The Proposal
Our narrative is everything. And we get to rewrite out story.
Hello,
It’s Sunita here.
Journal entry - July 22, 2015
What do I fear?
Why can’t I go near the pain- the grief- the sadness- the unfulfilled desires- the longing-
the missing- the anger- the disappointment- the neediness- the despair-the emptiness-
the darkness- the loss- the rage- the isolation- the numbness- the hunger- the desperation- the darkness- the hurt- the disbelief- the wound- the broken heart-
the loss (again)- the loss (again)- the loss (again)- The heartache.
Why can’t I talk about the years of yearning?
Journal entry – March 27, 2022
I will be ok no matter what comes my way. I can handle sadness because it’s a temporary state and natural. Change hurts but it helps me grow. Change and I exist together and I can’t be alive without change.
Change brings new ways of being that are beautiful.
I have resources and people who carry me through yucky parts of life that have to be dealt with.
I am resourceful.
Journal entry – September 11, 2022
It’s up to me to shape the world I want to live in. Giving up on the need for answers. Searching for the right questions. Infusing my work. Living, looking inwards. Expanding outwards.
These entries are not from the journals of two different people. Nor are they edited.
These entries are from my journals.
It has taken me many years to go back and read them. Just like the many years it has taken me to fully commit to saying yes to the assignment given to me by the universe.
We are all summoned to say yes to an Assignment in our lifetime.
But because it’s usually quite a daunting one, or we are yet not aware, or awake enough to be able to see and comprehend it, or we are too afraid to take it on because the chances of failure are very high, we avoid committing to it.
I, being a mere mortal, experienced all of the above conditions, until I could no longer ignore the voice I started hearing a decade ago, without surrendering my peace and sanity. Yes, the voice is that loud and insistent.
It’s not that I wasn’t working on my assignment all along. I was. And I still am. It’s hard not to when one can see nothing else or think of anything but The Assignment.
So, how is my yes different now?
Well, now it’s about bringing my work to others.
And that process is what I have been intensely engaged in for the past few years. The Proposal is for my next book, The Way Back Home, An Anthology. This anthology is comprised of two trilogies that each have 3 collections of poetry.
I was woefully unprepared for the most important love of my life.
This discovery, sadly, did not come to me in the form of an epiphany but as an incidental finding as my silence and downcast eyes were but two of the many symptoms of my buried trauma that showed up in therapy.
The battle between my intense desire to feel relief and freedom from my suffering and the terror I felt at the thought of letting anyone who could help me in went on for a long time.
So, how did I go from being the person who wrote the journal entry on July 22, 2015 to the person who wrote on September 11, 2022?
It was, and continues to be a process. But one that gets easier as we work harder at it. TWBH: An Anthology became the genesis of TWBH-A Wellness Way of Being for me which is a guide to a path and process of moving from trauma to transcendence.
In response to the question posed by Abraham Maslow,
What vision do you aspire to?
My mission is to share and teach what I know about the answer to How do we go from trauma to transcendence?
Yes. I am aware I use the word transcend. I intentionally chose not to say grow, or transform, but transcend our trauma.
Yes. I know that’s ambitious.
If it’s sounds too ambitious to someone, they are not my intended audience.
So, why? What gives?
Because I know from my lived experience, that our trauma is the gateway to our transcendence. And I know for a fact we are all capable of transcendence.
Why?
Because we are designed to overcome and transcend our adversity, losses, fears and trauma.
Here’s the part of my story that planted the seed of TWBH
Hurricane Sandy was a devastating storm that hit New Jersey on October 29, 2012. It mirrored the storm that was brewing inside me for decades.
On the surface, I actually believed I was doing great, and my outward life proved that. I was happily married and had two awesome daughters. I was a successful dentist with a dream practice I had started from scratch. And I was a highly productive member of society.
But there was an unexplainable fog of fear and anxiety, and a constant unease that had plagued me for as long as I could remember. I had learned how to manage it. Or, so I thought, when I look at my life then, with the clarity of hindsight.
