The Heroic Journal  

Living Your Resilient Life

August 2009

Welcome to another edition of The Heroic Journal, a monthly newsletter which features a variety of ways individuals, families, communities and businesses thrive during difficult challenges. 
 
This month's newsletter focuses on another type of heroic journey: the journey from victim to thriver after childhood trauma.  Statistics indicate that 20-30% of all people, male and female, may experience a violation much like is described in this edition today. This type of trauma knows no cultural, socio-economic, educational boundaries. Mary E. Schocke's story is one that shows one of several ways people get through difficult life events and Schocke shows that people can and do heal from those events. Mary is a practicing Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the Middle Tennessee area.    
 
 
Coming soon: 
 
Not Riding Off Into the Sunset: Fran Welton, the 90 year old "Cowboy" 
Kristina Deiner: From Drop-out to Psychologist
 Elizabeth (Liz) Wilson: The Ironman Journey
and much more 
 
Special Business edition:
 
Leadership and the Journey
Jim Clayton: From Sharecropper's Son to Billionaire
It Takes a Village (or a Team)
Ladies Who Launch: Allies & Mentors
 
Special Veteran edition (November):
 
Serving Others: The Veteran Experience
Journey from the Abyss: The Long Return
How A Community Can Really Support the Troops
Veteran Resources
 
 
If you have missed past editions of The Heroic Journal, archives may be found at  
www.theomnibuscenter.com    
 
Quotes for the Journey
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the midst of winter I finally discovered within me an invincible summer. (Albert Camus) 
 
Surviving is important, thriving is elegant. (Maya Angelou)
 
You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.  (Alexander Pope)
 
My assumption is that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all. (Frederick Buechner)
 
You must carry the chaos within you in order to give birth to the dancing star. (Nietzsche)
 
There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss.  You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.  There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal. (Henri Nouwen)
 
The primary cure for suffering is to face it head on, grasp it waround the neck and USE it. (Mary Craig) 
 
Don't measure a person's success by how high they climb, but how high they bounce when they hit bottom. (General George S. Patton) 

 
 
 
 
 
Journey of the Heart 
Mary E. Schocke, MSW, LCSW
 
 
Written and submitted by Mary E. Schocke
 
The true story of every person in this world is the journey of his or her heart.  The inner life, the story of the heart, are the deep places within us - our hopes, dreams, fears and deepest wounds. 
 
The true story of every person in this world is the journey of his or her heart.  The inner life, the story of the heart, are the deep places within us - our hopes, dreams, fears and deepest wounds.  When I was a young girl I loved to spend time with my Dad riding the tractor, milking the cows and going with him to the grain elevator.  He was gentle, likeable, hardworking, and respected.  I admired him in every way.  He was especially my friend and protector.  At a young age, I had reasoned that my mother was much too serious and busy to bother with stories, games and little girl dreams.  Mother was a task-oriented, take charge person who viewed emotions as sentimental, sloppy and weak.  It was this confusion that spawned deep thoughts of inadequacy, troubling questions about whether I belonged, and where did I fit.  As a girl of 12 or 13 years of age embarking on the turbulent teen years of transition from childhood to the attainment of adult prerogatives, responsibilities and self-sufficiency, my Dad pulled away from me and turned me back over to my mother.  In addition to these troubling events during this period of time, my grandfather also began to make sexual advances toward me as well as fondling me.  The coldness and distancing from my dad, my mother's sternness and my grandfather's inappropriateness caused me to create a system of responses that would sabotage my life and relationships for many years.  It was not a conscious decision that I remember making.  The four years between childhood and young adulthood, from 12 to 16 years of age, are probably the roughest 4 years of most people's lives because there are so many major adjustments to make. 
 
