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Letting Go, Not Clinging, Is the Safer Path through Life

It’s a paradox. For someone with chronic PTSD, this truth is both deeply vulnerable and incredibly freeing.

As a young child, I could not allow myself to feel what my body knew to be true — I had been sexually abused by a relative, my parents ignored it, and I had no concept that adults were people you could open up to. I shoved the memory shoved down into my deepest forgetting. I didn’t remember the abuse until 20 years later.

I knew my parents loved me, but the parts of me that felt unlovable hid deep inside my body. I suffered from a weird phobia, which was the only way the hurt part of me could express herself. I was terrified to spend the night away from home at a friend’s house. I didn’t fear that anything bad would happen to me. I trusted my friends’ parents in the same way I trusted my own: It was provisional without my knowing it was provisional.

Life handed me a simple equation: Being at Joanie’s, or Lauren’s, or Barbie’s house overnight = terror. I was born that way. Obviously…So I had to believe.

I did my best to create safety in a family where I felt essentially unsafe, but could not admit it, especially to myself. This meant living in my head. From a young age, thinking and figuring things out wasn’t just how I got by in school — it was how I survived the unacknowledged terror within.

Gestalt therapy has a term for these coping strategies, which I like because it depathologizes them: Creative Adjustments.

Kids are nothing if not creative. I created a tenuous but reliable sense of safety out of the non-material stuff of thought.

As I grew up, reinforced by a culture that values intellect above the heart, thinking felt solid and real as my own body. It also became an addiction.

I have totaled two cars in my life — fortunately, no one was hurt — but I caused these accidents not because I was high, drunk, texting, or even listening to audio. I was distracted by thinking. In one case, I was thinking about poetry writing. Benign, yes? Not when you sideswipe a truck at 45 miles an hour. In the other case, I was thinking about — get this — a meditation retreat I was driving to. I plowed into the car ahead of me at an offramp from the highway. Never made it to that retreat.

I slacked off for a few years, but 2 years ago I thought I’d try recommitting to meditation. It was an experiment. What if I practiced daily for, say, 2 years? Where would I end up? Here’s where I am today.

Meditation is a safe way for me to release the illusion that I’m in control. Controlling is like trying to grab a handful of the ocean. The practice is teaching me that I gain agency, the ability to affect my reality for the better, as I release what isn’t mine to control.

Meditation’s taught me an awful lot about thinking…about healing…about working with my emotions. Loving kindness meditation, or Metta, is crucial.

Because I spent a lifetime stuffing trauma symptoms, I knew that straight-up mindfulness could further traumatize me by releasing long-denied fear.

This is why I believe that Metta (loving kindness) or compassion (Karuna) meditation is the safest path for those with PTSD.

This simple Buddhist practice involves sending thoughts of love and acceptance to myself and others. In the beginning it was comforting that I didn’t have to FEEL self-love. All you have to do is offer yourself a WISH for happiness.

It was a relief not to have to control the results.

Sometimes it felt like I was chewing the words like tough meat, but I persisted. In time, I began to experience loving warmth. Often I will send Metta to my inner child when she’s afraid. Anxiety in my body is her cue!

In the beginning,I felt safe enough to practice releasing control during the meditation process — not trying to control the breath might seem too basic or obvious to bother with, but it can be challenging as well as freeing. Letting myself feel the anxiety carried deep in my bones was hard because it felt like I was in danger within my own body. I kept going, sometimes only because I didn’t know what else to do with myself!

Now I know my body is a safe refuge, and I don’t just know it intellectually. Gradually, my grip on life is relaxing. Meditation is surrender practice.

I’m learning to improvise when I meditate, which is a form of healthy self-trust. Sometimes, I need Metta. Sometimes, I can experience relief from the anxiety held in my body by feeling the bodily sensations without adding in any thoughts about them. Identifying with a particular tension or flooding sensation by naming it as something “Bad” creates the hated state I call “Anxiety.” Simply feeling the sensation as a sensation is actually a huge relief.

This one is a difficult practice for me and I’m only at the beginning. Over thinking is so deeply engrained that gentle determination is needed. But the moments of relief have been so real that my motivation is high. I can’t expect to shed these old habits overnight! And even though at times I feel like I’ve lost ground, the patience required to keep going benefits my inner child. The slow approach to meditation creates a safe, green landscape in my heart for her to venture out.

Not everyone will find – or need — a committed meditation practice. But I believe that healing PTSD always involves turning away from the false promises made by excessive fear. Making a practice out of the self-trust implicit in meditation is part of my chosen path. Have you found yours?

With our minds, we make the world. Speak or act with kindness, and happiness will follow you as surely as a shadow follows the person who casts it. – The Dhammapada