumatic danger is no longer imminent. When a traumatic incident occurs, a person is unable analyze his or her experiences of the trauma and associate them other areas of knowledge. It appears that it is precisely this inability to transform and integrate the particular emotions, images, sensations, and muscular reactions related to a trauma that leaves certain individuals experiencing their traumas over and over again without appreciable decreases in their distress for months, years, and even decades after the actual event occurred (Janet, 1894; van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995; van der Kolk, Hopper, & Osterman, 2001; van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1991). With LI PTSD, we acknowledge the feelings of “inescapable shock” (Breuer & Freud, 1983) experienced by the client and, through the process of “proving” to her body-mind system that the traumatic event is over, we help her move towards healing from the impact of that trauma by taking out the bad. Empirical Research on LI Effectiveness. In recent years, LI has garnered growing interest. Trinity Western University (TWU) has played a pioneering role in initiating a program of LI research, and has secured initial funding for this (J. Kwee, personal communication, October 2, 2014). A primary focus of this research is to move beyond anecdotal support for LI and to establish an empirical basis for LI therapy efficacy. In addition to TWU’s research on LI, spearheaded by faculty member and clinical psychologist, Dr. Janelle Kwee, there is ongoing potential for research collaboration with global colleagues, including Swedish physician, Dr. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 36 Gita Rajan who is designing the first Randomized Control Trial of LI therapy (G. Rajan, personal communication, December 13, 2013) and with British neuropsychiatrist and trauma therapist, Dr. Nuri Gene-Cos. Balkus (2012) conducted her research on LI efficacy at a women’s residential treatment program in Seattle. Her study included 17 participants, all of whom selected a single trauma to address with LI standard protocol. Clients’ traumatic experiences ranged from car accidents to severe domestic violence situations. Each participant self-scored the impact of events scale (IES) by Horowitz prior to LI (Horowitz, Wilner, & Alvarez, 1979). IES was used to measure participants’ levels of “intrusion” and “avoidance” related to trauma symptoms. After this, participants received two sessions of LI standard protocol from one of two experienced LI therapists. Findings showed that prior to any LI therapy sessions, the mean score for avoidance and intrusion measured separately were each around 28 out of 30. After two sessions of LI therapy, the means scores of avoidance and intrusion were approximately 6 out of 30. One month after the second LI session, with no intervening LI work, participants self-scored the IES and it was discovered that avoidance and intrusion scores had continued to decrease to approximately 3.75 out of 30. Balkus’ study indicates that LI can, in fact, reduce trauma-related symptoms and that the benefits of LI therapy are maintained over a follow-up period of one month. More recently, Hu (2014) conducted a mixed-method, pragmatic, adjudicated multiplecase study to investigate LI efficacy. Hu also sought to investigate whether and how LI protocols and treatment goals would be linked with evidence of treatment efficacy and what this evidence would then say about the underlying theory. This study, which utilized an expanded version of Elliott’s (2001, 2002) Hermeneutic Single Case Efficacy Design (HSCED), looked at TILL WE HAVE VOICES 37 the process of healing during treatment for three participants ranging from 20 to 60 years of age. Each of the participants came to therapy with chronic and/or enduring issues linked to histories of childhood abuse and trauma. Advanced LI therapists were recruited to work with each of these participants over a three-month period in the naturalistic settings of their private practices. The results of this study indicate that each of the three participants experienced significant clinical change in the issues that brought them to therapy. The data also indicate that there is a strong alignment between LI’s treatment goals and methods and the underlying theory. This supports the claim that LI works to foster integration (Siegel, 1999, 2012), coherence, and other markers associated with secure attachment, higher functioning, and mental health. Rensch (2015) conducted a study that looks at LI efficacy with trauma-exposed children. Also utilizing the HSCED, Rensch examined changes in a child-client who will be receiving LI therapy over a course of several months. He was also interested to see whether LI can account for the changes observed, and he wanted to discern what parts of LI are most helpful in bringing about this change. Finally, Carlee Lewis (n.d), a current student in TWU’s Masters of Arts in Counselling Psychology program, is completing a thesis on the topic of LI efficacy in addressing attachment processes with adopted children in middle childhood. She utilizes the HSCED to gather quantitative and qualitative data from an adoptive parent-child dyad who were experiencing LI therapy for the first time. Lewis is seeking to observe changes in internal attachment processes and the attachment bond between the parent and child over the course of ten sessions of weekly LI therapy. The study is intended to provide evidence that attachment disruptions can be repaired in middle childhood and that attachment processes can be targets in intervention beyond early childhood. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 38 The role of LI in re-membering: Resourcing and reconnecting. In Chapter 10 of her book, Peggy Pace (2012) talks about how the integration of separate self-states helps clients to reconnect to their essence and to being. She quotes A. H. Almaas (as cited in Pace, 2012) in describing how, during the process of development and through interactions with the environment, we can experience a loss of essence, a fragmentation of our true selves, and a disconnection to our inherent ways of being: When a baby is born, it is pretty much all Essence or pure Being. Its essence is not, of course, the same as the essence of a developed or realized adult. It is a baby’s essence – non-differentiated, all in a big bundle. As the infant grows, the personality starts developing through interactions with the environment, especially the parents. Since most parents are identified with their personalities and not with their essence, they do not recognize and encourage the essence of the child. After a few years, Essence is forgotten, and instead of Essence, there is now personality. Essence is replaced with various identifications. The child identifies with one or the other parent, with this or that experience, and with all kinds of notions about itself. These identifications, experiences, and notions become consolidated and structured as the personality. The child, and later, the adult believes this structure is its true self. (p. 83) Here, the fragmented self is portrayed as a debilitated being, one unable to connect to a true sense of one’s essential identity, silenced by identifications, experiences, and notions which it falsely believes to comprise itself. Through the process of LI, Pace (2012) argues that the self becomes a more embodied being, one that is connected to its spiritual self, and to its very essence. The self ceases to be silenced by its inability to recall its essence, and through careful alignment of all the fragmented parts to the solid “core self,” the separated self-states cease to act TILL WE HAVE VOICES 39 as divergent, independent, incongruent parts of the self and, through integration, begin to “work together somewhat seamlessly as a team under the competent leadership of the Self” (Pace, 2012, p. 79). Indeed, after enough sessions of appropriate LI protocols for the integration of self, the client may notice that parts of the self that previously “hijacked” the self-system now remain peacefully in the background or are not longer in evidence. This joining of the various parts lends itself to congruency and an attachment to the Self, an ability to stand by oneself and be oneself (Pace, 2012). Summary Although suffering and trauma are as ancient as human history, there are certainly gaps in literature expounding the destructive, annihilating, isolating, and silencing effect of traumatic experiences. Our understanding of the pathological effects and neurotic symptomology related to trauma has proliferated in recent decades (van der Kolk, 2015). Emerging disciplines synthesizing biological and social sciences (see Cozolino, 2014; Siegel, 1999, 2012) have illuminated important findings regarding mechanisms involved in healing. Pioneering therapies, such as LI therapy (Pace, 2009), apply relevant insights to address salient facets of trauma. All innovation and progress requires movement, and there has been significant movement in the field of trauma psychology. Nonetheless, it is my belief that addressing trauma involves a reenvisioning of vitality, wholeness and voice. Rationale of the Present Study Many researchers cite the importance of honouring and promoting the fulfilled potential of personhood in therapies, yet very few of works exemplify the aim to understand the transformational potential of therapy in addressing the enduring, distressing, whole-person repercussions of trauma, including a pervasive felt sense of insecurity, terror, disconnection, and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 40 numbness towards the fullness of human experience. To address issues related to the lived experience of trauma and of healing, we need to conduct research that represents holistic and integrated knowing. This includes privileging the voices of clients and seeking to gain insights about clients’ embodied sense of what it means to grapple with the effects of trauma and overcome them. In a concerted effort to engage an integrated way of knowing, a feminist view undergirding this project in aim and epistemology, I will seek to explore and promote voice in the aftermath of trauma, and in light of an experiential, mind-body integration therapy approach. The emphasis will be towards uncovering the potential of personhood and resisting reductionistic explanations of symptom-focused psychopathology in individuals who have experienced trauma. This phenomenological, person-centred understanding of human experience is consistent with particular strains of feminist psychology as well as existential analytical psychology, both of which focus on acknowledging and understanding individuals as whole people–complex in their emotions, thoughts, beliefs, worldviews, cultural backgrounds, relational contexts, and so forth, and situated in rich and deeply meaningful contexts of lived experiences–with the potential for being themselves with others and in the world in fulfilled, and mentally and emotionally free existence. In this study, there is allowance for (and encouragement towards) the telling of one’s story in the context of one’s embodied experience of the whole self. As participants speak and tell stories about their lived experiences in the process of healing and re-membering, we (the research team and I) listen to their voices, we privilege their accounts of what it was like to experience shifts in therapy, and we honor their felt sense as a legitimate way of knowing. In so doing, we acknowledge that having a voice, both in the research encounter and in one’s relationship to oneself, to others and to the world, is central to vitality, personhood, and one’s sense of agency. This is prerequisite to freedom and to overcoming the psychologically TILL WE HAVE VOICES 41 debilitating, disembodying, and silencing effects of trauma. The embodied themes that arise from listening to the voices of the participants can serve as important guideposts to assisting the process of reclaiming voice and a felt sense of wholeness, restitution, and agency for those who are struggling to overcome their experiences of trauma. The implicated researcher. As a researcher, I am implicated in how I view, approach, and conduct research. My experiences, my assumptions, my lens for inquiry, my biases and preconceived notions, and my knowledge base all impact how I will engage with and interpret the experiences of the participants in the study. Carol Gilligan (1993) puts it this way as she explains her perspective on engaging research: “Instead of holding as an ideal a no-voice voice or an objective stance – a way of speaking or seeing that is disembodied, outside of relationship, in no particular time or place – we seek to ground our work empirically, in experience, and in the realities of relationship and of difference, of time and place” (p. 23). In Gilligan’s work on research methodologies, she has proposed and popularized new ideas about relational aspects of the research process. Her model of research emphasizes the passionate subjectivity of the interaction between researcher and participants as opposed to a tone of detached objectivity (Gilligan, 1993; see also Harding, 1988; Reinharz, 1992; Rosenbloom & Killian, 2013). In the following section, I will reflect on my positionality and identity (Berger, 2013; Ergun & Erdemir, 2010; Ezzy, 2010; Humphrey, 2007; Soni-Sinha, 2008; Taylor, 2011) as it pertains to this project and seek to expound upon my own situatedness within the project context. Prior to entering the M.A. Counselling Psychology program at TWU, I had developed great interest in the ineffable qualities of human experience. I wanted to make sense for myself and my family, for my community, and, ultimately, for all the people that I would encounter, my TILL WE HAVE VOICES 42 fellow human beings, just how it is possible to feel understood, seen and joined with even in the midst of difficult to articulate experiences. I remember reading the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell during my final year of high school. In his book, Gladwell (2008) writes that, “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness” (p. 41). He says that an individual must spend about ten thousand hours on something before achieving mastery. At that time I had asked myself, “What would I spend ten thousand hours on?” It was in my first year of university when I realized that my favourite feeling in the world could be described as resonance. It is that feeling which is evoked when an author or poet puts to words something that I have always struggled to articulate. It is that same feeling when a conversation gives rise to ideas that have previously been in flux, muddled by questions and perplexities that sought answers and explanations but to no avail. In those moments I would think, “Wow. That is what my soul has longed to hear; those are the words that I needed for all my life. I didn’t know I craved them until right now. Somehow this person has been to the depths of me and brought salve to my aching wounds, saying exactly what I needed to hear before I even knew I needed to hear it.” I decided then that that was what I wanted to bring to the world; I wanted to spend ten thousand hours learning how to evoke that sort of feeling in others. This set me on the trajectory to becoming a clinical counsellor and led me to writing a thesis that is about giving deep and embodied expression to parts of the human experience which often feel as if they are beyond name and form. In my limited experience journeying with others through divorce, doubt, rape, inadequacy, loss, poverty, and addiction, I have found it common that people will struggle with conundrums of psychic disruption to identity and to the integrity of embodiment following conversations in which they felt stilted in attempts to explain their inner experience. It was as if TILL WE HAVE VOICES 43 elements of their bodily and emotive experience always escaped capture in the codifying practices of a fully-formed, communal language or vocabulary. As they grappled with a whole host of strong feelings including distress, rage, pain, fear and, occasionally, pride, delight and pleasure, a distinctive lack of words to describe bodily affect seemed to disturb the relationship between the person speaking and the one listening. Previous to entering the program at TWU, I was unfamiliar with the practices of “sensory interviewing,” yet I would instinctively ask questions such as, “What was that like for you?,” “Where did you feel it in your body?”, “How did that impact you emotionally?”, “What came up for you when he/she/they said that?”, “Did you experience any thoughts or feelings at that time?” Again and again, people appeared perplexed, if not somehow abashed, by my line of questioning. Many used complex metaphorical descriptions whereas others used sounds or body language as forms of protest against the ambiguity, the emptiness, and the silence which threatened to “sweep away all traces of the specificity, corporeality, of their own processes of production and self-representation” (Grosz, 1995, p. 2). Despite the desire to express their visceral and emotional experiences, it became clear that standard linguistic and discursive expressions were insufficient. Consequently, it seemed that people often felt scared, baffled, enraged, and isolated by their deeply felt and embodied experiences. These private and seemingly incommunicable pieces of their lives at once resisted expression yet demanded interpretation. Anthony Storr (1997) writes that: When a person is encouraged to get in touch with and express [her] deepest feelings in the secure knowledge that [she] will not be rejected, criticized, nor expected to be different, some kind of rearrangement or sorting-out process often occurs within the mind TILL WE HAVE VOICES 44 which brings with it a sense of peace; a sense that the depths of the well of truth have really been reached. (p.22) For many who have experienced trauma, such peace feels distant and unapproachable. The unsettling effects of perpetual dissatisfaction with the small sliver of their experience made visible through their words continuously gnawed at them. Out of passionate curiosity about the life histories, the daily experiences, and the self-perceptions of those who have endured unspeakable assailments to their concept of self, to bodily integrity, to their spirituality, to a sense of connection and belonging, I began this project whist believing and proponing that what is often taken to be incomprehensible is, in fact, subject to expression, though that expression is not fixed and may be constantly disruptive to what is conventional, safe and comfortable to discuss. As such, this thesis is about my efforts to discover what is beyond the words and thoughts, beyond the tensions and paradoxes, and beyond the capacity to reason and to question – the truth of lived experience. By conducting this study, I was committed to participating in solidarity with those who struggled to find healing and freedom in the aftermath of traumatic events. I wanted to start by “looking at social reality – a move that [entailed] analysis as well as the recording of stories . . . for it is in stories that the validity of a host of very diverse experiences is found” (Ackermann, 2003, p. xvi). I believed that out of experience and critical questioning we could find a language which leads us out of the temptation to undermine others’ sense of reality of the sake of expediency. This, to me, is deeply important since I believe that we all, as Adrienne Rich (1979) writes, “have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other” (p. 190), to “take [our] existence serious as theme and source for art” (Rich, 1983, p. 535) insomuch as this helps TILL WE HAVE VOICES 45 us to “live with the questions, while getting our hands dirty with the stuff of life” (Ackermann, 2003, p. 108). At the heart of this thesis is the longing for not only understanding but also resonance; therefore, the process of this project is centred upon the words of German poet Rilke (1975) who says that we need to: Be patient towards all that is unsolved . . . and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms . . . not seek the answers that cannot be given because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. (p. 31) Purpose of the study and research question. The purpose of this study is to listen to the voices of individuals who had previously endured traumatic incidents and have more recently experienced a felt shift in the process of undergoing LI therapy in the pursuit of healing and wholeness. It is also to understand whether or not embodiment and/or the integration of one’s felt sense of self plays a role in the process of healing in therapy. The following research question will guide this study and help attune our ears to the critical moments or crossroads in each of the stories that are told: what is discovered about the process of healing by taking a voice-sensitive approach to understanding the lived experience of individuals overcoming trauma through shifts that occur in LI therapy? TILL WE HAVE VOICES 46 Chapter 3: Method Like a wolf at midnight howls You’ll use your voice in darkest hours To break the silence and the power Holding back the others from their glory. —Josh Garrels, “White Owl” Research Paradigm Methodological pluralism permeates the world of therapy process research (Howard, 1983). Qualitative methods have been employed to study the cultural-historical context of therapy, as well as various aspects of the therapeutic process (McLeod, 2001). Despite this, many researchers still regard randomised controlled trials as being obviously and self-evidently the most appropriate way to conduct therapy outcome research (McLeod, 2001). For these researchers, randomised controlled trials provide the methodological technology needed to demonstrate efficacy of treatments and generate plausible outcome findings around therapeutic practice (McLeod, 2001; see also Roth & Fonagy, 1996). The rhetoric of randomized controlled trials, however, is one of power and control (McLeod, 2001). With this quantitative, statistical approach to investigating outcomes, researchers seek to exert a high degree of control over the context and conditions of their research and over what research participants can say, and what is done with their words. (This is demonstrative in the use of close-ended survey questions, Likert scales, symptom checklists, etc.) Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber (2012), in her opening chapter for the Handbook of Feminist Research, challenges a way of knowing which encircles knowledge claims by those who occupy privileged positions – those who can, say, translate the lived experience of psychological dysfunction into a list of characterizing symptoms. She points out TILL WE HAVE VOICES 47 ways in which this exercise of power and control can diminish and invalidate the experiences, concerns, and worth of participants engaging in more dominant avenues of research. In some ways, the issues of power and control represent a useful starting point for an exploration of the distinctive contribution that qualitative research makes in the field of counselling psychology and psychotherapy studies. Qualitative research takes a more collaborative stance. It allows the space for openness and expands room for the possibility of dialogue between researchers and participants. It invites the creativity and humility that underlies a richness of understanding (McLeod, 2001). Proponents of qualitative research challenge dominant discourses of knowledge, urging us to embrace the creativity and openness that is required for grappling with a perhaps messier, yet fuller and richer understanding of participants’ experiences of healing in therapy. Equating statistically significant results to inner healing truncates and trivializes the work of psychotherapy and psychotherapy research by focusing on success over purpose. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929) writes, “Thus was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me” (p. 258). She, among other prolific writers such as Simone de Beauvoir (e.g., 1952), Betty Friedan (e.g., 1963), and Dorothy Smith (e.g., 1978), has sought to poignantly express feeling of exclusions from dominant avenues of knowledge building. In some ways, the origins of feminist research’s epistemology and methodology draw on the insights and struggles of those whose experiences lie outside the circumference of dominant knowledge or are huddled at its margins. Feminist researchers resist a rhetoric that encircles dominant knowledge and excludes and/or diminishes the voices of individuals expressing their unique lived experiences. Feminists are seeking to ask “new” questions that place people and their lived experiences at the centre of TILL WE HAVE VOICES 48 social inquiry. In this way, “feminist research disrupts traditional ways of knowing to create rich new meanings” (Hesse-Biber, 2012, p. 3). In the context of psychotherapy research, this means to bob and weave various threads of understanding regarding the unique perspectives and concerns of individuals in therapy and listening to their voices as they explain the role of therapy in their lived experience. This way of knowing, in which we listen to the experiences of others as legitimate knowledge, gives prerogative for researchers to look at voice. It is a method of conducting research that orients both researchers and participants to an “incarnational,” holistic exploration of the lived experience; it is integrative and capable of providing insight into the embodied experience of individuals as it is lived here and now. Engaging in a praxis of counselling psychology research which aims to honour and promote the full potential of the human experience involves a re-envisioning of the ways in which we pursue knowledge as well as healing. For the feminist scientist-practitioner, this means reframing psychology as a practice of relationship by voicing the relationships that are at the heart of both psychological inquiry and practice. By the nature of the profession, psychologists, “are in positions of some authority and power, able to (licensed to) treat people, assess people, test people, write about people in ways that affect their lives, their feelings and thoughts about themselves and about others, their economic and social opportunities” (Gilligan, 1993, p. 22). This interpersonal power shapes the therapeutic relationship and it shapes the kinds of research that psychologists carry out. Recasting psychology as a relational practice prioritizes the relational dimension of listening, speaking, taking in, interpreting, and writing about the unique lived experiences, the stories, and the narratives of other people. This relational understanding of the research process shifts the nature of psychological work from a profession of truth to a practice of relationship in which truths can emerge or become clear. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 49 Qualitative Inquiries into Client Experiences of Therapy: A Review There have been several studies looking at client experiences of therapy, and these studies make excellent cases for the use of qualitative methods that allow for in-depth understanding of clients’ internal changes. They reveal insights into clients’ experiences with therapy that simply would not be understood through quantitative analysis alone. One phenomenological study explored the ties between theories of therapeutic alliance and client experiences of this alliance (Bachelor, 1995). The findings showed that client-therapist alliances manifest themselves in various ways. Furthermore, it appeared that the extent to which the alliance is experienced as being therapeutic is greatly affected by clients’ readiness for therapy. More recently, Edmond, Sloan, and McCarty (2004) conducted a study in which they explored the subjective experiences of women who have been sexually assaulted, and how treatment impacted their lives. They found considerable distinctions between two treatment groups, Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and therapy and eclectic therapy, in terms of the importance and effect of client-therapist relationship, and in terms of the depth of change reportedly caused by the different therapies. The data indicate that survivors of sexual abuse experienced a deeper sense of trauma resolution with EMDR, whereas within eclectic therapy, survivors more highly valued their relationship with their therapist, through whom they learned effective coping strategies. What is notable is the differentiated experiences of clients across treatment groups. This suggests the importance of conducting qualitative explorations and comparisons of clients’ experiences of different types of therapy. Some grounded theory studies have provided insight into the kinds of things that clients experience as helpful or unhelpful during the therapy process. In a study by Watson and Rennie (1994), clients were given the opportunity to reflect upon and then to give feedback regarding TILL WE HAVE VOICES 50 their perceptions of important events in therapy 24 to 48 hours after a given therapy session. These client-participants reviewed tapes of their therapy sessions and then engaged in reflective interviews on their sessions. Through these interviews, clients were able to reflect on their own cognitive-affective processes during therapy, and their own reflexivity in the change process was made evident. Many of the processes that occur during therapy are, to a greater or lesser extent, covert processes to which clients “do not give expression during the therapy hour (Watson & Rennie, 1994, p. 506). This opportunity to reflect on one’s own experiences of therapy allowed clients to: (a) gain insight into their internal processes of change which occurred over the course of therapy, and (b) give voice to these processes of change by sharing their insights with clinicians who were then enabled “to intervene differentially to facilitate each of these processes during the session” (Watson & Rennie, 1994, p. 506). Levitt, Butler, and Hill’s (2006) exploration of clients’ experiences during therapy revealed a number of aspects of therapy which clients found to be particularly positive or negative when in therapy. By interviewing clientparticipants, all of whom had spent anywhere between two to ten months in therapy, Levitt et al. (2006) discovered categories of elements of therapy which clients tended to find either useful or harmful. In their write-up of the study, Levitt et al. (2006) decided to also move beyond simply having categories of clients’ positive and negative experiences in therapy. They used themes that emerged from their interviews to elucidate specific principles of which therapists can be more aware. The principles will not be explained here. The reader is encouraged to see Levitt et al. (2006) for a full description of the various principles established in this study. As the Levitt et al. (2006) note, their intention was that this in-depth analysis of client perceptions of therapy would help to “sensitize therapists to clients’ internal and covert processes as well as inform therapist decision making” (p. 322). Their study was meant to provide clinicians with something TILL WE HAVE VOICES 51 that could build on their abilities to be aware of and attuned to their clients’ experiences. The information provided in this study could not be extracted from, for instance, a symptom checklist or a session-evaluation Likert scale. This study moves beyond empirical evidence of a therapy’s efficacy in and of itself. It centres the client-participants in their own experience of therapy and solicits their perceptions regarding what is helpful or unhelpful in session. These aforementioned studies demonstrate the richness of understanding that can be gleaned about client experiences and therapist effectiveness when “turning towards” clients through qualitative approaches to psychotherapy research. Research Methodology Feminist scholarship refers to voice as a metaphor of the embodied experience of self (Jack, 1991; see also Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986). Building on the concept of voice to represent holistic and integrated knowing, research in feminist tradition hinges on the question of whose voice is heard. The pertinent issues include: “Who has a voice? What is the quality of the voice? What rhetorical strategies are used to persuade the listener of the truth of what is being said in that voice? How are other voices silenced?” (McLeod, 2001, p. 163). According to Gilligan (Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009, para. 15), “listening for voice and the analysis of narrative are crucial methodological choices” that still distinguish this form of research–where the researcher derives an interpretation from an analysis of the text itself rather than relying on secondary sources and seeks to analyze the structure of the narrative, the voices and points of view, the symbolism, the patterns of repetition, and omissions–from other existing forms of research. It is a method which Gilligan and her colleagues have worked to render systematic in the form the Listening Guide, “which lays out a four-step process of listening as a TILL WE HAVE VOICES 52 way of coming to hear and to understand the structure of another person’s inner world” (Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009, para. 15). Brown and Gilligan (1992), in their work with the Listening Guide method, draw attention to the multiplicity of voices that comprise people’s lived experience. They notice dissonances between these voices as well as resonances; they also note that all of this is encompassed within people’s lived experiences. In light of the lack of attention paid to the embodied experiences of clients in therapy, more studies are needed to phenomenologically and deeply access what matters to clients in terms of their healing processes. Carol Gilligan’s Listening Guide, which is an intrinsically relational approach to research praxis, lends itself to this (Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, & Bertsch, 2003). The Listening Guide method fosters the emerging truth of people’s experience in a natural way. The focus on personal pronoun statements and the in-depth listening to respondents are some of the key features that distinguish the Listening Guide as a unique method of qualitative analysis (Doucet & Mauthner, 2008). Rationale for choosing the Listening Guide. In this study, I utilized the Listening Guide method as a means of philosophically centring clients within the experience of their own healing as they engaged in LI therapy. It is my belief that LI therapy lends itself to this kind of qualitative voice-centred, relational method of research analysis. LI’s treatment goals include moving clients towards greater levels of internal integration and towards a felt sense of the embodied self. This embodied sense of self aligns with Brown and Gilligan’s delineation of the concept of voice. “Voice,” they write, “because it is embodied, connects rather than separates psyche and body; because voice is in language, it also joins psyche and culture” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 20). TILL WE HAVE VOICES 53 Philosophically, there are distinct overlaps between the rationale supporting the use of LI and the rationale underlying the analysis process of the Listening Guide method. Both can be evoked to stimulate discussion on praxis in terms of recognizing the importance of people’s lived experiences to the goal of unearthing subjugated knowledge and allowing such accounts of unique and richly lived human experience to impact the dominant avenues of knowledge building. Both bring embodied experiences, the felt sense, and physical ways of being into the scope of psychological inquiry and practice. In this study, I capitalized on their commonalities and sought to: (a) highlight the voices of participants journeying towards healing and a felt sense of wholeness; (b) utilize a voice-centred, relational approach to understand the process of healing and re-membering in individuals who have undergone trauma; (c) propone holistic and integrated knowing as a viable means for delving into the psychotherapy process; and (d) advocate for the necessity of valuing participants’ unique lived experience in counselling psychology research. Applying the Listening Guide. The Listening Guide is a way into the complexity of voice and relationship. Using this approach to navigate through interviews, the research team “listened” to the voice of each participant “speaking” about her subjective experience of therapy. It was by way of “tuning into the polyphonic voice of another” (Gilligan et al., 2003, p. 157), that we entered into relationship with the voice of the speaker and, in turn, became deeply attuned to, and engaged with, her lived experience. We assumed a posture that allowed for our interaction and engagement with the variety of narratives that were included in a single interview. We listened for movement within the interview sessions, for stops and starts, and for silences and struggles stemming out of participants’ processes in reflecting upon and speaking about their experiences of therapy. Through a process of listening and re-listening to the voices that emerged from the interviews, we interpreted and analyzed themes that naturally presented TILL WE HAVE VOICES 54 themselves. According to Houghton (2006), “listening to voice is, in part, the difference between speaking and being heard – the latter being critical in conveying the depth of one’s experience” (p. 28). We engaged the dialogic nature of speaking and listening, and the Listening Guide method offered us a way to “[trace] and [untangle] the relationships that constitute psychic life, including our relationships with [our participants] and our responses to their experiences and stories” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 27). Steps of the Listening Guide. Gilligan et al. (2003) prescribe four “listenings” as a part of their listener’s guide. The first time through the interview, members of the research team listened to the story that the participant was telling; this included the “geography of this psychological landscape [and] the plot (in both senses of the word)” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 27). We paid attention to the context of the story, and we began to get a sense of what was happening. We followed the unfolding of events and listened to the “drama” of the narrative (i.e., the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “why” of the story). By carefully “[attending] to recurring words and images, central metaphors, emotional resonances, contradictions or inconsistencies in style, revisions and absence in the story, as well as shifts in the sound of the voice and in narrative position: the use of first-, second-, or third-person narration” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, p. 27), we could locate the speaker in the narrative she was telling. In addition, this first listening required that we reflected upon and noted our own responses to the narratives of the participants. We considered our own subjectivities when engaging with narratives (rather than feign objectivity that could never truly occur when entering into relationship with the narratives). We also considered the meaning of our own feelings and thoughts about the narrator and about her story. In this study, members of the research team read through each transcript individually and, upon recording initial reactions to, thoughts about, and feelings towards the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 55 narratives spoken, we reconvened in order to discuss our reactions with one another. During this time, we asked questions of one another, seeking to probe deeper into how the other responded, and inquired regarding the ways in which our reactions towards the participants and their stories are different or the same. The second time through the interview text, we followed the use of first-person pronouns, listening for the voice of I, through which the participant spoke of herself. Rather than approaching the interviews with a priori judgments regarding the speaker and her voice, we attempted to know her and understand her story on her own terms. We then sought out resonances in our own psyche so that we could respond to what she is saying emotionally as well as intellectually. This process of coming to know the speaker and her voice in the story allowed us to “come into close contact with an interiority – a power, a creativity, a suffering, a vision – that [was] not identical with [our] own” (Sommer, 1996, p. 153). Through this process of connection, we attended to our participants’ thoughts and feelings as well as our thoughts and feelings in response. We allowed her, her voice, and her narrative to affect us and we began to learn from her – about her, about ourselves, and about the world we share in common, especially the world of relationships. As we identified places in the interview where the participant used this individual voice to speak of herself, we underlined each instance of the pronoun “I,” along with the verbs that followed it. These segments of the interview were then compiled, pulled together to create what Gilligan has termed, “I-poems.” In highlighting the ways in which the participants used the voice of “I” or self, we could hear the way she was speaking of herself in therapy. In relation to speaking of herself, we could locate themes regarding what she felt in therapy and how this had affected her. It is notable that traditional uses of the Listening Guide tend to focus on themes TILL WE HAVE VOICES 56 regarding resistance or oppression. However, because this study targeted a channel for discovery of participants’ lived experience in LI therapy, we adapted our listening to focus more on how women spoke of themselves in relation to shifts, changes, or movement towards or away from healing during, and after, therapy. We felt that this was the best way to address participants’ lived experience of healing in therapy, and their experiences regarding the effectiveness of LI therapy, without deviating inordinately from the purposes and intent of the I-poems, which, according to Gilligan et al. (2003), are aimed at identifying the “distinct cadences and rhythms [of the first person voices, as well as to] hear from how this person speaks about himself or herself” (p. 162). The third time through the interview, we listened for “contrapuntal voices,” which were characterized not only by the content or subject of participants’ speech, but also by the “philosophical and psychological underpinnings of what [was] being said [which] . . . [differentiated] one voice from another” (Sorsoli & Tolman, 2008, p. 507). This approach recognizes polyphonic narrators with multilayered psyches and this recognition guides both the identification of the contrapuntal voices and their interpretation. Listening to these different voices as different stories being told about experience allowed us to identify, specify, and sort out the threads of the interviews that spoke to the research question. In order to locate these various threads, we read and reread through the various I-poems, and listened for voices that seemed to emerge from the way the participants spoke of how they experienced themselves in the relational landscape of the LI therapy process. We then prioritized several voices from each transcript and sought to listen to them in-depth. As we did this, we highlighted phrases that created and maintained those voices, and from this, pieced together a narrative specific to each voice. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 57 In the final listening, these various strands from the interviews were gathered together for analysis. We sought to interpret what had, or had not, been said by the participants. Each of the listenings were brought back into relationship with one another in order to achieve an understanding of each participant’s lived experience of therapy which was not truncated, but rather characterized with the fullness of its complexities and nuances and was injected with the participant’s felt sense of authenticity and resonance in the expression of their experience (Gilligan et al., 2003). After listening to each narrative on several different levels, and listening to different voices individually, each thread was then woven back together to examine the gestalt of the interview and the voices of which it was comprised for a deeper, fully, and richer understanding. This served to provide us with what Wertz (2011) refers to as “plural, multivocal knowledge” (p. 85), which is the intended product of interpretive, qualitative methods of data analysis. Analysis of the “adapted” Change Interview using the Listening Guide. The Change Interview (Elliott, 1999; see Appendix H for interview protocols) is a qualitative interview aimed at procuring client descriptions of changes experienced over the course of therapy. This interview, approximately 30 to 60 minutes in length, mainly consists of questions regarding the client’s perception of changes since therapy began and her attributions for these changes, including helpful aspects of therapy. “(Information on negative aspects of therapy and on medications is also collected.)” (Elliott, 2002, p. 4). Additionally, the interview invites the researcher to gather information about whether the client was engaging in other simultaneous activities, or whether other events occurred, in and around the time of therapy which might affect the credibility of the client’s attributions for changes in therapy. The client is then asked to rate the changes on three 5-point scales; these are meant to help determine whether the changes were TILL WE HAVE VOICES 58 (a) expected, surprising, or neither; (b) unlikely without therapy, likely to have happened anyway, or neither; and (c) not at all important, slightly important, moderately important, very important, or extremely important. The change interview is generally structured around nine topics, including (a) general experience of therapy, (b) changes, (c) change ratings, (d) attributions, (e) resources, (f) limitations, (g) helpful aspects, (h) problematic aspects, and (i) research aspects (Elliott, 2012). Elliott’s (1999) Change Interview provided the overall structure for the interviews that I conducted with participants in this study. Slight adaptations were made for the purposes of acquiring information that pertains specifically to the research question. The questions from the Change Interview support an illuminative, person-centred approach to research which privileges client voice and experience when looking at changes that occurred in therapy. The interview questions naturally represent examples of how I might access the domain of experience I wanted to explore, namely felt shifts over the course of LI therapy. As such, I felt that the Change Interview was an appropriate framework for facilitating dialogue with the participants, and I believed that it could, in fact, provide us with rich, detailed, and unique information regarding the subjective experience of these participants which, in turn, can contribute to a deeper overall understanding of the phenomenon in question. Sampling and Recruitment In this section, I will be describing the attributes of the population that I have selected for this study. I will then outline the criteria I used for sampling, including specific exclusion and inclusion criteria. Next, I will provide an overview of the sampling strategies used in order to select participants. I will then define the recruitment process. Finally, I will describe the process of obtaining informed consent and give an overview of the semi-structured screening interview TILL WE HAVE VOICES 59 which was utilized to identify whether potential participants were, in fact, appropriate for the intended purposes of this research study. Participants. This research study was conducted with a population of people who selfidentify as having experienced trauma. A trauma-related diagnosis from the DSM-5 (APA, 2013) was not required. Participants were all individuals who had completed a segment of LI therapy and who could locate experiences of felt shifts during therapy. Therapy needed to address the effects of trauma, though use of the PTSD protocol in therapy was not an essential for the purposes of this study. In other words, therapists confirmed that working through trauma had been a focus of their therapeutic work. Individuals were selected on the basis that they had been receiving therapy long enough to be stabilized past a point of acute crisis and suicide risk. This information was corroborated with the participant’s therapist. Participants needed to be able to tolerate self-reflection of the therapeutic process and of traumatic events addressed in therapy without being triggered into posttraumatic states. In a practical sense, this involved being able to engage in the activity of recalling events in therapy free from high levels of distress and without evidence of dissociation. Exclusion and Inclusion Criteria Below, I describe, more specifically, participant criteria related to experiences of trauma, exposure to LI therapy, and self-identified experiences of shifts in therapy. Experiences of trauma. First, I chose to screen for individuals who had undergone a traumatic experience or were exposed to trauma. Although many of the participants in this study were referred by their therapists based on perceived fit-ness in regards to participant criteria, it was important that the clients self-identified as having experienced trauma. The nature of the traumatic event was not pertinent to the study. Moreover, it was not necessary that the clients’ TILL WE HAVE VOICES 60 presenting problem(s) at the onset of therapy was trauma-related. It was crucial, however, that trauma and issues related to the traumatic experience became central to the client’s clinical presentation and that this warranted significant attention in therapy. Exposure to LI therapy. Secondly, it was necessary to confirm that potential participants had undergone LI therapy with an advanced LI therapist. We required that participants were those who had completed a certain “phase” of treatment as per the participants felt sense of completion and the therapist’s corroboration of this information. Self-identified shifts in therapy. To determine if the individuals expressing interest in participating in the study had experienced the phenomenon of interest (i.e., the experience of shifting – to hopefully becoming more integrated in their mind-body system and more connected to their embodied sense of self), I screened for participants who self-identified as having experienced a felt sense of something moving, shifting, and/or changing in the process of therapy. This entailed that the client had experienced a felt shift in relation to a traumatic event or that she acknowledged certain changes in terms of how she spontaneously interacted with artifacts of trauma. The experience of change, itself, did not necessarily need to be positive. In this sample, I was not just interested in exclusively exploring positive, comfortable, and/or enjoyable experiences of undergoing therapy (since this is rarely the case for those engaging in a process of working through deeply traumatic events in their lives), I was also interested in those who identified great discomfort, stress, anxiety, avoidance, and/or distress while undergoing the process of re-membering in therapy. I chose a wider girth in terms of the types of lived experiences of therapy to include in the scope of this investigation because I wanted to include the stories of those who experienced complex emotions throughout the course of therapy and whose journeys toward healing and wholeness were, perhaps, not entirely straightforward along TILL WE HAVE VOICES 61 a clear and direct route, but rather wound through barren deserts, and past raging rivers, dipping, at times, into dark valleys before emerging on the other side. Sampling Strategies Purposeful sampling, according to Patton (2014), “focuses on selecting information-rich cases whose study will illuminate the question under study” (p. 264). Because this study looks at the lived experiences and “inner world” of those who have undergone trauma and who have experienced shifts in therapy, I purposefully recruited participants whose traumatic experiences became focal in therapy and who self-identified as having experienced shifts in therapy. The research on trauma has contributed to our understanding of voice and memory; this includes the ways in which we can come to falsify our history and lose the ability to tell our stories accurately (Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009). The aim of the Listening Guide is to cultivate stories regarding one’s lived experience and to promote resistance against the loss of voice and relationship through a highly-attuned, relational approach to discovering the structure of another person’s inner world, how she construes reality and how that shapes her experience (Kiegelmann & Gilligan, 2009). To this end, I also utilized purposive sampling as a means of identifying participants who would be able to bring their honest voice to the research encounter and who, whether with halts and pauses, long, meandering tangents; abrupt, concise descriptions; impregnated silences; varied intonation; or soft, whispered secrets now finally coming to light, could speak to the ways in which therapy introduced new experiences, new perceptions, new ways of seeing or thinking, and new ways of being with oneself, with others, and in the world. In this, I did not exclusively nor intentionally seek out clients who identified therapy as having been, necessarily, a positive experience; rather, I sought participants who noticed changes in themselves–in their felt sense of being and in their perceptions of self, others and the world–in TILL WE HAVE VOICES 62 and through the process of therapy. I was interested, not only in participants who might articulate experiences of connectedness in therapy, but also those who may have experienced therapy as highly disconcerting because to uncover that which has, for the most part, been unseen or unspoken, can be deeply disturbing. I am of the belief that vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage, but that truth and courage aren’t always comfortable (Brown, 2012). I was open to exploring these experiences of discomfort in the process of becoming, hopefully, more reconciled and more whole. I was allowing the participants to lead me where they might as we unpacked their stories of journeying in and through their traumatic experiences. Recruitment Stages In order to promote this project, I distributed brochures and informational posters (see Appendix A and B) to colleagues, professors, and friends to proliferate general information about this study in the context of their offices, private practices, and so forth. The goal was to raise awareness regarding this research; however, this was not intended as a specific recruiting strategy. In fact, LI therapists who were recommended or endorsed by approved LI consultants were more intentionally targeted for recruitment of participants. The research team and I decided that we were not inclined to recruit widely through the LI discussion group/listserve, “LI-WORLD” simply because we wanted to vet the therapists’ qualifications in that they should be representing some level of current “best practices” of LI. Once I was able to identify therapists who are endorsed by Cathy Thorpe, I contacted them in order to invite them to partake as recruiting members of the present study. These therapists were provided with information regarding the study in order to determine whether they were interested in referring eligible clients for this project. Once therapists expressed that they were interested in supporting this project by referring eligible clients for the purposes of this study, I provided them with electronic TILL WE HAVE VOICES 63 copies of the brochure and poster (see Appendix A and B) in order that they could be printed out and made available for clients in reception areas of the therapists’ offices. Printed versions of the brochure and poster were also mailed to therapists upon request. Therapists were also given the “Initial Information Sheet for Clients who have Formally Expressed Interest in the Study” (see Appendix C). Clients who were initially interested in the study were directed to talk to their therapist about involvement in the study. To prevent any felt coercion in terms of participation in this study, it was made clear to the therapists that involvement in the study must be based solely on the client’s initiative. Once the client had expressed formal interest in the study, the therapist could provide her with the information sheet (see Appendix C). The client would then be directed to contact me. Informed consent and confidentiality. Interested participants who were deemed suitable for the study in conversation with their therapists were invited either to email or call me. Further details regarding participation in the study were discussed once I was able to arrange a telephone conversation with the interested individual. Moreover, any questions that the participant had were answered during the phone call. During this telephone exchange, I confirmed that the individual had, indeed, experienced trauma. If answered affirmatively, I asked the participant to briefly describe the trauma; this was to further ensure that the potential participant met the criteria regarding the experience of trauma. Next, we discussed the potential of being “triggered” by the research content. If the trauma felt resolved to the potential participant, I would then ask about her time in therapy to ensure that she met the criteria for exposure to LI therapy. Finally, the participant was asked to confirm that her experience of LI therapy involved shifts or changes during and/or throughout the process of therapy (see Appendix F for a general script of the telephone screening interview). After this, individuals TILL WE HAVE VOICES 64 who did not meet all of the criteria necessary for participation were excluded from the study. Those who matched the participant criteria and expressed a sustained desire to engage in the research were then welcomed to continue to the interview process. With eligible participants, I proceeded to schedule a meeting for the Change Interview at a location that was convenient and comfortable for them. When possible, the meeting was scheduled to take place at the participants’ usual places of therapy in order to facilitate a felt sense of stability and comfort. The participants were asked to sign a physical copy of the informed consent form (see Appendix D) during the in-person meeting, prior to conducting the formal interview. Data Collection After the recruitment and screening phase, participants engaged in one- to two-hour interviews. The interviews were conducted in person. They were video and audio recorded with digital recording devices. This information was stored on a password-protected computer and in an encrypted, password protected file. The thumb drive or SD memory stick used to transfer the file from the recording device to the laptop was completed cleared and wiped of any content after the transfer was completed. The computer was then kept on my person or locked in my home office at all times. Since the interviews were transcribed and paper copies of these transcriptions were kept in a locked filing cabinet, which was kept in a locked office on the TWU campus. Recording files and transcripts were kept until the completion of the research study and until TWU had approved this study as meeting all of its requirements for completion of a thesis for the Masters of Arts in Counselling Psychology program. Following the completion of this thesis, all the raw data for this study were deleted from the computer, or shredded. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 65 The Research Team Prior to analysis of the data, a research team was recruited to engage in the relational process of uncovering plots, weaving together narratives, locating voices, and collaboratively distilling what is essential about the lived experiences communicated through the stories of participants. Data Analysis Transcription. The act of transcription is, in fact, an interpretative process. In some ways, it is the beginning of the analysis of the data because, in transcribing the interviews, the listener is engaged in a dynamic process of determining what exact information will and will not be included in the written text and how that information will be represented. This includes gestures, halts or hesitations in speech, tone, pacing, volume of speech, and so forth. It is inevitable that some of the richness of the interview is lost in the creation of a transcript. The transcriber, however, retains highly important and relevant information regarding the interviews. In delegating the transcription to someone other than myself, I became aware of the fact that it would be important to consult with the transcriber before moving towards coding the data. For this reason, the transcriber and I “compared notes” at the completion of each transcript. I would communicate how the interview touched me and how I was impacted in my conversation with the participant. I would then solicit the transcriber’s sense of the interview and what stood out for her. I would ask her about key decision points and about her method of transcribing the interview. I would ask about how the interview touched her and about whether she noticed any reactions that she had in listening to and transcribing the interview. Through the process of this dialogue, I would develop a firm grasp of the content and flow of each transcript. Moreover, I had the privilege of consulting with another person on their sense of the interview as a means of TILL WE HAVE VOICES 66 further processing my own impressions of it. By articulating my thoughts, feelings, and impressions of the interview to the transcriber, and in hearing her feedback of what she experienced, I was able to gain a depth of insight into each interview that could not be attained without engaging in such open, thoughtful, and reflexive dialogue. Coding. The process of coding involved a research team who reviewed the transcribed interviews. Each member of the research team was required to fill out a confidentiality agreement form (see Appendix E). The research team and I then proceeded to conduct each of the four listenings of the Listening Guide method. It was necessary that the members of the research team took a phenomenological approach when listening for voices of participants in each of the Change Interviews. We allowed ourselves to be touched and transformed by each interview. This stance is natural to a feminist-relational paradigm of research and the Listening Guide method facilitates a dynamic and process of engaging with the data. The hands-on, process-oriented nature of the analysis required that we attended to emerging themes among the various voices, and that we ongoingly and reflexively sought to expand, narrow, reconsider, and rename each of the voices in order to ensure their best fit to underlying concepts. Once the interviews were each coded individually, we sought to identify any meta-themes that stood out as being overarching categories or domains of experiences across the various interviews. This helped us to locate substantiating and enriching themes that contributed to the research question. Areas of disagreement regarding the voices, which were identified in reading through the transcript, were resolved in dialogue between members of the research team. The purpose of the dialogue was to inspire deeper understanding and clarity around the narratives from the interviews. There were no major discrepancies in coding that were not rectified through further discussion. This was the basis for our collaborative process in the analysis of the data. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 67 Member checks. Following this phase of analysis, I connected with the participants either in-person or over the phone in order that they could communicate their experience of their story, and then invited participants’ responses about engaging in the project. This step imbued the project with added rigour and quality by honouring the relationship between researcher and each participant and by, in a way, giving the research back to the participants so as to allow their voice and voices, distinct in resonance, range, dissonances, and harmonies, to shape the project at crucial moments in the process. This also served the purpose of verifying and adding richness to my interpretations by allowing participants to inform a deeper understanding of their stories and experiences within the context of inquiry. Methodological Rigour The Listening Guide is a voice-centred, relational method for analyzing interview data. It engages the researcher to capture fully the power, meaning, and richness of each individual’s story (Gilligan et al., 2003). This emphasis on the unique perspective of the individual aligns with the thoughts of theorists such as DiQuinzio (1999) and Ruddick (1995) who stressed that each person has a different, individual voice which exemplifies her own personal and subjective experience and contains the subsequent interpretation of that experience. By attending to the multiple facets or voices of each story, the researcher is able to hear and specify nuances in the ways that the individual speaks about herself, and about herself in relationship with others and with the world (see van Manen, 2002). This offers an opening into the multiple layers of the individual’s experience and also seeks to honour the relational nature of human life. Brown and Gilligan (1992) speak about the importance of “authentic and resonant relationships” (p.40) throughout the entire research process when using the Listening Guide. For them, this meant “relationship in which both people can voice their thoughts and feelings relationships that are as TILL WE HAVE VOICES 68 open and mutual as possible, in which partially formed thoughts and strong feelings can be spoken and heard” (p. 40). Furthermore, Brown and Gilligan (1992) stressed that, because the method “allows for (and encourages) a polyphony of voices, it is essential [to] resist [cutting] off or [appropriating] the voice of the person speaking, especially if her voice is discordant with our own. A shift from encouraging (enforcing) consensus or agreement to engaging diversity creates the possibility for real rather than fraudulent relationships with those with whom we engage in our work” (p. 40). Entering authentically into relationship for the purposes of research–not only with research participants but with members of the research team and others involved in the process–is, in many ways, empowering for me since it is not only allowed but suggested that I bring my whole self into the process in order to encounter others in their fullness and make use of knowing, sensing, and dyadic interaction to add to the data gathered, providing depth and richness (Doucet & Mouthner, 2008; Gilligan et al., 2003; Mertens, 2010; Morrow, 2005). In considering the Listening Guide method, including its purpose and goals, paradigmatic base, and underlying characteristics, I decided to draw upon the framework proposed by Morrow (2005) in order to establish a means for determining the quality of this research. Even though a range of qualitative criteria for validation has been suggested, Morrow recommended Guba and Lincoln’s (1989, 1994) criteria as most relevant. These criteria include: fairness, ontological authenticity, educative authenticity, and catalytic authenticity. Fairness implies that differing constructions of the research data are solicited and honoured. Ontological authenticity demands the participants’ constructions be expanded and matured, whereas educative authenticity is the process by which the participants’ understanding and appreciation for the constructions are enhanced. Catalytic authenticity speaks to the extent to which the participants have been moved to action. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 69 This study, which is based on the philosophical underpinnings of a voiced, resonant, and relational psychology, makes use of various strategies proposed by Morrow (2005) and Guba and Lincoln (1989, 1994) to ensure the integrity of this research and to support the creation of various pathways into relationship rather than a single, fixed framework for interpreting human experience. I prioritized prolonged and persistent engagement, member checks, and progressive subjectivity in order to gain the reactions of participants and members of the research team, to add to the depth of my understanding of the phenomenon under study, and to validate the information gathered during interview as well as my interpretations of the data. The research team and I met frequently to discuss the interviews that had been conducted and to process my subjective experience of the interviews, including how my experience may complement, challenge, and/or confirm the subjective experience of the participants. Although it is not a step included in the original Listening Guide method (Gilligan et al., 2003), the results of the research study were shared with the participants following the individual interviews as a means of bringing them into the process. Through this, I sought to foster a relationship with each participant, to build rapport, and to establish as a sense of trust, mutuality, respect, and inclusion. In total, I conducted 12 interviews including the individual interviews structured after Elliott’s (1999) Change Interview and the follow-up interview. These steps help to ensure that the study met Morrow’s (2005) criteria for rigour through clarifying meaning with the participants. Morrow highlights the importance of co-constructed meaning between participant and researcher. He asserted that the researcher’s ability to adequately interpret the data requires intentional and progressive contact with participants during which rapport and trust are established and through which an understanding of participants’ culture and context is expanded. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 70 Additionally, the member check contributed to ontological, educational, and catalytic authenticity, whereby participants’ response, transformation, and action were observed. The intent of sharing the data and analysis with members of a research team and with participants was done, as previously mentioned, in order to achieve mutuality, transparency, openness, and inclusion. This, in turn, helped to establish fairness. I was able to make explicit my assumptions underlying the interpretation of the data and invite constructive criticism and accountability. Participants and team members alike were asked to challenge my assumptions if they appeared to reflect my own biases in a way that excluded the subjective experiences of the participants. Members of the analysis team who were intensively involved in the coding of data included faculty members and graduate students in the Counselling Psychology program. Nonfaculty members were trained in the Listening Guide method of analysis and were selected for their ability to both intellectually and intuitively connect with the narratives of others. They supported the process of analysis by providing feedback, confirming findings, staying involved throughout the entire analysis process, and engaging in open and honest dialogue about their perspectives regarding the clinical and personal significance of both the process of analysis and the findings that were emerging from this study. Throughout the process of analysis, no fewer than two members of the analysis team were present and involved. I also kept a journal detailing my experience of the research process; this included key moments of insight, resonance, or reaction that I had noticed as well as moments during which I had been touched by the reactions or comments of participants and/or members from the research team. This was to demonstrate researcher reflexivity which is considered by Patton (2002) to be a crucial standard of quality in qualitative research, allowing for the researcher subjectivity. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 71 Throughout the process of recruiting and involving participants in this study, I sought to make clear the overall purpose of the study, the methodology being utilized, and my own experiences which shaped the research question guiding the research. I did this, at first, through fliers and brochures advertising the study, through explanations given by therapists whom I personally connected with in order to ensure a shared understanding of the research, as well as through an information sheet that therapists could provide participants for further information. Then I also clarified this information via a direct conversation that I had with participants during an initial telephone contact. It was important to me that the participants self-identified as being suited to the project and were, themselves, giving full consent to the process. As such, I prized participants’ sense of their interest and desire to be involved first and foremost, and I sought to connect with them at the onset before confirming suitability with their therapists. During the debriefing period, participants were invited to ask further questions about the study and provide responses to the process of engaging in a purposeful and intensive dialogue about their experience in LI therapy. This was done to achieve both fairness and ontological authenticity. Moreover, when conducting each interview and throughout the process of analysis, I, along with other members of the research team, made every effort to heed the voice (or voices) of the participant. Attention to voice is an important criterion of a feminist-relational method for conducting research, and it is a unique feature of the Listening Guide. Based on the guidance of this method, our team of researchers sought to engage with and capture the essence of participant voices wherever they emerged. Finally, this process of turning towards the participants’ narratives with an attitude or “posture” of passionate subjectivity and a personal openness to being touched does not end with the processes specific to this study. Rather, it is my hope that the reader, in lieu of simply accepting the “correctness” of my interpretations of the participants’ TILL WE HAVE VOICES lived experience, will herself engage in a process of turning towards and opening herself up to the participants’ stories in a way that allows for a personal realization of resonance around this study’s findings. 72 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 73 Chapter 4: Results Be easy. Take your time. You are coming home. To yourself. —Nayyirah Waheed, salt. The following chapter is focused on the results of the study. It begins with an introduction to each participant, a snapshot of her story as gleaned from our interview, and an analysis of the interview transcripts regarding how each participant spoke about herself regarding the process of undergoing LI therapy. This is then followed by a discussion of the voices that emerged from the narratives of these participants with regards to their perspectives on trauma, dissociation and disconnection, disempowerment, internal fracturing, re-embodiment, healing, and treatment. Other emergent themes and overarching concepts are then discussed in order to contextualize the findings and the narratives in which the voices arose. Next, resonances as well as dissonances of voices across multiple interviews are highlighted and discussed. A composite analysis of the findings, which includes and is shaped by participant feedback, is then presented for exploration of the research question. By doing this, we delve into the ways by which these participants speak to illuminate a richer understanding of regaining voice and a sense of embodied self in the aftermath of trauma. The chapter concludes with a discourse about the “wholly embodied voice” as a medium for expressing the lived experience of dismembering and re-membering in the aftermath of traumatic experience(s). Individual Analysis Summaries In this section, I present case studies of each of the six participants in the order in which their interviews were conducted. First, a brief history and biography of each individual is provided, followed by summaries of the interview experience. I will then present the responses of members of the research team who sought to become familiar with the participants’ narratives TILL WE HAVE VOICES 74 by listening for the story conveyed in and through the transcribed interviews. I will outline the plot that emerged, along with significant characters, common themes, and metaphors that members of the research team identified during the initial listens. It is interesting to note that while sifting through the data, it became evident that there were different contributions of richness from each participant. I could not entirely control the degree to which each participant elaborated with regards to particular details of their process in therapy, the circumstances that brought them to therapy, and the context surrounding their experience. For the most part, these were spontaneously offered. The research team and I sought to distill the information given to us for parsimony’s sake. Nonetheless, we discovered as part of our findings that people will tell their stories in different ways and express their narratives utilizing various modes and communicative tools. Though I start with a summary regarding each participant, I also included raw data that was a window into their experience. Based on what I had available to me, I incorporated different medias such as pieces of the I-poem, a letter, excerpts from a blog as well as quotes of varying lengths. These are presented to enrich the reader’s understanding of how the participants’ ways of speaking may have influenced their stories. This also permits the reader, herself, an opportunity to relate personally to the participants and to the many ways in which they speak of themselves in the context of their healing journey. Although the inclusion of some raw data means that different textures and pieces interpose what might otherwise be a structured and formulaic report of the findings, the research team and I sought to ensure that there is still specificity and continuity across the various descriptions of participants which is grounded in the opening summary where age, primary roles, descriptors and characterizing qualities, prominent concerns and issues coming into therapy, TILL WE HAVE VOICES 75 family dynamics and composition, and overarching experience in therapy are presented. Individual participants expressed varying degrees of consent with regards to sharing personal, potentially identifying, information. Some preferred more details to be included and for those details be in accordance with the actuality of their circumstances and lives; others determined that it was best to be completed anonymized. In the latter instance, less information is revealed about the individual and their families in order to protect and respect their wish for confidentiality. Rachelle. Rachelle (pseudonym) is 34 years old and is a mother to two children, Kelly (pseudonym) and Ben (pseudonym). She lives with her two children and is the full-time, primary caretaker. Her husband, Mitch (pseudonym), who is 38 years old, works with heavyduty metal in a family construction business based out of a different area. Mitch comes home to stay with the family during the weekends. Rachelle calls these weekend periods “Hurricane Dad” because, during Mitch’s visits, the children tend to be whisked away on various outings in order to spend intensive time with their father. On occasion, Rachelle and the children will drive out to visit Mitch. These visits frequently coincide with Ben’s counselling sessions since his therapist lives in the same area as Mitch. The family’s current living situation is purposed to allow Ben, who is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, to attend a school that is suited for his academic and developmental needs. When Rachelle was asked to describe herself to her therapist, prior to beginning therapy, she had responded by saying that she is “extremely capable, though somewhat ‘geared up.’” She had gone on to say that she is a “problem-solver, and maybe an overthinker.” She had also said that “[she is] good in ‘crisis-mode’ and able to work well under pressure.” She explained that she is a “multi-tasker and very productive, able to manage many things on the go.” Rachelle TILL WE HAVE VOICES 76 described herself “as a bit of perfectionist with a tendency to go a little ‘all or nothing’ when trying to accomplish tasks.” The therapist, reflecting on her initial meetings with Rachelle, stated that she experienced Rachelle as someone who is “highly energetic and eager.” The therapist also described Rachelle as “adventurous, intelligent, efficient, independent, and helpful.” When asked to describe the main problems that she was having which led her to seek LI therapy, Rachelle had disclosed to the therapist that she was experiencing “emotional absence . . . [and a] disconnect to life and to reality.” She had explained that she tended to “move from one big life event to another without really reacting to anything.” In coming to therapy, she had hoped that she could “learn how to come out of crisis-mode when there isn’t a crisis.” It was also understood that another major motivating factor for engaging therapy had to do with Rachelle’s daughter who was concurrently involved in counselling and counselling research. Rachelle’s participation in therapy supported her daughter’s involvement. All of this information was corroborated with Rachelle during our screening interview conducted over the phone. Rachelle’s early history and attachment relationships were varied and tumultuous. She described being “born into chaos” and has a vague sense of undergoing “trauma after trauma” throughout her life, though at the time when she was beginning therapy, she had processed very little of it. Rachelle explained that the list of problems she had hoped to address in therapy revolved largely around the following three issues: (a) difficulty connecting with others and connecting with her own emotions; (b) “letting go” of things at the end of the day and allowing herself to relax and “wind down;” and (c) recognizing her own (physical and emotional) limitations. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 77 During the time of therapy, Rachelle was not receiving psychiatric services, professional counselling, or psychotherapy elsewhere. She had never experienced LI therapy. She identified as having experienced various traumas throughout her life, but she recalled them vaguely. She believed that they somehow gave rise to her emotional absentness and wondered whether her, at the time, current “go, go, go” lifestyle and her inability to wind down and relax might have been tied to her ongoing experience of being in crisis situations. She was taking Cipralex for anxiety, and because she was experiencing moderately severe pain in her body, she was also taking Tramadol to manage the pain. She was not taking any herbal remedies or recreational drugs. Her reasons for seeking LI therapy at that time fit the criteria for this study. The therapist agreed that the targets for therapy centred around issues related to acute and developmental trauma. Rachelle attended 10 sessions of LI therapy with the same therapist on a weekly basis, for the most part, though there were times in which extenuating circumstances meant that sessions needed to be two weeks apart. Therapy was completed between April 20, 2015 and October 1, 2015. When Rachelle and I met to complete the interview, she provided me with a letter outlining her experience of undergoing LI therapy. I will include the contents of the letter below for the reader’s consideration. My experience with the study has been amazing. I thought that I was doing this for my daughter but have come to realize that it was extremely beneficial for me as well. Even when it came to just writing the timeline. It was hard to actually seeing my life all layed [sic] out like that. It's easy to push things aside but once you see it on paper it's much different. I truly had no expectations but have had a great experience with life span. The first time we did a run through it was weird and exciting to feel what came up during the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 78 session. There is something to be said about hearing someone else talk about and run you through your life. The biggest thing that surprised me was how looking at things from an outside 3rd party view was so powerful. I truly thought that I had dealt with things in my past but once [the therapist] started pulling back the layers it was surprising to learn that all I did tuck it all away as raw as when it happened. When this would happen it was such a physical experience of release at 1 point I even felt physically hot and flushed being in this state. It was not a comfortable experience but very enlightening at the same time. Also when you see your life layed [sic] out like that it gave me perspective on a lot of things. Doing the read throughs helps links things together. I saw how something that happened as a kid does effect [sic] me on all different levels still today. It also brought things up that had made me out up walls. Every time we pulled back a layer it was like a tiny bit of the wall would peel back. Being able to visualize things during the walk thoughs [sic] was amazing. It was very helpful on being able to process things after. When I would leave a session it was always a different feeling. Sometimes it was a peaceful feeling sometimes it felt like I wAs [sic] to [sic] tired to think as it took everything out of me just doing the run throughs. The processing that would happen in the following days or weeks was something I have never experienced. It would start with a wow, I didn't know that was still trapped. Then it was a few days of just thoughts and feelings on whatever we had touched on then. It was calming peace that would follow. The peace is a nice place to be. I have been able to visualize things even outside of the sessions now. I use to be able to do this but had lost the ability when [Mitch] had his accident. I am really happy to have that back. I feel a sense of calm now with having finished the study. I feel like it has given me back some of the control of my feelings and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 79 life. It was a great way to show my mind that yes we have been through hell and back a few times over but we always make it out in 1 piece. I have learnt that I also am very quick to just move on and not deal with issues and feel like I am better equipped to not be so quick and that feeling things bad or good isn't such a horrible thing. I always though [sic] it meant I was weak but I now know it takes more strength to deal and a knowledge that just toss it aside. Life span has truly been an eye opening experience and something that I will be continuing as well even past the study. I know I have layers we haven't even found yet.......... (personal communication) Though this letter was not shown to members of the research team involved in the analysis of Rachelle’s transcribed interview, team members’ responses regarding the overarching narrative to do with Rachelle’s healing journey largely paralleled what was written more explicitly and concisely in this letter. Several members of the research team noted that somatic reactivity featured highly in Rachelle’s experience of undergoing therapy and reflected that the process appeared to be uncomfortable and, at times, painful for her. They expressed respect and admiration for what they believed was indicative of Rachelle’s resilience, strength and courage. They noted powerful moments of insight and witnessed the surprise, joy and relief that were evoked in those moments. Kara. Kara (pseudonym) is a 40-year-old woman. She is married to her husband Paul (pseudonym) and, together, they have three children, one son and two daughters. Kara identifies as a stay-at-home mother. Paul works fulltime in the health profession. In describing herself, Kara stated that she is “caring and compassionate.” She stated that she is also “very discerning and [likes] to help people.” She described herself as “an innovator,” explaining that she “gets these ideas and [likes] to just play around with them.” She identified as being a mom and a wife TILL WE HAVE VOICES 80 as well as a friend to many. She admitted that she is someone who “can be hard on [herself]” and said that this is something that “[she has] to really watch for.” She expressed that she can “get overwhelmed sometimes too easily because [she is] doing too many things.” She went on to say, “I’m busy person. I’m not a . . . My husband is completely the opposite. He’s more contemplative, an excellent listener and I’m more of . . . ahhhhh!” Kara shared that “often a complement that people give [her] and something that [she loves] about the way that God has made [her] is that [she makes] people feel safe . . . or that they feel comfortable around [her].” She explained that she can “walk into a room and, in an hour, [she] can have everyone hanging out together.” She stated that “[she likes] bringing people together from different walks of life and . . . just kind of, like, watching everyone figure it out.” Coming into therapy, Kara hoped to “learn to be more still which would help [her] with not getting so overwhelmed when there are too many things going on.” Kara explained that she “hated yelling or raising [her] voice or getting frustrated with [her] children.” She wanted to “be more peaceful and happy in [her] day to day life especially when things are busy and feel more fast-paced.” She did not like “getting agitated constantly” and “feeling over-stimulated all the time.” She also hoped that therapy would help her recognize personal triggers and understand “those things that would set the alarm off and bring on this terrible sense of not being good enough or not doing things the right way or just simply failing at everything.” She was determined to develop a healthier sense of herself and experience a personal sense of worthiness. She wanted to be “really able just to walk in who [she is] and who God made [her] to be by moving through the junk that were keeping [her] from really thriving.” Kara spoke about some of the “hard things that came up in therapy” and about how they provided insight into the beliefs that she had about herself and about the kind of person that she TILL WE HAVE VOICES 81 is. She realized how dynamics in her family of origin impacted her and, through the process of undergoing LI therapy, she was able to locate the genesis of various maladaptive ways of operating. Kara explained that a “common theme in her household while growing up had to do with measuring success on a pass or fail basis.” She stated that “[she] was always afraid of making a mistake and failing” since this had severe repercussions in her home. She was able to see that her intense preoccupation with succeeding or doing well stems from a need to “prove [her] worthiness through actions and through works.” Kara found this to be extremely exhausting and, at certain times, anxiety-provoking. The pressure to succeed became unbearable after the birth of her children as she felt that it was crucial for her to be the perfect mother, and yet, consistently determined that she was falling short. She said in the interview: When Nick (pseudonym) was born – he’s nine now – I remember being a new mom! And even though I had a good mom, I thought at the time, I would see all these B.C. moms around me, like, making their own baby food and using cloth diapers and I was, like, ‘Oh! That’s a good mom. That’s what I have to do.’ Can you imagine how tiring that was? So that’s what I was. I was this little sponge soaking up everything that I thought was good, trying to do everything that constituted what a good mom does cause I wanted to be a good mom and I wanted people to think that I was a good mom. Having people over for dinner was always hell at our house. But it wasn’t until we had Sandra (pseudonym) – who’s six now – that . . . that’s when it . . . hit the fan, and that’s actually when my husband came to me and [recommended that I seek help] because he felt that whatever was happening with me really wasn’t good. I realized I couldn’t figure it out on my own at that point. I mean, it was horrible. It was exhausting. And people didn’t, on the outside, maybe see all that, but on the inside, it was horrible for my family to see. It TILL WE HAVE VOICES 82 was like a pressure cooker. Like, just having to do everything the right way, you know? And yeah, so . . . that was not . . . I guess, sustainable . . . and it was such a process to work through that, like, I had to be so intentional about learning that it was okay, that I was okay, that I’m a good . . . a good wife, a good homemaker, and therapy really played a big part in that, helping me to face myself and all the deep, ugly . . . like, probably from the trauma in my childhood . . . . I just had to deal with it and therapy helped me to do that. While reflecting on the narrative conveyed through the interview with Kara, a member of the research team stated the following: I hear the story of a woman who tried and tried to do it all. Until she came to a place where she unable to do it as she had, or do it alone, and admitted surrender. She allowed herself to bear witness to her life, allowed others to witness, and this illuminated the shackles that had weighed her down. When she witnessed her past, she saw what had been lost, or what had never been given that she deserved. Shedding light on her past seemed to emancipate her in her present. She was able to see herself in her life’s circumstances, and know that actually, she was good. It seems like she arrived at realizations about herself, and this self-knowing was consolidated by the witnessing of others: her husband, her therapist, an author, the interviewer. She began to own her life, past and present, good and bad, beautiful and brutal. In doing this, there seemed to be a freedom, a celebration of self conveyed with a childlike innocence. (D. Palmer, personal communication, June 20, 2016) TILL WE HAVE VOICES 83 Including pieces of her I-poem, the research team was able to identify that Kara sought to move to a place of wholeness that not only encompassed a sense of knowing, but a sense of experiencing. This desire for the knowledge of herself and of her being to seep out of her brain and into her heart is captured in a segment of her I-poem. She expressed that she had sought to do this on her own. She had sought to become more whole by making sense of her life. She spoke of coming to a place of realizing she could no longer do it on her own, and that she needed others. Her frustration, her felt sense of helplessness, and her experience of loneliness are evident in her I-poem: I . . . I, um, I had done a lot of work on my own I did a lot I I We process We process everything I had done so much work On my own I . . . I tried so hard You know I was doing But I I wasn’t Wasn’t fixing TILL WE HAVE VOICES 84 I couldn’t I couldn’t Couldn’t change I had failed I was not being Throughout the entire interview, Kara spoke of knowing what she needed while also feeling helpless to achieve this on her own. She said, “You know what? Um . . . I’m a . . . I’m a selfreflector . . . um . . . I’m always trying to be the best version of myself . . . . And so . . . so . . . that is kind of how we entered into the process and it was, um . . . I gave . . . Paul [pseudonym] said, ‘You’re kind of the ideal client.’ I showed up and basically said . . . um . . . [gestures with hands] . . . just like . . . here it is. This is x, y, and z, and I can’t put my finger on something and I need you to help me find it.” She continued on to say, “I had all these pieces already figured out, and so it was, like . . . so we moved quick . . . . I think, like, six sessions I had . . . we had . . . kind of gotten what we needed to do, but . . . so with that, it gave us a lot of pieces so I think for [the therapist], she knew, let’s do Lifespan, and that’s walk through that.” Kara spoke of her desire to find healing and a felt sense of wholeness through the experience of therapy, “And so, at first, I thought, ‘I’m here for trauma therapy, like, let’s just get one. I want to you to do the wonky . . . magical stuff . . . . Let’s just fix whatever it is in my brain and you . . . let’s get it all stored away properly . . . like I want it all stored away properly, so those alarms don’t go. I don’t want to be triggered anymore.” As she reflected on her experience of therapy after the fact, Kara found that the key thing in her process of undergoing LI therapy had to do with uncovering parts of her story that were previously buried away and forgotten. Kara stated that finding these pieces was crucial because TILL WE HAVE VOICES 85 it provided context for her experiences in the present. In reclaiming elements of her story, Kara was able grieve the things that had impacted her negatively as well as come to terms with feelings of neglect and abandonment that were so prevalent in her childhood. Kara remembered being shocked by the realization that there were segments of her life story “that [she] hadn’t . . . experienced before.” She stated that connecting to those pieces of her story was “transformative . . . because [she was] able to . . . look at and move through some pretty ugly stuff in there.” By reflecting on particular memories and revisiting places of deep shame and hurt, Kara was able reflect on a younger part of herself and bring words of wisdom and love to this younger part. Kara remembers addressing this part of herself saying, “It’s not you. You’re wonderful. It’s . . . it’s my dad. He’s . . . He’s bad. He’s wrong. You are beautiful. You are wonderful.” In looking back, Kara was able to recall the conditions of chaos that surrounded her as she was growing up. She says, “Like, for me . . . what I was living in was traumatic for my little brain.” Kara found that LI therapy helped to make sense of her lived experience and “[bring] it all together.” She exclaims, “The whole process of it, that was the part that . . . I had no idea! I had no idea about my mom . . . that she wasn’t [pause] Yeah, no idea! That I didn’t have a mom when I needed a mom.” Kara was able, over the course of therapy, to could come to terms with the impact that her parents had on her – her mom who was highly dissociative and who frequently withdrew or was absent, and her dad who was aggressive, angry, and hostile. Kara expressed that this was “so transforming for [her]. Just . . . all that experience. And with all the . . . the work [she] had done.” This work, part of which entailed “[going] to the dark places to receive [her] healing” and part of which was learning to live more freely in the present, was necessary in order for Kara to discover her own consolidated presence and find joy in her sense of self. A section of her I-poem conveys this internal shift towards wholeness and an acceptance TILL WE HAVE VOICES 86 of herself which Kara identifies as having always known but which she realized for the first time, the way a person realizes she is hungry or thirsty – a deep, felt sense of realization: Even with my warts and my bumps and my imperfections I know I’m wonderful I feel good I walk in that I just long to see I just feel Healing is a wonderful thing Tage. Tage (pseudonym) is a 35-year-old woman. She grew up in the care of a single mother whom she describes as “one of those really passionate, fiery, independent type women.” Tage states that “[her] dad left before [she] was born and so [she] has never met him.” Tage recalls going to a school for gifted children when she was younger. Tage explained that she did not enjoy being in that school, and so she ended up switching into French immersion after a several years in that school. She remembers feeling alienated from her classmates in school because of her own family’s socioeconomic status. She says, “I went to a French school with a lot of kids who had parents who were lawyers and doctors while my mom never really had a regular job and so we never really had a regular home life.” She states that her parents were divorced before she was born, and so she has never met her father. She remembers “living with [her] grandma, [her] grandpa, and two uncles until one of them got married.” She explains that it was a “very unstable house environment” especially once her younger uncle, who is unmarried, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and began to experience “psychotic breaks on a regular basis.” TILL WE HAVE VOICES 87 Tage states that the home was “filled with violence” and was “very intense due to the kinds that would often break out amongst family members.” When her mother passed of cancer, Tage remembers that a close friend of her mother’s sought to inherit their mother’s estate via underhanded means. This began a six-year legal battle that Tage’s family eventually won. Around this time, Tage began living with her aunt and uncle who, in turn, took charge of her mother’s estate. Tage, being 16 at the time, remembers that her uncle and aunt were “extremely religious and strict with her.” She recalls feeling a lot of shame and guilt during the years she lived with them, and states that she “never felt good enough.” She began to experience severe depression and anxiety. After she was married, Tage and her husband continued to live with Tage’s aunt and uncle. Following this, Tage and her husband had their first child. When their second child was born, Tage recalls that she and her husband moved out and cut off their relationship with her aunt and uncle. Currently, Tage and her husband, a law enforcement officer, live in the lower mainland along with their two children. Tage is working as a writer and a graphic artist. When asked to describe herself in the present, Tage shared that she prides herself on life experience. She views herself as being “wise, mature, passionate, and compassionate.” She also describes herself as “strong and balanced” in various aspects of her life. She states that before engaging with LI therapy, she would have seen herself as being “weak and extremely stuck and . . . a lot of negative adjectives for the fact that [she] was stuck and couldn’t move past [some of the tough stuff] even though [she knows] that [she has] always been those more positive things that [she] said describes [her].” Tage admits that “because [she] felt like [she] couldn’t get over the things that [she] was stuck with, [she] felt like [she] was weak, and there was something fundamentally wrong with [her].” Tage says that going through LI, however, helped her “get over some of the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 88 stuff that was gripping on to [her] and was refusing to let [her] go.” Tage says that she came to LI wanting “to be free of the kinds of things that were making [her] feel so stuck and so down on [herself].” “They had been there for years, since my childhood!” Tage exclaims as she becomes slightly teary-eyed. “But the process of going through LI really helped me to see that just because you’re struggling with some things doesn’t mean that you’re weak. Today, I wouldn’t change a thing about myself. I am proud of the person that I am,” Tage explains. When she first came to therapy, Tage states that she was struggling with a debilitating fear of her husband being killed while on duty. She explains that she often “had nightmares or would visualize [her] husband being shot or otherwise killed, like, three or four times a week.” She describes feeling triggered by news that had to do with death and remembers that her husband was growing increasingly concerned with her level of distress. Tage remembers feeling constantly aggravated and says that she was easily angered or upset. She says, “Any struggle or disappointment or whatever was too much and my anxiety was so high. Like, I was just so strung out that anything, really, had the power to ruin my entire day or week or month, and I just couldn’t recover from it very easily.” Tage explains that she sought to distract herself as a means of coping with her anxiety, but she knew that she needed help in order to move through areas of pain and grief in her life in order to deal with the issues that were at the heart of her anxiety. In the end, Tage attended 15 sessions of LI and describes significant improvement as a result of her counselling experience. She describes this in her own words in a blog post she wrote in January of 2016. The following is an excerpt from her blog post: Imagine that you’re in a very long hallway. One whose distance is proportional to the number of years you’ve lived. Mine is white, with warm lighting . . . simple, clean and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 89 efficient. When I’m present in my life, I can look up and see grocery store aisle headings and I’m currently standing under aisle Present Day. This is exactly where I should be so that I can engage with the world from a place of mindfulness. This is what it means to be present. This is what I aim for at all times. When I look behind me, there’s aisle headings for all the years of my life. There’s also many doors that line this very long hallway. Special moments, significant memories . . . the hard times. The doors down this hall open to rooms that hold all these memories. Here’s where it gets tough. In the past, before trauma counseling, some of these rooms were shaking, sometimes violently. Under the crack of the door, things were seeping out. I had duck taped some of the doors, boarded and locked them up the best I could. Others were flung wide, the door ripped off its hinges and blasted in to a million pieces. The wreckage littering the hallway where real life occurs. Sometimes real life would trigger me and I’d be instantly transported to the door associated with the memory being triggered. At times, I could stand outside and use the peephole to look in. A ghost of my former self visible, going through that experience in a constant loop of the events. If I held the door shut with all my might, the moment would pass and I could walk back to present day. There were many other times that I couldn’t just stand outside and look in. No, I was given no choice at all. I’d blink and then find myself in the room. In that room was my younger self, the ghost of me – just a small fraction of what I am as a whole. The room was heaving around the both of us. A maelstrom of emotions and things from that memory flying around. Whatever was in that memory was now beating us down. Pummeling us from every direction. In an instant of panic and overwhelming emotion, TILL WE HAVE VOICES 90 my current self and my former self cling to each other for support. Before I’d realize it, we were one. Did she become me or did I become her? I could never be sure. But you surmise that you must have become her because you’re stuck in this room. And the chaos of the room has taken over. You don’t know up from down . . . where’d the door go? Was there ever such a thing? You’ve been here so long, this is life, isn’t it? Then one day you wake up and realize the hallway is where you’re supposed to be, not inside this room. You get out, leaving behind that piece of yourself that still isn’t healed, but you don’t know how to fix this. You don’t know how to fix her, or the mess of this room. So you run, only now you’re afraid to look back. You’re afraid to get close enough to shut those doors. What if I got sucked in again? What you don’t realize is that those other yous will always call you back. They are a part of you that shouldn’t have ever been separated and they need your attention. This mess is so big now. It’s leaking into present day. How will you sort this out? At first I don’t try and sort anything. This is life now, I assume. This is how it must be for everyone. So I deal with it as best I can . . . . Playing Candy Crush is a good distraction. It keeps your mind busy enough that you don’t have to think about anything else. Food also helps . . . . Then you learn what emotional eating is so you give that up. You trade that for controlling everything. Control how people in your life act, because if they treat you just right you’ll be ok. If your husband loves you just so, it’ll be ok. You think and plan for every disaster, you can’t be caught unaware. If you’re prepared enough, you’ll never feel the things happening in those rooms ever again. Life is so hard this way. You’re holding on so tight to this perfectly controlled version of life, there’s no room for joy, laughter, or uncertainty. There’s no room for anything but your TILL WE HAVE VOICES 91 control. That’s one way to deal with it . . . alcohol and drugs is another. Addiction of any kind really. Anything that allows you to escape your reality. Hyper control and hyper letting go are two sides to a very dangerous coin. You lost your way and digging through the rubble is goddamn painful. So drift away or control what you can and pretend it isn’t happening. In this version, life is really depressing . . . . This is the place where depression, anxiety and things like PTSD live. Some people like to call this the black pit. It feels bottomless and you feel hopeless . . . . It wasn’t until I gave Lifespan Integration a try that I saw a different way. The process revealed to me how many different ways I had hidden from my past, effectively shutting the lights off in this hallway and creating the feeling of being in a black pit. ‘The opposite of recognizing that we’re feeling something is denying our emotions. The opposite of being curious is disengaging. When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don’t go away; instead, they own us, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, Yes. This is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends.’ Brene Brown’s quote is absolutely bang on. I think the tough memories and situations that that make us feel stuck might need more than the process Brené Brown has described in her book Rising Strong, however, getting curious is definitely the first step. That’s a great start if you can do it. For me, getting curious was too dangerous. When you live with what was essentially PTSD, getting curious can do damage. There’s the potential to retraumatize yourself and it’s one of the reasons that traditional talking TILL WE HAVE VOICES 92 counselling hadn’t worked for me. I could talk to a counsellor about what had happened to me in my childhood, but as a protective measure there was a large part of me that was very disengaged and checked out during that process. It was too painful to touch in this way. So how can you heal when you’re trying to deny your story? On the other hand, Lifespan Integration is essentially a supportive and trained professional who has the tools to get you safely to all these doors, taking you one step at a time to the threshold of these rooms so you can sort them out. You definitely do all the work, but it’s like having a guiding and protective hand, leading you to these places you’ve done your level best to avoid. Once there, you have the opportunity to get your other you. You need this piece of yourself and you need to make the situation right in your mind—for your own peace. A large part of that happening is doing what your younger self couldn’t and then teaching your mind that the situation is really in the past. I was so skeptical at first . . . how could reliving these memories ever heal me? I relive them all the time. When I get stuck in those rooms. It’s horrible. The difference is that you’re never the you that had to face that situation. You get to get her out of there and your present day self is the one that does what needs to be done. It was the oddest thing, but those early sessions were splitting me in half. The duct tape I had used to hold all the pieces of myself together was failing me. Then something strange happened . . . the intensity of emotion in some of those rooms, the ones we had worked on, died down. It didn’t feel like an all out war was being played out. I could go back and look at these memories and that piece of me that was always in the room, was no longer in there. The me that had been trapped, was now a part of me— the present me. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 93 I slowly started to feel less fractured . . . . My mind was no longer a minefield of memories that could ruin me for days. I felt free from the tethers I had bound myself with. I felt untangled from the web of anxiety and depression. I felt my mind was once again wide open to me and completely under my own control. Soon after all the chaos that lived inside of me went quiet. I will never forget the feeling of this peace I had lived without for over 10 years. My mind was quiet and it was the oddest and most extraordinary thing. You know if you’ve worked in a place that plays Christmas music during the holidays and eventually you get used to it? If you don’t like Christmas music it’s unconsciously grating on your nerves. You go on with life, but everything is underpinned by this annoying soundtrack. That’s what this noise was like. Only for me it sounded like high pitched static. The day it stopped was like turning off the radio. I must have cried in gratitude over this simple joy for weeks. I’d wake up and realize . . . silence. Peace. I’d breathe a sigh of relief and cry a few tears while I emailed my counsellor and thanked her over and over again for helping me get my life back. For me it happened in this miraculous overwhelming way . . . all at once and like an avalanche. As soon as I gained access to a few rooms, the rest came fast and furious. I don’t know why and I don’t know if my counsellor knows why or how it happened so quickly for me, but it did. J. P. J. P. (pseudonym) is a 67-year-old man who is currently married and has one daughter. He and his wife are raising their 12-year-old granddaughter together. J. P.’s therapist describes him as “down-to-earth, straight-forward, motivated, kind, insightful, and intelligent.” When asked to describe himself, J. P. says that, “on the negative side, [he finds himself] very irritable.” Alternatively, he describes himself as being “intelligent, wise, healthy, able, resilient, TILL WE HAVE VOICES 94 and strong.” He says that he feels that he is “constantly maturing,” but states that he recognizes there are moments when he will “act out and react to situations in a way that is kind of childish.” He explains that he can sometimes be “a little irrational, especially when [he is feeling] impatient or frustrated with something.” J. P. says that others might describe him as a “kind, nice, and gentle person,” though he does think that, historically, “there has probably been a level of unapproachableness to [him].” He says: I think some people would see me as having some very, um . . . some pretty significant walls up, and there may be almost a kind of . . . almost a fear of trying to penetrate those walls because I’ve been very . . . I’m . . . I can be pretty sharp. I can be very, um, sarcastic, and, um . . . very defensive and I’m usually pretty persuasive. I guess I just intimidate people sometimes. J. P. came to therapy in order to work through feelings of anger and rage. His goals were to be able to better regulate the intensity of his feelings and to be able to act in a way that is more thoughtful and intentional as opposed to reactive and explosive, especially in moments when he is feeling “topped out and overwhelmed.” When speaking about the moment he decided to start coming to therapy, J. P. says Well, I got to a . . . uh . . . I wish I could remember the year . . . . I can’t really tell you, but just that what I described in terms of my relationship with my wife (and the way I would react to her when I got angry) . . . it got to a point where I just thought this is . . . I was just beside myself. I didn’t know if I could ever change. I was so, um, almost broken by that . . . . I was at the end of my rope thinking that there was just no way to change. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 95 When asked how therapy has impacted him, J. P. says that “it’s been transformative for [him].” He describes feeling “a lot more personal peace, a lot more depth in [his] relationship with Christ and more openness and vulnerability with the people around [him].” He says: I’ve been able to, I guess, in a group . . . a small group of people been able to articulate some of my experiences of this process, to talk about . . . like I shared earlier the . . . just the difference between the first time going through my timeline to the second time in the same visit feel the physical change and the, uh . . . I guess the emotional perspective on stuff has been something I’ve been willing to share with people, so that’s been a pretty big shift for me. I’ve had a couple . . . since I’ve started this process, um . . . well, I think shortly before I started this, I lost my older brother and then during the process I lost my younger brother. And so I was, you know . . . and this latest thing with my daughter. It’s been a pretty hard six to eight months, and so . . . but I’ve been able to openly talk some of that out with people in my . . . in my very small group of people. Sarah. Sarah (pseudonym) is a 24-year-old female who is currently attending university. When asked to describe herself, Sarah says that she is a “daughter, sister, student, and employee.” She states that “[she takes] on various different roles.” In terms of character traits, she describes herself as “stubborn and unyielding – someone who is not really sucked into the positive and negative influence around me.” She says that she is “pretty driven.” She also describes herself as “sympathetic [in that she can] sympathize with a lot with other people and can sometimes feel what they are feeling.” Sarah explains that she views this as a helpful trait since it “allows [her] to really connect with people and get a sense of what others are going through so that [she] can help them through certain things.” She identifies it as somewhat problematic at times, however, especially when “[she ends] up taking on a lot of stuff that isn’t TILL WE HAVE VOICES 96 [hers].” Sarah goes on to disclose that she is “really imaginative and creative and can come across a little bit child-like if [she] is comfortable with [the person].” She says that she “[enjoys] the simple things in life and really, really [loves] nature and the outdoors.” She also explains that she is “pretty simply all around and very uncomplicated.” As such, “[she doesn’t] like it when people get political and manipulative or anything like that.” She says that in those scenarios, she will “get kind of lost and won’t really understand what is going on.” Reflecting on how others would describe her, Sarah says that she has been called “shy and quiet, kind and fun and also naïve.” She shares that “someone once told [her] that [she is] someone who can relate to everybody and that everybody can find something in common with [her].” She “[thinks] that people would say that [she is] always happy and, like, always positive and always has something good to say and, like, looks at the glass half full and all that.” Sarah adds that “[she is] not sure that that is so much true but can see why other people might think that about [her].” Sarah says that it is her aspiration to be “softer but stronger, meaning that [she wants] to be able to feel more settled around other people and have a good sense of [her] own self in a way that frees [her] up to just be [herself].” In describing her current situation, Sarah says that “the last couple of years have been more mild as compared to the past.” She states that her family “has a lot of very deep-seated issues.” To explain, she says: My father is a narcissist and my mother is . . . I don’t even know what . . . . She’s somewhere between . . . I don’t know if you’re familiar at all with the way, like, narcissism and personality disorders work, but . . . So my mother’s somewhere between an enabler and a victim and one herself. I’m not sure why. As far as I can see at least. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 97 Um, and that resulted in a lot of chaos in . . . at home. The whole time I was growing up, there was emotional abuse – a lot of emotional abuse – mostly from my dad and in slightly different forms, from my mom – like, maybe not quite so overt, not something you would look at and call it that at first glance, but when you kind of do, you know what was going on. It’s, like, this is not quite right. Beyond her family of origin, Sarah describes other relationships in her life as being tumultuous as well. She says: I had a lot of what you could probably characterize as drama in my friendships and relationships. And sometime around when I was 15 or 16, I got . . . well, essentially what happened is that I got cheated on and the girl was my best friend, um . . . and so I kind of lost a boyfriend and a best friend at the same time and there was just a lot of drama involved in the whole thing where, uh . . . she, the girl and her family, kind of ended up, like, turning the–cause we both went to the same church–and they sort of turned everybody in the church against me and my family, um . . . and, uh . . . it was just a big, big mess. So that was such a big deal. I mean, ultimately, I think the biggest thing that affected me was my family and everything that went on there. I mean, it’s a little hard to, like, nail down because most people, when they think about trauma, think about things like sexual abuse or that kind of thing and that didn’t really happen. Things got a little physical a few times throughout my childhood but it was mostly on an emotional level which became a lot harder to, like, actually nail down and point to as, like, a problem. It’s not as outwardly apparent, I guess. But, yeah. A lot of chaos and turmoil in most of my relationships so I think that that shaped me. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 98 Deborah. Deborah (pseudonym) is a 67-year-old female. She is married to a man who previously served in the Vietnam war. Together, they are raising the child of their adopted daughter. Their adopted daughter has passed away. In describing herself, Deborah states that she is an introvert and that she “would rather be alone.” She explains that, “[she loves] to read and [she loves] to ponder and that kind of thing.” Deborah goes on to say that she is friendly and “definitely caring.” Laughing, she says, “Yeah, and, um, I think I’m funny–probably funnier than other people think I am, but . . . I sort of have a dry sense of humour.” She describes herself as “energetic and sporty.” She also says that she enjoys baking and eating. Growing up, Deborah recalls that she “always thought [she] was mean and selfish.” She says: “I think those words were said to me probably, but I don’t remember them being said but I always . . . I think . . . I was selfish. I don’t know about the mean part.” Deborah described experiences of relational breakdowns and ruptures vis-à-vis her family of origin, especially as it pertains to her mother whom she characterized as being “very distant and very, um . . . condemning.” Deborah explained that “there was a lot of guilt and shaming” and that her mom was “kind of, well . . . she was cruel.” Deborah states that “that’s where [she] got the whole picture of being mean and selfish.” She goes on to say: The main thing was that I was always just searching for love, you know? I just spent my whole life trying to find it, and trying to do nice things and, you know, you never get enough praise; you never get enough, um, anything, and so . . . um, you started realizing why I did things, you know, from books that I read and everything. But . . . and . . . and then, plus . . . I just . . . well . . . coming to this place where I couldn’t do it anymore. I was so exhausted. I just could not play that game anymore, um, and so I had a . . . I felt like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 99 Deborah explains that she suffered symptoms of anxiety and depression during that time. She remembers asking herself after several months, “Wow. Is this what . . . is this what normal people feel like?”; however, it was not until she experienced a severe crisis in her marriage that Deborah sought help from a psychologist. She says: I just spent my whole life adjusting to my husband and trying to, you know . . . He was my main . . . I just realized this lately that, uh, I was . . . I knew I was co-dependent on him but that he was my, um, not stability . . . but he’s where I would get my self-esteem from, and so if he was silent or if he was angry or anything, you know, then I’d go into this head thing about, ‘What did I do?’ and all that. And so I think that’s what . . . and he has PTSD. He is a Vietnam veteran so yeah that was . . . cause I said you have to . . . we have to do something because I can’t stay here any longer . . . And, um, and I knew [the therapist] from this church group. Yeah. And so I would come to see her and talk to her about things to do with my husband, and, um . . . so there were just a whole lot of things in several different areas of my life where, you know . . . The first one was that I couldn’t go on playing this game anymore and the second one was that I couldn’t deal with this marriage anymore. It was, you know, hard and everything so . . . It was accumulative in a lot of ways. Deborah goes on to describe the extent of the co-dependency in her relationship with her husband. She also talks about some of the relational traumas she experienced with her daughter. Deborah explains that her daughter was in her mid-thirties when she passed away. Deborah came to therapy in hopes of recovering from a paralyzing sense of being unlovable and being “bad.” She hoped to gain independence from her relationships in such a way that allowed her to be able to withstand criticism and displeasure. She sought to gain a voice and be able to TILL WE HAVE VOICES 100 advocate for herself as a means of ensuring that she is cared for, listened to, and properly respected among those around her. She wanted to “feel comfortable in [her] own skin and be able to accept some things about [herself].” By the time that we were meeting for our interview, Deborah had attended approximately 30 sessions over the course of a year. She continues to attend therapy once a month for maintenance purposes, according to therapist, after having taken a break for several months. Voices As we delved more deeply into the stories of the participants, three categories of voices emerged: voices which spoke of trauma’s dismembering effects, voices which spoke of turning towards the pain, and voices which spoke of healing (see Figure 1). Voices of trauma’s dismembering effects included disconnection, pain, impasse and a felt sense of failure or disorientation, and dissociation and escape. The voices that spoke of turning towards the pain included active acceptance as well as mourning. In the midst of this, there was a desire to be more whole, more alive, and more able to thrive. Participants spoke to the recognition of what could or should have been. The voices of healing were numerous and nuanced. There was a voice which spoke to personal essence or “being me”–that is, the embodied, renewed, structured me for whom “being” (ontological) is prioritized over “doing” (which is often part of a felt sense of disconnection). There was also a voice of integration which incorporates attending to self, making sense of oneself, developing a coherent sense of self, self-acceptance, authenticity, having gratitude for one’s self, taking perspective and self-distancing, and reconnecting somatic and affective pieces of oneself. A voice of astonishment also emerged. This voice spoke of being touched and delighted. There was a voice of agency. Finally, there was a voice of calmness and peace. This chapter will describe each of these voices in more detail. I will TILL WE HAVE VOICES 101 provide examples of each voice and describe how they relate to each other as they are expressed within each participant. I will then talk about how the different ways in which participants manifested these voices allow for a fuller understanding of the complexity inherent to the embodied, lived experience of each individual. Similarities across the voices of various participants will also be discussed as a means of drawing attention to resonances that occur in shared experience. Figure 1. Categories of voices. This figure provides a visual summary of the voices identified by the research team. It is notable that there were differences in prevalence and in “participation rates” for each of the voices. Even still, the voices which emerged were comparable in relative prominence when considering the overall portrayal of the healing process and the journey in and through traumatic incidents as depicted by participants’ narratives. In the end, though the explicit representation of the voices through direct quotation from participants do, in fact, vary, it was the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 102 determination of the research team that each of the voices identified was featured distinctively and bore a “strength of embodiment” across the various stories of participants. Voices of trauma’s dismembering effects. In the voices connected to trauma, we see trauma as inherently dismembering where the self turns away from one’s life and experiences. This is characterized by disconnection from others, relationally, and disconnection from oneself through dissociation from one’s own feelings, memories, and body, and through an impasse towards growth. In dissociation, participants fail to bear witness to their own experiences and pain. Living is characterized by barriers rather than opportunities. Loneliness from others and disconnection from the self are felt as barrenness, and as not fully being in life because of what is not seen and not accepted. The voice of pain, which starts to emerge in therapy, points to the traumas that precipitated disconnection, dissociation and impasse toward healthy growth and development. Pain re-emerges as trauma survivors begin to see the cut off parts of their experiences in the beginning of therapy, and pain becomes the point of turning towards life and away from dissociation. In the following section, I will address the voice of disconnection, the voice of pain, the voice of impasse, and the voice of dissociation. These fall under the category of voices of trauma’s dismembering effects. Voice of disconnection. Many of the participants were familiar with the sensation of feeling disconnected. When they spoke from this place of feeling disconnected, they were highlighting the experience of feeling alone, feeling unseen, unheard, or misunderstood, and feeling isolated, esoteric, or apart from everyone else. This voice spoke of the interpersonal impacts of trauma and was identified when participants talked about feeling as if they could not connect with their loved ones and/or feeling as if they did not have the capacity to reach out and be in relationship with others. Some of the participants could speak to the issues underlying this. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 103 Kara, for example, noticed that members of her family, such as her husband or her daughter, would trigger her, and she realized that this would evoke either an attack or withdraw response, mostly motivated by shame and fear. Kara recalled how this impacted her family members. She said: I’m usually a pretty pleasant person to be with. [laughs] Um . . . and . . . and . . . wake up pretty happy, like . . . ready to face the day . . . But then there’s this part of me that would show up, like, 15, 20 percent of the time and it’s like I could go from that person to this . . . Grrr! And it’s, like, so confusing for my children and my husband because it’s so contrary to who I am as a person . . . And um . . . it just kept happening more than I wanted it to, so like, I would just get to a point where . . . um . . . and especially with my daughter, Sandra, who is six now, but she was five at the time when she could . . . she could really trigger me, and I . . . I didn’t know why at the time . . . It was like with her in particular, I could get the most upset, and there were a few instances where I got so angry with her that I was, like, yelling at her . . . like, pretty intensely . . . to the point where she was . . . she was afraid. And for a little kid, you know, that’s . . . that doesn’t compute. Like here’s my gentle, happy wonderful mom and then here’s . . . that’s . . . and people would say, “Oh Kara, you’re so hard on yourself,” and that’s true but I knew it wasn’t right, and I knew how that was impacting her. I could see it on her face and I didn’t like it. And I get overwhelmed . . . um . . . super easy. Like . . . like a lot of moms get overwhelmed but I would get overwhelmed to the point of . . . and it was usually always, like, leaving the house . . . like a panic. In another segment of her interview, Kara talked about how her triggered responses hindered her ability to connect with her husband. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 104 So . . . so . . . he can come in and he could say, um . . . he could come in and he could say something like, “Oh what’s that smell?” He’s just making an observation that something smells, but for me, I would internalize that. It was the little girl, right? . . . That wounded little girl. That alarm would go off, like, “Not good enough. Not good enough. I didn’t . . . I didn’t do it right. I didn’t do it right,” you know? So for him that was always so hurtful because I would assume the worst of him. As she spoke to the reasons for which she began therapy, Kara said “Those were the two reasons why I went to therapy – the way it impacted [my husband] and the way it impacted my children.” She recalls telling the therapist: Let’s fix whatever it is in my brain and you . . . let’s get it all stored away properly . . . like, I want it all stored away properly, so those alarms don’t go. I don’t want to be triggered anymore by my beautiful little girl who is just so precious. In Kara’s case, the felt sense of disconnection from her family and the ways in which she could see that her triggered responses affected them truly grieved her. She struggled to make sense of this. She tried so hard. Nonetheless, she noticed how “everything [she] was doing wasn’t fixing this one thing” and that it was something that “[she] couldn’t change” on her own.” Rachelle, in her interview, also spoke about her experiences of feeling disconnected to others, especially in the wake of a jarring move away from her home country. I never would have thought, like, leaving from [N] – like, I was seven – I really see now how that’s played out. And it was just kind of like, “Wow! I never would have thought that.” I never would have thought that moving here at seven years old would cause . . . like, even going through the timeline with [the therapist], I think that I realized that that was time . . . at that point, I put up my first major wall. Cause, you’re pulled away from TILL WE HAVE VOICES 105 all your family, everything, give up your cat, give up everything – first time I probably learned to suck it up and brush it off a little bit. It’s, like, “Wow. I never would have thought the move caused that.” Throughout the therapy process, Rachelle began to notice ways in which she kept others away from her due to her own pain, and she could see how this disconnection had become a defense mechanism in her life. So it’s just having some of those personal insights, and going, like, “Okay, it’s not just because I’m a cold bitch,” and I don’t attach to people and I am so quick to . . . once [I’ve] been burnt to, just . . . done. [I] literally just, “See ya,” and I literally would just walk away, and be like, totally, “Nah, I’m good,” and I just, totally, like, *click*. Tage explained that a theme from her childhood has to do with trying to achieve a sense of worthiness. She says that she believed she was only a good person if she could help people. She linked this to the feelings of helplessness she experienced as a child trying to take care of and save her mom who was sick and dying of terminal cancer. Tage said: Maybe a part of me believed that if I could have done more, she would have survived, and so I took on that burden in my life – feeling like I was a failure for not having been able to save my mom. That followed me everywhere after that. I had this tendency to be a nurturer and, like, a healer in ways and I always fell into that trap in relationships . . . like, in friendships. I could only have friendships where I felt that I was benefitting the other person, and you that comes with the fact that if you don’t feel that you are worth yourself, you are always thinking about what you have to offer everyone else, right? You have to feel that you are wonderful just as you are, not that you can provide a service to anyone or, you know, provide whatever. It’s not about that. But I was stuck there, and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 106 so I spent a lot of time in relationships like that. I really struggling with that because I couldn’t have appropriate boundaries with people because I wouldn’t be a good person if I said, “No.” So that was a big thing. I had people in my life, but I wasn’t real with them. I wasn’t me. And that was such a lonely and painful experience. I was always feeling guilty or ashamed or inadequate. And I don’t know if other people knew that. But it was awful. I felt so disconnected from people because I was always trying to hide my shame and hide my lack of self-esteem and self-worth. Similarly, J. P. talked about the way in which he isolates from others when grappling with painful emotions. He said, “I recognize how inhibited I am and how resistant I am to allowing other people to be a part of a process that feels really messy and unwieldy.” J. P. went on to explain: I think it’s my self-protection, um, response . . . There’s some sense in my . . . uh . . . in this control that I have about knowing stuff and not letting others know it that makes me feel powerful, so I try to keep that ‘cause if I open up, then I lose my advantage, you know? And so there’s sort of this power struggle that goes on about that. And so, um, you know I mentioned that my . . . when my dad committed suicide, there was no conversation about that. No therapy, no priest, no school counsellor, and no talk in the family and no talk with my friends and the woman that I’m married to right now. I knew back then that . . . and she is the only person that asked me pointedly about the impact of that on me and it . . . that really is like, well, you know, it was like I got put up a big fence with this woman and I’ve kept that for the whole time, you know, and so that’s kind of not very pretty. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 107 He said that sentiments such as, “‘I’m not going to cry. You’re not going to hurt me. I’m never going to let anybody hurt me,’ became, like, a kind of oath that [he] took to protect [himself].” J. P. reflected on the fact that, as he kept saying those things to himself, they “[started] becoming a reality, um, hindering relationship and intimacy.” He went on to say, “I’ve been there for a long time and I don’t want to be there anymore.” Sarah, in a similar way, noted how past traumas, especially as it pertains to her immediate family, have contributed to a sense of feeling unsafe around others. She said: I kind of close myself off from people and from the world a lot. Um, but I don’t really want to . . . When I started therapy I . . . I was struggling a lot with things like communicating with people and being able to relate, and um . . . The thing that actually made me come to therapy and start really trying to look for a solution to the whole thing was, um . . . I had been in a relationship for about a year and a half and I was realizing that, um, I was hiding some big problems in terms of being honest with my boyfriend and being able to communicate with him and it was causing a lot of problems in our relationship because I couldn’t open up and I couldn’t connect on a real level very well. But, um . . . yeah. I was just not really able to connect. Deborah talked about the extremely loneliness that she experienced in her past. She explained that it appeared that those around her did not truly see her in the ways that she had been struggling. As a result, she felt that she had to grapple with her fears, her hurts, and her insecurities on her own. She said, “You know, people never knew who I really was ‘cause I was playing this role all the time, um, but when I hear people now, I mean, my friends now, um, for one thing they are so surprised that I felt like I did inside ‘cause it . . . ’cause I guess it didn’t show and, um, yeah, I found that they thought, especially the ones that used to know me . . . TILL WE HAVE VOICES 108 really didn’t know that I had such low self-esteem and stuff, you know? Nobody, nobody got that, ‘cause I hid that very well. But I was very lonely. Even, years later, in a marriage and with kids around and everything. So yeah. It was hard.” Deborah also talked about having fears that “others may not like [her]” and spoke about how this has “really bothered [her].” She shared that it has been very exhausting for her to constantly be worrying about what others were thinking, and hence she often has “felt most comfortable when [she is] alone.” She said: I just love that. I love it when nobody is bothering me and I don’t have to worry about pleasing anyone, but I know it’s not good just to withdraw and hide away all the time and want to be away from people. I just . . . sometimes really need that, you know? But I want to be more okay with people, and with myself. Overall, the participants characterized trauma as a disfiguring, lonely time. They expressed that suffering through trauma felt most unbearable in those moments when they felt most alone; yet, at the same time, several participants explained that even in the midst of sharing their suffering with others, it was clear that no one else could fully walk the road with them the whole way. Their coping reactions, at times, kept others at an arm’s (or several arms’) length. Their fears around further loss, pain, grief, anxiety, and distress blocked every intention to reach out. There were days when they felt detachment and frustration towards even their closest friends and their most beloved family members. There was frequently a deep distrust of love or presence or vulnerability in the aftermath of trauma. For a number of participants, seeking out shelter in others required tremendous courage; and though it was a matter of life or paralysis, many individuals struggled to allow others to stand with them in their pain. Although it was their desire to connect and to allow others’ care, love, and support to buoy them in their time of need, it seemed that there was a galaxy of disfigurement and longing and disorientation in their TILL WE HAVE VOICES 109 navigation of these relationships. In the end, the voice of disconnection portrays that one of the processes involved in trauma is that people are impelled both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. The capacity for intimacy is compromised, and the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others is destroyed. Voice of dissociation. The voice of dissociation encompassed both active and passive dissociation which occur in response to pain and in protection against pain. Participants stated that there were elements of their lived experience which they did not remember and parts of the experience that they could not connect with and/or feel. This void of experiencing brought in memory as well as cognitive, affective, and somatic dimensions. Emotional disconnection also featured as an element of the dissociative experience; this refers more to the intrapersonal, internal dynamics of disconnection. Rachelle stated that the process of building her timeline “really highlighted how much of [her] life [she] had . . . like, kind of . . . forgotten . . . no, not forgotten . . . just buried maybe. It made [her] realize how many things [she] had buried.” She said that she began to “realize how many blanks [she] had” in terms of memories regarding certain periods of her life, “especially around the time of Mitch’s accident.” Kara, reflecting back to the beginning of therapy, stated that it was hard to remember pieces of her story in order to create the timeline. She said: I don’t . . . who remembers something from two years old? I mean, there are few things that I really remember very clearly. I remember feeling afraid at times, but . . . like . . . I guess I always had this story of my dad as the bad guy and my mom as the hero and I just assumed . . . I just assumed that . . . Cause my mom left my dad when I was six because she tried for so long to make I work, but he . . . he was abusive to her. The thing is, I TILL WE HAVE VOICES 110 don’t ever remember seeing him, like, hit her or push her. My sister does, but I can’t remember any of that. My mom explained that he would get quite aggressive at times, and that there would be lots of yelling. But as I was trying to make up my timeline, I called my mom and said, “Mom, help me remember which . . .” like, she helped me put some cues together and my mom was, like, “[Kara], there were times when plates of food were being thrown around,” so, little snippets like that tell me that it was an awful environment, but I just learned to, I guess, as a little girl, to block it . . . or my brain did anyways. Kara found it daunting to try and recall specific memories that, she assumed, had been either suppressed or otherwise forgotten over the years. Yet, the lack of a congruent narrative felt disconcerting. Without key pieces of the story intact, Kara found that it was hard to orient herself around various emotions and, what felt like, more visceral reactions to certain triggers in her daily life. She explains that though it felt counterintuitive to delve into some of the brokenness and woundedness that are a part of her past, she knew that it was essential in order to gain a perspective on “all the stuff that [she] had to work through and fill in.” She exclaimed: I mean, it was weird, and I can’t explain all of it . . . even when I try to explain to people . . . I mean, it’s hard for some people to understand, but there was this whole collection of memories that I had never really tapped into, you know? There was just some pretty ugly stuff that had happened but I must have just completed blocked it out. Maybe that was safer back then. Maybe I needed to do that to be able to cope. But it’s just weird that I don’t have any memory of it which explains why there were just certain things about myself that I couldn’t really figure out, and why I felt so helpless in the midst of it all. It was so hard, and it just got harder and harder the more I felt like I couldn’t understand TILL WE HAVE VOICES 111 what was happening inside of me and why I was reacting the way I was towards my kids. It felt a little scary at times. Tage found that LI therapy revealed that there were parts of her story that she had not spoken about in previous counselling sessions. This, for her, was surprising since she describes herself as a “really open person who has always been really honest in [her] counselling sessions.” Tage explained that “[she has] done a lot of couns–, talk counselling before” but that LI taught her that there was “so much more that [she] had not been willing to discuss even if [she is] a super open person.” Tage stated that it was not so much that she was trying to “hide anything in the counselling sessions that she had done before, but that there was just stuff that [she] didn’t totally realize was there.” She said: The big thing about Lifespan is that there is no . . . um, if you’re really participating in it, there’ no way to hold stuff back. And I think that has been the most important part, like aside from how the therapy works and how it works in your brain, um . . . The fact that there’s no pretenses there, like even your own mechanism to protect yourself is kind of gone. She explained that the process of, first, creating her timeline and then running through it in her counselling sessions helped to highlight pieces of her story that were deeply affecting but if not suppressed, then at least, “pushed aside or away or whatever – so much so that [she] barely remembered them.” Tage described herself as “a really open person who never denied things about herself or about the fact that her childhood was really shitty” but said that when she discovered LI, her reaction was one of shock and resistance because she felt unsure of the repercussions of revisiting painful memories from her past. Tage stated that she learned the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 112 difference between “knowing that something happened to [her] and truly entering into the experience of what had happened to [her].” She said: I did not realize that I, like, checked out of some of those experiences the first time through maybe because it was too much for me to really handle at that time and because this was my brain’s way of protecting me, the idea of going back and dealing with those things in, like, a totally different way seemed crazy. Tage went on to say: I thought it was going to kill me. I didn’t want to, but I knew that I had to in order to get better and be able to walk myself out of those situations that were stuck points from before. I knew that I needed to jump right back into some of those things that I had tried to move past but had never really moved through. It was scary because a part of me wasn’t even really sure what some of those things to were going to be, you know? Like, when you are operating in such a high intensity situation, especially when you are young . . . like, a . . . a child, there is no room to remember things. There is no brain capacity left to remember things. And some of the things that I think I’ve walked through, like, worked on a lot, like . . . you know, I was still surprised when those bad memories came up and how they triggered such a strong reaction cause I think I blocked a lot of stuff during that time, and I guess some of that has to come back. Like, I needed to be more able to remember those things, but I didn’t really even know there were things that I wasn’t remembering or . . . trying not to remember. I was like, “I don’t remember shit!” Speaking about the process of creating his timeline, J. P. also had the experience of struggling to remember elements of his story. He said, “I spend a lot of time on it. I don’t have a really good memory or recollection of particular ages.” The process of going back and revisiting TILL WE HAVE VOICES 113 certain aspects of his life also proved to be both uncomfortable and, at times, painful. J. P. recalled that his instinct was to avoid certain pieces of his life. He stated: I remember when . . . the idea was that I went to go through my timeline with the little, I guess it was . . . might have been pre-natal . . . I don’t remember for sure. Or at some point having to say to myself, like, ‘Here’s your life and I’m going to you show,’ and I got so tense about that because there’s just a lot of stuff in my life I wouldn’t want to show to anybody let alone take a little kid there. When asked how he has dealt with past traumas, J. P. said: For me, it seems like the whole thing has been, you know, the whole focus for me in dealing with trauma is protecting. Don’t let it show, don’t let anybody see it, and just buck up cowboy. So I’m kind of, we’re not going to talk about it, we’re not going to look at it, we’re not going to think about it. We’re just going to move on and so bottling up and that. Sarah, similarly, talked about how she “kind of blocked out a lot of [her] childhood.” She said, “The whole, like, timeline thing has been hard because I don’t actually have very tangible memories to kind of go off of.” Sarah explained that therapy helped her to “delve into some things that [she] kind of buried for a long time;” however, prior to that, she “[buried things] as a means of coping with all the things that happened to [her], especially in [her] childhood and things that had to do with a lot of [her] family’s deep-seated issues.” Deborah reflected on the ways in which her childhood shaped her self-concept, and although she could not recall specific events that were crucial in terms of their impact on her, she is aware that “[she] always thought [she] was mean and selfish.” Deborah said that “[she thinks] those words were said to [her] probably, but [she doesn’t] remember them being said.” Deborah TILL WE HAVE VOICES 114 explained that, in general, “[her] family was chaotic. There was always so much going on that it was constantly a bit of a blur which makes it hard for [her] to remember things in a way that really [made] sense to [her].” She stated that “[her] mother was, um . . . kind of, well . . . she was cruel. She just said, you know, cruel things.” Deborah admitted that “[she could] not even tell [me] what [her] mother said, but just that she did say really cruel and hurtful things.” She said, “looking back, it was traumatic and the only time [she] felt comfortable was when [she] was out in the woods and alone and [she] just loved that.” She considered that “it was likely for the best that [she does] not fully remember the things that [her] mother said to [her].” She wondered whether, “perhaps, it was [her] mind’s way of protecting [her] from those things, just blocking them out.” It seemed that, for many participants, the ability to suppress certain memories or emotions was constitutive of a survival mechanism during difficult periods in their lives. The dissociative experience had an anesthetic effect on the whole person by inducing the loss of sensation or awareness which, in turn, provided relief from or prevention of pain in moments when conditions were unendurable. Even though dissociation clearly does not negate the impact of harrowing life events, it served a necessary function when the mind-body system was overwhelmed and unable to process the immediate experience which confronted each of these individuals. Voice of emotional disconnection. The profound disruptions of trauma operate not only in the arena of the individual’s close relationships but also at the level of her own inner life. The damage of traumatic life events on relationships may, after all, be compounded by emotional disengagement or withdrawal due to a pervasive sense of numbness in the aftermath of trauma. Although not occurring as often, there were instances in which participants spoke about a severe TILL WE HAVE VOICES 115 inner disconnect which hindered their ability to be in possession of their own emotions; in other words, it limited their capacity to attune to their own emotional states. For Rachelle, this was a disconcerting and malignant effect of trauma. She explained in saying: Like, I was telling [the therapist] even before the beginning of this study that I’ve just got so good at flicking the switch [off on my emotions] and I’ve flicked it so much that when Mitch got into his accident, I think I flicked it, and I think I just forgot how to flick back on the emotion. But I’ll say that I have gained the ability to flick it back on again . . . Because I had definitely gotten stuck in one mode. She recalled that she was “really, really good at running on robot mode.” She explained that undergoing therapy “made it come out that [she] still [has] feelings, and [she] still [has] emotions, and maybe it’s not such a bad thing.” However, she “[remembers] having a total breakdown, and it was one of the last breakdowns [she] had . . .and [she thinks] . . . at that point, [she] just became a robot.” Rachelle said that “therapy made [her] realize how [she is] not comfortable showing emotion; as soon as [she starts] to feel any emotion, [she shuts] it off . . . like, right away.” She admitted that disconnecting from those emotions was likely a “survival tactic.” She said: I mean, I couldn’t have, like, articulated it or even . . . I don’t know if I was aware of it, but I definitely, like ‘closed the door’ to my emotions because it was all too much. I did not want to deal with the difficult things that were a part of my family’s circumstances . . . or maybe I just didn’t know how to deal with it. I don’t know. There was just always so much going on all the time. I was totally overwhelmed, and so I just shut it all down. J. P. also stated that he felt “emotionally inhibited in many ways” prior to therapy. He explained that it was a way to cope with the impact of painful life events such as his father’s TILL WE HAVE VOICES 116 suicide and his brother’s death. He said that “he never talked to anybody about anything that would start the emotional triggers to, maybe, be vulnerable or cry or do something like that. [He] just wouldn’t do it. [He] wouldn’t go there.” He talked about “resisting [his] emotions” because “[he] didn’t want to fall apart.” J. P. went on to say: And then you just really numb after a while. You stop feeling, or maybe . . . maybe you just stop being aware of your feelings. I was clearly feeling the impact of trauma . . . I’m still . . . I still have trauma coming at me all the time, but I think I was less aware of it . . . less aware of the impact and the emotions that I had around that. Indeed, it is sometimes the case that people who have experienced trauma may suffer the discovery of an appalling disjunction between their need for processing the complex emotions provoked by extreme situations and their actual experience of feelinglessness in the aftermath of trauma. Voice of impasse. Contained within the voice of impasse was a strong sense of facing something impenetrable. Participants expressed that they experienced difficulty moving through an internal barrier; many referred to this experience as a felt sense of “stuckness.” This stuckness was also experienced interpersonally. For several individuals, this meant that they felt unable to communicate with the significant people in their lives. It felt impossible to convey their internal state of being which felt so fragmented, disorienting, confusing, and incomprehensible. Participants described hurdles in terms of it being “their stuff” which got in the way of their daily living and prevented them from being fully alive. Many were aware that either they, personally, or their situation, specifically, required something; nonetheless, it felt difficult to delineate the need. Participants felt the lack of capacity to engage with and/or meet the need. Overall, this was highly aggravating for each of the participants. Some began to feel TILL WE HAVE VOICES 117 helpless; others doubted that there was any hope for their recovery. There was a sense of futility in their efforts to process emotions and face the aftermath of trauma in their lives. Rachelle spoke about “getting stuck in one mode of operating.” She said, “I just learned to suck it up and brush things off, and I got so used to that that . . . I guess . . . I guess I just didn’t come back from that.” She went on to say: I felt like I was always stuck in crisis mode and, like, I was constantly, vibrating at such a high level. I couldn’t switch it off. I wasn’t even sure that there was another way of operating, you know? So yeah. When I came to therapy, I was like, “Hey man, if you can do that for me, fantastic, but good luck!” I just didn’t think there was any way of shifting that. I had been, like, “go, go, go” for so long that I was sure that that was just the way that I . . . I just got so hyper-focused on the goals, like, with my kinds and stuff, that I stopped noticing what was going on for me. I mean, it just wasn’t about me anymore. It was about them. But, I think, in the long run, I just kind of got stuck in this place where I wasn’t just numb to my feelings, but, like, I wasn’t even aware that I had feelings or, like . . . I just didn’t know how to connect to my emotions. I’m not sure that I wanted to I guess, but . . . I think . . . at that point, I just became totally disconnected and, like, I had no idea how to come back from that . . . so I never really tried to. Kara stated that she remembers “feeling stuck in those hard places.” She said that felt as if “[she] was in bondage.” She explained that “[she] was broken and struggling and just needing to face her stuff but felt like [she] maybe lacked the courage or . . . or just didn’t have the right tools or something.” She said that she felt alone in her experience and that this was “a very despairing place to be.” She explained that, at moments, she felt “just totally unable to move past certain ways of thinking” and that “[she] would often ruminate on mistakes and on things TILL WE HAVE VOICES 118 [she] perceived to be, like, huge, monumental failures.” Kara stated that “[she] would get frustrated with [her] unrealistic expectations of [herself], but that [she] felt unable to just let it go.” She said: I just couldn’t do that on my own, you know? I just . . . I just remember going to Paul and being like, “Please help me. Like, I don’t know . . . I don’t know what do. I need help. I’m stuck.” And I was so overwhelmed and anxious but I just didn’t see any way out! It was awful. Tage sought therapy throughout her life as a means of seeking reprieve from the debilitating pain that that was a result of traumatizing events in her past. As someone who was suffering from heartache, loss, and constant anxiety, Tage knew that she needed help. In time, however, she discovered that her pain had not abated. She found certain modes of therapy to be ineffective in terms of allaying the symptoms of anxiety and became disheartened due to the lack of progress. In our interview, she openly described her frustration with therapy prior to discovering LI. She stated that she had tried “talk therapy” and found that she “talked [herself] silly with talking counselling, but even being the open, intelligent person that [she is], it didn’t work for [her].” Tage explained that she began to feel that “maybe something was wrong with [her] and that was why [she] wasn’t able to move through [her] stuff.” She remembered thinking, “Maybe I’m so damaged that I can’t be fixed. Like, I have all the tools and the knowledge, but it’s not working so it must be me.” Sarah had a similar experience. She explained that: [She] had been in therapy a couple years [before beginning LI therapy], and that was mostly because something had happened with [her] in a relationship that [she] had had and [her mother] sort of freaked out about the whole thing and decided that [she] needed TILL WE HAVE VOICES 119 to, you know, so she just kind of forced [Sarah] into it though [Sarah] felt like [she didn’t] need to be there and that this wasn’t going to help. Sarah admitted that her mentality towards attending therapy likely contributed to its lack of effectiveness at that time. She explained that she was “just so opposed to the idea.” She went on to say, however, that she continued to “struggle with a lot of things” and “began to feel as if she was stuck in certain patterns, like, in communicating with people and being unable to relate to them.” She said that she “had it in [her] mind that [she] could just forget about things that had happened in the past and choice that [she] had made;” yet, in time, she realized that “this was not working.” She noticed that she would “fall back into old, dark feelings and feel as if [she] was always coming back to square one.” “This was so frustrating and confusing!” she exclaimed. She went on to further explain: I mean, I knew that I had a lot of fear-based ‘unhealthy’ beliefs that were likely subconscious in many ways, but they were so engrained in me that . . . that I would fall back into those ways of thinking again and again. I just . . . there was a lot of impossibly difficult stuff, but, I think, I was hiding some big problems and eventually I just had to realize that I was stuck. I couldn’t really move forward on my own. This really came out in my relationship with my boyfriend. I didn’t know how to deal with some of the things that I kind of buried for a long time, and this was affecting the way that I was interacting with him. I couldn’t really communicate well with him, but it wasn’t necessarily intentional. I just wasn’t able to. It was hard to, like, actually nail down and point to the problem. I needed to seek help, and that’s kind of what brought me back to therapy for real this time. J. P. also spoke about burying the painful elements of his life. He stated: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 120 You know, I said that my dad, you know, he committed suicide. I never really spoke about that before . . . you know, before . . . I didn’t talk to my wife about it. I didn’t talk to my family about it. It just was not something that I could . . . that I could talk about. I had this, this tremendous resistance to showing emotional vulner– , you know, the crying or, you know . . . and so I’ve just . . . I just fought that. Yeah, and I’m still not good at crying. Um, there really have been times when I just want to. I just want to bawl my head off ‘cause I’m so frustrated. But I can’t get there. He talked about how “there’s that . . . there’s a whole big physiological thing that just stops . . . it just shuts it down when I start to get emotional.” He said: Maybe it was intentional at first, but then it just became automatic and suddenly there was this, kind of, internal locking mechanism that clamped down whenever I tried to access my emotions. I couldn’t get past that. Even if I tried to . . . I couldn’t access the stuff that needed to get worked through and so it kind of just had a hold on me and I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t move past it. Deborah reflected that her inability to move past the guilt and the shame that she accrued in her childhood eventually led her “to the verge of a nervous breakdown.” She said: I . . . I don’t even know what a nervous breakdown is, but I pretty much stayed home because I was so anxious and so overwhelmed. I didn’t even know what to do. Looking back, I think that I may have suffered from depression for a long period of time, but, back then, I think I just felt really stuck. I felt confused, overwhelmed, and stuck. It was awful. The feeling of stuckness was pivotal in many participants’ journeys towards seeking help. The realization that they were at a point of impasse provoked the desire to access support and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 121 search for ways of gaining insight into their situations. Some participants talked about feeling helpless whereas others spoke more about feeling frustrated and exasperated. Some sought to move past their issues by evading and disregarding their feelings and their reactions to triggering events. Others pursued particular forms of counselling and found their distress to be enduring; they experienced disappointment and confusion in the face of their continuing pain. It became difficult for them to believe that they could be relieved of their anguish. Many of the participants felt tied to their suffering, doubting that much could be done to induce changes in their present conditions. Inherent to this feeling of stuckness was a sense of despair. Faced with hurts which had gone too deep and taken hold, participants began to wonder whether there may be some wounds that cannot be wholly cured. Though they had survived the incidents of their past, they feared that their lives would never seem the same since they, themselves, were not the same. It became evident that many of the participants felt weary at this point in their journey, as if the memories of their pasts were heavy upon them. Voice of pain. In order to work through the threads of her past, each of the participants had to engage with a great choice: she had to choose the course into the depths of her pain, fight it through, and win. As it occurred in therapy, recalling events from the past and reencountering various emotions that had to do with those events was, in fact, deeply unpleasant for the participants. As such, the voice of pain features prominently in many of the participants’ narratives which detail their experience of therapy. The voice of pain represents a turning point between numbness and connection, a “quitting” of dissociating. This voice mostly occurs in participants’ accounts of beginning the therapy process. Specifically, in LI, a forced encountering of life experiences comes from being exposed to the timeline. Some participants resisted this pain and others chose more immediately to “turn towards” the pain. Ultimately, all TILL WE HAVE VOICES 122 remained in the therapeutic process, and they found that experiencing pain as a part of their reality was instrumental in the remembering/reconnecting process. This voice stands abreast the voices of trauma and the voices of healing. For many participants, the pain of being re-touched by trauma was catalytic in their pursuit of hope and healing. For some, the experience of acute pain in therapy provided a starting point for recognizing the impact of trauma on their lives. At this point, experiences that had previously been blocked came closer to consciousness. It was the task of the participants to overcome the anguish of recalling harrowing personal experiences from their past in order to take steps towards triumphing over misery, despair, and the loss of hope in their lives. J. P. shared that he experienced therapy as “very difficult.” He explained that “to actually even go back there to the whole suicide thing or to go back to [something] as recent as [his] brother’s death and that experience . . . that’s been . . . emotionally . . . pretty trying and taxing.” J. P. went on to say that part of the difficulty with engaging therapy was a sense of fear around the pain associated with his past traumas. In his own words, J. P. stated: Part of it is fear. Um, afraid to deal with the pain. Uh, afraid to let it show or let anybody know that I’m hurting or that there’s something or maybe, maybe . . . maybe they’ll think of it in terms of weakness, that being in pain or being vulnerable means that somebody hurt me and, uh, that seems weak and powerless and so the whole idea in my mind is, “Let’s gain control over it,” and “I’ll be in charge,” and so . . . Sarah also found the process of reflecting on her past to be difficult and painful. When asked about the hardest parts of therapy, she said: The whole going back through certain events . . . yeah. Um, I am not a crier and I have cried more times in here in the last couple of months than I think I had in the last year. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 123 Um, so I definitely was kind of having to relive, you know, the whole thing of reading back through of the timeline and what happened. Especially, like, focusing on a certain event and going through it multiple times, it kind of forces you to revisit it every time. Kara recalled specific moments in therapy during which she had felt as if she was reliving situations from her past. She said: I mean . . . and there were . . . there were some situations where I could . . . like, literally, I could see my dad’s hand and um . . . not like him hitting me, but him threatening me and being afraid. It was scary to go through! And it was hard. I remember it being so hard, you know? You start to see this part of yourself . . . this wounded little girl and . . . and you feel so much pain watching her suffer like that. You just . . . it was just so hard. Deborah described a similar experience in stating that “it was like reliving through some of the painful moments in [her] past again. She said: Like, remembering the kinds of things my mother would have said to me and feel all of that shame and that hurt and that . . . that guilt. I would feel helpless all over again just remembering how I couldn’t please my mother and remembering that . . . that . . . just feeling like everything I did was wrong. I could, like, feel it in my stomach and in my chest and it was so uncomfortable. It was really unpleasant! Like, that suffocating feeling of shame. I would almost want to crawl out of my skin, it was so bad. As Deborah alluded to in her account of undergoing therapy, certain participants had the experience of somatic pain as they journeyed through parts of their timelines. Rachelle, for example, experienced a “physical reaction when [the therapist] hit on certain trigger points.” She said that “feeling the physical reaction that [her] body has to certain trauma triggers [made her] realize how much [her] body held onto . . . or, like, contained trapped emotions and how much TILL WE HAVE VOICES 124 those emotions really affect [her] body.” She described the sensation in her body as “insane – like you want to crawl out of your skin.” When asked further about what it was like in her body to go through her timeline, Rachelle said: Horrible! Horrible. Like, going to every session, I felt like a little kid going, “I don’t wanna do this!” It’s physically uncomfortable . . . The first time I would say that I felt that, like, I can’t ever remember what she had hit on, but I say there feeling like . . . like, all I can say is it just feels like, you can feel . . . it’s like a nail on a chalkboard kind of feeling. It’s just like, you just wanna, like, crawl out of your own skin. It takes everything you have to not, like . . . like, you just wanna be, like, done. . . I didn’t expect that. I expected it to be mentally uncomfortable; I didn’t expect the physical part of that. So every session it was like, “Well, this is really going to suck,” but it did feel good afterwards . . . Like I said, the main thing is the insight into why I am the way I am, and with the body going like . . . Yeah, when you do internalize stuff, you think you just . . . but really in your body, you carry it. And as much as I knew that . . . I don’t know if I really believed it . . . But to finally go, “There’s a hell of a lot more in the subconscious then I thought,” was pretty interesting. I mean, like it was really good to feel my body let it all out as I went through this, because when you do hold it all in, like, it eats you from the inside. Tage, similarly, remembered having strong somatic reactions to LI therapy. She described how one memory that she and the therapist revisited “produced a kind of severe panic attack in [the therapist’s] office.” Tage said that she was dumbfounded by this, and she also stated that she remembers feeling “a lot of pain in [her] body as [she] was having this panic TILL WE HAVE VOICES 125 attack and even after the session, just . . . just, like, feeling a lot of pain in [her] body.” She explained that “it was very uncomfortable to go through.” For these participants, the pain of being re-touched by trauma called attention to the existence of a forgotten history. Through the experience of pain, the knowledge of horrible events periodically intruded into conscious awareness, breaking past denial, repression, and dissociation in such a way that challenged these individuals to reconnect fragments, reconstruct history, and make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events. Though the subject of their pain had, at once, provoked strong, often unconscious motives to draw a veil of oblivion over the past, these participants sought to endure the pain in order to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces, and to fit them together so as to gain an understanding of the impact of psychological trauma. Indeed, the emergent pain in the process of remembering the story of traumatic events highlights a conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud; nonetheless, these participants sought to uncover the “underground” history of psychological trauma as it was manifest in their lives. Their courage to make attempts at, first, acknowledging and then describing the atrocities that they have witnessed, suggests that a restorative understanding of the past is requisite to reclaiming the present and the future. This is further elaborated in the processes represented by the next set of voices. Voices of turning towards the pain. At the heart of the therapeutic process, we see participants describe the process of actively coming to terms with their own experiences as they have lived them, acknowledging what was loss or unattained because of trauma. What is significant here is that participants allowed themselves to truly notice how much they were hurting due to their past experiences; they, then, gave themselves permission to grieve over the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 126 heartache they endured and the resignation they felt in the face painful life events. The barriers that had been built up to prevent these individuals from feeling overly vulnerable and exposed were taken apart so that they could witness what had actually been there and respond affectively with mourning. Accepting what had occurred gave survivors a context for their current life. Clearly, this acceptance is not characterized by liking or condoning the sources of pain; still, it is a personal task which underscores a build-up of courage and capacity that are requisite for facing the difficult events of the past. This acceptance entails seeing and bearing witness to the lived truth of trauma. By turning towards their pain, participants actively confronted what has been there in trauma and allowed this to evoke an affective response. Whereas barriers had been erected in disconnection and dissociation and were evidenced by trauma victims’ experiences of impasse, the active process of mourning demonstrates a connection with one’s body, affects, and memories. Through this engagement with the reality of trauma and the loss of felt goodness, survivors demonstrate longing and a new openness to growth and opportunity. The following section includes the voice of active acceptance, the voice of mourning, and the voice of longing, all of which fall under the category of voices of turning towards the pain. Voice of active acceptance. The voice of active acceptance speaks to an intentional engagement of the truths of one’s experience. Active acceptance means coming face to face with one’s suffering and allowing the previously silenced parts of experience to emerge and to be. Though acceptance can provide a new lens through which to see and process one’s experiences, it is important to clarify that acceptance does not reflect an attitude which condones or likes the circumstances surrounding trauma nor the pain that had been dissociated or, in ways, separated from one’s self and driven away from one’s consciousness. Instead, acceptance is a stance that TILL WE HAVE VOICES 127 one takes in agreeing that pain and suffering have occurred and that certain traumatic events did, in fact, happen. Thus begins the process of remembering. The circumstances of life are seen as they are. One learns to say “yes” to the full scope of what has occurred in her life. All the parts of one’s experience become re-membered, and as one reconnects to these parts, they are slowly reclaimed and then, in turn, re-integrated into the self. The voice of acceptance represents the greatest movement in the therapeutic process towards re-integration. This is a dual-dimension voice of seeing what is there which is accompanied by a release of resistance, denial, and/or compartmentalization. It appears to represent an honouring and/or witnessing of the self to the self of having lived in and through painful experiences. One surrenders oneself to the reality of one’s life and there is a releasing of oneself to be with that which comes up in oneself. There is a “letting go” of the various coping mechanisms which a person has used to avoid the truly painful and excruciating things in her life. In relinquishing those mechanisms and defenses, the person chooses to “let be” and allows “what is” to be in coming to terms with one’s own lived experience. Rachelle explained that therapy “[made her] look inside of [herself]” which, in turn, “brought up a lot of emotion.” She said that in the process of undergoing therapy, she “saw that [her emotions] were there and that they needed [her] acknowledgement and attention.” She stated that: It was hard for [her] to see that it is okay for [her] to feel, that it is okay for [her] to learn all the little pieces of the puzzle that . . . that go into the . . . that fit into the story of [her] life, that it is okay to slow down a bit and really look at each of the elements of the story, that it is okay to be pissed off and frustrated. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 128 She discovered through therapy that there is a time and a place to address the pain that she is experiencing and the hurts which have accumulated in her life. She said: Knowing that it was time to really let go of all the ways that I have been turning away from myself and ignoring the pain I was feeling . . . it was relieving. I mean, it was time. I needed to really surrender those pieces and accept that things happened in my life that I didn’t anticipated. I didn’t want it. But that was the first step . . . cause, letting go . . . it just allowed the work to start flowing, you know? She explained that “actually talking about a lot of things that [she hadn’t] thought about or talked about in a long time . . .it caused [her] to feel more emotion than [she had] in a long time.” This, in turn, “felt like a kind of release.” She said that, “Through this process [she] felt like [she] got a glimpse of what it could feel like to let go of [her] past trauma . . . like, not just to ignore it or suppress it, but really let go, you know?” For Kara, her belief in God and the redemptive power of God’s goodness and grace was the bedrock upon which she stood while seeking to “make sense of all the things that have happened in [her] life.” She explained that “for a long time, [she] just wanted to fix it all so that [she] could move on with the rest of [her] life.” “In the process of going through LI, [Kara] realized that while difficult and painful at times, [her] life, in its entirety, is something still worth celebrating.” Kara said that going through the timeline “brought up a lot for [her] and caused [her] to face some really terrible things that had happened in [her] life.” She stated: “t brought me back to specific moments in my life that had been hard or even . . . even unbearable, you know? Like . . . like, I had to realize that there were some really dark seasons in my life. Kara shared of her experience in running through her timeline. She said: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 129 [In confronting those moments, however, I was able to] see how different stages in life affected me and start to realize that those are all important parts of my story – like, all the times I moved, all the times I was alone and there weren’t any parental figures around to take care of me, all the times I needed someone there, but no one could be emotionally present and give me what I needed . . . . I could see how God redeemed those things . . . those parts of me story in order to shape me into the person I am today. She said that “accepting those parts of [her] life became the starting point for getting to place where [she] could really start to experience what Brené Brown calls ‘wholehearted living’.” She stated that “[she] has come a long way just in terms of being okay with [herself] and with [her] life and with all the things that make [her] who [she is].” “That’s a big deal,” she said. Indeed, a pivotal part of Kara’s healing journey had to do with accepting the ways in which the painful events of her past have impacted her. She found that therapy helped her to develop a broader perspective by unearthing some surprising truths that had otherwise been concealed by time and protected by fear, secrecy, and shame. Tage stated that she did not have “much faith in LI when [she] started the process.” She explained that she struggled to trust the ways in which the treatment would lead her into and through painful memories in order to gain hope and understanding. She remembers thinking to herself: How is talking about every memory going to help me? This is like the worst idea. It’s not going to work. I do that all the time when I think about, like, all the terrible things that happened to me, like . . . I have a photographic memory so, for me, I have videos of those memories. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 130 In moving through her timeline, Tage became conscious of the fact that she “could not hide.” She was exposed, not only to the memory of something that had happened to her, including the “smells associated with the memory, the colour of things around [her], like, the colour of the fence or whatever,” but also to the attuned and tender presence of the therapist leading her into and then through the memory. She said: I mean, I had, like, lived and re-lived all of my memories from past experiences in my life, but there was a kind of letting go and letting the experience wash over you and really take effect on you . . . that’s something that was different in LI and in working with [the therapist]. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like I just really let go and let her do the work, and even though I remember thinking that it’s totally not going to work for me, there were times when I was just, like, bawling. I remember telling [the therapist], through my tears, “I don’t know why I’m bawling! I don’t know . . . .” And that was healing somehow – just letting it all happen and letting myself feel whatever I felt and just, like, letting go. She explained that in her experience of LI, it was important to “decide to take the leap.” She said: It’s an incredibly hard process, but you have to decide whether you’re in or you’re out, like . . . You’re not sure exactly what’s going to happen if you commit, but without the courage to just take that leap, you’re stuck. So you’ve just got to jump. Tage found that the decision to truly allow herself to engage in the difficult process of engaging past hurts was extremely terrifying but claimed that, for her, it was “worth it in the end.” Tage said that it is like “surrendering yourself to a medical procedure.” She explained: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 131 It hurts like hell but you have to do it. You have to let yourself go through it. I mean, taking out a splinter is not even like the level of pain that this is, but, uh . . . it’s maybe more like, you know, putting a wound in, like, salt water, you know? It’s going to hurt, but it’s going to heal. All of it hurts in the beginning and so you just learn to live with the pain of it. It just . . . it’s all so painful, but you just allow yourself to experience it because it’s going to heal you in the end. You, like, come into the appointment, you sit down, you cry, but, like, you’ll be fine, you know? So you just let yourself cry and go through it and . . . yeah. Tage found that undergoing LI therapy presented an opportunity for her to take a harrowingly honest, compassionate, and sometimes angry look at some of the painful aspects of her past experience. This, for her, was “transformational” and “empowered [her] to promote [her] own healing;” it “helped [her] come to terms with and gain a better understanding of [her] life as a whole” which, in turn, provides the necessary perspective to “respond more effectively to the up’s and down’s of daily life.” Tage explained that LI facilitated “vast learning behind the root causes of why [she] might do the things [she does] and why [she] might feel the way [she feels] and helped [her] to be okay with everything that goes into that.” Through therapy, J. P. experienced a “transformation in [his] coping.” He described feeling as if he came to know “how to release some . . . .release some of the pain and the anger and the frustration which had developed a kind of hold on [him].” J. P. spoke of being able “come to terms with aspects of [his] past and the kinds of things that [he] went through.” He said that this then helped him to get to a place where he was more willing to share aspects of his journey with others. He stated that this felt not only connective, but also relieving. He said: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 132 I’ve been able to, I guess, in a group . . . a small group of people been able to articulate some of my experiences of this process, to talk about . . . like I shared earlier the . . . just the difference between the first time going through my timeline to the second time in the same visit feel the physical change and the, uh . . . I guess the emotional perspective on stuff has been something I’ve been willing to share with people, so that’s been a pretty big shift for me. I’ve had a couple . . . since I’ve started this process, um . . . well, I think shortly before I started this, I lost my older brother and then during the process I lost my younger brother. And so I was, you know . . . and this latest thing with my daughter. It’s been a pretty hard 6 to 8 months, and so . . . but I’ve been able to openly talk some of that out with people in my . . . in my very small group of people. Reflecting on his time in therapy, J. P. said: I mean, this feels like I’ve, you know . . . I’ve been somewhere, like I’m on a journey. I’ve been in this process and there’s some things here that I want to talk about and relay the experience, and that’s been very rewarding for both me and my wife. He went on to say: I think that I had to do some work on accepting the pain in my own life before I could share that with anyone else. I’m not sure that I’m 100% there yet, but I am noticing a difference in terms of how I process life events – rather than shoving it down or putting it away somewhere, I am more willing to open up. Being able to open up and share his experiences with others has been a poignant part of J. P.’s journey towards healing. He has come to recognize that bottling up his emotions and isolating himself from others when feeling upset or overwhelmed is “a pretty destructive method of coping.” J. P. readily admitted that he would often leave sessions “with the idea in mind that [he TILL WE HAVE VOICES 133 was] going to open up and [then did not] do it . . . . He said, “There [had] been many times when [he had] just not gotten there.” He stated that he still has a hard time allowing himself to let go and be vulnerable with the people around him; it “rubs against this persona that [he’s] created for [himself].” Nonetheless, J. P. stated that he is realizing that the process of letting go and opening himself up to the process of being emotional is not as frightening, overwhelming, and disempowering as he might have imagined. In fact, he has come to see how the process of talking with others and sharing his experiences with them has “lessened the grip or the power that some of those traumatic experiences have had and so they’re not as triggering.” J. P. said: I never talked to anybody about anything that would start the emotional, you know, triggers to maybe be vulnerable or cry or do something like that. I just wouldn’t do it. But I feel like that has kind of lost its power. I am learning to let go. J. P. shared some of the ways in which the process of letting go has helped him to reframe what it means to be strong and resilient, to be powerful, and to be a man: I might still resist it but I know that I’m not going to fall apart if I do start to allow some of the emotion to come up. And even though I find myself still resisting the emotion a little bit . . . . I guess at the same time I feel like it’s . . . it’s okay to have that experience. I don’t feel any less of a man. He added, “Yeah, but I still won’t cry, so it’s . . . it’s still a struggle.” J. P. admitted that he continues to struggle with the impulse to “pull back a little quicker than is maybe necessary since [he finds] it difficult to stay connected to some of those circumstances;” nonetheless, he is discovering that he has the capacity to “endure those pieces of [his] life” and is growing in his ability to “allow those things just to be there . . . and . . . be . . . just trying to integrate them in such a way that doesn’t involve, like, avoiding or denying or suppressing.” TILL WE HAVE VOICES 134 In many ways, active acceptance was a process of turning towards experiences of pain and pronouncing them valid and real. For many participants, this required moving beyond an initial resistance to remembering things that had otherwise been suppressed or forgotten. Even though it often felt counterintuitive to recall severely unpleasant and, sometimes, terrifying events, several participants stated that they recognized the necessity of “taking the leap” and “pressing into hard moments.” This was an important step in their journey towards healing. Without giving credence to past hurts, many of these individuals felt that suffering, mistakes, and the weariness of life continued to thrust them back in seemingly inexplicable ways. Some reported feeling perplexed by aspects of their inner world. Some explained that they seemed unable to make sense of their reactions to certain stimuli. Others found it extremely frustrating and bewildering that they struggled so much to cope in specific situations. For many, their desire to understand the circumstances of their lives and a stubborn pursuit of more effective means by which to respond to present day situations drove them forward. At the point where they needed to face not only the signs, signals, and symptoms of their distress, but also the underlying, deeply personal plights which, in multitudinous ways, gave rise to the distress, all of the participants found that they were able to reach and accept the real truths of their lived experiences at last. Indeed, as each individual took this harrowingly honest, compassionate, and sometimes angry look at trauma and at those parts of themselves that have been afflicted with it, they discovered a greater context for understanding how the painful events in their lives shaped them; this, in turn, was both enlightening and empowering. It allowed each of the participants to begin to cultivate a more nuanced and complex understanding of themselves and the ways in which they interact with others and with their environment. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 135 Voice of mourning. This voice represents the flow of emotion accompanied by recognizing what is lost in trauma. It can be described as remembering with affect, grieving, and feeling the impact of trauma as these disconnected/dissociated parts are re-integrated into one’s coherent sense of their life story. There is a simultaneous “no” and “yes” – with the no being evoked from acknowledgement that what happened should not have happened, and the yes being a stance by which one comes to terms with it actively, as witnessed with the emotion. This occurs hand in hand with the voice of active acceptance. To accept without mourning is retraumatizing. Mourning takes a position in the recognition that there was a loss. It allows the peak of taking a position to be: “this was wrong.” Indeed, in the process of mourning, there is an admittance to trauma and pain. Longing is also an integral part of this voice – recognizing and gaining awareness of what could/should have been/be. Through the process of creating her timeline, Kara was confronted by the absence of her primary attachment figures, most notably, her mom. She talked about the grief that set in as she processed these pieces of her past which had previously been forgotten or tuned out. Kara said that she remembers “sitting at [her] kitchen table finally finishing up and as [she] went through [the timeline] and [she] looked at it, [her] heart broke because [she] could not see her mom in the light that [she] always had seen [her] mom.” At some point, Kara had to realize that her mom had not been as present in her life as she had assumed and noticed periods in her life during which her sister had raised her. At the time of realizing this, Kara remembered wondering aloud, “Where is my mom? Like, um . . . Where was my mom?” and she “couldn’t figure it out.” Kara stated that, at that point, she “just started to grieve.” With wonder, Kara acknowledged that she “wasn’t expecting that. [She] wasn’t expecting to find any of that out when [she] went to [the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 136 therapist].” Nonetheless, she recalled that “it was essential because that whole attachment thing . . . . It explains all the stuff that [she] had to work through and fill in.” Tage was also deeply impacted by the process of revisiting various aspects of her life story. She had strong emotional reactions to recognizing the ways in which trauma had impacted her. She explained that therapy “paved the way for [her] to grieve all the things that were traumatic and upsetting in her childhood, things [she] had maybe talked about and even delved into deeply in terms of content, but never fully grieved.” She stated: Going through Lifespan was a really emotional process for me. I remember telling a friend earlier on that I felt like duct tape was holding me together, like . . . I was in pieces and I had to duct tape myself together and Lifespan is taking all of that tape off and saying here’s all my pieces and you just, like, pick them up and carry them around everywhere you go. And it makes you really emotional! Like, there’s no . . . You’re not put together. You kind of have to be apart to do the world, like . . . You can’t just be, like, yeah, I’ll untape this part of me. Here’s a little piece. Let’s fix this. I don’t know. It’s kind of like an all or nothing thing and I remember in the beginning I wore my sunglasses everyday everywhere because I had tears in my eyes every time, like, through that. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. That is what it’s like. You’re ripped apart and all of your defense mechanisms and all of your coping kind of goes out the window, and you’re just so raw. It hurts. And you feel like you’re totally falling apart. You have to keep telling yourself, “Don’t be afraid,” because it’s just so scary to look at all of the pieces of yourself and remember those things that really broke you. You mourn it a lot. You grieve. It’s so painful. It’s so real. And you have to let yourself be sad about the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 137 things that hurt you, the things that went wrong. It was really healthy and needed, but, like, I felt like I was dying. It was just so painful. But in the end it’s so worth it. J. P. explained that, “at some point in the whole process [of therapy], [he] just wanted . . . like, [he] just needed to cry. [He] didn’t want to. But it was what [he] felt like.” He said, “So much was coming up and I was looking at all of these things in my life, thinking, ‘Woah. That’s a lot.’ It was heavy.” Deborah, similarly, spoke to a kind of sadness that came up for her at times throughout the process. She said: Sometimes . . . sometimes, I just became very sad. I mean, just right now as I’m thinking about it, it makes me so sad to see the ways that I’ve been hurt, the ways that I felt like I wasn’t enough. Deborah recognized that, in her past, she felt neglected and unattended to. She said: It’s so sad now to see that I didn’t have what I needed [as a child], you know, um, and I went on to spend my whole life searching for it. I mean, I’m . . . I’m old now and I just, um, you know, it’s like . . . And all these years I wish I’d found this sense of affirmation and wholeness. I wish I’d had this years ago and I wish I would have found it then. She went on to say: The main thing was that I was just searching for love. I just spent my whole life trying to find it and trying to do nice things and, you know, you can never get enough praise, you never get enough, um, anything and then I just came to this place where I couldn’t do it anymore. I was so exhausted. I couldn’t play that game anymore. Sarah explained that: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 138 In some ways, therapy gave [her] the permission to really confront a lot of the things that happened in [her] life and reflect on them in order to, kind of . . . like, decide that it was, you know . . . it was really serious for [her] and to say, like, “This impacted me!” She recalled that: The whole time growing up, um . . . there was emotional abuse, a lot of emotional abuse, mostly from [her] dad and, in slightly different forms, from [her] mom – not quite so overt, not something anyone would look at and call, you know, abuse at first glance . . . but looking back and really looking at what happened, you know what was going on. She that, “with everything that went on there, it’s a little hard to, like, nail down because most people, when they think about trauma, they think about, like, sexual abuse or that kind of thing and that didn’t really happen.” She explained that “things got a little physical a few times throughout [her] childhood but it was mostly on an emotional level which became a lot harder for [her] to actually nail down and point to as, like a problem.” She said, “It’s not as outward or, like, explicit maybe.” For Sarah, the process of reflecting back on these events allowed her to “really feel the impact of those things in [her] life.” She stated: I then was able to realize that this is maybe not the way that things should have been and so . . . so . . . there is kind of a feeling of loss or . . . or a feeling of, like, regret, but not, like, personal regret . . . just like . . . a sadness that things were the way they were. For several participants, a powerful and intense flow of emotion was loosed upon taking this panoramic yet highly intimate look at the widespread and perplexing impacts of trauma in their lives. It was evident during the time of the interviews that they, in moments, could still connect to some of the tragedy of their childhood, to the despair that had threatened to overwhelm them, to the pain and regret that characterized periods of their lives. It was a moving TILL WE HAVE VOICES 139 moment both for the interviewer and the person being interviewed when themes of loss, yearning, disappointment, fear, pain, misery, and abiding hopelessness emerged. Each individual gave an enormously compelling account of what it meant for them to truly grieve the ways in which they felt that their lives had gone askew – whether in childhood or later on in adulthood. Some expressed that the grieving process “felt good” or was “somehow cleansing and revitalizing.” Others described the process as “heavy and saddening.” All felt that the process was necessary and was, as J. P. said in his interview, “a long time coming.” In allowing themselves to grieve, they allowed their souls to breathe. This openness to the flow of emotionality in response to dramatic and painful seasons of their lives created a sort of porousness through which memories and yearnings and forgotten hopes and dreams seeped out, pouring forth from their hiding places. These came to them loudly, readily, ragefully, tenderly, calamitously, heartbreakingly. In the end, it was a way in which these individuals could evoke the messages from their inner selves which have long desired to be heard; these messages had become more and more pressing until finally, the discomfort of avoiding them became impossible and it was necessary to make peace with them and to, in ways, seek them out and gave space to their weighty contents, as opposed to avoid them. Despite the fact that many participants expressed that at some point or another, they had believed that attending to their grief would mean becoming buried in it, being bent to their breaking point, or being asked to hold more weight than they were built for, they soon discovered that their grief gave way to a “great melt,” that it washed over them and, in fact, slowly carved them into different, often kinder, creatures. Voices of healing. The final category of voices represents voices of healing. These voices are characterized by survivors’ encounter with their own personal essence, a transcendent TILL WE HAVE VOICES 140 deep sense of self, and a reintegration of the parts that were walled off by trauma. In the voices of healing, we see survivors describe a discovery of self and a reintegration of self. These processes result in survivors describing a newfound capacity for astonishment, marked by childlike experiencing of the world with newness and delight, side by side with mature adult agency and self-responsibility, and a resulting felt sense of peace and calm in place of former fear hyperarousal. This ability to feel okay emerged out of a sense of solidness, self-connection, and capacity. Although the focus on the voices of healing emphasized intrapersonal dimensions, in contrast to the interpersonal dimensions of the voices of trauma, the survivors also described a newfound readiness to be “seen” and known by others, demonstrating that the growing capacity for intimacy with one’s self is reflected also in a growing capacity for intimacy for others. In and through this voice, participants spoke of both containing life and being in life. In this section, I look at the various voices of healing, including the voice of personal essence, the voice of integration, the voice of astonishment, the voice of agency, and the voice of calm and peace. Voice of the personal essence. This voice indicates an awareness of the essential “me,” that is, one’s unique personhood, of finding and connecting to one’s self, and of finding that the essential self is still there and intact. This voice also identified the “deepest sense of self,” which is transcendent in spite of trauma, and can be described as the “well from which you draw the others aspects of self.” This self is, in ways, the spiritual self and the “seed of the person.” The voice of personal essence refers to participants’ descriptions of being able to look inside themselves and see themselves while also allowing themselves to be their true and essential me. Participants, with regards to this voice, spoke about feeing permission to be in their own skin, without needing to justify their being, and without needing to appear or, most impossible yet, be TILL WE HAVE VOICES 141 perfect. Participants sought this sense of “being me and being okay” and spoke about standing with themselves in various circumstances and across various conditions. They discovered an inner closeness at the same time as they were allowing others to truly see them; there was both a seeing and revealing of themselves. By connecting with their own personal essences, participants found that they re-emerged from therapy with greater clarity and were “enlightened” to a sense of awareness through the processes of acceptance and mourning. Rachelle expressed that an important outcome of therapy was “being able to connect to [herself] . . . like, really connect to [myself].” She stated that “for years, [she] hadn’t . . . [she] hadn’t know how.” She said: Like, for me . . . I wasn’t even sure that there was, like, more of me . . . or a deeper part of me that I wasn’t connecting to, but there was this . . . there’s this whole emotional aspect . . . this whole part . . . . I mean, for so long, all of my energy has gone into the kids and so you put yourself on the back but this . . . this whole process was about me. And so I had to start tuning into stuff and it’s like, “Oh shit! Like, is that me? Is that . . . is that a part of me?” You just start to discover all these pieces of yourself and you really start to see yourself and, like . . . really feel yourself . . . if that makes sense. You get a real feel for yourself. I started to realize that I hadn’t tuned into myself for a long time. But then, suddenly I was, and it was like all of what made me me was coming up to the surface and it was like, “Woah! Okay. This is what it’s like to be in my own body, to be aware of my own emotions, to, like, really be me.” Kara explained that it had been her observation that although Paul, her husband, was “always affirming [her], always thanking [her],” she “continued to struggle with the belief that [she] was good enough.” Through the process of therapy, she realized that, as a little girl, she TILL WE HAVE VOICES 142 had “internalized a lot of negative messages and those basically shaped who [she] thought she was.” She said: I had a hard time really knowing who I was beyond or aside from those labels, you know? Like, I just wasn’t in touch with who I was at my core. I just thought that there was so much wrong with me and that was really hard. I was always comparing myself to . . . to others . . . and just . . . I just felt like I was insufficient or inadequate, you know? But through therapy, I have come to this place where I . . . I am able to really know myself and feel like I can identify those things that make me me, and so . . . I feel like I am able to really celebrate whom I am as I become increasingly aware of who I truly am. Like . . . I think . . . that . . . I think that as I gain a deeper understanding of my . . . um . . . as I gain this, like, deeper access to myself, I can see I don’t need . . . I don’t want, you know, to be mediocre, like . . . I don’t want to engage in mediocre living. I don’t want to just get by every day. I want to thrive out of the truest sense of myself. I want to be happy. I want to impact others and live out of my greatest calling. I want to have purpose and meaning in my life and I can only do that when I am connected to all the deepest and most important parts of me. Do you get that? I mean . . . cause people respond to that . . . when there’s something about you, they’re like, “What’s different?” And it’s freedom . . . freedom to truly be and to truly come alive. There’s something about that wholehearted living and it’s just such . . . it’s so powerful to be so deeply settled in who I am and who I’m created to be . . . you know, by God. You just start to see yourself differently. You see yourself . . . like part of . . . you know . . . you just start to see yourself as a whole person once you are willing to go to the dark places to receive TILL WE HAVE VOICES 143 your healing and . . . and yeah. You become, like, reconciled to the . . . to the deepest parts of yourself and . . . and you get to the heart of who you are. In identifying some of the changes that she has experienced since undergoing LI therapy, Tage talked about how there is “definitely a component of looking at [herself] in a positive way” or a more “positive self-belief.” She stated that she is able to “look back now and value the strength and resilience and courage in [herself] in a way that [she] maybe could not have done at the time.” She said, “There is now, like, a ‘me’ that is “able to reflect on life experience or past life experiences whereas before it was more . . . it was too painful of . . . like, of a kind of thing.” She explained”: It’s like now I am able to just go, “This is me. I had to live through a lot and I survived, and this is the person that I’ve become. This is me. I am me.” And I can really reflect on that and understand the person I am today. It’s pretty empowering. Tage recalled thinking that the person she is in the deepest sense of herself had been lost due to all of the negative experiences in her past. She said, “I thought that person was lost, and I thought that person was gone, like . . . like it had been damaged out of me. But to have that back is . . . It’s incredible. It’s huge.” As she reflected on the experience of therapy, Sarah said: I would use the word enlightening maybe, but kind of inward focused. Like, I feel like usually when people say enlightening, they’re talking about, like, seeing the world around them more whereas this has been kind of seeing inside myself more. Sarah has noticed that she has been “a lot more introspective” since beginning therapy. She said that, in gaining perspective through “thinking about past experiences as well as present ones,” she is able to “see things [she’s] doing in the moment from the standpoint of both who [she is] TILL WE HAVE VOICES 144 today and who [she was] in the past and who [she] might be or who [she wants] to be in the future.” In consolidating these various pieces of herself, Sarah stated that: [She has] kind of a more three dimensional way of, like, going through life. It’s like a more embodied sense of being [herself], maybe . . . which stems from being more aware of what it’s like to be [her] from various different angles – emotional, psychological, spiritual . . . like, all of it. Looking at a matryoshka doll (i.e., a Russian nesting doll) on her therapist’s shelf, Sarah said: Part of the therapy is like that little thing, the stacking thing up there . . . . It’s a good representation of . . . um . . . so [the therapist] used it with all the little people inside of each other where it’s like . . . through therapy, you have . . . you get like this much more three dimensional view of yourself and you have, like, all these little cells kind of inside of you and you, um . . . and that is something that [the therapist] has been doing with me more recently and it’s made me aware of, like, you know, quote-unquote “myself” as a younger version that, you know, um . . . and it’s really odd but it makes me feel more like a real person. It makes me, like . . . and it’s, I don’t know . . . it gives me dimensions. It gives me, um . . . and that’s a big difference . . . . That’s something that’s changed . . . . I don’t know. It’s weird. 3D is the best way I can think of to describe it. Sarah found the symbol of the doll to be a powerful metaphor for her sense of self, post-therapy. She said: You know, cause they all come out of each other. Like, they all sit separate but then they all go back into one – one body, one person, you know, if you will, and it’s a really, I think, a cool way to think about it because even though, you know, in reality, your self isn’t fractured, it’s a multiple, right? But anyway . . . It’s an interest way to think about it TILL WE HAVE VOICES 145 and, you know, in the session, [the therapist] kind of takes you through, you know, takes you back into the past maybe and, like, look at a situation that happened and you see yourself in that situation and your present self can talk to your past self. And it feels super weird in the moment cause you’re, like, ‘You want me to do what?’ But when you come out of it you’re, like, I get this. Like, I get that there’s still this part of me in there that’s, like, still sort of that person and now I feel more complete because I recognize that and I can let that kind of influence, um, what I do now and this is how I feel about everything. So yeah. In therapy, Sarah was guided through a process of attending to herself in terms of her own subjective states and mental processes. This ability to mentalize allowed her to reflect on various aspects of herself and gain a more embodied access to her core self. She said that LI contributed to her ability to “take perspective, on [her] life and see things for what they really are . . . or maybe just see [herself] for who [she] really [is].” She went on to say: I know that through LI I was able to see all these different aspects of my life and all these different stages that I, like, walked through . . . and that developed a sense of, like, core understanding about . . . like . . . it was like gaining this deep level of awareness of what it was like to have experienced all of those things in my life that make up who I am. And I guess I just have a better sense of who I am even as I continue to learn how to be more true to whom I am. But at least I have this sense of connecting to that deep . . . that, like, inner self. In considering how therapy has impacted her, Deborah said: I think I’m becoming much more true to who I really am which I didn’t quite know who that was before. And so . . . And I’m much more comfortable with myself. So, um . . . TILL WE HAVE VOICES 146 and more confident . . . I’m not so down on myself. Um, in fact, much more, um, I would say, sure or confident around people. Deborah recalled times in her life when she “pretty much just hid who [she] really was,” but states that she has come to be able to “accept some things [about herself].” She said: “It just feels so much better to be in my skin because . . . because I’m not wrong. I’m not . . . Everything I do is not wrong and I don’t have to be perfect. I mean, once in awhile, you know, something will happen where [all my negative thoughts about myself] will start to come up, but I don’t . . . I can get out of that now. I don’t get stuck dwelling on it. I can, you know, be me and know that that is okay. Yeah, I think that’s awesome. She continued on to say: “I’m not blaming myself for things and I’m not feeling so guilty, uh, and I’m really, um . . . trying to think things through, you know, and figure out if I’m at fault or . . . I’m not saying that I’m never at fault, but I just, uh . . . I just feel so much more secure in myself and, um, that’s probably the biggest change. The process of discovering and connecting to the “essential self” was evident as a part of the healing journey for many of the participants. In this phase of recovery, these individuals who have survived trauma began to embrace fearless and open-hearted visions of who they are and who they are to become when they are no longer possessed by their traumatic pasts and are, instead, in possession of themselves. Each person had begun to recognize the person she used to be before the trauma and had gained a more astute understanding of the damage done to that person by the traumatic event. These individuals were re-centred within themselves – they now know that, in the aftermath of difficult and painful events, they still have themselves. For these participants, the work of therapy illuminated the ways in which they had been limited by a sense TILL WE HAVE VOICES 147 of helplessness and futility. These individuals realize that they have been holding back the most valuable parts of themselves because those parts are messy and unpredictable. Yet, by hiding truths about themselves within the shadows of the unconscious mind, there developed an internal conflict which forced a kind of existence that was so out of character for almost every facet of their humanness. It was in reconnecting with their true and childlike selves that these individuals found a sense of inner restoration and freedom. Previously, their lives were dominated by repetitions of the trauma in which the dynamics of fear and implacable hostility were frequently relived even in apparently trivial encounters. Yet, when instinctual mechanisms for self-survival were put to rest, these participants spoke of a capacity that was then liberated–the capacity to live out of a holistic union within themselves and to allow their true sense of self to naturally and organically emerge. Instead of renouncing parts of themselves that have felt almost intrinsic to their beings, these individuals were free to define their own longings and dreams, to engage in the active exercise of engaging with themselves in order to capture and act upon their own agentic wishes. Participants spoke about a new sense of “knowing themselves.” As this genuine connection to the self was cultivated, it appeared that these individuals were far more prone to inspiration; they were free to explore the risk of testing their abilities driven by that expansive feeling that comes from experiencing real inner growth. Voice of integration. This voice refers to the process of bringing back together the parts of self that had been shut out due to trauma. Through this, one begins to recreate the fabric of one’s life. There is a “thickening” of the autobiographical story. Here, the participants recall the ways in which they reclaimed and brought back aspects of themselves cued by the timeline. They describe a process of substantiating the self with previously disjointed parts and speak about attending to parts that had been previously mistreated or hurt. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 148 For Rachelle, the process of therapy helped her to “get back to putting [herself] as the focus.” She said that “for years, [she] hadn’t and so [she] hadn’t had a chance to really make sense of a lot of things that happened in [her] life, especially since [she] had the kids.” Rachelle said that, in going through her timeline, she “got to learn about [herself] and kind of go, like:” I always knew I was a certain way, but now in working through all the little things and getting to reflect on all the stuff that [the therapist] would pick up on, I kind of have a sense of why I do this or that. Rachelle stated that the therapist helped her “make connections between all these different parts of [her] life.” She said, “I could finally pull all these pieces of myself back together.” She explained that when the therapist pointed out the links between different aspects of her life or certain parts of herself across various points in her life, “[she] was shocked.” Reflecting back, she said: Yeah. I never would have thought to make that relation. But the moment she said it, I was like, ‘Damn, you’re right!’ and I could see how all the pieces fit together, you know? I could understand all these things that I was previously unaware of . . . like, I could see how they made me me cause there were so many things in my life that I just never dealt with. I just kind of hucked it in the garbage, and I just ended up with a pretty big garbage dump, but it was still kind of like the ball and chain and it was like, “Wow!” I mean, I never really realized that I was throwing parts of myself away by doing that, you know? I didn’t realize how that would impact me in the long run, but it did. Therapy helped me to bring those pieces back and really look at them and really put them back into their place in my life. And it was like the more pieces that I reclaimed, the more I felt like I TILL WE HAVE VOICES 149 could be me. It gave me a lot of understanding and insight into who I am and I would say that that has definitely been a huge, huge thing. Kara stated that in and through therapy, she had hoped to “become more whole’. She explained that she often felt scattered and overwhelmed and “just . . . just, like, deeply anxious.” She said: Yeah, I just think I was always kind of . . . a little bit like a little chameleon, like . . . like . . . “Who do I need to be today?” Like, like . . . “What do I need to say that’s the right thing?” or, um . . . yeah. I don’t know. I just was . . . I would say I was just consumed with measuring up but I think that had a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t really know who I was. Everything revolved around appearances and being enough, being good enough. In addressing areas of past life hurts, Kara could see how a part of her was like “a wounded little girl who had internalized messages about not being good enough. In speaking about how this this part of her had been deeply hurt and neglected during her childhood, she exclaimed, “I didn’t even know!” By bringing that part of herself to the forefront, Kara said that she was able to see that “[she] deserved better. [She] deserved more.” Kara explained that: This allowed [her] to take a position on how [she] was treated as a child and, like, come to the realization that, like, that little girl was so wonderful and she should have been cherished and should have been taken care of. She said that she was “able to attend to those broken and wounded parts of [herself] and that doing this helped [her] to feel more coherent and whole and less fractured.” She stated that, “Everyone’s broken and struggling, and just needing to face their stuff, and like . . . I just really TILL WE HAVE VOICES 150 got the chance to do that through therapy, and I am grateful. I feel more myself. I feel more whole.” Tage stated that, prior to therapy, her memories “felt fractured in [her] mind.” She explained that it was the process of “taking [her] current self to revisit certain memories, to sit there, and be in that space before walking away from that and coming back to present day” that helped to piece together some of those memories. She said that: Without Lifespan, there were pieces of [her] that were still stuck in the past, and so Lifespan was about collecting all of those pieces and joining them back to [her] so that [she] can just go as a whole person instead of seeing that little bit of [her] that’s still stuck which [she visualizes] as being like a ghost of [herself]. This ghost of herself, Tage explained, felt “not whole. She said: It was like I was transparent or, like, insubstantial and there were these different parts of me that were separate from me but need to be joined with me in order to make me solid and whole, you know? There’s just no way that you can go through life with these pieces separated from yourself. Like, I needed to be able to go back to certain memories and just do whatever I needed to do and then, like, it was amazing. It’s, like, I was just able to do what a little younger self couldn’t do and I think that’s, like, key to the trauma, right? Like, you feel so helpless and something happens that you can’t fix and you just want someone to save you, right? But through LI I could save myself and it totally changed everything. I could bring pieces of myself that were stuck in the past and move them past these stuck points so that I, myself, in the present could be more whole. Sarah said that, “Therapy really helped [her] to bring things together in her life.” She explained that: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 151 Going through the timeline helped [her] to almost make . . . like, take a mental inventory of, like, ‘Okay, so this all happened in my life. This is from the past. This is how it impacted me then. This is how it impacts me now,’ and this all helped [her] to gain a better understanding of how all the things in [her] life really go together. She went on to say: I think it’s really cool to be able to see all these different pieces of myself and my life and then be able to just sort of weave them together slowly . . . like, I mean, it’s kind of weird, but . . . I’m not sure I felt totally ‘all there’ before, not like crazy or anything, just that I felt like I was missing myself, you know? I don’t know if that makes sense. But I feel more like a complete person now, and that’s really cool. I love it. J. P., similarly, said that therapy helped him to “put some things together that [he’d] never done before.” He said that, in so doing, he has developed “a better, um, maybe a healthier overall perspective on [his] life experience that, um, while there are some trauma or dramatic experiences . . . there have been lots and lots of positive things.” He said that, through this process, “[he] not only [feels] like [he] better [understands] the different aspects of [his] life and how they impacted [him], but that [he is] more able to see the greater context surrounding [his] life. He explained this by saying: I’ve been asked . . . I mean, I always hear this question asked in church particularly or other places, “Who are the significant people in your life and that have made a difference?” And I’ve never been able to answer that question. I’ve just thought . . . I’ve though that there was really nobody. Not my parents . . . not my . . . you know, and going through this Lifespan and just all of a sudden thinking about this person or this person or this person, it’s about the impacts that they had, uh, the confidence and the trust TILL WE HAVE VOICES 152 that they had in me as a person . . . was pretty . . . .that was pretty neat to be able to actually say, “Hey, wait a minute! I did have some folks in my corner.” That really felt good to be able to identify them. I never put that together before. For J. P., part of reconciling pieces of himself had to do with noticing that others had believed in him and affirmed him along the way. He found that this bolstered his self-concept and made it easier to see how various parts of himself are valuable and worth attending to. He explained that “by internalizing those things that others had said to [him] in order to build [him] up and encourage [him] even when [he was] younger,” he was much more able then, in therapy, to engage in exercises of self-nurturance and affirmation that helped him to attend to various parts of himself as he reflected on aspects of his life cued by the timeline. In the end, this helped him to develop a broader perspective, not only of himself, but also of the life events which shaped him. He felt more able to “take in those things and be more open to how those dynamics impacted [him].” This imbued him with a greater sense of self-understanding which, in turn, helped him to develop a more coherent sense of self and the underlying motivations, feelings, and core needs that drive him. Deborah, in reflecting on the process of LI therapy, spoke to how she is now better able to reconcile pieces of herself and to recognize how parts of her have been hurt and mistreated. She talked about attending to those parts of herself and nurturing herself. Deborah stated: There’s this whole piece of realizing that, um . . . I was just a child, but I grew up to be this person who I am today. Back then, I thought that I was bad. I . . . I was told that I was bad. But how, at five, can you possibly be so bad that . . . But I thought I was! I think back and now I just think, ‘I was just a little girl!’, you know? So that whole piece, that whole piece of that from a whole different perspective, that, um . . . is . . . it doesn’t TILL WE HAVE VOICES 153 really come from [the therapist], really, or . . . I don’t know how that happens, but it’s just like I see it – I see it from the adult side, and it’s a huge realization. In the aftermath of trauma, individuals must face the fact that their sense of self has been irrevocably impacted and thus must undergo a process of recovery, reclamation, and transformation. This task requires a reorientation towards what is typical, average, whole, and “normal” in the lives of ordinary people. For many, a felt sense of helplessness and isolation has long shaped their worldview; thus, empowerment and reconnection are core experiences of the healing journey. In order to achieve hope and healing for the whole person, each of these individuals needed to take a sustained and honest look at the ways in which her personality has been shaped in the traumatic environment. She must recognize that various aspects of her self have been hurt, neglected, abused, demeaned, and/or otherwise mistreated. Then, to incorporate lessons of her traumatic experience in her life, she must be prepared to listen to those parts of herself that have been shut down, cast out, silenced, ignored, and/or left behind. She must gather all these parts of herself together with care and compassion and ask, “How was it for you? How would you have liked to feel? What did you need? What was missing? Where did things really go wrong?” In this way, she takes steps to deepen her alliances with all those aspects of herself. Participants in the study spoke about the process of integration in different ways. Some focused on savouring the growing sense of conscious and intimate connectedness with all the parts of themselves. These individuals highlighted the importance of shedding aspects of the self that had been imposed by the trauma and seeking to reclaim parts that had been highly valued from the time before the trauma. They explained that both repudiating identities which were formed by the traumatic experience and creating new, liberated selves that felt intrinsically congruent to their sacred and authentic beings helped to restore a coherent system of self which TILL WE HAVE VOICES 154 encompasses personal meaning and value. Other participants described the development of completely new and fresh ways of seeing and experiencing certain pieces of themselves which they had previously assumed were destroyed. A few of them talked about finding anew a sense of belonging both within themselves and in the presence of others around them. In all cases, reconciliation between parts and restoration of previously exiled parts were indicated. Though, in the past, they had spoken of losing themselves, now they were speaking of regaining a coherent, established, and meaningful sense of themselves. Participants often described the immensity of this adaptive task by exclaiming that they had been woefully ignorant of the potential to be whole prior to feeling that they were, in fact, more whole. This, for many, was a powerful realization – one that both affirmed and confirmed their sense of inner healing. Voice of astonishment. The voice of astonishment refers to experiences of joy, surprise, newness, gratitude, and delight that participants found themselves experiencing as they reclaimed somatic, affective, and cognitive memories related to what was previously cut-off by trauma. It is characterized by a childlike capacity to “see” for the first time beauty, goodness, and value, which is often described by the words, “wow” and “thank you.” This voice emerges out of integration where the adult and child parts encounter each other in their personal essence. In describing her experience of therapy, Rachelle said, “I think therapy makes you look inside yourself, and when it brings up the emotions, then you are able to see that they are there, and see that it is okay for you to feel them. I mean, therapy brought up so much more than I expected . . . and the shifts that I feel are way bigger than I ever through they would be.” Rachelle stated that she found therapy to be extremely beneficial but that she “never expected it.” She explained: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 155 Like, so much of therapy has been so good for me . . . like, everything . . . everything has been helpful – learning the little pieces that go into my life, learning it is okay to slow down a bit, that it is okay to be pissed off and frustrated but there is a place for it, and it doesn’t have to be continual. I didn’t really know that there was so much to learn about . . . like, about myself, and [the therapist] really knew where to dig . . . and how to get to some of the trigger points. I mean, a lot of them were there that I didn’t really even realize, and the most surprising thing was learning what the trigger points were! Like, I had no idea! Through the whole process, I was just like, “Wow. Okay. Like, wow.” I just kept gaining all these insights and things just really made sense after that. It was a really shocking experience, and like I was saying before, the physical element of it was, like, yeah. I didn’t expect that at all. You could maybe say that I had some idea that it would be mentally uncomfortable; I didn’t expect the physical part of it. So every session it was like, “Well, this is really going to suck,” but it did feel so good afterwards because of the insight you get and the, “Oh!” and every time going a little bit deeper and seeing how there are times when things come back and I’m, like, “Wow! I’d totally forgotten about that” and being like, “Yeah, that happened.” So, like I said, I just didn’t expect any of it and the main thing was the insight into why I am the way I am, and with the body going like, “Yeah, when you internalize stuff, you think you just . . . but really in your body, you carry it,” and it was so relieving to let that stuff go. It was just, like, “Wow.” Kara, reflecting about her experience of finding hope and healing through therapy stated: I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t expecting to find any of that out . . . you know, like . . . the stuff from my past and about my mom, when I went to [the therapist]. But it was TILL WE HAVE VOICES 156 essential because that whole attachment thing . . . it explains all the stuff that I had to work through and fill. She went on to say: Like, I was so surprised when . . . like, when I was able to process through some of that stuff and see shifts and changes in my own life in terms of how I feel about myself, how I feel about family, how I feel about my friends, how I see the world, and, like, I wasn’t expecting to . . . to really look at and move through the ugly stuff that started to come to light as I was in therapy. I was so relieved to be able to do that though. Like, I feel lighter and healthier and happier and just . . . like, yeah! I feel really . . . just like, really surprised and delighted that I was able to clear some of that up and move towards a more courageous and wholehearted version of myself. It’s just so wonderful! Tage, in speaking about the changes that she experienced as a result of therapy, stated that “all of it was completely unlikely, like all of it . . . without therapy.” She went on to say: It just like . . . I 100% believe, like, 100% . . .there’s just no, there’s no way I could have done this without LI, and I was just so shocked that it worked. I mean, I had hoped that things would shift, but it’s just such a drastic different and I am so thankful. It’s amazing. I recommend everyone do it because, like . . . we all need healing and this was just so . . . like, wow . . . It’s just . . . wow . . . it just totally changed everything. Deborah talked about experiencing “relief and joy” during therapy, especially in the moments when she was envisioning her adult self coming to her child self. She said, “It’s like somebody cares. Somebody’s there and . . . You know?” For survivors of trauma, building a new life premised on assumptions that are radically different from the ones associated with the traumatic past can simultaneously evoke both the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 157 wonder and uncertainty of freedom. Owing to their deplorable and skewed early environments, individuals can feel like strangers in a foreign country once they have experienced a shift – whether in their perception regarding the degree of control they have over their own bodily and emotional responses; in their characteristic ways of coping with social situations that may not be overtly threatening but nonetheless are experienced as such; or simply in the way that they experience themselves in their own being and the systems of their daily living. It is often the case that certain assumptions and behaviours have been so ingrained that they have operated outside of awareness. As such, when therapy succeeds in facilitating drastic changes in terms of how an individual experiences aspects of her own personality and behaviour, this can be experienced as shocking and as an unexpected breakthrough. For some of the participants in this study, this was, in fact, the case. Several of these individuals were surprised and delighted at the effectiveness of therapy in facilitating healing in their lives. The relief in their voice was often palpable. Voice of agency. This voice refers to participants’ experiences of pride and ownership of their lives and their actions which, in turn, reflects a freedom and responsibility towards themselves and the world. It also reflects participants’ ability to take themselves, including their own personal sense of being in the world and being agentic human beings, seriously. The voice of agency represents their experience of freely taking responsibility towards their lives in context with the world. In this voice, freedom and agency are apparent through proactive, intentional ways of living through taking a position towards one’s self and the world. This voice is actionoriented; it depicts the expression of the self in a positive and honouring way which emerges out of the healing voice of the therapeutic process. In some ways, it is a “product” of the other voices. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 158 Rachelle, in explaining the way in which therapy cultivated an ability to honour her own lived experience and the struggles she has endured and overcome in her lifetime, made the following comment: I will say the therapy has helped me to really to not just be so hyper-focused on the goals that I don’t . . . don’t, like, stop and really notice all that I have accomplished. Like, I remember telling [the therapist] one day that I don’t think I’ve had that . . . like, celebrated the, “Woah, we did it! We really did it!” in, like, a long time! I mean, like, last week, I just started to cry, like, non-stop cry, and it was like, “Wow, we did it. We actually pulled it off.” And in a way . . . doing the therapy just allowed me to be really able to enjoy this moment of, “We did it!” I remember thinking before . . . like, just . . . I remember thinking, “What is wrong with me?”, but just, like, through therapy, feeling that release . . . and really seeing that I’ve made it through everything and . . . yeah, like, it’s just changed my mindset. I am definitely proud of myself . . . and seeing the trickle effect of this, like, on my family, and seeing how something really good came out of doing something good for myself and thinking, “Maybe doing something good for myself isn’t really a bad thing.” Rachelle went on to say that it was “really powerful to realize . . . realize the shift that happened internally for [her] and to see that it really did begin with [her] and with [her] ability to go through the process.” She explained that: Going through therapy helped [her] to [realize] that [she] does need time to make sure that . . . [she] needs to . . . realizing through this experience that [she] can actually take time and do this for [herself], to make time to, like . . . to take time for [her]. Kara noted that, as a part of therapy, she came to the realization that: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 159 Though [she] didn’t have as awesome a mom as [she] thought and even though [she] had to grieve that . . . like, comparing that to what I give to my kids . . . it also made [her] go, “Oh my gosh! I’m an excellent mom!” For Kara, this was “really exciting to, like, to see and celebrate.” She explained that: Those are things that [she] hadn’t recognized before because [she] was living in the before . . . and was being so hard . . . and beating [herself] up and saying that [she is] a failure and that [she’s] not getting it right. Post-therapy, Kara stated that she is able to say, “Oh my gosh! It’s pretty amazing that I am who I am based on looking at this and what all I lived in and what I went through and, like, oh wow! I’m actually doing pretty good.” She said that “going through Lifespan Integration therapy, [she] saw all the times [she had] moved, all the times [she was] alone and, like, there wasn’t . . . wasn’t, like, a parental figure or anybody around.” She realized that: Part of [her] story was about [her] mom not being there when [she] was very little . . . um . . . physically she was there–she was a stay-at-home-mom–but her not being emotionally present and not giving [Kara] the things that [she] clearly needed as a little girl. Kara stated that she could see how “this really shaped [her] and may have contributed to why [she] made a lot of bad choices about relationship and dating . . . and, like, through all these different stages in [her] life.” Nonetheless, Kara found that reflecting on her past and on some of those characterizing moments served to bolster her sense of pride with regards to her ability to overcome the negative impacts from troublesome childhood experiences. Kara stated that she can “appreciate [herself] more” in light of her past. In fact, “[she remembers] walking down [her] stairs one day going, ‘I’m actually a pretty good mom!’ Like, ‘Yeah! I’m actually not doing that bad!’” She explained that this is a notable change in her perspective on her abilities and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 160 achievements as a parent. This, in turn, has imbued her with a sense of pride pertaining to the ways in which she has sought becoming “the best version of [herself].” Nearing the end of the interview she began to cry softly as she explained: You just come to this place where you can really recognize how far you’ve come and how much you have accomplished in just getting to where you are now. I mean, I’m not perfect and I still face challenges everyday, but I’m so settled in my role as a mother, as a wife, as a friend, as an imperfect but deeply loved, deeply cherished child of God. I am confident in the person that I am, the person God made me, the person I’m becoming each and every day and . . . and . . . I love that. I really love that. Tage, reflecting on her healing journey, explained that “[she] is proud of all that [she] accomplished in therapy.” She stated that: In the past, any, like, struggle or disappointment or whatever, all of those things would, like, spike [her] anxiety level, like . . . [her] anxiety level would be so high and . . . it’s like those things, um, had the power to, like, ruin [her] entire day or week or month where [she] couldn’t recover from it and, so, um . . . yeah. More recently, she would say that “[she doesn’t] have those issues on a regular basis anymore.” She explained that “[she] is, in no way, perfect and that [she continues] to have moments where [she’s], like, down or, like, even a couple of days where [she] can’t recover very easily.” Nonetheless, she has “grown a sense of trust in [her] own abilities to eventually get out of it.” Tage stated that LI imbued her with a deathless courage whereby she chooses her course and fights it through in order to regain agency and an internalized sense of control. She said, “It’s just . . . I was a ghost of myself before . . .and, like, I used to feel so helpless, like, all these TILL WE HAVE VOICES 161 things have happened in my life and I can’t fix it and you just want someone to save you, but through doing LI, you save yourself which is an amazing thing.” Sarah stated that her progress in therapy had largely to do with her willingness and readiness to engage the change process. She explained that “therapy is definitely a tool to use to really change some things, but . . . the person has to be willing too.” Of herself, she said: I came into this very . . . almost desperate. At that point, I was like, “Alright, just lay it on me. Like, I’m ready to try anything at this point. Like, let’s fix something here.” And, I think, that made a change possible – my own attitude of just openness and, like, you know, whatever . . . like, an “I’ll-try-anything” kind of thing. Sarah said that “previous attempts by [her] mother to force [her] into therapy” had yielded unspectacular results; however, as she began to see evidence of “a lot of negative stuff that had piled up in [her] life” and “recognize that it was causing a lot of problems in [her] relationships,” Sarah found herself exploring options for therapy on her own. She explained that, in taking responsibility and ownership over the process of “figuring this all out . . .it kind of made [her] think twice about whether [she] had actually solved [her] problems or if [she] had just buried them, and so this prompted [her] to go back to therapy.” Sarah stated that her re-entry into the therapeutic process brought her face-to-face with “some of the things [she] had kind of buried for a long time; yet, [she’s] found this to be really valuable.” She said: I guess this process of choosing to take my own healing seriously and to really delve into the work of sorting through all the painful and awful stuff that had happened throughout my life and, like, all the . . . the big . . . like, the big problems that stemmed from that, it was really important. And necessary. And . . . I . . . I think I had to value the process more than anything else. I had to give some level of credence to, like . . . to my own TILL WE HAVE VOICES 162 suffering and to the things that I was struggling with. I had to be the one to . . . to make it happen. I mean, it wasn’t easy, and I still continue to struggle with stuff, but it’s . . . I don’t feel powerless about it anymore. I don’t think it’s gotten easier, but it’s certainly gotten more doable to deal with things as they happen. I think therapy gave me the confidence to really deal with it and to, like, face painful situations and . . . like, actually deal with things. That’s important. J. P. found that therapy helped him to “better respond to [his] circumstances” by cultivating a capacity to “really reflect on whether [his] physical and emotional responses correspond with a situation or whether they are out of proportion or as a result of a trigger from [his] past.” J. P. said that this helps to increase his sense of agency and choice in his day to day life. He went on to explain: Like, if I can kind of take a step back and really look at what is happening around me and inside of me and put all the pieces together, then I can actually feel like I am in control of how I respond . . . like, I can be responsible . . . or accountable, even to myself, with regards to how I choose to act, you know? Because that was hard before. I felt like I was just going to react the way I reacted. It felt like it was kind of out of my control. I know that that’s not totally true, but that’s what it felt like. I would get really angry or upset and then I would just react. But I feel like I have more control these days . . . like, I can make some conscious decisions about how I want to be. So that’s been good. I still get irritable and angry, but I don’t feel controlled by the rush of emotion that . . . that, like . . . there’s not as much power left in some of the things that maybe contribute to the emotional intensity of my reactions to certain things. And I think that’s a good thing . . . TILL WE HAVE VOICES 163 that there’s not much power left in some of those experiences cause I’m not having the same kind of emotional response that I did initially . . . or, like, before. In terms of whether there are things that she feels she is doing differently since being in therapy, Deborah said that she is able to tell herself that she is “not wrong” and that “everything [she does] is not wrong.” She stated that she is more able to “own [her] own thoughts and feelings and opinions and voice them to others in a way that isn’t so apologetic and selfeffacing.” She said that she now knows that “[she does not] have to be perfect.” Although selfcritical thoughts “still come up, [Deborah said that she] can get out of that dark, awful place of hating [herself] now. She said: I know I cannot dwell on that . . . . And, you know, I mean . . . I can deal with the feeling that others may not like me. If they don’t like me, so what? I’m me! You know? I can be me! I feel like I can own my sense of self, and just think, “Oh well. If they don’t like me, well . . . you know, I got some good stuff here and they’re missing out.” Deborah explained that her husband has noticed a change in her as well. She said: I don’t think he . . . There are times I can tell that he doesn’t like it so much cause . . . cause probably I’m not as dependent on him for, um, getting what I need, and I do a lot more for myself now. I take care of myself and take responsibility for making sure that I am getting out, having fun, and doing things that I enjoy. I do a lot more without him and, um, so I can kind of see sometimes, you know, that he kind of wishes that I wasn’t so . . . self-sufficient and independent maybe. I mean, nowadays, I don’t take everything that he says . . . like, I never believed everything he said anyway but I acted like I did, and now I don’t act like he knows everything, and for him it’s like, “Oh no.” TILL WE HAVE VOICES 164 Deborah smiled and laughed as she talked about the ways in which she has been able to assert her boundaries, especially with her husband. She said: It’s a hard thing to figure where your boundaries are and stuff, but it’s been good to start pointing out to [my husband] when I feel like his anger is just way over the top and stuff or when I tell him that he needs to not raise his voice that way or whatever. I am finally starting to realize that I can take charge of a situation when I feel threatened or overpowered or totally disregarded. It still happens between him and I, but it’s getting better. I mean . . . it used to devastate me when he said harsh things to me in an argument, but now I have a better sense of who I am and I can withstand it better. And I’m standing up for myself! It was common across the narratives of participants to detect feelings that indicated a sense of success, pride, completion, and relief in having undergone the process of therapy. Some of these individuals came to therapy having reached a point where they were certain that they could not go on battling with traumatic repetitions in such a way that left them feeling exhausted, defeated, and helpless. Yet, with deathless courage, these individuals sought to address the complex and recurring issues related to their traumatic experiences by defying their continued vulnerability to threats and reminders of the trauma and choosing to engage more actively with its effects. They sought to incorporate the lessons of their traumatic experiences into their lives so as to then be able to move forward and face the task of creating a future. Emerging from the traumatic environments which have shaped them, each of these individuals came to the recognition that she has still the great choice: in her post-traumatic world, she can choose her course and fight it through and win. Moreover, in accomplishing this work, these individuals TILL WE HAVE VOICES 165 were able to reclaim a degree of control over their own bodily and emotional responses that reaffirms a sense of power. For some, the process of regaining control involved frank reevaluations of their characteristic ways of coping with situations that, although not overtly threatening, felt hostile and reminiscent of socially condoned violence or exploitation which had been a part of their past. The goal was not for these individuals to take responsibility for crimes of violence, exploitation or harm, nor was it to put the onus on these individuals to obliterate fear resulting for past traumatic events. The goal, rather, was to learn how to live with the sensation of fear as it arises in their daily lives and to, in the midst of that, take up the adaptive tasks of relearning their own abilities and rediscovering their ambitions and aspirations. The participants in this study explained that therapy helped to facilitate their efforts to overcome maladaptive social responses as well as their physiological and psychological responses to fear. In the course of therapy, they then elected both to remember the trauma and put those memories aside. The ability to do this was a source of energy and enlightenment for many of these individuals. Reflecting on therapy, then, felt empowering for most of the participants in this study. In remembering the process of recovery, each participant was able to celebrate the concrete steps she took in therapy to increases her own sense of power and control. By focusing on what was working in her life and on the ways in which she was taking power in real-life situations, each individual was able to speak about her struggle to deepen and strengthen the reach of the self towards further limits of autonomy. This, in turn, evoked a sense of renewed pride which, in turn, fostered a healthy admiration of the self and the self’s strengths and abilities. Voice of calm and peace. The voice of calm and peace refers to participants’ descriptions of inner stillness and resting, completely contrasting the hyperarousal of trauma. It TILL WE HAVE VOICES 166 is characterized by a positive letting go or openness towards what is good, and a sense of trust. Somatic “calm” is described by stillness and is contrasted to the feelings that often arise in “elevated” or “activated” states. Whereas “calm,” as it is utilized here, delineates more of an experience within the body, it was evident that participants were also connecting to a transcendent element of “peace” which is deeper and more spiritual in nature. The transcendent voice of peace relates to trusting in one’s deeper self and/or in the divine. Members of the research team noted that the voice of calm and peace often appeared in conjunction with the voices of astonishment and agency. Rachelle, who previously used dissociation to cope with a felt sense of inner turmoil, marveled at the extraordinary power of addressing emotional, mental, and physical blocks by bringing awareness to the root issues underlying the symptoms and encountering the thoughts and feelings embedded therein. Having gained a greater capacity for self-regulation and a greater tolerance for emotional intensity, Rachelle discovered that she could utilize her own adaptive resources to enrich her present life rather than to escape from it. From a position of increased power in her present life, Rachelle came to a greater appreciation of her strengths and abilities. She feels able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Crises and disruptions now feel less intense. At this point, Rachelle is able to feel more relaxed and secure. She moves to enlarge her exploration to areas of life in which she can feel calm and more peaceful. In her interview, Rachelle stated: Since I did therapy, I’ve gotten glimpses . . . I don’t want to say into normalcy cause I don’t really know what normal is . . . but glimpses into . . . I want say “the normal”’ but that’s not really the word. Glimpses into the calmness, I would say. And I guess, I want to say, this study has been huge, and it’s been really weird . . . . It’s, like, for the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 167 moment, for the first time, I don’t have to have the next thing, to have another plan, and I’m okay with it . . . . And I don’t think I would be like if I didn’t do this therapy. I just feel calmer. Like, the other day, the other day, I went running and just, like, had a really good cry . . . and I remember after, just sitting there and taking a real deep breath and going, literally going, “I think this is the first time I have truly take a real deep breath in the past couple years, that I have been able to take that full, deep breath.” Kara stated that she had achieved similar positive gains in the therapeutic experience. She spoke to a sense of “calm that just came over [her] after doing some counselling with [her therapist].” She explained that therapy “was a turning point in [her] life” and that it “helped [her] to realize the beautiful person that [her husband] and [her therapist] and others in [her] life so readily saw in her.” She said that this, in turn, allowed her to “feel more settled in who [she] is and who God says that [she] is.” She explained that becoming more accepting of herself “helped [her] to feel calmer, happier, and just . . . just . . . better . . . like, just more at peace.” Kara said that she is able to be “more loving to [herself] and that this is cyclical in allowing [her] to be better able to take in the love of others which helps [her] to then love [herself] more, and then others more.” Kara teared up as she continued on to say: That love is . . . it’s just a real good feeling. For the first time in a long time, I’ve been able to be like, “Wow! I feel good about myself! I feel settled in myself. I can rest in who I am. I am not wrong or bad. I am just me and that is enough.” And that is just a beautiful feeling. It is a relieving and peaceful and grace-filled feeling that just floods into the space that self-criticism and self-doubt leave behind when . . . when . . . it just used to be . . . it used to cause so much pain and disappointment and I would be overwhelmed by it. But I have learned that being so hard on myself is ineffective and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 168 even harmful to my sense of self. Giving grace helps to increase my self-esteem and that can powerfully impact how I feel on a day-to-day basis. These days, I am just filled with so much more peace and tolerance and compassion and love. That helps me to rest and feel just generally calmer. Tage spoke equally as highly about her experience in therapy. Though resolution is never complete, it was entirely sufficient for her to experience an abatement of post-traumatic symptoms and take pleasure in the resulting tranquility and peace of mind that emerged thereafter. In describing how she is doing after undergoing LI therapy, Tage began to tear up as she said: I’m, like . . . I’m relaxed. I remember waking up one morning, like, in June so that was kind of like the end of where my sessions with [the therapist] . . . my sessions kind of ended around that time and I just remember waking up in the morning and there just being peace, like there just being no thoughts, no, like, no anxiety, like it just kind of . . . like the way that it kind of just happened and I remember crying all throughout that day because . . . because that’s such a gift. I don’t know how I lived with [that level of anxiety] all the time. So, for me, to wake up and be at peace . . . like, that’s pretty incredible. So I’m still, like, overcome by, like, gratitude for having that because I didn’t have it before, so . . . I’m doing really well! She explained that “a big thing for [her] is just that . . . um . . . just, like, the peace.” She said: I mean as cliché as it sounds, like I . . . there’s no other way to put it . . . it’s just a certain level of, like, harmony and peace that I didn’t have before. Um, uh . . .like, there’s . . . I just have the ability to be, like . . . if I’m getting upset by something, I can recognize it TILL WE HAVE VOICES 169 and to, you know, be able to come down from that and so it’s not constantly like trigger, trigger, trigger, trigger, you know? Tage went on to say: It’s just like a flip being turned off . . . like a switch . . . a flipping of a switch that I didn’t know existed. Like, I didn’t know that I had a switch that I switched on to constantly being, you know, just so overwhelmed and so anxious . . . that that was my everyday life. So just to suddenly not have that anymore, like, to just be off and just be calm – that was, like, I mean . . . It was crazy. Moreover, she said: I didn’t realize that I was living in such an elevated level all the time, you know? But now there’s like . . . there’s just like this calm. And that’s a really wonderful thing that came out of therapy. I’m really grateful for that. Like, it was crazy. I feel like I have to do so much repair to my body now, like rest extra and, you know, take care of my health and give myself time to just, like, heal from that. I do feel like there has to be healing from that level of anxiety or it’s too much. It’s crazy. But I am really moving in that direction, and that’s good. I think I would have died without LI. Like, 10 years from now, like, living with that level of anxiety, how could I have not have had a heart attack or, um, gotten to the point where I was suicidal. Like you can’t live . . . you can’t sustain that level of anxiety forever. Something’s going to break. Sarah also reported that, post-therapy, she “[has been] finding [herself] more relaxed, sleeping better, calmer, less stressed, more, just more at peace with [herself] as a whole.” From therapy, she has gained “an ability to calm [herself]. She said: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 170 I don’t know if I would call it self-soothing, but that’s sort of what it is . . . like, to recog– , instead of just rolling with my emotions and, like, freaking out, to, like, stop and recognize, “Hey, I’m about to freak out. I probably shouldn’t do that,” and then, like, take steps to not do that, you know, in whatever the situation may be – whether it’s just that I’m stressed and I have a lot of work to do or something has come up and, like, somebody’s angry at me or I’m upset with somebody else or, you know. J. P. said that he “did feel a shift in the sense that [he] is more able to stay calm rather than blow something up through [his] reactions to things.” He explained that, “while [he] can be pretty short, especially with [his] wife, [he] is growing in [his] ability to be patient and kind even when [he is] feeling frustrated.” J. P. stated that after several months of therapy, he is “able to be more gentle . . . like, more soft.” He says that that “might have something to do with the fact that [he] is calmer inside [himself] and better able to control and monitor [his] emotions.” J. P. admitted that he “is not where [he wants] to be in terms of being able to let things go and move on without getting really pissed or really, really angry;” nonetheless, he thinks that “[his] response to things are less powerful than before.” He stated that “when [he] first started coming the [therapy], [his anger response] was just dreadful,” but more recently, he has noticed that he is “less concerned about blowing up” because, “generally speaking, there has been a pretty big improvement that way.” J. P. expressed that “inner calmness impacts the way that [he reacts] to things and so feeling calmer internally has really helped to reduce the amount of anger [he] expels or, like, lets out in that more explosive or out-of-control sort of way.” J. P. stated, “I notice a significant difference even just within myself. There is always room for improvement, but, yeah . . . it’s been good.” TILL WE HAVE VOICES 171 Deborah recounted that the “biggest change that [she] noticed in therapy has to do with feeling more secure in [herself].” She said, “I feel some freedom and relief in that.” Moreover, she explains that: Though certain things used to devastate [her], [she is currently] more able to take a step back and remain calm just in knowing that [she has herself] and that [she doesn’t] have to depend on others for [her] sense of wellbeing and positive identity. This ability to feel settled within herself has imbued Deborah with a greater sense of courage and strength, but also peace. She states that “that has been good.” She says, “I can even feel it in my body. I am less tense and anxious and nervous. I am calmer.” It would appear to the research team that a sense of self, of worth, of humanity often provided the strongest protection against terror and despair in the aftermath of trauma. Being in possession of one’s self seemed to be a strong antidote to past experiences where one was isolated, stigmatized, neglected, degraded, hurt, or abused. For many of the participants, there came a moment in which they realized that something in themselves which they had believed to be irretrievably destroyed – whether hope, faith, courage, goodness, worthiness, or decency – was restorable and, through their healing process, restored. In this, they are able to reclaim lost parts of themselves which, in turn, dissolved feelings of inner conflict and deeply rooted shame. This then gave way to feelings not only of relief, but also peace. Having broken through anxious states of being, these individuals were able to regain a sense of serenity and repletion. This, for many, was deeply gratifying. Some stated that this peaceful feeling seemed to nurture a space within themselves to be more authentic and wholly present. This, in turn, helped them to feel safer, more trusting, and less ashamed. For many, this provided respite from terror and was experienced as welcome reprieve in contrast to more fearful, anxious, and stressful states. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 172 Chapter 5: Discussion Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. —Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince The purpose of this study was to explore and better understand the posttraumatic therapeutic journey. We aimed to listen to clients’ stories about their experiences in therapy. We believed that in conducting this study, we would discover more about the “felt” and embodied experience of healing in the aftermath of trauma, specifically in undergoing LI therapy. It was through the relational and in-depth analysis process of the Listening Guide that we were able to flesh out various threads in the larger tapestries of chronic traumatization, dissociation, memory, transformation, and healing. This voice-centred approach, which is characterized by literary, clinical, and feminist ways of listening to people, led us to much critical activity surrounding the ineffable elements of psychological trauma and its manifestations not only in the purely personal, visceral experiences of individuals, but also in the more social domains of posttraumatic and dissociative phenomena. Mirroring the therapeutic process, the principle of restoring human connection and agency was considered to be of central importance in our analysis. In solidarity with the participants of this study, the research team and I intentionally fostered trusting and allowing space in which to truly immerse ourselves in the narratives of these individuals, and with that, absorb a wide gamut of perspectives as we unraveled both personal and more global elements of emotional pain and suffering. Our inner task was to open up room within ourselves to be receptive and wholly present with the candid reflections of participants speaking their truth. We recognized that as these individuals gained the freedom to know and tell their stories, their TILL WE HAVE VOICES 173 personal testimonies and individual case studies provided us with a powerful and kaleidoscopic look at the pain of trauma and the process of recovery. As a team, it was our honour to learn from their lived experience. Throughout the process, we sought to listen intently, and by so listening, press deeply into meaningful encounters with their stories. By staying responsive and by wielding compassionate curiosity toward the task of persistently inquiring to the thrust of each participant’s story, we grasped the possibility of authentic understanding. This, in turn, yielded greater insight and a richer understanding of the biological, psychological, social, and even spiritual dimensions of trauma. The reward of engagement was the sense of enrichment in and through our encounters with true stories about pain being transformed into hope and restoration. As we allowed ourselves to be touched by real human experience, we fostered and deepened our own capacities for integrity by honouring the reality even at the expense of orthodoxy. Whereas scientific culture extols the merits of a more distant and impersonal stance in achieving unbiased observation for research purposes, it was our intention to invite the participants as collaborators in the process of discerning the underlying common principles of traumatic exposure and experiences. To achieve and sustain this kind of closeness and mutuality, members of the research team engaged in multiple listenings and were encouraged to relate deeply and personally to the stories of these individuals. Bearing witness to terrible events and former abuses that have largely remained unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion was not, itself, simply a research enterprise. Instead, it became the occasion for moving beyond abstract scientific curiosity and toward a passionate intellectual and social commitment stemming primarily from a strong interest in the individuals themselves and the in narrative and historical specificities of their varied experiences. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 174 The participants in this study compellingly described what it means to walk through dramatic and painful seasons of life, and yet find meaning and dignity in the midst of suffering. As they recounted courageous measures of personal growth and transformation, these individuals spoke about moments in which they suddenly felt empowered to dissolve old patterns, hidden beliefs, and ways of being in order to create richer and more fulfilling lives and relationships. Drawing upon their stories, their experiences, their very language for clues regarding how they have experienced the world and the events in their lives, we discovered that intensity, pain, and immense triumph are all essential in the ecology of healing. Beautifully spoken and rendered, we found that these participants’ stories can serve as a roadmap for all who are looking to come home to who they really are, to connect to their pure selves beneath their beliefs, emotions, behaviours, impulses and reflexes. Moreover, these poignant, emotionally authentic, and highly illuminating accounts provide an unflinching testament to the profound power of human resilience. Our own research team found that the testimonials of these participants serve to remind us of a most important truth: even in the darkest places, we are not without hope. In the end, we sought to eschew vague and unfounded conclusions regarding the nature of trauma and the process of healing. We, thus, turned our attention towards locating and specifying integral and intrinsic themes by which these participants’ experiences could be named and validated. Although the story of each individual was unique, there were notable elements spanning across various stories which, when mapped onto one another, converged into a chorus of experiences that echoed and resounded in similar ways. By tuning into these elements, the research team and I heard and connected with three categories of voices. These included: voices of trauma’s dismembering effects, voices of turning towards the pain, and voices of healing. Each category of voices underscores some resonance amongst participants’ narratives. This will TILL WE HAVE VOICES be further discussed in the following chapter. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the findings derived from this study. I will begin with a discussion of the overall strengths and limitations of the research. Next, I will unpack the findings and seek to generate thoughtful discussion with regards to the importance of these findings as well as their implications for the field of traumatic stress studies and for clinical practice in the area of psychological trauma. I will highlight the emerging insights and expound on ways in which these can help inform both our academic and clinical responsibility for remapping traditional characterizations of trauma and renegotiating connections between trauma and one’s inner essence or true and fully embodied sense of self. Finally, I will discuss possible future directions for research. Strengths and Limitations As is theme and source for this project, the relational nature of the qualitative method allowed for personal engagement between researchers and participants so as to evoke a greater level of understanding and a depth of knowledge gleaned from the stories of individuals who narrated their own experiences in therapy and spoke with radical subjectivity using their own voices. We encouraged these participants to share their own unique understanding and experiences of the healing process and facilitated a space in which they were empowered to dictate avenues of exploration for unraveling the process of recovering from traumatic experiences. Each individual story helped to reveal the ideographic complexity inherent to (re)finding and (re)connecting to one’s sense of self in the aftermath of trauma. By immersing ourselves in the unique stories of a limited number of participants, we were able to better understand the messy, lively qualities of subjective and embodied experience with depth and richness. This gave us a window into the sinuousness and wholeness of embodiment even as it 175 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 176 prevented the assimilation of multiple levels of healing into a single, fixed pathway from trauma to recovery. By focusing on the process of healing, we neglected to delve more deeply into traumatic effects. This may have limited participants’ reflection to their experience of shifting out of trauma states and moving towards bodily presence and awareness and into a more embodied sense of being. The extent of locating the impacts of trauma was through retroactive reflexivity about how it was to experience the dismembering effects of traumatic incidents and all of this given the foresight of recovery and the contextual experience of having undergone a certain mode of therapy. The emphasis on recovery may have influenced the participants to perceive their trauma in light of their healing journey which, in turn, may have affected how they spoke about their traumatic experiences, framing those narratives to accommodate the larger narrative of healing and restoration. The broader context of participants’ traumatic history was circumscribed for the purposes of focusing on the healing components of posttraumatic growth and development. Additionally, LI’s specific protocols lend themselves to a specific narrative with regards to healing – one that involves traveling through time from past, often traumatic, memory scenes to the present in order to clear the neural (cellular) memories of trauma and to rewrite the life script in such a way that connects the pieces of one’s life into a more coherent whole. This process of running through a timeline of memories and images constituting scenes from clients’ lives shapes the way in which clients experience their healing and thus frames the way in which they will talk about recovery. Therefore, since this study was intended to specifically address shifts experienced in LI therapy for the recovery of trauma, the results accrued from this study are not necessarily generalizable to different forms of trauma recovery, TILL WE HAVE VOICES 177 nor do they speak definitively about the pathways of recovery for people who have been seriously affected by trauma incidents. For readers who are more interested in inferential statistics, it may appear that the sample size of this study was a limitation. Indeed, it is important to note that most participants were Caucasian and from upper-middle class families with a Christian background. Though there was exception to this, the majority of participants shared a life context in which there may be overlaps in worldview, perspectives, and beliefs due to similar sociocultural influences and understanding. Five out of six participants were female and, therefore, this study lacked balanced gender representation. Moreover, the main presentation of participants applying themselves to the therapy process centred on developmental traumas with elements of acute trauma in certain cases. This may have given us a particular, perhaps unique, window into the impacts of LI as it pertains to a specific trauma presentation while excluding other samples of traumatic stress such that manifests, for example, in light of accidents, rape, war, prolonged torture or exploitation, ongoing domestic abuse, or natural disaster. Beyond that, another potential limitation is that only two therapists were involved in recommending participants to this study and thus there is a limited purview on the practice and manner of therapy being observed in and through the experiences of the participants. In seeking to deepen within the paradigmatic framework of this study, it is necessary consider that longer interviews with each of the participants, or perhaps a series of interviews in longitudinal fashion could, potentially, have enhanced the rigour of this study. Corroborating interviews with the therapists, not only prior to the interviews with participations but also subsequently, may have added another helpful layer of triangulation for the verification of findings. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 178 Finally, the use of the Change Interview, which looks at the role of therapy in facilitating shifts and changes that clients experience throughout their healing journeys, may have reinforced a ruling consideration of therapeutic progress over the internal, felt process of healing. The wording of most questions implied the central role of therapy despite a small handful of questions that look at the potential influence of factors other than therapeutic intervention. To conduct a qualitative exploration focusing more on clients’ experience of healing rather than clients’ experience of therapy, we may otherwise have sought to use interview protocols that promote and engage clients’ interceptive awareness regarding the experience of healing in order to assess and better understand the process of healing. Such protocols may refer to embodied experience more explicitly and seek to encompass components of sensory and emotional experience by directing questions toward participants perception and processing of bodily activity, their reflexive engagement of the self with a given phenomenon or affective experience, and facilitate identification of differentiated facets of core processes involved in emotionprocessing. Though this may provide us with a more unmitigated account of the embodied and emotional experience of healing and recovery in the aftermath of trauma when not premised upon a specific mode of therapy (i.e., LI), it then broadens the scope of inquiry so as to effectively separate the process of healing from the therapeutic modality targeting that healing. It was the purpose of this study to look at the integrative effects of LI and its influence on clients’ experience of healing in the aftermath of traumatic events. There was the desire to connect the experience of healing and the modality used to achieve it so as to gain insights not only about trauma and recovery, but also about LI therapy and its role in the healing of trauma in the lives of individuals struggling to reconcile those pieces of their lives. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 179 The specificity of this study gave rise to most decisions around method and tools used to conduct our research. The primary focus of this research was to gain in-depth knowledge about essential processes in LI that help to move people from traumatic disintegration of self, of attachment and close relationships, of previously held beliefs and worldviews toward hope and reconciliation through a renewed capacity to connect to the present, to self, to others, and to the world. In many ways, the design of the study promoted the purposes thus outlined by targeting complexity and depth over transferability of findings or replicability in the generic sense. The strength and merit of this study is reflected in the details of participants’ personal and comprehensive accounts regarding their very own experiences. The voices of these participants penetrate the mysteries of a profoundly intimate yet pervasively human phenomenon, that one which we all spend our entire lives seeking to actualize: a felt sense of coming home to ourselves. Exploration of Findings The intent of my research question was to focus on shifts from a felt sense of insecurity, terror, disconnection, and numbness to the full potential of one’s ongoing lived experience. In providing a clear focus for this research study, I attempted to simply sideline the external milieu of trauma definition and diagnosis. Oppressive terror focuses violence on creating self-doubt, attempting to fragment what cannot be broken, and attempting to obscure the truth and life of wholeness in re-membering. Many versions of these deceptions take space in our pain, from shame, to dislocation from our situated embodiment, to subtle lies of disconnection, as if caring relationships were not intrinsic to the fabric of our humanity. LI seems to help tap the very fabric of this reality, connection resonating as integrity and recognition of one another. Voices emerging in lived experience connect us deeply to what is essentially human. This research is meant to embody a clear recognition that engaging the reality of evil does not need to create a TILL WE HAVE VOICES 180 complicity with oppression to draw upon richness of the lived experience. It is my hope that the truth of caring emerges in strength, without having to neglect or underplay the realities of betrayal and suffering. Implications Research. Although more conventional means of inquiry within the mainstream of scientific research has looked to produce precise and specific knowledge about psychological trauma and trauma recovery, this study is reminiscent of more creative earlier investigations toward integrative concepts as well as a more conceptual understanding of psychological trauma (Herman, 1992). Bridging the worlds of psychological analysis and literary theory, the research team and I engaged participants in the reflexive telling of their narrative accounts. This process was hinged upon a method of inquiry which facilitated the uncovering of knowledge and meanings produced in clients’ embodied experience of healing and integration. Driven by the desire to access and explore both the clinical landscape of the psychotherapeutic process as well as participants’ narration of their journeys in and through this process, I utilized an adapted version of the Change Interview which provided a rich array of entry ports into critical moments and vital avenues for change, healing, and restoration. According to its developer, Robert Elliott (2010), the Change Interview is not a psychometric measurement instrument but rather a qualitative interview protocol. This means that the instrument stands or falls on the basis of the usefulness of the data generated for addressing particular research questions. At the core of the Change Interview are questions on three key issues: (a) clients’ qualitative perceptions of prepost changes (see Klein & Elliott, 2006); (b) helpful factors throughout the therapeutic process; and (c) hindering factors throughout the therapeutic process (see Timulak, 2007). As a core component of the Hermeneutic Single Case Efficacy Design (HSCED), the Change Interview TILL WE HAVE VOICES 181 has enabled researchers to integrate client experiences into holistic explorations of the efficacy and perceived helpfulness of treatment methods. In this way, the Change Interview and HSCED look to validate the variety of client experiences in psychotherapy and seek to demystify what is profoundly personal and deeply felt in the process. Among colleagues and faculty members at Trinity Western University, the use of the HSCED in LI research reflects a particular way in which we are seeking to challenge and move beyond truncated angles in some mainstream habits of psychotherapy research. The goal here is to push back dismissive strategies and offer substance by cultivating ways to draw upon lived and experiential realities. This includes deflecting “causality” as privileged vocabulary while keeping space clear for recognizing deep truths of betrayal, suffering, care, and summons to fullness in life. The current study seeks participation in these broader themes at multiple levels, including research design, formulation of inquiry, and clinical conceptualization. It was my intent to trace those pathways in life-honouring manners. In my reviewing of resources of research design and hermeneutic inquiry, I extended efforts to foreground performance of truth via bricolage strategies, to honour phenomenological givenness, and to draw upon relational heritages for transformation in healing betrayal and contesting violence in the context of traumatic incidents. It seems to me that feminist and indigenous voices are important markers for us in psychotherapy research. Indeed, a violent binary continues to re-emerge in many practices of inquiry, as if contesting the evils of violence and betrayal somehow fails to sustain transformational horizons of healing and relational integrity. Sidestepping this binary has been a core strength of this research in working through the Change Interview and in engaging the indepth analysis process of the Listening Guide. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 182 Towards an embodied understanding of trauma. For this study, the Listening Guide was utilized as a means of phenomenologically accessing truths embedded in the lived experience. This “bottom-up” approach allowed us to take an intensely personal yet investigative look at how trauma manifests and proliferates in the lives of individuals trying to heal. Here, we relied on the descriptive talents of participants to provide us with what Gabor Maté (2008) calls “teachings of the heart and revelations of the soul” (p. 3). Speaking about the impacts and legacy of trauma, these individuals generously volunteered thoughts, ideas, and reflections all distilled from their own personal experiences. When these insights were collated, a somewhat ambiguous clinical snapshot of trauma gave way to the relational existence of embodied experiences which carry with them the meaning and subjectivity inherent to personal stories and affective reality. In seeking to make sense of the complex, polylogical aspects of participants’ experiences in surviving and living with emotional, psychological, and corporeal residues of traumatic events, we focused on capturing the emergent embodied “truths” commingled with the ambivalent, multivocal, and contradictory subjectivity of narrators telling their stories. As a research team, we recognized that re-evoking the visceral elements of experience largely depends on the messy and lively qualities of story-telling. Because of this, we looked to engage with (rather than “smooth over”) moments of excess or ambiguity in the participants’ narratives. Forsaking expediency, we cleaved to the truth of participants’ experiences and sought to truly understand what they meant to convey as they spoke as clearly and overtly as they could about what therapy was like for them; therefore, instead of pruning out segments of “narrative debris” or glossing over “rough spots” (see McKendy, 2006) which presented interpretative difficulties, we determined that it was both theoretically and analytically important to take participants’ experience seriously as theme and source for knowledge and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 183 understanding regarding the dual phenomena of trauma and recovery. This produced findings which were, in some ways, indeterminate, and decidedly beyond standard conceptions of signs and symptoms related to trauma. Because it appeared to us that grappling with trauma is altogether “messy, in-between, on the edge and ontologically challenging” (Chadwick, 2016, p. 17), the research team and I were intentional in resisting the urge to limit our understanding to the narrower diagnostic criteria commonly used to describe trauma. We felt that we could not undermine participants’ sense of reality with logistical coordinates of a definition for trauma or a formulaic structure for understanding the healing process. Helpful as such definitions and structure may be, we recognized that we had to take a broader view to understand trauma and recovery more fully. A multilevel exploration of these phenomena was necessary because it is impossible to understand the complex processes involved in healing from any one perspective; therefore, we needed to view the processes simultaneously from many different angles – or, at least, while examining it from one angle, we needed to keep the others in mind. In other words, to get anywhere near a complete picture of the process of healing, it was necessary to hold the various different and unique stories of participants in view to see what patterns emerged. The Listening Guide offered us a unique way of engaging with transcript texts and of foregrounding both the manifest content of stories/talk and its underside which disrupts “clear and orderly meaning” (McAfee, 2004, p. 15). By listening to multiple, competing, and potentially contradictory voices, we were able to tune-in and distinguish the various inter-tangled layers of the embodied narrative. This allowed the multivocal aspects of trauma and recovery to be highlighted. Amid the complex interplay between various voices both within one individual’s story as well as across different individuals’ stories, the research team and I sought to trace the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 184 discursive movement of subjectivity in and through story-telling while also identifying larger narrative frameworks structuring each of their individual stories. Through the stories of participants in this study, we grasped that the possibility of renewal, as Maté (2008) writes, “exists as long as life exists” (p. 3). Through their accounts of the journey, we also discovered key elements which can support that possibility. Paired with insights from the trauma literature, the findings of this study offer thoughts and suggestions concerning the healing of the traumatized mind; nonetheless, it is important to note that this research is primarily descriptive, and not prescriptive. Though the process of interpersonal disconnection to intrapersonal healing was clearly indicated by the persons, quotes, case examples, and life histories comprising this study, many of the details remain to be discovered. The outlines of this process were traced in and through the intersection of participants’ stories. Members of the research team noted that the participants seemed to inadvertently agree on the elements of therapy and personal work that had the greatest impact on their recovery – for example: accepting the realities of their past; confronting painful memories and difficult emotions; grieving the losses of their childhood; reclaiming pieces of themselves which they had previously thought lost, damaged, or destroyed; and rediscovering a sense of self that is more integrated and whole. Though these convergences do not represent a definitive index of traumatic repair, they do help to elucidate the experience of undergoing violent, distressing, or painful circumstances as well as the journey to preserve and regain a sense of wholeness and health. Phenomenological methodologies for the scientist-practitioner. This study looked at the quality of the lived experience of therapeutic encounter and engagement in the process of recovering from traumatic incidence. Harnessing the capacity of individuals to speak about their TILL WE HAVE VOICES 185 experience in therapy may have useful applications that span beyond the scope of academia in its more formal sense. In other words, clinicians may benefit from the reflexive feedback of clients through the use of research methodologies towards developing critical understanding of the actual and apparent experience of individuals undergoing therapy. Tools, such as the Change Interview, have expository value in that they offer perspective regarding aspects of lived human experience which are perceived and processed by the individual. Indeed, by employing the Change Interview, we privilege clients’ experience of both helpful and hindering components of therapy. We also heed their feedback as it pertained to attributions for changes experienced in therapy. This can enable us to better understand the voice and vocabulary of the healing self. Utilizing the Change Interview to gather client feedback and unpack their healing with them – whether throughout a client’s entire journey or as a part of a depth termination interview – can grant clinicians access to a treasure trove of practical information regarding perceived efficacy of treatment, personal attributions for significant and transformational moments as well as subjective and intensely embodied experiences of change. By focusing on clients’ reflexive percipience, we avoid centring clinicians’ experiences at the cost of inadvertently marginalizing clients’ experience in therapy. We are then also inviting our clients to shape the process of therapy both immediately in their own healing journeys as well as in larger psychotherapeutic frameworks structuring clinical practice and applications. Clinical. Trauma and the complexity of the self. Research in trauma, attachment, infancy, and neurobiology indicates the importance of both traumatic and nontraumatic interactions with attachment figures in shaping a person’s core self (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1988; Bromberg, 2011; Wilkinson, 2006). Traumatogenic environments, most notably in early childhood, can TILL WE HAVE VOICES 186 have deleterious consequences for one’s working models and sense of self (Bucci, 2011; Llinas, 2001; Winnicott, 1958). The gamut of childhood circumstances – from secure attachment to disorganized-disoriented attachment to severe, prolonged attachment trauma – engenders different degrees of integrative failure which occurs on a continuum between mild differences in self-states to trauma-related dissociation (Ogden & Fisher, 2015). In cases of profound integrative failure, individuals suffering from the complex sequelae of chronic trauma may develop two or more dissociative parts, each with its own sense of self, often involving amnesia or lack of awareness for some emotions, thoughts, actions, and memories (Ogden & Fisher, 2015). Participants in this study did not exhibit major failure of integration such that they presented with a dissociative organization of their personality and/or dissociative parts. Issues with identity were not elaborate, though mild divisions in parts of their personality or in response patterns were common. Participants reported that this interfered with and changed their sense of self in subtle ways; this was more prominent in moments when they were feeling triggered. In other words, most participants reported some degree of internal conflict. Yet, few could describe the origin or nature of this conflict. What these individuals could detect was a constellation of thoughts, emotions, physical tendencies, and behaviours accompanying different aspects of self with their related socioemotional patterns and beliefs. Their daily living demonstrated the activity of various self-states; however, these tended to be more ego-syntonic. More specifically, it appeared that although unintegrated self-states or parts of self held different working models with regards to appropriate and necessary ways of being, feeling, and behaving, the overall person could reconcile parts of the self by identifying overlapping basic functions and goals. For these individuals, their self-states were less sequestered and had permeable boundaries. The struggle, then, for participants, had less to do with the experiential and neurobiological patterns TILL WE HAVE VOICES 187 of ongoing trauma-related dissociation; rather, these participants were faced with a conflict between the “familiarity of habitual relational knowing and self-knowing versus more adaptive or creative ways of being in relationship and in the world” (Ogden & Fisher, 2015, p. 36). Participants noted instances in their daily lives when default patterns of behaviours seemed to thwart adaptive action in favour of what has worked in past circumstances. For some, these actions depicted a structured, nose-the-the-grind, ambitious self-state that is focused on pleasing others rather than doing what the individual pleases. For others, these actions corresponded with a confident, independent adult who rejects her own physical and emotional needs (as her parent[s] did) in order to override what has previously been labeled a needy selfstate in which the individual yearns to be nurtured and to receive care. Still others performed actions that supported a working model of one’s self as “bad” and others as “dangerous.” According to Ogden and Fisher (2015), “such actions, along with their meanings and predictions, stem from trauma or attachment inadequacies and failures, or a combination of the two” (p. 29). In other words, these particular action sequences both reflect and sustain efforts to meet the expectations of attachment figures since all children instinctively adjust their inner needs and behavioural responses to parental demands and preferences by learning early on what is expected in relationships (Fosha, Seigel, & Solomon, 2009; Ogden & Fisher, 2015; Schore, 1994, 2003). Ongoingly, these physical and emotional patterns limit the range of affect and behaviours; the goal is to preserve survival, security, and social engagement by meeting and living up to certain learned expectations. Several participants reported that their emotions were biased towards frustration and anger as a way to cope with confusing and/or overwhelming situations. The environmental conditions of their childhood were fraught with experiences that felt unsafe and even, at times, TILL WE HAVE VOICES 188 threatening. As such, they developed procedural tendencies which allowed them to stay hypervigilantly prepared and on guard to avoid potential danger. More vulnerable emotions such as sadness, hurt, and disappointment remained unacknowledged and unresolved throughout their childhood and were consigned to a “not-me” self-state since those emotions stimulated attachment needs that were incompatible with a given situation or with the relationships at hand. Some participants suffered from generalized hyperarousal and from physiological emergency reactions organized around the neuroception of crisis or danger. Impulses to act upon defensive action systems were repetitive and persistent. Intrusive fears governed their emotions, thoughts, and responses which were, in turn, associated with past traumas. Their need for reassurance and care felt distinctly “other,” an alien “thing” to be managed since it could not be contained within the affective “truth” that the individuals were insulated by nothing other than their own abilities to stay afloat. All of the participants described childhood experiences that were uncomfortable, chaotic, overwhelming and highly dysregulating. Their narrative accounts revealed ways in which the legacy of trauma and early or forgotten dynamics with attachment figures gave way to unconscious fluctuations between extreme states of hyperarousal and hypoarousal which, in turn, influenced personality development and, in ways, the formation of self-states which occurs as a protective and even survival mechanism. The results of this study yield valuable information for working with individuals who have experienced trauma and are subsequently affected by conflicts between psychobiological systems corresponding to disparately motivated self-states. Therapists require an understanding of trauma-related dissociation as unintegrated self-states or parts of the self in order to “appreciate the struggles that occur in the clients’ treatment and even as a result of therapy, as well as recognize the valuable function of each part” (Ogden & Fisher, 2015, p 39). Without this TILL WE HAVE VOICES 189 knowledge base, therapists may perceive clients to be ambivalent, resistant, chronically relapsing, or identified with a false self, (Winnicott, 1960) rather than to be “internally conflicted between systems of daily life and defenses, or between parts of the self that were confirmed by attachment figures and parts that were denied” (Ogden & Fisher, p. 38). As internal conflicts surface and are recognized, the hard work towards integration has a better chance of being successful. Bowlby (1969/1982) asserted: Much of the work of treating an emotionally disturbed person can be regarded as consisting, first, of detecting the existence of influential models of which the client may be partially or completely unaware, and second, of inviting the client to examine the models disclosed and to consider whether they continue to be valid (p. 205). In this study, the emergent voices of various participants told their own inimitable stories of working models connected to attachment interactions and unresolved trauma. In other words, the voices expressed elements of the participants’ histories and inner dilemmas. They, at times, contradicted each other and served to conceal aspects of internal experience as well as reveal them. They arose simultaneously or sequentially to highlight conflicts between self-states, between an individual’s intentions for action and the automaticity of her responses, between what she aspired to believe and the beliefs indicated by her behaviours and associated affect. Observing and naming these voices enabled implicit phenomena, and the historical dynamics they represent, to become part of the explicit dialogue in our research. In this way, engaging mindful awareness of the implicit, experiential, and embodied templates of these individuals’ experience in therapy allowed us a window into the nearly unspoken, but deeply felt experience of clients undergoing the healing journey with all the emotions, thoughts, memories, and TILL WE HAVE VOICES 190 relational dynamics that spontaneously ensued within their internal world. We witnessed the movement towards a more aligned posture of the individual’s sense of self. Each participant felt a deeper relational attunement to herself by the end of therapy and was, thereby, better able to make sense of their emotional and somatic experiences. They drew on the intelligence of an integrated and more coherent self so as to be able to move forward from the past and reorganize their consciousness at a higher level. It is interesting to note that the results of this study also provided us with some indication regarding the directionality of the integrative process. This will be discussed next. Integrative process and the targets of therapeutic action. Years of careful observation suggests that a stable sense of a self depends on a person’s integrative capacity; that is, one’s ability to integrate her experiences into a coherent, whole “life history” and a consistent, yet adaptive, sense of who she is. Over the course of development, a person learns to connect life experiences across time and situations in such a way that continues to develop and inform her sense of self. These experiences provide her with ongoing feedback and form the basis of her life history. A person accumulates these experiences in being able to say: “These experiences and circumstances are mine. They belong to me. I act as me and am myself through all of these experiences. In good, in difficult, and in overwhelming circumstances, I am still me. My thoughts, behaviours, emotions, sensations, and memories with regards to and in response to various circumstances – no matter how pleasant or unpleasant – are a part of who I am.” Dissociation generally develops when an experience is too threatening or overwhelming at the time for a person to be able to integrate it fully, especially in the absence of adequate emotional support. This is a survival strategy which allows the person to try and go on with normal life by continuing to avoid being overwhelmed by extremely stressful experiences in both the present TILL WE HAVE VOICES 191 and the past. When these experiences occur in a nontraumatogenic environment, the person may experience the dissociation as a temporary disruption or limitation of her integrative capacity; examples of this may include periods of extreme exhaustion, stress, or serious illness. Chronic dissociation, on the other hand, is a mark of long-term impairment of our integrative capacity due to more severe traumatization. (Boon, Steele, & van der Hart, 2011). Individuals who have suffered trauma “do not feel integrated and instead feel fragmented because they have memories, thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and so forth that they experience as uncharacteristic and foreign, as though these do not belong to themselves” (Boon et al., 2011, p. 8). In order to integrate past and present experiences and re-organize one’s sense of self into a more cohesive whole, a person must be able to better understand her inner world by building awareness around the meaning and functions of the various aspects of herself and how they came to be developed in the context of her past. In LI, the goal is that the client would see how the past continues to impact her behaviours and choices in the present. Traveling through time by tracing emergent memories generated by the client’s unconscious mind, LI helps the individual connect unpleasant feelings and dysfunctional patterns with the memories of past events from which these feelings and strategies originate. Working at a neurological level, LI targets internal residues of the past – including early memories, particular unconscious emotions, or anything that suggests a connection to character – in order to render change in patterned responses and outdated defensive strategies (Pace, 2012). Though LI protocol aims to clear the neural (cellular) memories that reflect and sustain predictions that are overprotective, over-generalized, and outmoded, it also juxtaposes ego states over time so as to bridge previously protected memory gaps across various parts of self and reinstate the resiliency of interrelated and dialogical aspects of a coherent and integrated self. The underlying assumption is that disconnected self-states are TILL WE HAVE VOICES 192 immune to the potentially valuable input from other aspects of self (Bromberg, 2006); as such, an individual can continue to enact repetitive and dysfunctional patterns that, though they, at one point, helped to ensure the individual’s survival and wellbeing in impossibly difficult circumstances, are currently unhelpful at best and self-destructive at worst. The language of parts work has not been used in conjunction with LI therapy though Pace (2012) describes the integration technique of LI as a means of connecting ego states through time. The language of parts spans such approaches as Richard Schwartz’s (1995) Internal Family Systems Model and Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Ogden, Minton, & Pain, 2006). As such, the findings of this study with regards to the treatment of trauma speaks more broadly in support of treatments which focus therapeutic action toward the integration of all the different aspects of personality (including one’s sense of self) into a unified whole that functions in a cohesive manner. Unique to LI, however, are the use of autobiographical narratives and the development of cohesion through repetitions of the client’s timeline. In this study, the process of integration through LI procedures afforded potent inroads into what might be a critical aspect of the change process. By looking at the use of the timeline as a remembering/re-membering mechanism in therapy, we are able to suggest a means of addressing the goal of internal coherence through therapeutic intervention, whether clients have trauma-related dissociatively compartmentalized parts, not-me self-states, or simply mixed emotions. Clients who struggle to acknowledge or come to terms with traumatic incidents in their lives often find it hard to imagine how integration of their experiences will be helpful; they tend, instead, to want the trauma to be erased from their lives. In this regard, the timeline offers a response to their phobic reactions toward unintegrated experiences. This requires that the therapist hold the clarity that the emotional as well as TILL WE HAVE VOICES 193 psychosomatic responses to traumatic events cannot be eliminated; rather, they are to be brought back from the realm of dislocated and disowned experience in such a way as to be dealt with and resolved without the corresponding adverse reactions that may have been warranted and necessary at the time of the traumatic event. The timeline in LI presents an alternative for remembering and re-membering which does not overwhelm or threaten the integral structure of a person’s sense of self and her adaptive capacities to cope with and absorb the experiences that have been problematic for the life narrative up until now. An important element of this process is the way in which one’s integrative capacities are carefully restored and eventually able to connect the pieces of one’s life into a more coherent whole. Clients “learn to tolerate orienting and focusing their attention on their internal experience, while interweaving and conjoining cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor elements of their [experiences]” (van der Kolk, 2009, p. 462). Traumatic stress, however, exists not only on the plane of the individual’s inner world, but also across the continuum of systemic levels – that is, from the individual (biochemical and psychodynamic) to the family, social and cultural contexts. The voices that were identified as a part of this study point to the impacts of traumatic stress over time and across and within systemic milieus. Though it was not our intent to delineate a model of recovery in either an expository or interpretive sense, there appeared to be a general direction to the process of recovery from traumatic dismemberment to embodied remembering/re-membering. In speaking about the impacts of trauma, participants identified their experiences of relational conflict and attachment loss. They spoke about coping with isolation and loneliness. In therapy, these clients sought to change the effects of the past as they impinged on the present. In the process, the therapists did not so much “treat trauma and attachment” as they “helped to restore the belief in the existence of enduring human relatedness” TILL WE HAVE VOICES 194 (Ogden & Fisher, 2015, p. 51) by enacting a kind of relational negotiation of attachment which, itself, required a creative leap into the unknown where the outcome was unpredictable and uncharted. In LI, the timeline is the essential avenue of therapeutic exploration into the endangered attachment in order to generate a here-and-now reality where implicit enactments potentiate the navigation of collusions and collisions of the clients’ relational unconscious towards better resolution and integration. The timeline addresses the legacy of trauma and attachment by dialogically and somatically re-creating unsymbolized implicit processes; it is the intention of the therapeutic process to spur the emergence of suspended self-states that need to find a voice. Identifying the voices from this stage of the therapeutic journey, we discovered that participants were growing in awareness of their inner experience. By learning to tolerate and regulate certain emotions, thoughts, sensations, and memories related to past traumatizing events, these individuals were able to face what had been fearfully anticipated and avoided. They overcame their phobia of their inner experience. Guided by the therapist, these individuals sought to accept and calmly experience emotions and physical sensations that had previously been perceived as threatening and overwhelming. In the past, the phobia of