Understanding the Nature of Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability - Brene Brown - Part 3

VULNERABILITY

Vulnerability is at the core of shame, of fear, of guilt, and of self-hatred; and the struggle for love and belonging.  However, as Brene Brown points out, it is also the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging, and love.  If vulnerability is the birthplace of all those emotions that we truly cherish, then it is so vitally important to be tender and kind to ourselves, and to those around us.  Love begets more love, fear begets more fear.  It can be no other way.  When we give ourselves permission to be vulnerable, we give ourselves a chance to experience life from a place of wholeness, because we are not afraid of letting ourselves be seen.  This takes true courage, and the reward for living from this place, is you live from a place of true authenticity.  You are authentically you.

Why is it so difficult for us to be vulnerable?  For one thing, we numb vulnerability.  We don’t allow ourselves to live in vulnerability, which is about being in touch with who you are and with your feelings and emotions.  Human beings are unique in the animal kingdom because we think and we feel.  Feelings can make us feel very vulnerable and at the same time, make life so worth living.  Can you imagine what life would be like without feelings?  All the color and majesty of life would be stripped away; we wouldn't know what the sun on our skin felt like, the taste of an apple, the smell of a rose, or the tenderness of a kiss.  We wouldn't feel pain, but we also wouldn't feel joy either.  We live in a world of opposites.  This is how mankind learns – in contrasts, and it’s no different with feelings.  But we reject our negative feelings because we fear them, and what we fear, controls and dominates our lives. 

So what is it that we are so afraid of?  We are afraid of rejection.  We live in a very vulnerable world.  One moment you have a job, and the next, you've just been laid off.  Bills are piling up that you don’t know how you are going to pay.  A relationship turns sour and you don’t know if you will ever be able to love again.  Because there are so many areas of our lives where we feel threatened, or have experienced tragedy, we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable and feel those negative emotions.  It’s the only way, we believe, we can protect ourselves and our livelihood from the cold, cruel world.  What ends up happening is, instead of giving ourselves the permission to experience the negative emotions associated with a traumatic event, we numb it.  But you can’t selectively numb your emotions.  

So, this is what you do.  You think to yourself, ‘I’m not going to feel these negative emotions, it’s just too painful’.  Well, at this point, your mind employs unconscious coping strategies to drown out these toxic feelings.  For example: you go out and medicate yourself and/or engage in addictive or self-destructive behaviors; you sleep too much; you use tv, reading, or hobbies to distract you and numb out; you work compulsively at unrewarding jobs; you binge on any of the above activities when things get tough; you take out your anger and frustration by getting into fights with your loved ones; or you keep repeating painful experiences over and over again.  These are just a few ways people who have experienced trauma deal with the trauma in their lives.  Why do we do this?  

These deep seated emotions of guilt and shame are like poisons to our soul, and our soul wants to get rid of it.  It wants to be purged of all that is toxic to its well-being.  But when we numb our emotions, it’s like we put a plug on the wound hoping this will solve the problem.  It does temporarily, but like water in a plugged up pipe in your house, if you don’t clear it up, it will burst, and the mess you have to clean up later is much worse than if you just cleaned it up when you first noticed the problem.

By numbing your negative emotions, you also numb your capacity to feel love, your capacity to feel joy, and your capacity to feel good.  Life is seen through lenses that are fogged up, because your emotions are clogged up and your mind is stuck in the painful experiences of the past.  Behind all these negative feelings and emotions, are all the good feelings and emotions we want to experience: gratitude, joy, love, happiness, and authentic connection.  What ends up happening is when we don’t feel good, when we don’t feel happy, we feel miserable, and then, we’re not finding the meaning and purpose in our lives we desire, we feel despair, we feel hopeless, we feel like our lives are going nowhere, and so what do we do, we repeat the same cycle all over again.  We start drinking, we do drugs, we medicate ourselves all over again, and this becomes a dangerous cycle.  If we could just go back to the original trauma, the original place where the error occurred, and atoned for that error and heal it within ourselves, we can unravel all that we've done to ourselves to bury the pain of the experience.  We make it worse and compound the problem by employing all these other ways in which we try to cope.


