“I want to define love,” he began. An interesting diversion from other guided meditations I’d heard before, which generally followed a template. “Love is something you innately know. You know what love feels like. It feels like wanting the best for another person. Feeling connected to that person. Feeling like you accept that person despite their flaws. I want you to focus really hard on a person who you love deeply and who loves you.”
Of course I went with Joey. I unfolded my love for him enthusiastically. I conjured his kindness, his reassuring grin, the reckless certainty he made me feel. The love I had for him felt huge in my arms, too big to hold, like it was going to leap out of my chest. We all sat with these feelings of love for a few minutes, each of us a bright, humming being, radiating delight.
“Okay. Now, I want you to take that same feeling. That warm, wonderful, loving feeling. Feel it in your chest, in your feet, in your face, in your gut. Notice the texture of it. The shape of it. The joy of it. Now, I want you to apply it to yourself and understand that the person you love…must possess the same feelings for you.”
This was trickier. But Joey was waiting for me at home. He had made it clear that he’d always be waiting for me at home. So. It must be true. I tried to feel what he must feel toward me. Tried to see the good he must certainly see. Tried to see how he loves my flaws. But I struggled with this exercise, and tears started leaking out of my eyes. In the end, I stopped listing reasons. I just knew he loved me a lot. And what a fucking gift that was. I let waves of gratitude flow through me. How lucky I was to be loved in this way. How lucky, how lucky, how lucky.
After some time had passed, our teacher spoke for a third time. “Now. Gather up that warm and wonderful feeling of love. And apply it to yourselves.”
A year ago, I never would have been able to achieve this part. It would have been too hard. But the lessons from EMDR came flooding back.
During EMDR, I was able to conjure two separate, simultaneous versions of myself—the child version and the present version. I was able to feel child Stephanie’s emotions and my own. I was able to comfort her with my present wisdom. I was able to simultaneously be the one giving love and the one receiving it.
Now, I practiced a similar visualization to the one I’d had during EMDR. I brought up a recent image of myself—one from nine months ago. The Stephanie who initially struggled with her diagnosis. My hair was purple now, but I imagined a figure in front of me with the gray-blue hair I’d had at the time, wearing her winter parka. And when I saw her, when I applied that big fat love to her, I didn’t see disgust, actually. I felt empathy and pity and sadness, and what I saw most of all was that she was working really, really hard. She was trying her damnedest to be better.
“You’re trying so hard,” I said to her. “You’re suffering. But you’re doing good work. You’re doing all the things you think you’re supposed to do.”
I then explored other versions of me. It was like fanning out a deck of cards, each of them with some version of myself…little twelve-year-old me, little college me, me in my early twenties. And as I flipped through all of these Stephanies, I kept repeating this sentence again and again: “You are suffering, but you are trying so hard.”
The teacher interrupted my soliloquy. “Embrace her!” he cried out, his tone celebratory, like a trumpeting reveille. “Accept her! Accept her despite her flaws! For who she is!”
My face scrunched up into a wrinkled raisin because this was really difficult. But I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and leapt in. I embraced my February self. And then I tried to shift to embracing my current self, which was harder. To be held by my own consciousness. I pushed through the wall. It felt like curling up in a tulip. Like throwing a bull’s-eye and winning the prize I’d always wanted. Foreign. Wholesome. Good.
Around me, the handful of other meditators sighed or caught their breath. It seemed the meditation was working for them, too.
Love yourself. Ah, there it was. For the first time without the help of hallucinogens: unconditional self-love.
* * *
—
I didn’t feel peaceful walking out of that meditation place, but I felt a new determination—like I had a duty to take better care of myself emotionally. For the rest of the day, I collected things I liked about myself, and it was easy, because it felt like assembling a book of compliments for a friend.
But the best reward from that meditation center was a familiar face I could access every time I sat down to meditate. For a couple of minutes, I basked in the sun and breathed, and then I summoned an older version of myself, a year into the future. I imagined she was sitting behind me, enveloping me in a big-spoon hug. She had a few more wrinkles. A couple more freckles. She was wearing baggy, soft clothing. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said.
“I’m sad today,” I admitted.
“It’s okay to be sad. You won’t be sad a week from now. I love you, and you are doing your best,” she said, and I knew she was right. I leaned back into her belly. I could almost feel it pushing back against me, a solid pressure, telling me I was not alone. She silenced my mother’s voice in my head. Excised her not just in body but in mind.
She did it because, as my third parent, that is her right.
* * *
—
Self-parenting exercises taught me to slowly rebuild healthy self-talk. But it must be said: Even though I know reparenting has helped dozens of my friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has told me it’s exhausting. Reparenting takes time, and concentration, and calmness. It takes an intellectual and physical effort to shove aside the comfortably worn neural pathways and go in a different direction. And even though that effort comes with joyous rewards, sometimes it also comes with sadness. Because expressing the kindness to yourself that you deserve often reminds you of the kindness you didn’t get.
Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.
That sadness—the sadness of loss—is a different flavor than the sadness of reckoning. The sadness of reckoning feels visceral and angry and tinged with violence. It feels healable, somehow, with revenge or justice.