Some emotional experiences can be so shocking, that one will be emotionally wounded by them. One vital aspect of finding healing and growth from emotional wounds and finding the way forward towards emotional health is the essential security of an unconditionally loving environment. Studies have shown that brain pathways which are stuck in repetitive emotional trauma responses can be healed and released through revisiting of the trauma in the environment of a non-anxious, unconditionally supportive, friendly presence. [1] Revisiting troubling memories that have us stuck, while in the presence of someone who can be with us in unconditional regard, can actually rewire the plasticity of the brain’s pathways to switch from triggering rage, anxiety, despair, shame, and addictions to cultivating healthy ways of being. Bessel van der Kolk writes,
“Of course we can never undo what happened, but we can create new emotional scenarios intense and real enough to defuse and counter some of those old ones. The healing tableaus of structures offer an experience that many participants have never believed was possible for them: to be welcomed into a world where people delight in them, protect them, meet their needs, and make you feel at home.” [2]
American Jesuit priest and founder of ‘Homeboy Industries’ (the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program) Gregory Boyle works with gang members in Los Angeles, helping to build those kinds of “new emotional scenarios” and “healing tableaus of structures” among some of the most deeply entrenched, wounded little boys in the world. He writes,
“At Homeboy Industries, we seek to tell each person this truth: they are exactly what God had in mind when God made them – and then watch, from this privileged place, as people inhabit this truth. Nothing is the same again. No bullet can pierce this, no prison walls can keep this out. And death can’t touch it – it is just that huge. But much stands in the way of this liberating truth. You need to dismantle shame and disgrace, coaxing out the truth in people who’ve grown comfortable believing its opposite.” [3]
I believe we are invited to find our centred grounding in the only truly safe ground of all being – the loving presence of God. Albert Einstein said the most fundamental question is whether this is a “friendly universe”. He wrote,
“I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves. For if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly, and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process. If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially ‘playing dice with the universe’, then we are simply victims to the random toss of the dice, and our lives have no real purpose or meaning. But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives. God does not play dice with the universe.” [4]
[1] Begley, Sharon. The Brain: How The Brain Rewires Itself. Time Magazine (Jan. 19, 2012). See also Begley, Sharon, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How A New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves, New York: Random House, Ballantine, 2007.
[2] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Brian, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Penguin Random House LLC, New York, NY, 2014), p. 310.
[3] Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (Free Press, New York, NY, 2010) p. 193.
[4] Albert Einstein, Letters to Paul Epstein, 1945.