Part 4, the last in this series, tomorrow.

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Understanding the Nature of Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability - The Work of Brene Brown - Part 2

WE HAVE TO ALLOW OURSELVES TO BE SEEN

In order for us to connect to others, we have to allow ourselves to be seen.  We have to give ourselves permission to show others who we really are without fear of being rejected or shamed because it is the only way we will be able to have a true authentic connection with another human being.  We have to feel worthy of connection.  Now, this is what shame boils down to: am I worthy of love, belonging, and connection?  To feel shame is to believe you are not worthy.  The opposite of shame is worthiness.  So how do you get a sense of worthiness, a deep feeling of being worthy of belonging, love, and connection?  The key is to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to speak your truth without guilt, shame, anger, or blame, and to trust that your willingness to be totally transparent, will foster the conditions to bring the truth of who you are out for all those to see.

Brene Brown talks about whole-hearted people.  Whole-hearted people feel they are worthy of connection, and have a strong sense of who they are, regardless of what other people might be saying about them.  Brown describes four characteristics of whole-hearted people: courage, compassion, connection, and vulnerability.  Courage is often confused with bravery.  One of the ways our culture has defined courage is the inner strength to face your fears, which is often equated with standing on the battlefield in the front line facing a barrage of artillery, witnessing and partaking in the horrors of battle.  This is bravery.  Courage comes from the Latin, and its etymological root is ‘of the heart.’  Hence, the true meaning of courage is to tell your story of who you are with your whole heart.  That’s what courage is. 

Whole-hearted people are able to speak the story of who they are with their whole heart.  They’re able to speak all their imperfections, their insecurities, their self-doubts, and they’re able to do that with a sense of love about themselves, and recognition of their own limitations.  Our ego-minds have a tendency to infect how we perceive ourselves. If we are not as “perfect” as our ego mind directs us to be, then, we will believe on some level, whether we are conscious of this or not, that we are not good.  Whole-hearted people do not have this conundrum.  They recognize that life is a journey; they are imperfect by nature, which gives them permission to grow and learn from their mistakes and errors consciously without the burden of the excessive weight of guilt and shame.  We can only become the people we are capable of becoming by learning from our mistakes.  If we don’t allow ourselves to learn from our mistakes, and get stuck in guilt and shame, we impede the process of our evolution.

Compassion is the understanding or empathy for the suffering of others.  Whole-hearted people have compassion for themselves, for others, and recognize their own humanity.  They have let go of anything they thought they were supposed to be, or should be, so that they could be who they are.  This enables you to have true connection with someone because you are not hiding anything.  You are showing your strengths, your weaknesses, all of it.  By allowing yourself to be truly seen, you miraculously get this deep connection we’re all searching for, but what’s unique about this kind of connection, allowing yourself to be that vulnerable, is it is authentic.  You have an authentic connection to another human being.  You’re not hiding anything, you’re not covering up anything, you’re not deceiving anybody, and thus you’re opening yourself up to be who you truly are, the whole of you. 

People who are whole-hearted fully embrace their vulnerability.  It’s not something they run away from, cowering in fear, worried about what others might think of them.  They are not afraid of losing love because they know the source of their love is inside them.  They believe their vulnerability is what makes them beautiful.  To be vulnerable is to be fully open to life, to be fully alive, and is characterized by the willingness to embrace all that life has to offer.  So, whole-hearted people forgive easily, not because the other person deserves it, but because they deserve peace.  They will be the first ones to say, ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I love you’, because they know there are no guarantees in life; they recognize the transience of the material world, and will find out and cultivate what is truly most important.  It is not material things or grievances which are of value to the whole-hearted person.  ‘Love holds no grievances’ as A Course in Miracles says.  You cannot love someone and at the same time, hold a grievance against them.  These are contradictory impulses, and deny the holder of these impulses with the ability to see past the ‘sins’ of the other to the beauty that is in them.  

