It’s fall, ya’ll!
Back to school season. Virgo season. For me, the season when heat and humidity finally stop draining my life force and the cool, crisp air of fall reinvigorates me to return to my to-do list. Relate?
Maybe this is part of why so many people return to therapy in the fall. It’s a well-known and sometimes dreaded fact that therapists often have their clients totally disappear in the summer. Sometimes everyone decides that with all the free serotonin in the form of extra sunshine, they’re just fine. Other times, they simply disappear from June to September- a kind of ghosting therapists have come to expect. Therapists call it “the summer slump”, and more than anything, it indicates how loosely people treat summer. Not so fall! Fall, we’ve collectively decided, is our time to get our shit together…both in our mental health and elsewhere.
This fall, Tom and I decided to clean out our basement. It was overdue- our house is 300 years old, and our basement is a scary dirt and stone place that is perpetually damp despite the fact that two industrial grade dehumidifiers run in it 24/7. We’re having some work done in the basement this fall (pipes insulated against the terrible freeze that happened last year; sexy stuff!), so to be kind to our contractor we figured we should move some of the stuff cluttering the space. Most of the stuff, it turns out, was “chicken stuff”. Chickens require a remarkable amount of paraphernalia, from chicken wire and lumber to make their ever-expanding runs, to specialized water dispensers that keep water from freezing and an assortment of “toys” that our girls had played with for thirty seconds before abandoning forever. All of that paraphernalia eventually ends up in the basement. And much of it, we discovered, had accumulated quite the layer of mildew.
Discovering this mildew coating much of the stuff stored in our basement was a very unpleasant surprise. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, since our basement is a wet, dark place, as already described. But when you keep something in the dark all the time, you have no idea what is going on down there. And it turns out that what’s going on might not be okay at all. Mildew feels far too related to mold to not scare the bejeebees out of me. Who knows what would happen if we left it alone?! So we suited up and headed down to the basement to do some really dirty work.
Of course, as a trauma therapist, this immediately reminded me of the process of excavating trauma from the “basements” of our brains and bodies. It’s a common question I get asked, when I explain what I do. “Why should I dig out all that old crap?” Essentially, people want to know, why excavate something I can’t even see?
And I get it. I really do! I’m also not an advocate of excavating our trauma without seriously considering the benefits and risks. When I work with people in an intensive, it’s hard. They are releasing years- usually decades- of stored traumas, and much like our basement project, it stinks. And worse, it hurts. People’s bodies store their trauma, and as we release it, their bodies often shake and cry and feel nauseous with the effort. I would never recommend that someone undertake that kind of effort lightly. However, just like our mildewy basement, things are often happening beneath the surface of stored trauma that aren’t at all neutral or benign. When it’s right for someone to do the work of digging it all up and healing it, it’s because it’s having a very negative impact on them. Just like mold left festering in the basement of a house.
If you’ve been considering doing some inner work of your own this fall, let me recommend that you consider doing so in an intensive format. Just like Tom and I set aside a weekend to go into our basement, take everything out, bleach the heck out of it all, and then only return what we actually wanted and needed to keep, trauma therapy is a massive undertaking. Doing it in 50 minute spurts would be like us doing our basement cleanout just an hour at a time. We’d get all suited up (yes, we wore face masks!) and take care of one or two things before having to shower off and wait until next week to take the next step. Sometimes, that’s all the time you have- and if that’s the only way you can clean out your basement- literally or metaphorically- then it’s better than nothing! But I think the best way, if you’re going to do such difficult work, is to do it all at once.
Ready for your trauma clean out?
That’s what we do in a trauma therapy intensive. We set aside 3-5 days.We prepare ourselves. We go down to the basement of your nervous system and we don’t come back until we’re done. Until everything is all cleaned back and in order. If you’re interested in the process, you can read about it here and here.
Whatever you are attending to this fall, I hope it’s a good one!
