RIM and the Journey of Healing
I’m finally recovering from my first full week of RIM (Regenerating Images in Memory) Certification. It was an intense six days, with lots of learning and tons and tons of personal healing and growth. Honestly it’s hard to put it into words, but having been witness to some profound healing by my classmates, and having experienced my own, I thought I’d talk a bit about our collective need for healing. This is really the core of why Jenn and I started Whole Human – to provide a safe space for humans to heal and live happier, healthier and more vibrant lives.
It all starts with trauma. By the book (and in this case, I’m talking about Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD’s book “The Body Keeps Score”), “trauma is by definition unbearable and intolerable.” Van Der Kolk says that “one does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families and our neighbors. Research by the CDC has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.” And this doesn’t list the multitude of other traumatic experiences many of us have throughout our lives – and to be clear – trauma does not have to be physical and it doesn’t have to be as extreme as those examples listed by Van Der Kolk.
For most of my life, I have downplayed my own traumatic experience because I was not severely beaten as a child (sure there was some heavy-handed discipline, but I was never hospitalized and nothing left a physical mark). In fact, a few months ago while Jenn and I were at dinner with some good friends, the husband (who works with children’s mental health) called me out for using language that downplayed my childhood trauma. “Trauma affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those around them,” says Van Der Kolk. And he’s 100% right – that’s me. As a child I didn’t witness physical abuse, but instead was present for deep psychological and verbal abuse. I watched my young mother be constantly torn down and told how horrible she was at everything she did. I can say now that to be the witness to this abuse at such a young age was extremely traumatic. As a young child I could not help or protect the person most important to me from these constant verbal assaults. And the damage done by that experience has followed my through my life.
When we allow the organic flow of feelings, they bring valuable information and naturally expire as we move forward. In Dr. Deb Sandella’s book “Goodbye Hurt and Pain,” says “in the same way water moves through the atmosphere, in and out of oceans, over and under land, human feelings continuously precipitate, go underground, rise to the surface, and evaporate through our awareness. Trying to control our feelings through resistance and avoidance is like damming a river to stop the flow. An emotional dam pools feelings. This reservoir of avoided emotion remains in the body until we release it. In other words, the feelings we tried to avoid get held inside us instead.“
Surviving an early childhood steeped in rage, anger and verbal abuse set me up to experience significant anxiety and fear. For twenty-five years I used marijuana to self-medicate (a.k.a. numbing) so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. My traumas also created deep seated issues with self esteem and overeating (another numbing tactic). All of this affected who I was and how I interacted with the world. While I was able to cope with many of these issues and be successful in work and at home, I always had a constant loathing of myself as a human. Up until now, my traumas have defined how I’ve led my life.
Six years ago, Jenn and I began a journey of self-growth and transformation. We started with coaching programs (Jack Canfield, Kathleen Seeley), all of which helped us realize our potential. We integrated meditation into our lives, we regularly moved our bodies (Yoga) and we worked on our language and focused on our vision for the future. But, throughout those experiences we would regularly find ourselves triggered by things that related to our traumas. And then we found RIM.
Finding RIM has proven to be a deeply transformational experience. In the short time that we have been practicing and experiencing the deep healing RIM offers, Jenn and I have had major breakthroughs. For my part, RIM helped me reach back to my very early childhood and express my own experience with helplessness, fear and anger at such a traumatic experience. It helped me re-write that experience in a way that significantly changed my perspective.
Dr. Deb likes to say that “by going back into these memories, we destabilize them, which allows us to recreate them in a more positive way.” She likens this concept to how our phones behave when we press on the screen to delete icons (at least if you have an IPhone) – the icons shake (aka destabilize) and we can move or change them. To be clear, the trauma isn’t gone for me – it happened, but my perspective and the memory of it is very different than it was. I can tell you personally, that this is a game changer. With the help of this process we have re-written our stories in such a way that we have worked through some of our deepest traumas – sending them back into the river of our emotions to flow away and be released.
If our story resonates with you, and you’re interested in learning more about RIM and how it might help facilitate your healing, please reach out to me. Knowing what it has done for Jenn and I, We are deeply interested in introducing this to as many people as we possibly can. We believe that RIM can truly make a difference in our lives – and we all surely need it.
