What Remains Undone
The following true narrative recounts a part of myself and my life journey, which I’ve shared with few people but feel it’s time to share openly. This is a theme that in retrospect I’ve found (unsurprisingly) woven into all of my books, most explicitly in “The Trasker Project.”
Here is the entire piece, reprinted from “Kintsugi: Powerful Stories of Healing Trauma” which is a collection of similar stories. Please feel free to pass this along to others who might be moved or interested.
What Remains Undone
By Tom D Wright
I was a broken human being before I could talk. In fact, I was so broken by trauma, I had to repeat kindergarten—those who will understand don’t need to hear the horrific details; all too often they have lived their own version of it. How it happened is unimportant because over the decades I have processed those events, sufficiently enough that I no longer feel compelled to share them. I have left that behind me.
That is what I told my EMDR therapist the first time I met her for treatment to deal with childhood PTSD.
“So, why are you here then?” she asked.
Because the past is like a backpack we wear throughout our life. Whether immobilized on the side of the trail or moving forward through the hills and valleys of life, we carry whatever it contains with us. Despite my having unpacked much of the burden placed without my consent in that emotional backpack during my infancy, something of that past still traveled with me. Something within remained undone. I was still broken.
“Well, what have you taken out?”
Childhood for me was an ordeal of survival. The cause of my trauma was removed by the time I started school, but my psychic backpack was already stuffed. Other children had no concept of what I carried, but I was clearly “one of those things that was not like the others.” That was still a time when being outside the norm was deplorable, and Childhood PTSD was not even close to being a thing, let alone comprehensible. Unable to inter-relate normally, I was socially driven away and isolated myself on an island surrounded with an ocean of pain.
Through multiple child and family therapists, finally culminating in a hospitalization during my teen years, I eventually reached a point where I could function. Which simply meant I learned how to carry that backpack. Every step, every day, I carried my past trauma, along with the accumulated pain I added along the way.
And so, in my twenties, I realized that the only person who could deal with the contents of that backpack was me. Others could provide guidance and support, but they could not reach within my soul and surgically remove those festering contents—at best, they could guide me through being my own surgeon. Others can inflict injury in a single instant, but they can’t inflict healing.
That epiphany led me to embark on years of exploring a smorgasbord of counselors and therapeutic styles, eventually culminating in an education in psychology. I pursued a Master’s degree not merely to understand my broken self, but to understand a broken world convulsing with trauma, perpetrated on every level.
My journey required that I open that backpack and examine the traumatic contents which weighed on me like large rocks. I faced each traumatic experience within my backpack, saying to myself that I no longer needed to fear this rock. It held no power over me. I also volunteered to work on a crisis hotline, listening to the trauma of others and providing the understanding which only comes from someone who has been there.
“That’s wonderful,” my EMDR therapist commented a few sessions later. “Many people struggle their whole lives just to reach that point. So, why are you here?”
Because when my children were born, I realized that healing involves more than merely confronting the cause of the wound. I knew what sort of parent I didn’t want to be, and I learned enough techniques to try to “fake it until I make it.” But no amount of fakery could turn an emotional Pinocchio into the real thing—an emotionally living parent, let alone an emotionally present spouse.
In order to become a whole person, I had to contemplate the meaning and practice of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a poorly understood word in our society. Literally, it means giving up the claim to resentment or vengeful feelings. It is typically viewed as a gift benevolently bestowed upon an offender, releasing that person from responsibility. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Quite simply, it is merely an internal choice to let go of a past injury. No more than that. Yet we wrap our past around us like a blanket so tightly, that the simple act of letting go is anything but simple.
Recalling a harmful experience is a human survival trait, but it’s counterproductive when that experience controls and paralyzes long after the danger is past. Human nature clings onto those injuries out of a misguided perception that the offender does not deserve to be released. Expressing forgiveness may help an offender face his or her own burden, but that offender’s awareness is irrelevant—it doesn’t alter the broken burden which exists only within the person who carries it—step after step, day after day.
My burdens only affect one person. Me.
And so, one day I chose to open that pack, take out a rock and look at it—and realized that it had absolutely no value. It served no purpose for me. I had no desire to continue looking at it and it certainly held no sentimental value. I did not need it. After building a cairn from all the useless rocks of pain I carried on my back my entire life, I simply walked on.
The sublime, simple truth is that forgiveness is really is nothing more than letting go. Choosing to open my hand. Releasing.
“During our sessions, you have really climbed a mountain of pain,” my therapist agreed a couple weeks later.
“Yes,” I replied, “but you don’t climb Mount Everest because you want to live there. You do it because you want to conquer it.”
“And once it is conquered? What then do you still need to work on?”
Something immensely more difficult than summiting the Mount Everest of trauma inflicted upon me. The reality that people are often broken by other broken people.
It’s what we do—human history is largely a seething cauldron of humans traumatizing other humans, for every imaginable reason or often for no reason at all; on scales individual to global; physically, emotionally and now on a virtual level through social media.
Early in my life, and later on while I began to mend the shattered pieces of my self, I in turn hurt others, in ways that I regret. Through things that I did. Things that I failed to do. Through not being a whole person for them.
When I swept away the cobwebs of my own trauma, I had to recognize and reconcile with the injury and pain I caused to others. While the injuries I myself inflicted were lesser, I still understood that deep ache which never goes away.
Trying to forgive myself was facing a searing truth which burned as fierce as the very fires of Mordor itself.
“So, is that what remains undone? Is forgiving yourself why, in the end, you are here?”
My guilt does come back to visit me from time to time, and will always be my shadow, but I have made my peace with that. In developing compassion for others, I learned to find compassion for myself as well.
No, in the end, I was there to make one more examination of that backpack, Because, having removed all those other things, I was left with emptiness.
Where there had been fear, anxiety, anger—now existed a void. But having emptied the backpack of all the things I did not need to carry, I could now finally reach within one last time. What remained undone—was for me to retrieve what existed the whole time underneath the rocks—what I lost, from before I could speak.
Myself.
THE END
Reprinted from “Kintsugi: Powerful Stories of Healing Trauma” – a collection of narrative stories about healing from trauma
Copyright © 2019, Tom D Wright. All rights reserved.