THE BEFORE TIMES
Can you point to a moment in your childhood that some have called “the end of the innocence?”
For me, it was the moment when my parents sat me down in the kitchen. I was a pretty happy go lucky, eleven year old boy until my dad said, “I’m leaving.” I had no idea that there was a problem and I went into shock.
These days, a moment like that is referred to as a traumatic childhood experience, a harrowing event when our “normal” development comes to a screeching halt and our emotions freeze to protect us. This can be a death, divorce or a persistent stream of negative energy in a home. It can occur on the school playground or in a church rectory. Whatever the setting – it’s like a huge lightning bolt hitting a young tree. It pulls up the roots, breaks the branches and creates a scar.
Undoing the effects (or symptoms) of a trauma is what many consider to be “the Work,” the spade digging that over time helps us to go deep and reunite with the Inner Child we left behind. It often occurs after we remove toxic people and behaviors and engage in some mixture of therapy, group work or other healing modalities. I’ve been doing the Work for nearly fifty years, most seriously in the last twenty.
This is not an atypical timeline. Millions of us spend a large portion of our lifetimes undoing what happened in a moment or a few years time.
The Work is the most courageous thing I’ve ever done, but I didn’t want to do it. Honestly, it came after a long period of putting Bandaids on my problems and engaging in many forms of denial and control (booze, drugs and shopping addictions) before I got down on my knees, engaged my inner Loving Parent (what I believe to be a spark of divinity within us all) and gently coaxed my Inner Child to come out and play. It’s part of the reason I work with children – I get to be a goofball!
YESTERDAY
Do you remember the board game called “Chutes and Ladders”? In that game, there is one long ladder that’s a shortcut to the top. Well, yesterday I found such a ladder in my Soul Retrieval session with Melanie.
Over the course of one-hour, she took me back to that kitchen with my parents. But this time she asked me to bring along my adult self to sit next to the eleven year old boy.
In her recreation of the event, my older self was there to protect the boy. With the older Scott’s help, the eleven year old version of me was encouraged to say what he could not say back then to two strong-willed parents I feared and loved. In my case, that meant violently swiping my father’s can of Budweiser from the table and onto the floor, yelling at my parents for their selfishness and untruths, upending the kitchen table and chasing the two of them out of the room. In other words, I allowed my anger, the emotion I’ve always blocked, to surface.
“What do you want to do now,” asked Melanie?
“Have a catch,” I replied.
And so me and my little boy went to my backyard and did just that.
The rest of the process involved rebuilding trust, finding my power animal for protection, rediscovering a safe place to retreat to in the future and, eventually, absorbing that little boy into my adult self.
Sometimes, a Soul Retrieval occurs over multiple sessions. I did it in one probably because of other work I have done, because we’re here in Greece on retreat and, of course, because Melanie brings a lot of experience, love and wisdom to the sessions. I am very grateful.
I also believe that our current work with children and adults inspired me to super charge my evolution. Having taken the ladder up into the light (and the chutes down the darkness), I can sit with more people who are confused or scared and be a bridge over their troubled waters. Beth and I do it with music and movement, humor and stories – but it’s all love, love, love.
May you play, May you move through the darkness into the light and Shine. We need you. You are love.
Need a little bit (or a lot) of Melanie in your life? https://www.melanieryanlcsw.com/
