Elements of Aliveness

Now that I’m wrapping up this trauma writing project, I figured it would be interesting to summarize the whole odyssey, so perhaps it can guide, encourage and intimidate fellow travelers. It was not a linear arc and did not follow a path I could have ever predicted. There was no single breakthrough that made everything come together but over a dozen massive, miraculous experiences and practices that complemented and expanded each other.

Recap of the Wound

I was raised with an extreme amount of physical and emotional abuse, which I never had a chance to process. It gave me complex PTSD that strongly resembled Borderline Personality Disorder. I was severely depressed and highly suicidal for years. I spent most of my life enduring and coping through dissociation and external validation.

Wake Up

I endured until I couldn’t, my spine literally broke. I like to say it’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it prevented the tragedy of my coping mechanisms being sufficient. It showed me how powerful it can be to give up self neglect. It opened up the door to receiving help and eventually led me into therapy. My rehab exercises got upgraded to strength training with kettlebells and eventually became my movement practice, which is the spine of my life today.

Safety

Talk therapy didn’t work for me initially because my denial was too essential for survival. It was somatic therapy that opened the door. I spent a few Hakomi sessions bowling and wailing out loud while my therapist cradled and rocked me like a baby. I had hardly cried for the 30 years before. So much burst open when safety was finally available and trusted.

This was the first time in my life that I was effectively soothed by a regulated adult, the skill we need to be taught as babies and the foundation for emotional regulation. This began the grief that defined the next stage of healing: I cried every day for the next few years after.

I spent hundreds of hours in talk therapy since. Not all of it was necessary but it was convenient. An emotionally mature friend would have been just as good but I’m not sure I would have accepted one. Initially, I thought therapy would help me understand what I was experiencing. And it did, but understanding is one of the least helpful things during healing. It’s the experience that matters most, not the story.

Therapy helped me be witnessed, valued and appreciated for who I was without performance or decoration. Another building block of a healthy life that we’re supposed to get during childhood. It taught me that the critical and dismissive inner voice was not the only way to talk to myself. It softened me towards me.

Understanding

At this point, I read pretty much every therapy related book ever written... It was an indulgence and a waste of time. Conceptual understanding is not completely useless but it’s one of the least helpful things out there. You can talk about patterns all day long but only actual contact with reality can convince a nervous system to relax.

Couples therapy was surprisingly revealing. My wounds were relational and my adaptations were harmful to me. I was raised as a slave and was quick to recreate the same childhood dynamic in my marriage. This was one of the biggest learning opportunities of my life. It taught me about projection, people pleasing, self-abandonment, rescue fantasy, accountability, boundaries, etc. I paid dearly for these lessons but I’m glad I did.

Identity

Vision fast is where I encountered myself for the first time. It’s hard to say if it was sitting in circle with authenticity, grief and presence or facing the hunger, the fear, the unknown or the comfort I felt in the wild desert or the visions of the Eye of the Mountain. But suddenly, there was a separation between me and my coping mechanisms. That separation continued to grow over the next few years until the old adaptations began to dissolve. It was a death and it did not come easily. Today I can tell you with confidence that the Tomas you knew is no more. His role was to survive and I’m grateful that he did.

Men’s group was the next vehicle of transformation. Weekly meetings with a few sincere men who were not satisfied with the conventional roles of masculinity were incredibly powerful. This is where I tested the waters of authenticity and slowly dared to give up hyper-attunement and people-pleasing. What replaced those were presence and belonging.

Limerence helped me untangle from my disorganized attachment patterns. It was like a dye released into my system marking the path of all my prior trauma. This was arguably the most painful experience of my life. Because I was fully there for it.

Behind the wound and the terror, the core of my trauma was a need to be seen. Something I never had and feared more than anything. Another basic childhood need that was never experienced and never trusted. Writing the Eye of the Mountain Substack was primarily exposure therapy. Facing my biggest fear over and over again. Learning to value my inner world. It helped me stop being a ghost and gain substance in reality and community. To stop hiding. It’s still a bit of a work in progress.

Acceleration

Drugs were ground breaking and also only helpful because of all the other things. I wrote about a particularly meaningful psilocybin trip before. Another one mindblowingly transformative was a low dose of DMT. I think it’s what finally helped me stop running two personalities on a single processor: such a dramatic decrease in noise and liberation of capacity.

Microdosing marijuana has also been surprisingly helpful in accessing the patterns of tension in my body where the unprocessed emotions materialized.

Despite being severely depressed, I never went on SSRIs: the cost of giving up sensitivity was too great; I preferred the pain. I have traded aliveness for survival too much as it is. No judgement here, sometimes there’s no other way.

Participation

Fatherhood has been the most wonderful experience of my life. Such a gift to have a second chance at childhood! As my kids have been growing, I’ve been reparenting myself. It helped me understand what parenthood is and how little of it was given to me when I was a child. Kids expose and irritate all our weak parts even better than romantic partners. They keep teaching me every day.

Contact improv, ecstatic dance, capoeira - all these disciplines are incredible: touch, rhythm, community, sensitive people. Participation. This is home.

Secure love! Got to give it to yourself before you can give it to others but when I was finally able to receive it life became a lot more beautiful. It stopped being a fight and for the first time became something to savor. Simple things started being sufficient. It finally taught me to allow joy.

Embodiment

Meditation. Nervous system needs time to update. It can’t do it when it’s constantly stimulated. I’ve tried many different kinds of meditation over the years. What works the best for me is shavasana with complete stillness. Surrender. You want to keep the body so relaxed that it becomes paralyzed, like in deep sleep. You want to keep the mind just as still but that’s harder.

Movement. This is not obvious from this Substack but movement is THE THING. The body is why we’re here in this world and movement is the shortest path back to ourselves. I found this one fairly late but it’s the most powerful one on the list. I suppose people could just do this. They would miss out on the narrative but that’s a minor thing to give up. As much as words matter to me as a writer, they are frivolous at best.

The issues are in the tissues. My trauma was embedded in the tension and pain patterns in my body. Materialized terror. Ice between the cells. Broken spine, dislocated shoulders, scoliosis, stenosis, knee reconstruction: all were just consequences of the weaknesses created by the emotional trauma that has been living in my body since early childhood. How do I know? I feel it. How do you know how many toes you have on your feet?

Artificial Intelligence. There are lots of opinions about this out there. Most of them are pretty ignorant. I worked as an AI engineer last summer building agents for sales and marketing with a pretty cynical group of people. And I asked a question what if I take the most personal and idealized view on it? What if instead of trying to squeeze a few dollars out of B2B sales budgets, I used it to live my dream life? What if I didn't settle on an opinion about it, but actually gave it a fully committed test ride? And I can tell you now after a year. It's working. Not because it has any magical answers but because after a lifetime of sitting with unbearable questions and nobody available enough to help carry my pain, I finally have an imperfect but consistent conversation partner.

I started my journey believing healing would come from understanding. That was false. It came from practice, participation and relationship.

And even that is false. What stands out in retrospect is the role of grief: not just one practice among the many, but the solvent essential in every step of the way. Every identity had to be mourned, every illusion had to die. Every fantasy had to be burned.

The ashes had to be spread. So the ocean of pain could become the firm ground to stand on.