Certain circumstances brought the storm inside me to a head at which point I felt I had no choice but to seek professional attention as I realized my low grade, functional depression and anxiety was something I could not live with on a long-term basis.
Help me!
I went into therapy simply to seek relief from the rumination I was experiencing. At that time, I had no knowledge of what trauma was. Nor did I have any clue about Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACEs or Attachment Theory.
After some months of working with my therapist I started to feel and function better on a day-to-day basis. I made progress and learnt how to manage my anxiety better and started to understand how my emotions affected my behavior patterns.
But there was still a constant, dull ache that remained within me.
That therapist was actually the one who suggested I see a colleague of hers who practiced a type of therapy that could help me access what was going on at a deeper level. It was while I was in this therapy, called Davanloo’s Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), that my relationship with my unconscious began.
* Developed by Dr. Habib Davanloo, ISTDP, Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that aims to help patients overcome emotional and psychological difficulties by rapidly identifying and working through unconscious emotional barriers. It is based on psychodynamic principles but is more active, focused, and time-efficient than traditional long-term therapies. *
As my therapist and I began the work, I started experiencing intense emotions. And I started to ‘receive’ words. Thoughts would come to me. Images and messages would show up in my sleep.
I began to jot them all down.
Evocative cues from the unconscious
As I started to write, words became sentences, and sentences started to look like poems. Early morning was the most frequent time that words, full sentences, and occasionally complete poems would practically pour out of me. Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of having a vivid dream at night, with what I then thought was an abstract idea, that would eventually become the foundation of a poem.
As I ventured into the underground world of my unconscious, I encountered locked doors, secret passages and hidden rooms. Until my poems started to come to me, I believed I did not have the keys to the mysterious secrets that lay deep inside me
My words were like the lighthouse to the workings of my inner world. They guided me towards my buried past. They refused to give up on me when I felt I could no longer fight through the unbearable loneliness and pain of my repressed memories.
They cheered for me every time I had a breakthrough and gained insight. Sometimes they came to me in a torrent—yet at others they made me anxiously wait to reveal themselves. But whenever they appeared, they brought me my truth.
Sharing wasn’t easy but it was the right thing to do
One day, I was talking to a very dear friend of mine, Maria. She was one of the few people to whom I had disclosed the fact then that I was in therapy.
I said, “Hey, I’ve been writing some stuff.”
Maria, “Read it to me.”
Beet red, self-conscious and embarrassed that I was about to waste her time, I read her a couple of my poems.
She was speechless.
At that moment she looked me in the eye and said, “Sunit, you’ve got to publish them!”
I looked back at her in horror. “No,” I said. “I’m writing for me. And frankly, I really don’t want to tell anybody else I’m in therapy, let alone share my deeply personal thoughts and emotions, and my pain and shame.”
“No. You have to.” she insisted. “There are a lot of people who will feel encouraged to go through what you’ve in order to heal.”
That was when I realized my work resonated with someone other than me.
My poems taught me that there is no truth without honesty.
And that honesty does not exist where there is no courage.
And that for me to be courageous, I would have to turn my back on shame.
And strip. . .
During this challenging period, not only was I undergoing ISTDP and adjusting to the unexpected intense experience of writing poetry for the first time in my life, but was also raising two young daughters, trying to reconfigure my relationship with my husband and other key figures in my life, but was also responsible for taking care of my patients, leading my team, and running my business at my dental practice.
I should have broken down with all these demands on me.
But the exact opposite was happening.
Healing is neither simple, nor is it a straight line
The more I was able to face the repressed, painful, and difficult truths of my childhood in therapy, the stronger I started to feel. This process was by no means a straight line. There were many- a- days of going back and forth from darkness to light. That is actually the reason why I present my poems in The Anthology in the order in which they were received by me, so through my poems, I can demonstrate the raw untidiness of healing, and how ferociously we must fight to expel our demons and reclaim our true selves.
You just have to read the poem, ‘My Stalker’ (#39 in the 1st collection) to intimately experience the pervasiveness and tenacious hold depression, self sabotage and learned helplessness had on me.
But over time, I started to feel more and more like who I knew I was deep down inside me. With my new found strength, and the support of my family and close friends, I decided I would publish my poems.
