I first came to Process Work as a client.
I came to Process Work because I couldn’t stop crying. Not in a hyperbolic way, but in a very real, puffy face and snotty sleeves kind of way. I cried everyday of 2016. I cried biking to and from work; through staff meetings; at casual gatherings; crossfit classes; in restaurants, bars and businesses; at the post office, and at the bank; watching movies and cleaning the bathroom.
I would have suppressed the need for help and embraced the mantra, “I’m no crazier than anyone else,” if it weren’t for the dreams.
There were too many dreams.
Of wandering through empty hospitals after brief phone calls saying my mother had somehow survived and I needed to come pick her up. The nurse said they hadn’t expected her to pull through, so they’d told us she’d died, to spare us false hope. But she had recovered, and I could bring her home now.
After months of searching for her in my sleep, always to wake and rediscover this new day without her, shock and denial dreams twisted into darker scenes of separation.
Most nights I would watch myself in a single frame from behind, in a palette of greys, as I carried her cradled, naked and weak, deeper out into the crashing ocean waves, until she went completely under, and only my head remained above water. As time went on, night after night, same dream, from the same vantage point, I watched myself stay closer to the shore. I wouldn’t walk so far. When the water rose to her back, I would set her gently down, and watch her sink.
I knew I needed a therapist because I could see how much it disturbed people when I was honest about my feelings. Including that year of monsoon tears, I had spent eight years, since my twenty-first, trying six different kinds of therapy: bereavement support groups, trauma-informed yoga, Ecosomatics, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, good old talk therapy, and now Process Work.
Process Work has been, by far, the most impactful and transformative style of therapy I have encountered. Following process is a fluid, creative, and permissive experience - unlike most of our day-to-day movements in this society, that are bound by bizarre and oppressive social contracts.
A central tenant of Process Work states, “there is meaning in the disturbance.” Through Process Work, I became curious to explore the darkness I knew, without prompts to redirect my thinking, and without judgment.
Through dialogue, stuffed animal dramatizations, dance battles, and therapeutic visualizations, my Process Worker helped me unravel my story. She tended to steer away from the psychoanalytic, but she would sprinkle in some much needed insight here and there.
“When a child loses a parent to suicide, especially a daughter losing a mother, the child misses out on moments when mothering would be offered. The child must learn to mother herself. And on some level, the child comes to believe that she doesn’t deserve to be mothered.”
It had not been obvious to me that my thoughts of self-destruction were permutations of shame and guilt: shame that I had been a horrible, ungrateful daughter; guilt that I hadn’t done more to comfort my mother in the throes of her own depression. Six months of process work sessions helped shine a light into the ravine where I had been stuck: the deepest, darkest place of bitter unforgiveness within me. I could not forgive myself for leaving my mother home alone when I did. I could not forgive a world where so much grief was possible.
My therapist could see my despair, and so she helped me die.
I laid down on the rug in the middle of her tiny office, while she dimmed the lights. It took time to follow her into the exercise, because I had to become disembodied. It takes a while to die. Eventually I detached from the sensations and identities tied to my body. I envisioned my body being burned, my ashes reabsorbed into the earth. And then there was nothing. No people. No relationships. No buildings, or roads, or jobs or infrastructure. No books. No food. No sound. No words.
Images of water flooded in my mind’s eye. I became water. In rivers; in sewers; in the ground and the plants; the vapor in the air; the cells of all organic things; polluted and pure; stagnant; rushing; destructive; serene. Myself, as water, washing out with the brackish estuary current, into the ocean that took my mother, every night for years on end.
This perspective of the world, seen through ocean eyes, condensed within me. Passing through death I found faith that I might exist again in a place that my mother won’t leave. My own longing to die was not about my physical death; rather a longing to feel close to my mother.
When I opened my eyes and sat up, my therapist sat quietly with me. I told her where I’d been. She smiled and simply noticed, “there is salt water on your face.”
Mysterious as everything we can never fully know, I now believe we come and go in waterways. Everything that water is, is also me. The crying is meant to remind us.
Two years ago, if I had heard anyone speak of earth-based spirituality, or accessing death through waking dreams, I would have dismissed the ideas as far too out there. For the entirety of my twenties, I was too wounded to be open minded.
This, I believe, is the magic of Process Work. Process Work leads us home to our dreaming. Process Work allows us to access our essential nature, beyond identity, time, and space. When we reconnect with those parts of ourselves, we are made more whole.
As a more whole person, I have been able to have new experiences. I have been able to feel a sense of ease in my physical body, and connect with the natural world in new and profound ways. I have been able to soften into the impermanence of our days, and more fully cherish the complexities of our fraught human relationships.
New experiences have made room for my beliefs to shift and change, uprooting those that were planted by trauma. I have now rewritten most of the stories I tell myself about the world and human nature.
My most precious new belief is this: healing is possible.