My first experience with how the body stores traumatic memory came decades before I learned such a thing existed.

The year was 1991. Phil’s dad had died, and I was with him and his brother to help select his father’s casket. We were at Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary, where my dad had been entombed into a wall in 1961.

I entered a door and as soon as I stepped inside, a powerful gut punch doubled me over. No one was there. The punch came from something other than another person’s fist. The punch came from my body’s memory of trauma.

I didn’t think of it when I stepped through the doorway and entered, but as soon as the punch came, I remembered. The last time I was there was the day of my father’s funeral. It was the last time I saw my father’s body, white and unfamiliar, inside a casket. More than anything, seeing my once tan, vibrant, alive father now posing as a dead white something, broke my stoicism, and I ran into the arms of my mom’s best friend, crying. Deep sobs. The last deep sobs until decades later, when I’d finally peeled away the steel that covered my loss.

My body kept the score. My body remembered what my mind had forgotten. Walking inside a place of trauma for the first time in 30 years woke up the depth of trauma I didn’t know I’d experienced the day of my father’s funeral.

But there it was. And it was now 1991 and I didn’t have the knowledge or words to tell anyone what had happened. Wouldn’t people think I was weird to feel a sock in my stomach when I entered an empty room? I’d never heard of trauma, and the seminal work of Bessel van der Kolk didn’t exist. He hadn’t written The Body Keeps the Score.

I didn’t know painful memories remained hidden in my body.

My body had kept the score. My body knew what my mind had tamped down and forgotten. My mind had created a way for me to keep going despite of everything that had happened in my young life.

My mind had created an unhealthy way for me to live. And what it had created worked for a while. Even years of body work and therapy that I believed stripped me raw and allowed me to create a new me in 1981 hadn’t excavated what remained inside my body.

The pain of seeing my father dead in a casket may have remained had I not walked into the room at the funeral home that day in 1991. The day we were planning another father’s funeral. This time it was my lifelong friend who lived next door who lost his dad.

As I write this, I wonder, if I walked through those doors again, would my body again remind me of the extreme trauma I experienced at 12? Or was that one experience enough to shake loose and heal another fragment of myself?

I also wonder what lives inside us that informs our todays. I believe it is worth thinking about so that our past no longer remains the driver behind the vehicle that is us. And, if you’re young, it’s worth dealing with our traumas when they occur rather than thinking ignoring the pain will make it go away. It doesn’t.

What we don’t address remains and ripples throughout our lives, affecting all our choices and relationships.

Examining our lives as uncomfortable experiences arise is difficult, but it is important. The more we know about how we react and what we feel gives us the opportunity to choose from a place of power and awareness. In fact, it allows us to choose. When we’re asleep, the unconscious chooses, and often, we don’t recognize until much later that we’ve lived on rote and made choices that impeded rather than enhanced our lives.

Living an authentic life isn’t easy because it demands we acknowledge who we are—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Once we do, we can laugh at what once embarrassed us, and enjoy our days.

And days is all we have. Moments that add up to days that become years, then decades, and then one day you read that the age you now are has been declared old.

Don’t fall back to sleep.

 

 

Don’t Go Back to Sleep, Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.