All you see when you hold a grievance is the sinner, the unforgivable sinner who deserves punishment by you.  They may have done something in the past that was wrong, and the wrong may need to be addressed, but there is a difference in how you do it.  When you do it from a place of love, you respect the person who stands before you, you recognize the error they committed is not who they really are, that in that moment they fell asleep to who they truly are, and behaved in ways that were hurtful.  But you can’t solve a problem on the same level that it occurred.  You must rise up above the pain, anger, and desire for revenge, and seek what is noble in you.  When you seek what is noble in you, and act from that place of self-love and self-respect, you will begin the process of transcending the event which has caused you so much pain.  Trust in this process, and I promise you, you will see the person you hold a grievance against transform, you will no longer be holding them hostage to their past, and you and they will eventually be free from the past completely.

Tomorrow, Part 3.

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Understanding the Nature of Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability - Part 1

GUILT, SHAME, AND VULNERABILITY

One of the things you learn in my program is that mind is the cause; the observable world is the effect.  Perception is a mirror, not a fact, and what you look on is your state of mind reflected outward.  Now, in order for us to completely heal from our past, we have to understand the nature of guilt, shame, and vulnerability.  It is something that people who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and trauma are constantly fighting against, which is the regrettable memories of their past.  The things they wish they would have done differently, the things that they feel are unforgivable, that they can’t free themselves from and are imprisoned by.  Guilt and shame is a preoccupation with sin.  Sin has been used over the centuries in order to manipulate and control people and keep them down.  Religion has turned something that was intended to be used in guiding one’s conscience in order to do well and learn from one’s mistakes, and perverted the understanding to keep them in fear of God, in fear of eternal damnation, and so, as a consequence, they've been able to keep people in control through the use and manipulation of guilt and shame.

 

Sin actually is an archery term; it means ‘you missed the mark.’  It’s really about learning from your mistakes.  What sin has become is an exaggerated fear of eternal damnation.  If we sin, and God condemns us for our sins, our souls will live in the fires of hell for all eternity.  This idea has so embedded itself into our unconscious minds that we often punish ourselves in the present moment for the ‘sins’ we've made in this life before God has even passed any kind of judgment against us, and then, because we see ourselves as unforgivable sinners, we continue to do things that bring us pain, which only strengthens the idea that we are sinners, we are bad, and we are going to hell.  It’s a vicious cycle we do to ourselves without us even being aware of it.  The lives of people who suffer from guilt and shame, by virtue of these unconscious negative beliefs, can be so tortured and debilitating that one’s life is completely altered because of the things they have yet to learn from. 

So what is the nature of guilt and shame?  Guilt is ‘I've done something bad and I should feel bad about it.’  Shame is ‘I've done something bad and therefore, I am bad.’  Shame is total despair, an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, life has lost all its meaning, and there is a feeling that our errors are totally unforgivable and we will never be able to recover from it.  It is the total imprisonment of one’s self.  Shame is the lowest energy of the universe.  Someone who is so self-absorbed into their own shame cannot see how they will ever extricate themselves from the place in their lives they find themselves in.  Guilt is intimately connected with shame.  Guilt can be turned inward or guilt can be turned outward.  Guilt turned inward is self-violence; you are committing violence towards yourself.  Guilt provokes rage.   So let’s say you are guilty of doing something, or having done something, or having experienced something, and if you are non-violent, you will turn the rage that guilt provokes against yourself, and this shows up as ‘I’m not good enough, I don’t deserve this, I’m a failure, I’m not worthy, etc.’  If you are prone to violence, acting out from your pain, and projecting hatred out, you will put it ‘out there’, and then seek the means for revenge and retaliation.  That’s how guilt manifests itself.  Guilt is “the consequence of the memory of regretted past actions as they are recalled.” (Hawkins, p. 51).  What you feel is that what you have done is so bad, and what follows are the self-punitive judgments you make about your past actions. ‘I don’t deserve to have anything, I’m not worthy of anything, I’m not love-able, I’m a worthless worm in the face of God or the Universe, in the face of all my friends and loved ones’, and what pins this all together is the belief you don’t deserve to have any good and you are completely unforgivable. 

