What Healing Looks Like

This week while talking to one of my kids, I realized that I wasn’t afraid of thunderstorms anymore. And that I hadn’t even noticed when this fear had disappeared, though I know that it was still there at the beginning of the divorce because it was on my top ten list of things I was afraid of having to deal with alone when I moved into an apartment after mediation. I wasn’t even trying to heal this part of my traumatic childhood. But somehow, I have healed something that healed that thing and I’m still wondering what it was.

Then I realized that another thing had healed: my fear of dogs. As a child, I had a family dog Laddie and I was fond of him. But then he died and I had a paper route and got chased by and bitten by dogs on multiple occasions. As a teen, more dogs chased after and bit me when I went out running. I stopped running for about a decade and when I started again, there were still unleashed dogs out in every neighborhood I ever lived in, eager to chase after me and bark and terrify me. This was a major reason that I stopped running outside and started to love treadmills because when you run on a treadmill, you never worry about dogs chasing and biting you.

After the divorce, I started to carry pepper spray with me whenever I went outside, less to deal with humans and more to deal with dogs. I used it several times on aggressive dogs in that first year or two, but honestly, I don’t even think about it anymore. I am cautious around dogs, particularly ones that I encounter on trails who are not leashed and are not being tended to by human caretakers nearby. But it is on a case by case basis and I am not afraid of every dog I meet. Some dogs are cute and friendly and I might even take a pic now and then.

What happened to change my attitude toward dogs? Exposure therapy. My daughter has two corgis and I took care of them for one entire month a few years ago. I thought it might be difficult, and it was, but not because I was afraid of them. Only because they were messy and naughty and kept jumping on the counter to get my fresh expensive gourmet bread (Morty, get down from there right now!) I didn’t plan to get over my fear of dogs. But I am at least aware of what I did to cure it, if this is what a cure looks like.

My therapist says that I created new pathways in my brain and have required a traumatic response. She also thinks that I can do this with just about anything. She says that this is called “healing.” I admit, I am not so sure that I have as much power as she seems to think. There are certainly a wide variety of things that I am not at all interested in rewiring my brain about. But I admit, it’s possible that I will change my mind. I find myself much less likely to insist that things are a certain way or that this or that cannot change.

I suppose my therapist might also say that I’m learning to have more of a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. I am starting to see that the world might change, or at least my perception of it might change, and all just because I am willing to try things again that I have already tried before, and that my old experience of them might not be my new experience.

I used to think that I was really bad with color, and then I found myself experimenting with color in my afghans and now I think I am actually really good with color. I might not follow the “rules” you got taught in art school with the color wheel, but I have an intuitive sense of what works and what doesn’t and I’ve learned to let myself reconsider new combinations and patterns and to try them out and to let my inner sense decide if it’s good or not. And to not need to be right the first time because with yarn, you can always undo it.

It is a strange place to be in, at age fifty-five, to be discovering that the world and me in it, are not what I used to think they were. In some ways, maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to know how unstable reality is when I was younger. Maybe this is a secret knowledge that only old people can truly bear.