Confessions of a Trauma Therapist

Mary K. Armstrong

Description

To her surprise, dismay, and eventually relief, Mary Armstrong, a therapist with over thirty years of experience helping people heal from childhood trauma, uncovered her own history of child sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather and father. As she tells her harrowing but heroic tale, she casts light as never before on the issue of repressed memories and the invisible wounds left by childhood trauma.

Sujets

• Counseling
• Therapy
• List of counseling topics
• Sexual abuse
• Psychological trauma
• Grandparent
• Psychopathology
• Repressed memory
• General officer
• Psychologist
• Psychiatrist
• Psychotherapy
• Psychology
• General
• Father
• Family
• Hope
• Therapy?

Informations

• Publié par: BPS Books
• Date de parution: 22 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781926645469
• Langue: English

Extrait

Confessions of a Trauma Therapist
Confessions of a Trauma Therapist

A MEMOIR OF HEALING
AND TRANSFORMATION

Mary K. Armstrong
Copyright 2010 by Mary K. Armstrong
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a newspaper, magazine, or broadcast.
Published in 2010 by BPS Books Toronto and New York bpsbooks.com A division of Bastian Publishing Services Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-926645-19-3
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available from Library and Archives Canada.
Cover design: Gnibel Text design and typesetting: Casey Hooper Design
To Dr. Ralph Bierman, psychologist and grand old man of Experiential Psychotherapy who died in October 2008, before this book could be published.
Your wisdom, warmth, and compassion guided me in my healing and in writing this book. I miss you, Ralph.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART I / Trapped in a Fog
1 In the Beginning
2 My Life Goes on Without Me
3 When Father Came Marching Home
4 Trapped
5 Escaping
PART II / Struggling to Survive
6 Yoga and Me
7 Frankie
8 Back to School
9 Becoming a Therapist
10 Rethinking Yoga
11 Focusing
12 Letters to My Parents
PART III / Finding Lost Memories, Finding Myself
13 Finding My Lost Memories
14 Going Deeper
15 You Tell, You Die
16 The Wonderful Years
17 Life as a Trauma Therapist
18 Guidelines for Healing
Conclusion
Preface
I can t believe my life turned out so well. As I write this I am sitting in the sunshine on the spacious deck of the cottage my husband, Harvey, and I built when we were young. Our son, Frank, was two years old when we bought this island property on Georgian Bay. That was in 1971. Harvey was about to write his final exams in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Toronto. I was a yoga teacher, in the days before yoga was popular. Immersing myself in this ancient discipline was bringing me a deep sense of peace and fulfillment. I was growing and maturing in a guru-disciple relationship with my spiritual teacher, Swami Sivananda Radha. She and I had a close personal relationship, one I look back on now as a ten-year apprenticeship in Eastern philosophy and psychology.
Yet in spite of the support of my appreciative students, my yoga community, and my guru, a nameless fear kept churning in my gut.
In September 1978, when Frank was about to turn nine, I went back to school to earn my master of social work degree at the University of Toronto. This two-year course, I reasoned, would help me work more effectively as a counsellor and in the new area of palliative care.
Once I graduated and rented a large space for a yoga classroom with a small adjoining office for counselling, I was on my way to becoming a social-work psychotherapist. Discovering Eugene Gendlin and Focusing in 1981 launched me personally and professionally on a path to self-discovery and authenticity. My goal in life became clear: to connect myself and others to our own deepest, wisest knowing.
Our society discourages us from valuing our visceral, animal body. Our heads are all-important. But Focusing teaches us to pay attention to our body s physically felt signals. No matter what situation we re in, the body is always responding. What our head knows is just the tip of the iceberg. Our real wisdom lies in the body.
Learning to ask my body how it felt and allowing its story to open up released a whole new, compassionate way of being with myself. I started to really like myself.
Inevitably, I uncovered, through Focusing, the cause of my strange fears. My struggle to live a normal life had its roots in child sexual abuse.
Part I of this book describes the darkness of my childhood suffering and my determined struggle to fix myself. Part II tells of my years of maturing through yoga and how, thanks to Focusing, I finally learned to accept my imperfect but authentic self. Part III describes how I found my lost childhood memories and how, with them, I found my own strength and purpose in life. I became a trauma therapist, as well as the founder and director of the Centre for Focusing, experiencing a joy and lightness I never could have imagined.
