This morning, in a therapy session with my client, I came up with the metaphor of little ghosts in one’s healing journey. To explain this, let’s first get in touch with our “essential self”, which is our core or our “compassionate inner adult”. Just imagine that unbreakable, unshakeable, and very-close-to-your-nature-self that nobody can ever harm. If it helps, take a long breath out slowly and lengthen your spine, sit up a bit more straight and have the soles of your feet in full contact with the floor. You don’t need to know that your essential self is there since a curios intention would be enough. Then imagine bits and bites of little spirits, little ghosts (not in a threatening form, but perhaps harmlessly lost), floating around looking for landing somewhere. They have various shapes, colours, emotions, movements, speed and energy. In Asian culture, ghosts can mean unfinished businesses, unfulfilled wishes, injustice, or even little helpers and lovers….whatever energy that still needs closure and settlement that are not fully realised in a human form.
So we all have these little ghosts that haven’t “landed” and “settled” in our body yet. They are like lost children in Disney World, like fire flies twinkling by the riverside, or like cicadas screaming on the summer willows. They are like a gasp of wind swirling and brushing through your hair, or like the darkness of the night itself. Some could look like a hungry ghost who is relying on food and drinks to feed the lack, but can never be truly fed and satisfied. Some could feel like a disappearing ghost that vanishes once sadness is sniffed in the air, but doesn’t dare to allow it be fully felt and processed. Some could sound like a very harsh ghost, whispering criticisms into your ear when you don’t behave perfectly, yelling “shame, shame shame” while beating up your self-worth. Some could act like a dissociative ghost, disconnecting the pain from your body through physical numbing, blanking, intrusive images and thoughts, or isolating a part of you completely.
Healing is on.
Knowing or not knowing these ghosts and spirits meandering in the woods, lots of us have some level of capacity to co-live with them. But sometimes, when old wounds are triggered, one of these ghosts would take over and make the higher self/ essential self/ inner adult go offline, and that’s when the deep suffering occurs. Being activated, these ghosts are on a mission to behave based on past traumas, core beliefs, and possibly certain hell-like shame, self-loathing, and self-doubt.
When we gently re-experience our trigger and go towards the pain in a contained and safe therapy session, we work with these ghosts, perhaps one sliver at a time, to let them find their place. Are we searching and taming them, like the little prince and the fox? I don’t know. I don’t know if you can tame a ghost. Perhaps they can at least transform into another form of entity/ energy that is more helpful and nourishing. This journey looks different for every single person. Some people go there quickly, and some people need more time. The goal is never to get rid of a ghost…because you can’t kill a ghost so easily, can’t you? They are not evil spirits, remember. They are legitimate beings in your kingdom. You gotta gently approach them, listen to their howling, acknowledge and even thank their function, hold space for their emotions…then energetically allow them to land, to find new homes in the eco-system of you. Once they land, in a gradual process, they can have the possibility of being transformed. Perhaps one of them, the one that hurts all visitors and considers them as intruders, will be absorbed and turn into your most loyal knight who is capable of drawing boundary while trusting YOUR INSTINCT.
your instinct
Trauma makes people stuck in the past or the future, and disconnect from the present moment. Developmental injuries can be part of some complex trauma: on-going, relational, and birthing ghosts to cope with the chronic stress and distress. Attachment wounds are often caused in a supposed-to-be safe connection, for example, with a caregiver. Sometimes the hurt can be about what didn’t happen, versus what happened. Often times when my clients claim to have had a perfect childhood, I get curious about if difficult feelings were really seen and supported.
At some point in our developmental journey, as a baby, kid, young adult, or older adult, we have implicitly adapted to certain strategies/ beliefs/ thought patterns to deal with the adversity in the world, to survive and to be loved. Some of these beliefs served a purpose back then, but maybe not any more. If you imagine getting soaked in a thunderstorm. Instead of just simply bringing an umbrella when it forecasts to rain, you can’t help but to hold the umbrella even when it is not raining. The fear of being soaked again completely takes over when you sniff a tad of moisture in the air or spot a piece of cloud in the sky. Just think of how sore the hand will be to ALWAYS hold that umbrella, even when you are at home with a roof over your head. Also, you would have one hand less to do other fun and important things like…picking your nose? Lol.
Our neuroception detects and assesses if we are in safety or in danger. Sometimes with a traumatised system, we quickly search for that umbrella even when it is no longer necessary. The healing of it is to have more flexibility between the trigger (the cloud, the moisture, the thought of the thunderstorm) and the response (the umbrella), while having the capacity to put on a raincoat or simply choose to stay home when it pours.
enoughness
For example, one of my good old core limiting beliefs is “I am not enough”, and my coping mechanism responding to that is to take courses after courses, certificates after certificates, to fill the void of the not-enough-ness. It has helped me grow quickly with tons of training over the years, but the other side of this strategy is my perpetual need to advance, disproportionately disregarding the capabilities that I have already accumulated.
This reminds me of my mini hamster. No matter how much food there is around him, he always has the instinct to collect nuts and store them for “winter”. I feel like him sometimes, having my cheeks stuffed with sunflower seeds and still needing to forage more. My childhood was shaped by the hellish Chinese education system, where I was conditioned to associate my self-worth with my academic performance. I remember numerous times when the teacher announced our names and our grades while having us one by one coming up to collect our exam result, in the order of the ranking of the grade. A sense of shame was deliberately infused in the process, as a way to “motivate” us.
the antidote
The antidote to developmental injuries can take various forms: seeking out counter experiences consistently, healing in the therapeutic relationship with the therapist, building somatic resources to expand the window of tolerance, integrating parts, working with explicit and implicit memories…
I was just in a three-day continuous education workshop for my second year of advanced Sensorimotor Psychotherapy training. (I love it. It is such an effective complement to my humanistic therapy background). Yesterday in a peer practice session, in my limiting belief of not being enough, came up memories of being bullied in one of the many primary schools that I studied in. Tears emerged to mourn for that experience. Eventually, after having re-experienced the very tough feelings and core limiting beliefs, I felt relieved and gave some meaning to my “unnecessary” pain in the childhood: “that’s why I became a therapist.” I laughed a little with tears still in my eyes, grateful for my peer colleague in the training. Today I entered into my real therapy sessions with clients with more confidence and ease. Of course, there are a million ways to heal, and this is just one way.
What does your little spirit, little ghost look like right now? What is it craving for? I would like to invite you to get in touch with one of them with a warm and curious gaze from your essential self, like the steam from a cup of fresh ginger lemon tea.
Ciao for now,
