Turning Our Personal Truths Inside Out

I’ve had my fair share of therapy. I’ve talked in circles about my family, my relationships with men, my relationship with myself, my ongoing struggle with an eating disorder, and I was exhausted. Even though I had dug into the deep recesses of my being and brought the darkness out for examination, I still wasn’t fixed. I had been analyzed, assessed and pigeonholed time and time again but I didn’t know what to do with all of it. I believed that once I gained awareness of my thought patterns, actions and past, I would be healed. Yet, this wasn’t the case. Instead, I was tired.

My mother is currently in graduate school, working towards her Masters in counseling. One day after class, she called me to rave about an energy worker who had given a guest lecture. The guest lecturer, Thomas, spoke about how sometimes, in the aftermath of a traumatic event, the human body holds on to trauma in a way that is undetectable to us. If an individual is unable to protect, fight off or assert control in a traumatic situation, the body retains the experience. Often times, we subconsciously recreate a similar situation, trying to work through the previous situation in which we were helpless. The effects can sit in our bodies, making us sick, both physically and mentally, without us even realizing. Thomas claimed that in moving one’s energetic fields, a person’s natural state of being can be restored and the process of healing can begin.

My mother reached out to Thomas after his lecture and asked if he could fit me into his schedule as a new patient. When she told me this, I groaned, feeling like a small child. Secretly, I was grateful. I had forgotten what my natural state of being was, I hadn’t felt it in years. If he claimed he could help me get there, I would see him.

Thomas is a small man with long gray hair, thick glasses and a brusqueness that can be mistaken for dislike. After experiencing trauma in his childhood, Thomas dedicated himself to alternative forms of healing, and came up with a neurological system for transforming and moving trauma within. Hearing his voice over the phone made me nervous and I felt myself leave my body behind when I walked into his office.

I sat in a chair in the middle of the room while Thomas walked in a circle around me, waving pieces of paper around my body, trying to pick up on my energetic fields. I had no idea what he was doing, how waving paper around me was going to do anything for my state of mind and the things that were weighing on me. I wanted to laugh and run out of the room. Instead, I closed my eyes and let him work. He stopped when he circled around to the left side of me. “I’ve found it.” Thomas said that it looked as though I’d been hit in the side of my head with a baseball bat. According to him, the entire left hemisphere of my brain was offline, my body’s protective response to a trauma I experienced when I was 16.

At the end of our session, we sat across from each other. “It looks as though you’ve arrived. Like you’re in your body.” I did feel more present, more grounded. I spend most of time trying to not be in my body because I despise it. Eventually, it became a natural state of mine, to float above myself.

During my second session with Thomas, he did “heart work” with me. He showed me a picture of a spiral galaxy on a piece of white paper. “Which way do you think this galaxy spins?” “To the left”, I said, without hesitation. Thomas nodded knowingly. “That’s what I’d thought you’d say. And in reality, the galaxy spins to the right. You are spinning the wrong direction, that’s why your perspective of yourself and the world around you is so off. We’re going to reorient you.” Was that true? Could it be possible that the way that I saw myself and what I thought to be fact, was actually wrong?

I took a seat in a swiveling chair in the center of the room. “Ok, now spin yourself to the right. I will be standing in the corner, rocking back in forth, feeling your energy.” I nodded. I turned to the right, about a fourth of the full rotation. On the wall was a picture of an iceberg. I noticed the painting in full. I turned myself again to the back wall. A massage table was against it, and pictures of the sun, the moon and Jupiter were hung above the table. I turned again and looked out the window on the leftmost wall. I turned once more, and I finished a full orbit. It was hard for me to spin to the right, it made me feel uncomfortable and almost sick to my stomach. Had I really been askew in space up until now? I kept spinning to the right and eventually, began to pick up speed. It felt better the more I did it, I noticed small details on the four walls I hadn’t noticed the first, second or third time. “Ok, you can stop.” I stopped facing the back wall, staring at the picture of the moon. Everything was still.

“I’m not going to tell you that I healed you, that everything is better. What I did, is make you lighter.” Yes, perhaps Thomas did move something inside of me, but beyond that, he challenged my perspective. He let me know that maybe, just maybe, the way I saw myself wasn’t the truth.

From the time we are children, we learn certain things about ourselves and our personalities from experiences and interactions with others. Some of these teachings are affirmative and positive, but some lead us to believe that we are bad, dirty or flawed in some way and that this darkness is unacceptable. As we grow up, some of these thoughts and traumas can solidify into personal truths and eventually, become a part of us, like an arm or a leg. We don’t wonder about the negative things we tell ourselves because they’ve become so embedded into our psyche and we’ve grown around them.

I wonder if Thomas really did change something inside of me. Regardless of the energy work, he attempted to debunk what I believed to be true about myself by telling me that my perspective and orientation were just plain wrong. No, he didn’t dispel these truths overnight, that would be impossible. Yet, he questioned what I thought to be law and pointed me in a direction I couldn’t seem to find myself. He started a wondering in me. He gave me hope that it wouldn’t always be this hard, and that someday, perhaps my natural orbit will be spinning to the right.