Whatever it is, it's Already Here. Let me Feel it.
On identifying, processing & feeling my feels in real time
Nearly 11 years ago, I participated in my first PHP program.
[Wow, I hate that I have to acknowledge that I’ve needed more than one of these programs in my life… but I guess that goes hand in hand with identifying and acknowledging the stacked pile of trauma that’s been thrown at me pretty much seasonally for the majority of my life.]
I spent 14 weeks in full day therapy, all while balancing a severe break in my left foot leaving me on crutches for most of the winter, being hospitalized for two separate and severe undiagnosed Crohn’s disease flares, and again for a semi-emergent surgery to remove my gallbladder. For months I was literally only able to eat tiny tots baby food and choke down a couple of bottles of chocolate ensure each day, but I was still showing up to program faithfully at 7:45am every weekday morning. I had every reason in the world to pause or walk away from it - but I refused.
Becoming mentally well again was the most important thing in the moment to me.
You see, I had been living with symptoms of Crohn’s disease for four years by then, except I still had no diagnosis, no treatment options, and the only management tools I’d been offered caused dramatic, intolerable side effects and did not in fact reduce the symptoms that were causing me to live my life locked inside of the bathroom. I felt truly hopeless. What was the point of fighting so hard to stay in a life when I couldn’t make anything in my body work better, feel better, or actually heal?
I honestly didn’t believe there was any chance for better days. I couldn’t even find a doctor that believed me and was willing to fight for me, so how was I, at age 26, supposed to do that on my own? I had told my therapist that I thought I was done. That I couldn’t mentally shoulder the pain and responsibility anymore, and she felt like this program was my best option.
I did learn a lot during my time there - tools and tips and tricks to try to make things more manageable, mentally, to view things through different lenses but I left there feeling only partially healed. I had come to realize what I was fighting for, and where the energy to fight was supposed to come from, but nobody knew how to help me with the unpredictable symptoms & challenges that my body kept raising to gain my attention.
Much like today, at that time 11 years ago, I was already living in a body that struggled to communicate with me, that acted out without providing understanding, and that refused to work with me if it had the chance to continue working against me.
Truthfully, that fact will always feel like devastation.
During that program, we started each morning with a meditation, a short reading, or a progressive muscle relaxation to ensure we were fully present inside the room before digging into the hard stuff.
There was one specific meditation that has stayed with me this whole time. I can’t tell you when I first heard it, or what else was part of the exercise, but I can tell you what it kept coming back to…
“Whatever it is, it’s already here. Let me feel it. “
This mentality didn’t really surface for me during my second PHP two years ago, probably because I was still so close to my trauma that I couldn’t do anything BUT feel it; however, it has come up quite a bit during my ketamine treatments. Since I receive the medication via IV (or my power-port), there is maybe a 4-6 minute window of time between the nurse leaving the room and my beginning to feel the medication take hold of my body and my brain. During one particular session a few months back, I was extra anxious during this waiting phase, and these words came flooding back to me.
Whatever it is, it’s already here. Let me feel it.
I think the connection to this phrase is powerful because it admits and identifies that I know there’s a world of moments and memories, of wins and losses, of traumas and safety’s right under the surface - things that I haven’t had the mental capacity to access without the medication. And that particular day (and every day since), I was able not just to believe, but to sit with the feeling that whatever my brain brought up, I’d be equipped to handle. I had the systems and the tools in place to process trauma’s I didn’t even know I’d experienced - I just had to believe in myself.
Sometimes what comes up for me during these infusions are linked closely to what I have been thinking or feeling or writing about in semi-real time. Other times, they are things I never remember experiencing previously, even though I know I must’ve as they were clearly deeply stored away. In some experiences I remember moments much like we fall asleep - at first slowly, and then all at once.
Whatever it is - this … opens the playing field. It dramatically offers space to ANYTHING that is somehow related to where I am in my mental health treatment plan. That’s both terrifying and liberating at the same time.
It’s already here - sitting under the surface, buried deep beneath the reachable memories - it’s not new, I’m in a sense just allowing it to be conjured - if and when the timing is right.
Let me feel it - This. This has been, and continues to be, the absolute hardest part of treatment, of learning to live in the present moment. I have spent a lifetime swallowing memories and hard feelings, losses and painful moments. And per my trusted advisor - there’s no more pushing down the memories. There’s no more swallowing the things that feel wrong. There’s in the moment feeling. It’s ridiculously uncomfortable, painful even, and it makes me want to crawl out of my skin, but I feel it in real time, if I only hold onto or store what’s absolutely necessary - do you realize how much space I can save for the real things? The moments and the memories that have made me who I am today? The ones that are shaping my daughter? The times with my partner, with my friends, the ones that have created this upstanding version of Amanda?
I can’t heal if I don’t feel
Not feeling has never been my problem. In fact, I’ve always told people that I feel too much. And then my friend Jamie wrote a book with the same title which truly has served as my very own guide because his words come with a truth and an authenticity that resonate so damn deeply within me. The problem is not feeling the moments and experiences that I don’t clock in real time. The ones my body shows up to without my mind. The ones where I disassociate for an hour or a week or six months and have nothing to show for the time I was gone except ironically that I was still here.
That’s when I get into trouble.
That’s when the mountain of swallowed feelings comes at me.
That’s when it threatens everything I stand on and feel grounded in.
As I walk into the last two weeks of this year, and the last two weekly doses of Ketmine before it begins to get spaced out further, I wrote this honestly as a reminder to myself.