inner experience contributed to ongoing psychological stress and inhibition of pleasant or spontaneous activities (see Kashdan, Barrios, Forsyth, & Steger, 2006). Through the therapeutic process, these individuals developed the faculties and mode by which to address feelings of intense shame or misery, feelings of anger or sadness, the sensation of pain or discomfort, and the desirous longings and fantasies associated with the needs of inner child parts. This, in turn, helped participants to establish greater understanding regarding the nature of their feelings, their patterns of thoughts, their emotional reactions, and their habitual movements and behaviours. As the participants became TILL WE HAVE VOICES 195 more comfortable in noticing how they interacted with various aspects of their inner experience, there gradually arose a deep empathic understanding which looked to the inner conflict, confusion, and chaos that had prevented them from accepting important needs. This evoked grief and a poignant sense of loss. Here, the participants mourned the impact of trauma on the structural integrity of their deep, inner selves which had, at the time of the event(s), been crushed under the weight of inner distress and the intense, and even violent, emotions that were stirred up. At this point, participants increasing acknowledged and accepted the sense of being and feeling fragmented. Their attention turned inwards, and they became more curious about the various parts of their inner selves which felt torn apart and thrust asunder. They examined the functions of those parts and sought to establish cooperation and active rapport across ego states. Through ongoing repetitions of the timeline, participants began to notice a felt sense of integration not only in terms of their memories and iterations of narratives regarding the past but also in terms of a more coherent sense of self. More generally in the process of healing, participants appeared to move from interpersonal disconnection to intrapersonal healing. The beginning stages of healing focused on the highly unstable and destructive bonds that were enacted due to expectations of rejection, hurt, betrayal, or abandonment stemming from traumatizing relational events in the past. Later stages of healing attended to the severe inner conflict and confusion that existed among various parts of the individual’s personality. Participants, through therapeutic actions and intervention, grew in their understanding of their inner experience and learned to tolerate knowing a little more about parts of themselves in the present. Sociopolitical. Beginning with participants’ own accounts of conflict, loss, dissociative amnesia, violence, and abuse, we examined how extreme adversity can give way to lingering TILL WE HAVE VOICES 196 challenges with which survivors must contend. We listened to descriptions of the deficient emptiness often felt by those who have long-standing wounds as a result of trauma or abuse. We also noted that the narratives of the participants took a departure from the traumatic material to include not just constrictive responses that spoke to a dissociative or slightly numbed experience of the posttraumatic reality, but also illuminating accounts of the courage, the grace, the desire for human connection, and the tenacious struggle for existence and even for dignity–all of which characterize the lives of those who have undergone and survived trauma. By tuning into the full spectrum of participants’ lived experiences–the descriptions of which reflect the inherent turbulence and complexity of integrating trauma–we were plunged into a narrative study of lives situated and specified for the purpose of developing particular questions and critiques of a narrowed, predominantly neurobiological understanding of trauma and PTSD. Through a rediscovery of the essential interconnection of biological, psychological, social, and even spiritual dimensions of trauma, we began to approach a rhetoric of trauma and recovery that does not merely reiterate the most conventional articulations of those terms. Herman is among a group of clinicians, researchers, and politically-involved advocates who have taken an angle on the enterprise of traumatic stress studies which establishes an association between psychological trauma and the wider cultural context. In Trauma and Recovery, Herman (1992) argues that our understanding of trauma and the impact of traumatic events are heavily shaped by cultural factors and developments. She asserts that the rhetoric for discussing the characteristic symptoms of traumatic stress is influenced by the cultural climate. In recounting the historical context surrounding the study of trauma, Herman draws attention to the fact that, over the past century, three distinct discourses regarding particular forms of psychological trauma have surfaced into public consciousness, each time driven by a political TILL WE HAVE VOICES 197 movement which caused these investigations of trauma to flourish and gain momentum. The first emergent study of the phenomenon of psychological trauma began with the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s examination of hysteria. Herman (1992), who highlights Charcot’s work, states that the study of this archetypal psychological disorder of women “grew out of the republican, anticlerical political movement of the late nineteenth century in France” (p. 9). The second to emerge was the study of shell shock or combat neurosis. This “began in England and the United States after the First World War and reached a peak after the Vietnam War. It’s political context as the collapse of a cult of war and the growth of an antiwar movement” (Herman, 1992, p. 9). Finally, the last and more recent study of trauma to come into public awareness has to do with sexual and domestic violence. Herman explains that, “its political context is the feminist movement in Western Europe and North America” (Herman, 1992, p. 9). She believes that “our contemporary understanding of psychological trauma is built upon a synthesis of these three separate lines of investigation” (Herman, 1992, p. 9). More recently, researchers are exploring a new wave of defining trauma in the postmodern era. Postmodernism and its impacts on human interaction and ethics have, over the past decades, attracted the attention of philosophers and theorists such as Jean Baudrillard (1891/1994), James-François Lyotard (1984), and Fredric Jameson (1991, 1998). As evidence for phenomena surrounding post-modern society and social dislocation has continued to accumulate, mainstream sociological investigations are moving to examine how the western societal move toward technological revolution and urbanization leads to a disconnection from reality and to resultant fracture in social relations (See Elliott, 2000). This development of social and political concern to do with postmodernism has now garnered interest from researchers and practitioners in the field of psychology. Bracken (2001), for example, has produced an article TILL WE HAVE VOICES 198 discussing the impacts of the fractured conditions of the postmodern world and its contributions to PTSD. Alexander (2000, 2008), on the other hand, has looked at the ways in which social dislocation and despair are creating the social conditions for addiction in the context of capitalism, globalization and post-modernity. Very much along the same vein as Alexander, renowned speaker and author, Gabor Maté (2008), argues that alienation, violence, and addiction constitute “the ravages of social breakdown” (p. 262). It is his belief that “dislocation” (by which he means the loss of psychological, social and economic integration into family and culture; a sense of exclusion, isolation, and powerlessness) is the precursor to addiction. Indeed, with the rise of industrial societies came dislocation and Maté (2008) states that the social and psychological results of massive dislocation are not only predictable but also already obvious. He points to the disruptions, dysfunctions and disease which Western social models engender, stating that social deprivation and dislocation give way to results disastrous for the development of emotional attachment. For people whose place in the normal human communal context has been disrupted, pain and suffering become more pervasive and enduring. Given the advent of postmodernism – with its societal impacts and relational breakdown – how do we reformulate the way in which we conceptualize trauma? And more specifically, for the purposes of this paper, how do the findings of this study converge on this perspective of psychological trauma as well as on the impacts of traumatic events? Though the sociological reading of postmodernism expounds upon its dazzling globalization of social relations, its deconstruction of metaphysical foundations, its reifying of technology, and its cult of consumer hedonism (Elliott, 2000), more philosophical works have sought to describe the ways in which postmodernism, virtuality, and globalization have contributed to a growing fragmentation of the self (see Jameson, 1991; Turkle, 1995). Turkle (1995) explains that this fragmentation of the self is characterized by the TILL WE HAVE VOICES 199 derealization of the world, the waning of historicity and time, and the inability to represent one’s own experience. It is her belief that this seems to reach its full expression in the phenomenon of virtuality. In line with concerns regarding the psychological implications of the electronicallyfacilitated decentralized self and its political implications in our world, Maté (2015) speaks to the fragmentation, enactments of self, decentralization of the person, and derealization of the world as constitutive features of trauma. At a recent workshop titled, Beyond Addiction, Maté (2015) stated the following: The essence of trauma is that, as a result of the overt abuse or neglect, or because of the relational trauma, we lose the connection to our essence. That’s what the trauma is. The trauma is not what happened. The trauma is not that I was raped. The trauma is not that I was abandoned. The trauma is not that I was hit. The trauma is not that my parents didn’t know how to listen to me. That’s not the trauma; the trauma is that, as a result of that, I lost the connection to myself. Hence, I lost the connection to my essential qualities: my joy, my vitality, my clarity, my wisdom, my power, my strength, my courage. That’s the trauma! The good news is, that can be healed, because if the trauma is the loss of connection to myself then that loss of connection to myself can be healed. What happened fifty years ago, or twenty years ago, or fifteen years ago, or three years ago can’t be healed. If you were raped when you were five years old by your grandfather, that’s never going to change. But if the effect of that was that you lost the connection to yourself, that can be changed. My teacher Almaas says, “The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, is not that there was no love or support. The greater calamity, which was TILL WE HAVE VOICES 200 caused by that first calamity, is that you lost the connection to your essence.” That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not. That is the beauty of it. In this study, many participants spoke about the despairing state of a nearly perfect – albeit unwilled – solitude which engulfs them once the connection between self and world has been broken. In the aftermath of trauma, they feel fearful and isolated; immersed in a rootless, discombobulated existence which remains profoundly disquieting for them. Because traumatic experience has eroded the social conventions which had previously insulated their unquestioned beliefs regarding the safety of the world and the trustworthiness of their fellow human beings, survivors of such experiences are seized by, what often feels to them, the ungovernable urge to hide, to vanish, to run away, or to violently protect themselves. Furiously trying to stabilize their lives; to regain some sense of order, agency, or control; to attain some predictability; and to come back from the brink of a terrible danger, these individuals are consistently thwarted by inner turmoil and an extraordinary feeling of betrayal – the catalyst of frantic attempts to withdraw from a brutal world that has cast them out from the ordinary structures of meaning and propriety. By then, a process is already in motion, one which the individual may not herself be fully aware of; as fear begets the weary frustration of anarchic discontent, the individual retreats into herself only to find that the realities of self have, in fact, been irrevocably altered. What Maté describes as the essence of trauma is soon realized by the individual – she comes upon an unfamiliar sense of self in the aftermath of either overt abuse or neglect, or some other form of relational trauma. This sense of relational displacement in conjunction by a decentralized internal world due to the fragmentation of self points to a growing concern that a disconnection to one’s own essence is intimately linked one’s ability to operate in the world. In cases of TILL WE HAVE VOICES 201 trauma, there is a clear breakdown of both. Reformulating trauma as a dissolution of the constitutive connections to others and, ultimately, to one’s self is likely a pertinent endeavour for our times, given the wider scope of inquiry into phenomena of dislocation, decentralization, and derealization in the postmodern era. Further theoretical and sociopolitical work is needed in order to develop recommendations regarding how future research could be framed and focused on examining trauma within the post-modern context. Recommendations for Future Research Future investigations are required to determine whether these findings reflect the essential process of moving towards inner wholeness from traumatic dismemberment. Even as preliminary results suggest that the process follows the lines of interpersonal disconnection to intrapersonal healing, it is necessary to look at other therapeutic journeys around the same constructs of dismembering and remembering in order to truly parse out the conceptual nuances embedded in the interpersonal and intrapersonal dynamics of trauma and healing. To do this, future research may look to trace the process of healing in and through other modes of therapy. A similar study which looks at healing in the context of a therapeutic modality rooted in different values and theoretical assumptions, which represents a contrasting psychotherapeutic paradigm, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, may serve to highlight how the healing process is consistent or perhaps differing when approach from various angles. Still other studies might also want to look at whether healing presents differently for those who have experienced singular and/or acute traumas or for those who have endured gross violations of their human rights for prolonged periods of time whether in the context of war, in TILL WE HAVE VOICES situations of sex-trafficking, in refugee crises, or in circumstances involving torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. In terms of gathering different kinds of data, researchers adept in observing and interpreting real-time displays of brain activity using electroencephalography recordings could further this research by investigating the neurological integration of states and experience through the monitoring of electrical activity of the brain across various segments of the healing process. This may represent another form of assessment, looking at correlations between brain activity and reported shifts in therapy. This adds another level of complexity to our ability to perceive the process of healing in those seeking to overcome their trauma(s). 202 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 203 Conclusion In her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor (2014) references the following quote by Hildegard of Bingen: “We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light” (p. 149). My hope for this study was to better understand a phenomenon that often wraps itself in ambiguity, emptiness, and silence which threatens to “sweep away all traces of the specificity, corporeality, of [the] processes of production and self-representation” (Grosz, 1995, p. 2). Indeed, trauma is frequently described as incomprehensible, excessive, and absurd. “The ordinary response to atrocities,” says Herman (1992), “is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the world unspeakable” (p. 1). Nonetheless, the purpose of this study was dedicated to the relationship of witnessing. By dialoging with the participants and listening to their voices, we sought to hold space for the unsettling effects that rethinking trauma implies for those horrible traumatic events which take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Herman (1992) writes, “To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance” (p. 9). As such, whether the subject of trauma can be pursued or discussed is, itself, a question of context. To counteract the knee-jerk reactions of silencing and denying, we needed to engage in the active process of bearing witness so as not to forget or overlook aspects of painful and difficult to articulate experiences. In this study, we looked at the broadband processes surrounding traumatization and recovery. We entrusted our efforts to understand these processes to the sincerity and honesty and courage of the participants. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 204 Moreover, the strength of the study resides in the participants’ capacity to take back the telling of their own stories and utilize their voices to speak openly about the truth of their experiences. To capture the whole of their testimonies with regards to the process of healing posttrauma, we sought to deposit all the aspects of their lived experience–whether “strange and inexplicable moods and thoughts that invade the mind [or] things that are often too elusive to be seized and held fast” into the transcripts and texts for analysis even as experiential fragments and incongruities which appeared to exceed or rupture the standard narrative frame. What appeared before us, then, was the dynamic inner life in its immediacy and spontaneity–without breaks in the recording of inner happenings, in their succession, and without direct causal links. We embraced the situated expressiveness of each narration and drew on tones, pauses, gestures, outbursts, laughter, and silence in order to gain a sense that the depths of the well of personal, emotional, and intensely visceral experience had really been reached. Anton Chekhov, in his classic novella The Duel, writes, “In the search for truth human being take two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them forward. And who knows? Perhaps they will have the real truth at last” (as cited in Maté, 2008, p. v). In seeking to overcome the pervasive feelings of terror and disconnect which arise in the aftermath, these individuals sought to push through suffering, through various helpful and unhelpful means of coping with the pain, and through weariness and a felt sense of hopelessness in the face of daunting circumstances in order to put forth their truth and to reclaim their sense of agentic self – free and able to courageously “[rediscover] what is whole and has not been absent, just obscured” (Maté, 2008, p. 395). Through the stories of participants, we feel that we have, in fact, gained an abundant and rich purview of the journey from loneliness to connectedness; from fear and numbness to peace TILL WE HAVE VOICES 205 and presence; from a sense of deficiency to the experience of wholeness; from an inner void to a felt sense of embodiment; from the loss of essence to regaining essential qualities such as love, joy, strength courage and confidence. For each of us, it was an honour to be welcomed into the sacred place where healing occurs – a place located within all of us, where our authentic nature is hidden. Maté (2008) beautifully writes that, “From hidden resources the miracle of survival renews itself with surprising force, as a geyser springs from underground waters through bare earth, shale and ice” (p. 399). 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TILL WE HAVE VOICES Appendix A: Brochure for Advertising the Study 224 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 225 TILL WE HAVE VOICES Appendix B: Poster for Advertising the Study 226 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 227 Appendix C: Initial Information Sheet for Clients Who Have Formally Expressed Interest in the Study Dear potential participant, My name is Elizabeth Chan, and I am in the M. A. of Counselling Psychology program at Trinity Western University. I am the principle researcher for the “Voices of Re-membering” study which I am conducting under the supervision of Dr. Janelle Kwee and Dr. Marvin MacDonald. Thank you so much for your interest in participating in this study. This study looks at the embodied and felt experience of healing in LI therapy. It is my hope that this research can provide valuable information to professionals and other researchers so that we can continue to enhance our knowledge and ability to walk alongside others who have experienced the whole-person dismembering effects of trauma and are looking for ways to pursue hope and healing. It is also my hope that this experience can be a rich and gratifying opportunity for you to share your story of undergoing LI therapy in grappling with the effects of trauma and overcoming them. I believe that this will be an honouring and commemorative experience toward an open, interactive sharing of insights. Participation in this study involves of a minimum of one face-to-face interview which will take place at a location that is preferable to you. The interview will begin with general introductions and with a review of the consent and confidentiality forms. Then, you will be asked questions about your experience of therapy, your expectations towards therapy, some of your goals for therapy, the points at which you experienced felt shifts in therapy, what has helpful and hindering about therapy, and about any other aspects of therapy and your experience of being in therapy that you may like to speak to. After the interview, your level of ongoing involvement in the study is amenable to your preference; there is wide variability in terms of the level of involvement ranging from none at all to reviewing the accuracy of the conclusions I have drawn from our time together to reviewing the thesis document – from which this study derives its context and purpose – before it is finalized. In terms of the thesis itself, be assured that all information regarding your identity as well as details about you will be anonymized so that you are unidentifiable in the final document. All other products of the interview that contain your identity will be kept confidential and secure. Further details about this process will be discussed if you decide to proceed. I ask that you take the time to consider the opportunity in order to allow yourself to decide whether this is something you want to participate in. If you feel any sense of uncertainty about your involvement in the study, I encourage you to discuss these feelings with your therapist. I also welcome the opportunity to personally answer any question you may have at any point. Please do not hesitate to contact me by phone [phone number] or email [email address] to talk about any aspect of your potential involvement, the research process, or the study itself. Absolute best, Elizabeth Chan, M. A. Student Department of Counselling Psychology Trinity Western University TILL WE HAVE VOICES 228 Appendix D: Informed Consent VOICES OF “RE-MEMBERING”: LISTENING TO ACCOUNTS OF CLIENTS’ EMBODIED AND FELT EXPERIENCE IN LI THERAPY Principal Investigator: Elizabeth Chan, M. A. Student in Counselling Psychology, Trinity Western University. Contact number [phone number]. Contact email address [email address] Supervisor: Janelle Kwee, PsyD, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Counselling Psychology, Trinity Western University. Contact number [phone number]. Contact email address [email address] Purpose: The purpose of this study is to listen to the voices of individuals who have previously endured traumatic incidents and have more recently experienced a felt shift in the process of undergoing LI therapy in the pursuit of healing and wholeness . It is also to understand whether or not embodiment and/or the integration of one’s felt sense of self plays a role in the process of healing in therapy. Due to the whole-person dismembering effects of traumatic experiences, a pervasive felt sense of insecurity, terror, disconnection, and numbness towards the fullness of human experience is common in the aftermath of trauma. Researchers will seek to construct insightful descriptions and interpretations of the way in which individuals speak about their lived experience of trauma and healing. This study is designed to inform the academic community, clinicians, and most importantly individuals who have undergone traumas and who are seeking hope and healing, with the purpose of helping individuals understand the embodied and felt sense of healing in the context of an experiential, mind-body integration therapy approach. Procedures: The method chosen to conduct this research represents holistic and integrated knowing. This includes privileging the voices of clients in seeking to gain insights about clients’ embodied sense of what it means to grapple with the effects of trauma and overcome them. To be able to participate in the interview portion of this study, you must be an individual who has undergone trauma, completed a client-therapist agreed upon discrete “section of work” in LI therapy to work on trauma and/or the effects of a traumatic incident, and experienced a “felt shift” during the therapeutic process. For the interview portion of this study, you will participate in a semi-structured interview where the researcher will ask you questions about your experiences of shifts in therapy, the felt importance or significance of these shifts, how these shifts have contributed to your journey of healing, and whether therapy presented any problematic and/or hindering aspects to the healing journey. This interview will take place in the location of your choice – a place where you feel most comfortable in sharing your account of the therapeutic experience and your process of healing and re-membering with the researcher. This interview will last between 1 and 2 hours and will be either video- or audio-taped for transcription at a later time. During the transcription, all identifying information will be removed. You will be able to select a pseudonym for identification in the final research report. After the interview of all the participants have been collected and reviewed by the research team, you will be given the opportunity to aid in the interpretive process of the data analysis, and provide insight and input in the analysis of your own personal experience. When the study is completed, the results will be made available to you if you would like. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 229 Potential Risks and Discomforts: Despite that there are not significant known risks of involvement in this study, reflecting upon your experience may result in some emotional discomfort similar to that which you may have experienced in a therapy session or, otherwise, in your day-to-day life. All interviews will be conducted by the primary researcher, who has both training in counselling psychology and internship experience in working with populations of people who have undergone traumatic incidents. The primary researcher will not be providing counselling services herself; however, her training will enable her to create a safe place for you to share your experience and to provide support and emotional containment if, at times in the interview, you connect with triggering or emotionally intense material. The researcher will also provide you with a referral to a clinical counsellor should the emotional distress reach an undesirable level. Potential Benefits to Participants and/or to Society: Participating in this study will help researchers to better understand the felt, embodied experience of healing in the aftermath of trauma, and how LI contributes to this process of healing. This will help to better inform clinicians, researchers, and other interested individuals about the felt sense of healing in therapy, and how that impacts one’s personhood and one’s feelings of being integrated and whole. In addition, this study provides an opportunity in which to celebrate your experiences of healing thus far, and to discuss how therapy may have imparted you with a more re-membered sense of being with yourself, with others, and in the world. It also provides an opportunity for you to explore areas of therapy that were unhelpful or hindering in your process of healing. This can allow for the propagation of your felt and spoken experience of being in therapy in order to offer your unique perspective to others who may be seeking therapy for the dismembering effects of trauma. Confidentiality: Any information that is obtained in connection with this study and that can be identified with you will remain confidential and will be disclosed only with your permissions or as required by law. Recording files and transcripts of the interviews will be kept in an encrypted, password protected folder on the researcher’s laptop computer. Access to the computer itself is also password protected. Upon transfer to the laptop computer, the thumb drive or SD memory stick on which the recordings may originally be stored, will be completed cleared and wiped of any content that has to do with the study and with your interview. Paper copies of the transcripts will be kept in a locked filing cabinet, which is kept in the researcher’s locked office. Recording files and transcripts will be kept until the completion of the research study, and until Trinity Western University has approved this study as meeting all of its requirements for completion of a thesis for the Masters of Arts in Counselling Psychology program. Following the completion of this thesis, all the raw data for this study will be deleted from the computer, or will be shredded, by the researcher. Contact information about the study: If you have any questions or desire further information regarding this study, you may contact Elizabeth Chan, at [phone number] or [email address] or her research supervisor, Dr. Janelle Kwee, at [phone number] or [email address]. Contact for concerns about the rights of research participants: If you have any concerns about your treatment or rights as a research participant, you may contact Ms. Sue Funk in the Office of Research, Trinity Western University at [phone number] or [email address]. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 230 Consent: Your participation in this study is entirely voluntary. You may refuse to participate or withdrawal from the study at any time (in person, via email or telephone). Your refusal to participate or to withdraw from the study will not prejudice your future relations with your treatment provider nor will it in any way affect your relations with any member of the research team. Your withdrawal from this study, however, is not possible after the researcher has integrated your story into the dataset. Your identity will be protected through the use of your selected pseudonym. Signatures: Your signature below indicates that you have had your questions about the study answered to your satisfaction and that you have received a copy of this consent form for your own records. Your signature indicates that you consent to participate in this study and that your responses may be put in anonymous form and kept for further use after the completion of this study. _________________________________________________ ________________________ Research Participant Signature Date _______________________________________________________________ Printed Name of the Research Participant Signing Above TILL WE HAVE VOICES 231 Appendix E: Confidentiality Form for Members of the Research Team CONFIDENTIALITY AGREEMENT As an assistant to the Voices of “Re-membering” study, I acknowledge that I am in a place of significant trust and responsibility related to participant identification, data, and confidential matters. I acknowledge that wisdom and great discretion must constantly be exercised to keep in strict confidence information made available to me during the course of my work as well as when communicating by phone or electronically. I acknowledge that I must encrypt and password protect electronic data and take all care with paper documents, storing them in locked cabinets when not in use. Information for Non-Disclosure. The protection of confidential participant information is vital to the success of this study. Such confidential information includes, but is not limited to, the following: • Computer Passwords • Participant Identification • Field notes • Data gathered • Transcripts and analysis I have read the above Confidentiality Agreement and am willing to be bound by its terms both during and after my work with this study. ________________________ Assistant Name: __________________ Signature: _______________ Date: ________________________ Witness: __________________ Signature _______________ Date: TILL WE HAVE VOICES 232 Appendix F: Script for the Semi-Structured Telephone Screening Interview Hi _________________, My name is Elizabeth Chan, and I am the principle researcher for the “Voices of Re-membering” study which I am conducting under the supervision of Dr. Janelle Kwee and Dr. Marvin MacDonald. Thank you so much for your interest in participating in this study and for your willingness to be a part of this telephone interview. Please know that your participation in this interview is entirely voluntary, and that you may refuse to answer questions at any point in time. The following questions will help me to ascertain your fit for the study and ensure that you meet all criteria for participation. 1. Can you tell me a little bit about your interest in this project? 2. Can you describe to me about how you see yourself as a candidate to participate in this study? a. If not spontaneously described, probe for experience(s) of trauma, for exposure to LI therapy and whether the client and therapist, together, have agreed that the client has worked through and completed a section of work as it relates to trauma, and for confirmation that the client did, indeed, experience shifts in therapy (whether positive or negative). 3. Can you commit to an interview for an hour or two hours? 4. Do you feel that you are able to reflect upon your experiences in therapy and explore various aspects of the work that you and your therapist were able to do together in therapy? 5. If selected for participation in the study, would you like to be contacted for further involvement in the study, such as reviewing the accuracy of the conclusions that I draw from our time together and/or reviewing the thesis document before it is finalized? Thank you for your interest in the project, and I will be letting you know about participation in this study in the near future. Should you notice that you have experienced any undesirable reaction today or at any point in the future as a result of this interview, I have a list of free or low cost counselling services that you can access. Fraser River Counselling 7600 Glover Rd., Langley, BC V2Y 1Y1 (604) 513-2113 Brookswood Counselling Services #107-20103 40 Ave., Belmont Centre, Langley, BC V3A 2W3 (778) 278-3411 Burnaby Counselling Group 3701 Hastings St., Burnaby, BC V5C 2H6 (604) 430-1303 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 233 Appendix G: Pre-Interview Script Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me and for your willingness to share your story. Before we begin, I would like to go over the informed consent and confidentiality form with you. Do you have any questions or concerns at this point? As mentioned in our telephone conversation, I will be asking you personal questions about your experience of re-membering in the process of LI therapy. You are free at any point in time to refuse answering any question, and you may discontinue the interview at any point in time. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 234 Appendix H: Interview Procedures as per the Adapted Change Interview Change Interview (Elliott, 1999) Adapted to interview research participants for the “Voices of Re-membering” study By Elizabeth Chan, Trinity Western University, October, 2015 Client Pseudonym: ___________ Interview: _______________ Number of LI sessions: _________ Date:_________________ 1. General Questions: 1a. What medication are you currently on? (record medication name, the symptoms that the medication is for, the dose/frequency, how long the client has been on the medication, last adjustment for the medication, herbal remedies) Psychopharmacological Medication Record (incl. herbal remedies) Medication For what Dose/Frequency How long? Name symptoms? Last adjustment? 1b. What has therapy been like for you so far? How has it felt to be in therapy? 1c. How are you doing now in general? 2. Self-Description: 2a. How would you describe yourself? (If role, describe what kind of ____? If brief/general, can you give me an example? For more: How else would you describe yourself?) 2b. How would others who know your child well describe her/him? (How else?) 2c. If you could change something about your child, what would it be? 3. Changes: 3a. What changes, if any, have you noticed in yourself since therapy started? (For example Are you doing, feeling, or thinking differently from the way you did before? What specific ideas, if any, have you gotten from therapy so far, including ideas about yourself or other people? Have any changes been brought to your attention by other people?) [Interviewer: Jot changes down for later.] 3b. Has anything changed for the worse for you since therapy started? 3c. Is there anything that you wanted to change that hasn’t since therapy started? 4. Change Ratings: (Go through each change and rate it on the following three scales:) TILL WE HAVE VOICES 235 4a. For each change, please rate how much you expected it vs. were surprised by it? (Use this rating scale:) (1) Very much expected it (2) Somewhat expected it (3) Neither expected nor surprised by the change (4) Somewhat surprised by it (5) Very much surprised by it 4b. For each change, please rate how likely you think it would have been if you hadn’t been in therapy? (Use this rating scale:) (1) Very unlikely without therapy (clearly would not have happened) (2) Somewhat unlikely without therapy (probably would not have happened) (3) Neither likely nor unlikely (no way of telling) (4) Somewhat likely without therapy (probably would have happened) (5) Very likely without therapy (clearly would have happened anyway) 4c. How important or significant to you personally do you consider this change to be? (Use this rating scale:) (1) Not at all important (2) Slightly important (3) Moderately important (4) Very important (5) Extremely important Change Change was: 1 – expected 3- neither 5 – surprised by Without therapy: 1 – unlikely 3 – neither 5 – likely 1. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 Importance: 1 – not at all 2 – slightly 3 – moderately 4 – very 5 – extremely 1 2 3 4 5 2. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 3. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 4. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 5. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 6. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 7. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 8. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 5. Attributions: In general, what do you think has caused these various changes? In other words, what do you think might have brought them about? (Including things both outside of therapy and in therapy) 6. Helpful Aspects: Can you sum up what has been helpful about your therapy so far? Please give examples. (For example, general aspects, specific events) 7. Problematic Aspects: 7a. What kinds of things about the therapy have been hindering, unhelpful, negative or disappointing for you? (For example, general aspects. specific events) 7b. Were there things in the therapy which were difficult or painful but still OK or perhaps helpful? What were they? 7c. Has anything been missing from your treatment? (What would make/have made your therapy more effective or helpful?) 8. Suggestions . Do you have any suggestions for us, regarding the research or the therapy? Do you have anything else that you want to tell me? 236 TILL WE HAVE VOICES 237 Appendix I: Debriefing Script Following the Interview Thank you so much for your participation in this study. I have several questions to ask in order to gain some insights into what it was like to be a part of this study. 1. What was this experience like for you? 2. Was there anything new and surprising that happened for you during this process? 3. What has been the most challenging/rewarding/natural part of this process? 4. If there is one thing you would like to impart to others who are struggling with the effects of trauma and seeking to overcome them, what would that be? 5. If there is one thing you like other therapists to know about undergoing the process of healing in LI therapy, what would that be? 6. Is there anything else that you would me to know regarding your experiences both here today and in general? 7. Do you have any final questions or comments about what it was like participating in the study? 8. As a final check, are you okay for this information to be included in this study? Please remember that your withdrawal from this study is not possible after the research team and I have integrated your story into the dataset. Just a reminder that you have the opportunity to be involved in what we call a “member check” which entails that we meet again in order for you to let me know how accurate my conclusions are about what I learned from our time together. You may also wish to review the final document to make sure that you feel accurately represented in the final results. Your participation in this part of the process is entirely voluntary. I will contact you in the near future, during the next few months, to see if you are interested in being part of the next step. Furthermore, if you would like me to send you the results of this study without being a part of the revision process, I can send you the completed thesis. To reiterate, when I discuss my results, I will not use your real name or identifying information; however, I also do not want to be too impersonal and use something like a case number. I am wondering whether you have a name that you would like to use as a pseudonym in the final document? If not, I can conjure a name that feels intuitive to me. To wrap up, I will summarize in saying that our time together today has been all about exploring what it is like to having undergone the process of LI therapy in the aftermath of trauma. More specifically, we sought to identify shifts that occurred in therapy and you provided some description of what your felt sense of those shifts were and talking about how they seemed to have impacted your healing journey. I really want to thank you for being so open and willing to share with me today. It has been a privilege to be a part of this with you. I am extremely grateful for your time and for your contribution to this research. TILL WE HAVE VOICES 238 Appendix J: Thank You Letter with Local, Free or Low Cost Counselling Services Dear _________________, Thank you again for your participation in this research study. I am very hopeful that your expressed experience of being in LI therapy will be used to help other survivors of trauma to come and embrace their journeys of healing. If you notice that there is something that we talked about which you wish to speak with a mental health professional about, or if you experienced some distress as a result of this interview, below is a list of free or low cost counselling resources in your community. Fraser River Counselling 7600 Glover Rd., Langley, BC V2Y 1Y1 (604) 513-2113 Brookswood Counselling Services #107-20103 40 Ave., Belmont Centre, Langley, BC V3A 2W3 (778) 278-3411 Burnaby Counselling Group 3701 Hastings St., Burnaby, BC V5C 2H6 (604) 430-1303 Thank you very much, Elizabeth Chan TILL WE HAVE VOICES 239 Appendix K: Debriefing Script Following the Reviewing of the Analysis What was this experience like for you? Do you have any additional questions or comments about what it was like participating in the study? As we have talked about before, the completed thesis is available to you if you would like to see the final results of this study. Thank you again for your participation in this study. I am very grateful for your time and contribution to this research.