Guilt and shame have been exploited by people in position of power throughout mankind’s history to keep man down, in fear and trepidation for the welfare of his soul, and trapped in the tragedies of the past.  I’m saying to all of you, who are reading this blog; you can break free from your past!  What I want you to know is guilt is something that ages you and will make you sick.  It will show up in your body if you don’t change it and heal it.  It can be changed, it can be re-contextualized, and it can be used as a means to re-calibrate your life and your story, which helps you to make peace with your past.  PTSD and trauma suffers must learn how to overcome and transcend their guilt and shame. 

The foremost authority and expert on guilt and shame is Dr. Brene Brown, who spent ten years researching the nature of guilt, shame, and vulnerability.  Her research is a part of my program and we watch a video where she goes into detail about what she uncovered and discovered through her years of collecting data and information regarding this topic.  I’m going to share with you what’s in the video, what the meaning in it is, and what I got out of it.

Brene Brown begins by talking about connection.  The reason why we are here on this planet is to connect with others.  We want to connect with them physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.  When we have connection with others, this gives us the meaning and purpose in our lives we so deeply cherish.  If we have connection, to others, to ourselves, to all of life, our lives become imbued and filled with meaning and purpose.  We are neurobiologically programmed to feel connected to others.  When we experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or trauma from a traumatic event, whether it is war, physical abuse, emotional abuse, accidents, disasters, etc., we feel disconnected from life; we have been disconnected from connection. 

What unravels that connection is the shame.  This shame is the fear and disconnection that there is something wrong about me.  And that if others know and see this thing inside of me, what I've done, what happened to me, what I experienced, then I won’t be worthy of any connection.  This deeply rooted fear is something we all have, this is not an ‘American’ issue, this is universal.  The only ones who don’t have this fear are those who are sociopathic, who have no empathy whatsoever, who are unable to feel compassion for others, and therefore cannot connect to people on an emotional level. 

We don’t want to talk about this stuff.  No one wants to talk about their shame, no one wants to talk about their guilt, because we have been taught to suppress it.  This is the dark, ugly side of us we should avoid and separate ourselves from.  Hence, we project these unwanted qualities within us out into the world and they become our shadow figures and theses shadow figures are the things we hate about ourselves, and when we see it in others, we end up hating that quality in them.  When we project it out into the world, it can lead to violence and the acting out of our repressed desires to destroy that which we hate in them, which is really about us.  However, this doesn’t produce the desired effect of eliminating that which we loathe, and instead, what happens is our acts of violence only create more violence. 

“If you don’t talk about your shame and guilt, there’s a good chance you got it.  And the less you talk about it, the more you got it.”  Brene Brown points out that shame is lethal, it will destroy you.  As she defines it, shame is “the profound sense that you are unworthy of love and belonging.”  If you don’t feel you are deserving of love and belonging, you won’t survive.  Aristotle said that we are social by nature, thus, if we don’t feel like we belong, that is as good as death.  We may be alive, but we are dead inside.

Now, what holds this idea of shame together is the idea that ‘I’m not enough, I’m not good enough, I don’t deserve to have good things, I’m such a sinner that I don’t deserve to have the good things life has to offer’.  This idea makes us feel extraordinarily, excruciatingly vulnerable, and as a consequence, we can feel immense despair and total hopelessness of ever being able to connect again to another human being.  This state of existence can be overwhelmingly painful to the sufferer because of the deeply held unconscious fear associated with the total absence of love, which is fundamental to our existence.  

A momentary aside before I continue with the work of Brene Brown as I evaluate my own experience with guilt and shame.  I descended to the very depths of my own hell, thrust down by the heavy weight of all my past, and went through what is often called, ‘the Dark Night of the Soul’.  Now that I have fully recovered and come out the other side, I have some new understandings substantiated by personal experience.  Our greatest fear is not death.  It is the total and complete loss of love, a state of absolute lovelessness, where we have been separated from love.  This is equivalent to a total separation from God, for if God is Love, and love is the binding force of the entire universe, then if we reach the state of total separation, we must be unworthy of love, God has abandoned us, and for this we either must miserably die or savagely retaliate against love.  In my opinion, this is the source of evil.  As A Course In Miracles states, "Love cannot give evil, and what is not happiness is evil."  But that’s another discussion for a future time.