For the most part I tell my story chronologically, except where I describe scenes from the past that gradually came back to me-scenes from a childhood that I had completely forgotten.
I have to say that with the help of caring friends, a steadfastly loyal and loving husband, a wise and wonderful son, exceptional teachers, plus a determination to find help wherever I could, I have become one happy woman. Now, with this book, I want to share my knowledge and my hope. There is a way to recover from devastating trauma. Working through the pain and digging up the memories can lead to joy.
Acknowledgments
W ithout the support and guidance of my good friend Judy Steed, this book would never have been written. She is a veteran journalist and author of four of her own books, including Our Little Secret: Confronting Child Sexual Abuse in Canada . From the beginning, during the lonely days when I was first attempting to put my life experience into words, her encouragement and editing skills were my constant companions. Judy believed in my book. She believed from the start that it was my gift to the world-that it had to be sent out to the world.
PART 1
Trapped in a Fog
Chapter 1
In the Beginning
L ooking at me during my childhood years you would have seen a spoiled rich kid always smiling and never causing any trouble. On the inside, life was different. Under the placid exterior I existed in a wet, gray fog, never quite sure of what was happening around me.
My mother was disappointed when she gave birth to me, a girl. She had hoped to produce a son for my father. They already had a daughter, my sister. Never mind that my father didn t want any more kids. Maybe to get back at her and maybe because he didn t give a damn, he had planned to be at army reserve camp when I was born. However, our family doctor shamed him into sticking around for my arrival.
Once my mother and I came home from hospital to our home in Stratford, Ontario, my five-year-old sister began a hate campaign that lasted throughout my childhood. Being smarter and stronger than I, she perfected endless ways of tormenting me. In one of her choice tortures, she straddled my helpless body as I lay face up on the floor, drooled a long string of spit over my horrified face, then slurped it up just in time. Another favourite was what she called the Chinese Burner. In this one, she twisted the skin on my arm in opposite directions until I screamed with pain.
My sister had been sent away to relatives when Mommy was pregnant. My sister found Mommy s big, fat, pregnant belly disgusting, and Mommy couldn t stand her little girl s revulsion. Nobody told my sister that a baby was on the way. At the end of her visit to an aunt and uncle, she returned home to find a howling infant in a crib taking up a lot of Mommy s time. I can understand why she hated me. What I can t understand is why the adults didn t stop her from torturing me.
My father had grown up in a fine old Ontario family. His grandfather, who had come to Canada from Bandon, Ireland, became a respected educator and, from 1874, headed what was then called the Ontario Institution for the Education of the Blind (now the W. Ross Macdonald School), a provincial institute in Brantford. Since teaching paid poorly, he determined that all of his children would be lawyers. His sons W.H. and A.T. practised together as high-profile lawyers around Osgoode Hall in Toronto. Another son became Chief Justice of British Columbia. This son s white clapboard house, known as the Judge s House, is still open to tourists in Victoria.
My lawyer grandfather, W.H., found engineering interesting and decided that two of his sons, including my father, would break away from the family tradition of being teachers and lawyers. My father was fascinated during his student days in civil engineering by the building of the Welland Canal and Ontario s new roads. He graduated in engineering in 1929, right into the Great Depression. No more roads, no more canals, no more of anything he was interested in.
Needing to earn a living, he went to work for Coca-Cola Canada as their first-ever engineer. His family was shocked. What a comedown. The rest of the family had been professionals for generations.
Because he found the big company headquarters in Toronto stressful, he and my mother decided on a quieter lifestyle in a small city. They opened a Coca-Cola plant in picturesque Stratford.
They bought an old house backing onto the Avon River. A small bottling plant was already attached to the back of the house. With a franchise from Coca-Cola Canada, they began building a business with a fleet of red trucks, an ever-expanding territory, and, finally, a red brick factory on the edge of town. Soft drinks were big sellers during the Depression. A five-cent bottle of Coke brought instant gratification to a cash-strapped society thirsty for some relief from the grayness of those years. My parents were soon enjoying an affluent lifestyle while their disapproving family members, whose stocks and savings had shrunk, were forced to sell their big homes.
My mother, for her part, had grown up in genteel poverty