The Healing Journey™

Have you ever asked yourself, why can’t I get over X or achieve Y? You’re smart, you make things happen, yet there are these X’s and Y’s that won’t move.

You aren’t alone. We all struggle with creating what we want in life.

The biggest things that get in our way are stress or trauma. I used to teach Mindfulness Stress Reduction to Type-A-personality professionals. Before the end of the 8-week class, these people learned how NOT to let stress take them out. Often they would surprise us with how their lives changed.

When one class began, I remember one woman, a VP for a large bank, bragging about how hard and long she worked. She claimed she often was on her two phones simultaneously. She didn’t take lunches or vacations and worked upwards of 60 hours per week.

Before the end of the class, she had removed her second phone, was taking lunches, and worked no more than 40 hours per week. What amazed her was not only how she was happier, but how she was getting more done.

Animals Do It

An old colleague of mine, Peter Levine, Ph.D. first taught me that wild animals don’t have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD); they naturally deal with trauma.

We all know we are hardwired to survive—fight or flight. Yet when we can’t defend ourselves or run away, we have a third option – we freeze. When a deer can’t outrun the mountain lion, she goes into shock and pretends she is dead. Hopefully for her, the mountain lion will believe she’s dead and leave to return for a later meal. Once safe, the deer comes to. She goes through recovering from the trauma, and runs away.

Stress and trauma progressively build in our body/mind from all those times we didn’t use fight or flight, and we just grin and bear it. However we can re-teach our physiology so it doesn’t default to freezing, but releases the stress. Then we’re back to behaving like wild animals.

But “releasing” does not mean we get into fistfights, or run down the street to escape stressful situations. In the vast majority of situations, it means we are breathing and speaking. To be able to release current stress, we often need to release the old stress and trauma.

The Quick Way

Many body/mind therapies indirectly remove the frozen stress response. The quickest could be a process called the Healing Journey™, developed for Sandpoint Men’s Group (SMG). In the course of 30 to 45 minutes, a man with the guiding of a trained facilitator travels back to the event(s) that created the trauma that was never fully experienced. The man physically experiences that frozen stress (trauma) as the block he can’t get over and possibly the cause of his PTSD.

We have a natural ability to regain balance once the block that prevented us from experiencing our resources is removed. It’s as if the stored energy converts into usable energy to move through our blocks. Beneath the block lies a hidden gift – a skill that was entrained as we learned to hide our trauma. The acceptance of our stress and traumas eventually leads to discovering the positive aspects of what the previous events created. Those gifts are powerful and only available if we journey through the trauma to our healing.

SMG and Sandpoint Women’s Group (SWG) use the Healing Journey™ developed by Owen Marcus as a way to expedite chang

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It’s Wednesday night in Sandpoint. A lot of Sandpoint husbands and fathers aren’t home. So where are they? Drinking? Bowling? Watching “the game”? Nope. They’re gathering in houses and offices to enjoy the honor of being men.

For more than three years, a steadily-growing group of Sandpoint men have met every Wednesday night. The Sandpoint Men’s Group started with twelve men who wanted to recapture the camaraderie of youth, the feeling of relating to other men in a setting outside a bar or a baseball diamond. We all remembered the boyhood excitement of hanging out with our friends—the friends we looked forward to seeing, the friends we could count on to be there when we needed them, the friends who were honest with us, even with those hard truths.

With all the pressure these days, there’s not much opportunity to just be with our friends, where nothing is expected from us. We have roles to fill and responsibilities to meet for our work, our family, and even our friends. Don’t get me wrong: we chose these roles, and we enjoy them. But we need a place where we don’t have to perform, a place where we’re the only expectation is that we’ll just be ourselves.

What is in a meeting?

Letting go of my roles to “just be” was hard. There were a lot of things I needed to leave at the door, like my position in the community and my mask of being a professional. At Men’s Group meetings, I walk through the door simply as a man. A simple concept, but a challenging task. But in three years, I’ve learned to be the man I once dreamt of being.

As a kid, I imagined that a man was a person who possessed special qualities that I couldn’t see having. My father and other men seemed superhuman. I wondered how these men who once were boys became men. Conception was a mystery, but manhood was the mystery.

For decades, I was processing a belief that I was not one those men I saw as a boy. I felt cheated that I was not anointed into manhood. But I certainly was not going to admit that I was a fraud as a man. I joined the collective agreement: don’t question another man’s authenticity, and he won’t question mine.

But I let go of this agreement. I realized that my father and his friends were suffering the same fate I was. I understand how difficult it is to be a man. Through the pleasure of trusting them, my resentment and fear of other men transformed into compassion and empathy for them.

Men from the groups have experienced such powerful changes, their friends and family started to ask: “What have you been doing? You’re happier, you’re more fun to be with.” These men’s wives and partners wanted the same for themselves, so they started the Sandpoint Women’s Group.

The Sandpoint Men’s Group and the Sandpoint Women’s Group both support personal evolution. We’re working to evolve out of the boxes we placed ourselves in. We’re learning to just be ourselves.

We’re not therapy groups, and we have no religious affiliation or agenda. Participation in the groups is free. The groups meet weekly, following an agreed-upon protocol of confidentiality and honesty. But each man or woman determines his or her level of participation.

You are invited

If you’d like to learn more about the groups, you, your friends and family are invited to an open house on May 14^th at the Sandpoint Community Center from 6:30 to 8pm. You will meet many of the groups’ members and their families, have the chance to ask questions, and enjoy some food and drinks.

To learn more about the groups view our web sites: www.SandpointMensGroup.com and www.SandpointWomensGroup.com. If you’d like to talk to someone, please call Sandpoint Men’s Group at 946-4266.

This article first appeared in the local Sandpoint paper, the Daily Bee on May 7, 2008.

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