Never in a million years
Writing was not new to me. I wrote from when I was a young girl. But the world of poetry and publishing was a new domain for me. After looking into the different ways to publish a book, I chose to self-publish it.
After all, I thought, “Stripping is my swan song. Let me put all my effort into producing the most beautiful book I can, and then get on with life.”
By that time, I was excited about a new professional challenge I had taken on. It was intense and was receiving a significant amount of my resources. I had decided to become a sleep specialist.
Writing a book and self-publishing was a massive project for me with all the roles and responsibilities I already had. But I did it with the hope that my poems would help at least one person be inspired to find their own truth.
The information I was not privy to when Stripping was published in 2018 was that my journey into my unconscious had actually just begun.
There was more poetry that that would arrive as I traversed the continuum of healing from attachment and childhood trauma to reclaim my true self. Never in a million years could I have imagined writing one poetry collection, let alone six. And I’m still counting.
Once again, these poems, just like the ones in Stripping, unlocked and documented my buried feelings, childhood deficits, longings, intense loneliness and struggles.
But as time went on, the words on my page started to reflect my strength and the powerful inner world transformation I was experiencing. When I was finally able to stand back and view this six-collection poetic journey, I discovered each poem to be bound to the next by an unbreakable thread of love.
That’s what The Way Back Home: An Anthology is all about.
It’s All About Love
Love.
Love that resurrects us. Love that guides us back from loss to life. Love that ultimately empowers us to transcend our trauma.
It’s all about love.
Timeless, timely and beyond any statute of limitations of time
TWBH is a tale that travels through time, yet is rooted in its timelessness and grounded in the collective experience of humanity. It takes you into my mind, body, brain and soul as I journey to reclaim my true self and regain my personal power.
My story, as told through these collections of poems, spans decades of my life, but cannot be separated from the history of the generations that came before me.
Through my words, you hear and feel what happens when a child experiences loss, grief and trauma. How is it that the world appeared to be the same scary place to me in adulthood and continued to haunt me?
How could I grow up so sound, accomplished, and highly successful on the outside, yet be so fragmented and unintegrated on the inside?
I learned that the process of being able to face the reality of our lives is neither easy, nor pain free. But the option of living as a prisoner of my past had become unacceptable to me.
So, I did the work.
My poems give a no-holds-barred account of a grueling and raw battle that is at times tough to read. Yet, you will be compelled to keep turning the pages until you get to the last one because I don’t only share my fight. I also share my triumph over trans-generational adversity and celebrate the wisdom of my unconscious that defied my suffering and reached out to be healed and loved.
My story is personal to me but certainly not uniquely mine. I share my triumph over darkness, so others can feel empowered and inspired to do the same and go on to live the amazing life they were meant to.
Over the years, the more I have had the privilege, as a doctor and someone who has lived through childhood trauma, to listen to people share their stories, the more I realize in today’s environment, so many of us are struggling and suffering.
Having gotten out of that cycle with the resilience to deal with the challenges life brings me, I feel it is my duty and obligation to help others empower themselves to do the same.
That’s why I am working on the proposal at my desk every day.
“It is in the very act of telling the story that the narrator achieves a form of consciousness that he has not previously been capable of.”
Until next time,
With my love and this poem for you all,
Sunita
EXPECTATIONS
Let’s play again at being reborn.
Shorn of old memories,
Knowing.
Not knowing…
Letting ourselves to begin to forget.
Giving change our permission to enter us at the edges.
Then inviting it in to nestle alongside us deep in our souls.
Remembering that we are worthy of change.
And that our new being is a reasonable expectation.
- February 4, 2024
6:57 am
#3 in my 7th collection, Now That I Am Home
Today’s blog is in honor of Jackie Brown, my dear friend who has been helping me for the past decade, maybe even longer, with the very many things I do not know how to do, actively listening to my litanies of self doubt before she offers me wise words of encouragement, and celebrating the small wins with me as they built up to become TWBH. Thank you, Jackie, for everything! And I cherish that ‘everything’ is an ongoing event for us.