A daughter needs unconditional male approval, especially from her father.  This means helping her accept herself and believe in her attractiveness.  Some fathers are very loving and involved with their daughters while they are little girls.  But when their daughters reach adolescence they may feel insecure about relating to them as young woman so they withdraw their affection.  This sudden coldness of a father and a mother's high expectations of her daughter's achievements - you have the right ingredients for an endless search to deaden the sharp pain of one's heart.  The loss of my father's affection and approval caused me to be very frightened.  I could find no meeting place between my life as an adolescent trying to be accepted and the needs of a wounded heart that never felt connection with a father and mother that are so necessary to living with hope and courage.  Today many years have passed and I believe my mother also lived without connection.  She was sexually molested by her father and rather than her mother offering her protection and assurance, she was left to manage the best way she could.  This abusiveness continued until she left school at age 16 and married my father.  She gave up her dream of finishing high school, entering college and becoming a nutritionist.  My mother longed for acceptance and futility attempted to attain it through perfection and having perfect children. As a high school student, I recall desperately wanting to go the prom and being a part of other high school activities.  The church I attended taught that activities such as this would cause me to go to hell.  So as much as I craved acceptance I was just as afraid of spending eternity in hell.  It seemed my primary sources of acceptance - home, church and school each offered more challenges and hurdles than warmth and encouragement.  The message of each was that I did not have the right stuff.  At home I believed if I had been a boy I would have been cherished and more valued.  Therefore, I competed with my brothers to do the same things they did but do them better.  I played basketball, ran track, learned to run farm machinery and made better grades; but it still seemed that boys had more privilege and recognition.  At church, women occupied no place of significance or value.  In addition, the focus of most of the church's teaching was geared towards how women were to dress and behave.  If women attempted to be attractive they were labeled "sinful" and "loose" like Jezebel in the Bible.  At school I was gifted athletically but there was no outlet or opportunity for girls.  So it seemed I was a girl that went to the funny church with all the rules and could not participate in after-school activities.  My heart was adrift in deep pain and vulnerable to anyone or thing that offered comfort.  Out of this turbulence during my 18th year while away from home attending a bible school I was drawn into a friendship with another 18 year old female that became intimate.  From this a battle of shame and guilt raged within me.  How could a Christian girl fall into this?  At this point in life I barely knew the facts about sexuality, yet condemnation poured over me like an opened floodgate.  I was trapped for I did not have the abilities to coolly and calmly assess the situation and make the right choices.  My heart just could not be managed in such a cold, mathematical, detached way. 

A person who is shame-based sees herself as deeply and permanently flawed.  They know they are not like other people and know they are different.  They know they are so bad that they are beyond human repair.  They know they are less than fully human and they will never be allowed to join others in a world of respect, love and pride.  This person is stuck in their shame and they believe this shame is irreversible.  Many years later I now know this is a myth - but for many years I believed I would have to die in this condition.  From time to time I tried to escape, I yearned and longed to gain a sense of dignity and worth, but I had no idea of how to be included and accepted - I just didn't know how to make it happen.  I had not known affirmation of myself as a person, as a female, as one having worth within myself.  These were all unaffirmed identities.
Having been insufficiently loved, I therefore could not love and accept myself and found myself in a painful identity crisis.  Having been use to stern words I had few consoling and affirming words for myself.  The painful rejection and hurts throughout my growing up years constantly sent up images and thoughts of myself as something far less than the kind of person I yearned to be.  Therefore, I listened to the accusing voices and believed them.  I hated and rejected myself.

As I assess my life, I have come to understand how some of these unique wounds have shaped me.  Just as there were deep wounds, I then unconsciously responded with major commitments to never face that kind of pain again.  I tried to become super spiritual - fasted, prayed, and made all sorts of promises to God.  These promises, however, did not solve the deeper issues of my heart.  The cycle continued with long periods of success and then it would seem out of nowhere I would fall into sexual sin.  Still I plodded on determined to be someone, to prove that I was OK.  I finished my graduate studies hoping this would bring satisfaction.  However, it seemed like my head and heart was on a separate journey.  Unknowingly, I choose to deaden my heart.  My goal was to quench my thirst with whatever water was available.  I choose to live a religious life to satisfy the "should's" in my head and the inner life of needs, the place where we quench the thirst of our heart I denied and turned off.  Instead of dealing with my wounds I silenced the longing. 

Constantly, every moment of my life I was trying to make sense of all this.  I recall being asked by my older brother "why or when was I going to get married?".  I had no answers - this was embarrassing and I didn't understand.  (It wasn't that I didn't like boys - I didn't know how to relate to boys and lacked the confidence that I was desirable.)  There was a boy I loved but this relationship ended when he married a friend of mine.  So I gave up on romance for something that was more predictable - which is to say - aloneness - I thought I could trust only myself.  Screaming to know that there was someone there for me, I tried being "good", being ultra-spiritual (which I now see was only having religion), pursuing education and being successful.  After years of these pursuits I reasoned there was no one strong enough to care for me.  I had been taught not to need and not to ask -- just as Solomon concluded all is vanity -- I concluded I was alone in this world, that no one had ever been there for me with the strength, tenderness and faithfulness I longed for.  Thinking back, I remember in the 1st grade at recess time I would play and hide in a clump of three bushes by the half-circle drive in front of the school as opposed to going to the playground with other children.  One day while playing in my very own safe place, my teacher, Mrs. Anderson, found me.  I still recall her leading me by the arm to the playground where I had to face the terror of not being asked to play.  To me it seemed that by my 6th year and certainly by my 18th year the cards were stacked against me.  I had been drawn into a battle I could not win.  I had already failed after only 18 years on this earth with the most hideous of all sins.  As Paul declared in his letter to the Romans "Oh wretched man am I!", I declared that I was also wretched, that I was bad and if people really knew they would agree in much harsher terms with my assessment.  I had learned very early from my church and home that my flaws and mistakes were unacceptable.  I had not been invited to live from my heart but was scripted into a role.  I had been taught to live a false self from behind a protective mask.  My false self is a combination of drivenness, a strong need to excel, to be able to handle anything without help, to be silent, and to bury feelings, needs, wants and longings.  Early in my life these beliefs became an enslaving dictator.  My image was that I was inadequate, incompetent and my value was determined by my performance.  This perception poisoned me for years.  I desperately searched for someone with whom I could unburden my troubled soul.  The church I grew up in was legalistic and unsafe.  I believed one of two things would happen:  One - I would be told I should pray harder, fast more and "just get right" and I had already tried that; or two - was that I would be judged, ostracized and treated as if I had leprosy.  Thus the journey with my false self continued and not until some years later a kind hearted Christian therapist began to help me to see myself differently.  I was destined to live with a diseased mind and soul until someone came along who had the power to take it away to free me from the false image and false selves that I had used to make life work.  Without such a person, we remain lost living out distorted beliefs anxiously looking about for someone to tell us who we are. 

Learning to "see" differently has been a journey of dismantling the beliefs that good is obtained through our own understanding, that life is achieved by what we can see with our own eyes, and that a religious system of "do's and don'ts" only steals our passion for living.  This journey has also called me to embrace a new identity.  Living spiritually requires more than being good.  It requires abiding.  Abiding and resting is not just applying some spiritual formula as a kind of self-help kit.  It is experiencing God as our daily bread.  Learning to abide in his rest was also learning to reject the anxious self-defeating thoughts and replace them with "words of life".  The healing of traumatic rejection had to occur first because the old wounds caused me to not accept myself.  This initial healing enabled me to "look upwards" more freely and begin the journey from immaturity (freedom from the old way of seeing myself) to maturity with both humility and self-acceptance which is the opposite of self-centeredness.  With this healing came energy to press on, to act and feel out the essence of where Christ dwells and raises up a new person, to live life rather than live from the locus of the unloved and hurting little girl.  The loss of a mother's love is perhaps the greatest deprivation a person can know.  The infant comes into the world not knowing itself to be separate from it's mother and it is in her love that it begins to recognize itself as a separate being in its own right.  In her loving acceptance, the infant begins the long and arduous task of emotional and psychological separation.  This kind of deprivation and deficit cannot simply be made up until healed of the old deprivations that have been grievous rejections.  The failure to accept ones self is the fruit of this kind of rejection.

One of the progressions that are necessary in self-acceptance is the step from the narcissistic period of puberty, the self-centered phase of one's life when attention is largely focused on one's body and self.  It is necessary to move past this period where the major focus is one's self and to the developmental level where one has accepted himself and turned his eyes and heart outward toward all else.  To whatever degree one fails in regard to this step, he will find himself stuck in some form or manifestation of the wrong kind of self-love.  Every one of us has been stuck in these sick, diseased forms of self-love which often manifests itself in a constant analyzing of self and one's thought life is introspective, full of doubt and questions.  This is what the fall of man is all about.  However, Christ redeems us from the devastation of the fall and continues His work of grace as we continually confess our pride - the self-serving kind of love.

As my soul has grown my hearts capacity and desire has grown.  I now know joy in the knowledge that God has summoned me into the world that my being here is no accident and has given me an enormous gift and growing ministry in my profession.  I now see myself as a miracle, a wonder of God's grace.  Truly, God has always had His hand on me and preserved me from the time of my infancy.  This is also verified by the fact that when I was but an infant I nearly died with an incurable blood disorder (Shinlines hemorrhagic pupura) and the doctors offered no hope to my parents.  I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if God could heal me physically, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally - He can heal anyone. There are only those who need healing of rejection and abandonment.  I chose to forsake old, unaccepting and unloving attitudes toward myself.  I chose to see myself through His eyes, to see that I am a beautiful person, lovingly crafted by the Ultimate Designer.  Oswald Chambers in commenting on Isaiah 26:3 "thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind (imagination) is stayed upon Thee", asked the somber question, "is your imagination stayed on God or is it starved?"  The starvation of the mind is the most fruitful exhaustion and sapping of one's life.  If you never used your imagination to put yourself before God, begin to do it now.  It is no use waiting for God to come to you.  You must put your imagination away from the face of idols and look unto Him as we place ourselves directly before God we then become empowered by His presence.  The same as God began to help me see differently and to reign in my imaginations; He also began to help me to hear differently.  Few of us learn to listen to God for healing until we have crashed and burned.  Aleksander Solzhenitzn first became aware of God's Word and himself in a communist prison camp.  There, in these conditions, he found the time and inclination to listen to his heart and to God.  Though he was a communist, he was weary with the lies of the world, the devil and especially the communist world.  In that lonely, desolate jail cell he learned the art of listening and being content with himself and God.  He later wrote "Bless you prison for having been in my life!". In attentive listening we hear the gentle whispers of God, which is a vital part of the process of becoming a whole person.  In quietness, in solitude and listening in His presence we find that the old man, the selfish, self-absorbed, neurotic, compulsive person is not real and that God is real and He calls the real us to separate from our sin and neuroses.  As we listen we become.

It has long been a desire of mine to share the story of God dealing with me in the crucible of conflict and confusion as the events of sorrow came together and crystallized.  From this perspective I learned that the "rose garden" mentality is unrealistic to the serious Christian.  What I once thought were serious flaws and spiritual defects, I now see this as the inescapable fundamental signs of the believer's battle with evil and the unmistakable purposes of God.  I humbly offer these few lines as a testimony to God's grace in the face of unfathomable depression that seemed to dwarf all hope.  Paradoxically, however, the depths of despair provided very clear evidence of God's intimate care and concern for me.  I now know God in an unmistakable way for He reached to my lowest point, my lowest hell and offered me the means to elevation in knowing God. 
 
written and submitted by Mary E. Schocke
Authentic Living Radio with Andrea Mathews
 
Writt
 At 3pm (CST) on September 16, 2009, Andrea Mathews will be doing an hour long interview on The Heroic Journey with Melissa (Missy) Bradley.  Tune into: www.modavox.com/7thWaveNetwork 
 
Other guests on Andrea's show have been best-selling authors: Dr. Bernie Siegel, Thomas Moore, Julia Cameron, Gary Zukav, Dr. Larry Dossey, John Holland, Joan Borysnko, Byron Katie, Neale Donald Walsch, Caroline Myss and more.
 
Mathews is also the author of Restoring My Soul: A Workbook for Finding and Living the Authentic Self.
 
Stories of courage, tenacity and inspiration needed...
 
Do you have a story to tell? Perhaps you or someone you know has made it through a challenging time and would like to share about that experience with others.  By telling your story, or even a PART of your story, you may inspire a person to take another step, to keep trying, to take a positive risk.  Budding heroes need "old timers" to give those stories of hope.
 
If you wish to be interviewed for your story, rather than writing your story, that can be arranged.  If you wish for your story to be anonymous, that can be arranged as well.
 
If you are interested, drop an email to Missy Bradley at [email protected] 
A Heroic Journey seminar may be coming to you...
Get Your Clinical CEU's - Social workers, psychologists, nurses, psychiatrists, drug and alcohol counselors, pastoral counselors, marriage and family therapists, case managers, teachers, recoverying individuals and anyone on a conscious journey...
 
The Psychology of Resilience: 
 A Multi-Modal Framework for Thriving Using the Heroic Journey is coming to:
 
 
August 12, 2009 - Duluth, MN
August 13, 2009 - St. Cloud, MN
August 14, 2009 - Minneapolis, MN 
 
September 9, 2009 - Buffalo, NY
September 10, 2009 - Albany, NY
September 11, 2009 - Syracuse, NY 
 
September 29, 2009 - Boise, ID
September 30, 2009 - Spokane, WA
October 1, 2009 - Portland, OR
October 2, 2009 - Seattle, WA
 
October 12, 2009 - Melbourne, FL
October 13, 2009 - West Palm Beach, FL
October 14, 2009 - Miami, FL
 
November 4, 2009 - Ft. Myers, FL
November 5, 2009 - Tampa, FL
November 6, 2009 - Orlando, FL 
  
 
If you would like to see a brochure, you may find them at
www.theomnibuscenter.com (under schedule 2009) or to sign up, call Cross Country Education 1-800-397-0180 or www.crosscountryeducation.com  Seminars will be posted and available for registration approximately 45 days before the event. Audio CD's are also available through Cross Country Education.
 
Three Stages of Healing: Counseling Victims of Trauma
Clinical CEU self-study course 
 
The self-study course "Three Stages of Healing: Counseling Victims of Trauma" is 6 hour (or 7.2 for nurses) for psychologists, social workers, case managers, marriage and family therapists, pastoral counselors and A & D counselors. This seminar is on audio CD's, you receive a 180 page manual and exam for CEU's.  Three Stages is about moving from victim to thriver (Heroic Journey) after trauma. For more information, contact www.crosscountryeducation.com or Missy Bradley (developer and clinical trainer) at [email protected]
 

Melissa (Missy) Bradley, MS, NCC, BCETS, FAAETS     

The Omnibus Center
 
 
Brentwood, TN
615-377-6002
 
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