Part 2 next week.


References:

1.  Hawkins, David R., M.D., Ph.D. Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Stairway to Enlightenment.  Veritas Publishing; 1st Edition, 2006.
2.  A Course In Miracles, Workbook for Students.  Course in Miracles Society, Omaha, NE.  2008
3.  Dr. Brene Brown video, TED Talk, 2010. 

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Freedom from Depression

In light of the Robin Williams tragedy, and having experienced severe chronic depression and suicidal contemplation throughout much of my adult life after my time in the military, I feel compelled to tell you a bit of my story during the darkest times with my battle with depression, PTSD, and trauma.  It is my hope and intention that what I share will be healing for those who might be battling their own personal demons and feel there is no way out.  Some of the things I will share in the next few blogs are very dark, and are not suitable for children.  I am exposing my demons to you, and thus I ask that you please read this first before any young children read it.  By sharing my battle with my inner demons, I hope it will serve to stop someone who might be thinking of ending their life, and get some help.  Getting help was the best decision I've ever made.  It helped me to find the joy for my life once again.


Depression

One of the most common consequences of someone who has experienced Post-Traumatic Soul Distress or trauma in their lives is the experience of depression.  Depression is something we all have experienced at least once in our lives.  It's very common.  It can be traced back to ancient biblical times.  Depression is as common as man has been on this earth.  In the energy field of depression, we view ourselves and the world as sad and hopeless; a place of sin and immeasurable, unending suffering; and our view of God or Source is someone who doesn't love us, who ignores us; who has no feelings for us, is uncaring, and who we feel separated from and abandoned by.  Essentially, at its core, we feel separated from life.  The most common feelings associated with depression are self-blame, self-loathing, guilt, shame, and worthlessness.  In addition, a sufferer of depression feels powerless to do anything about his condition or effect positive changes in the world he lives in that might change his perspective.  He feels total hopelessness and despair that his life, and life in general, has no meaning and no purpose.  There are many regrets about the past.  There are paralyzing fears about the future. Attached to both of these are the feelings of guilt and anger.  Depression can be described as anger turned inward.

What happens is we project what gives us value and what gives us meaning as outside of ourselves.  We place value and significance on other people, on our families, on our jobs or careers, on our possessions, and things which are transitory in nature.  We give away our power to these "outside things" because we believe they will give us the love, recognition, validation, and identity we need, and thus imbue our lives with meaning and purpose.  This, we believe, will give us the connection we want.  A depressed person is not able to make this connection.  When the outside sources of their happiness has failed them or been lost to the regrettable past, whether it's a person, place, or thing, the internal emptiness one feels can be so overwhelming it's crippling.  The sufferer can become so incredibly despondent where he is barely able to function, all is dark, his life force completely drained, and he has no will to live.  The future is gone, and what he lost, can never be replaced or replicated, it's gone forever.  This perceived lack and total separation from life can be so detrimental to the point where the person feels the only way to extricate himself from this excruciating pain is to commit suicide.  To feel separated from that which we want is to unconsciously feel separated from God as our Source.  We are totally separated from the source of our happiness.

For most of my life, I was sad and depressed.  As a child, I was quiet, shy, gentle, and sad.  That doesn't mean I didn't have good times; I did, I have many, many beautiful memories from my childhood and adolescence, my battle with depression doesn't negate or take away from any of those times, they were the times I lived for.  However, as I grew older, I began increasingly feeling more sad, lonely and depressed, never quite measuring up in my mind to the people around me, always seeing others outside of myself as being happier, more content, having a better life.

It's not like I wanted to be depressed.  Depressed people know they're depressed, and they know no one wants to be around someone who is depressed all the time.  It's depressing.  When family or others take notice something is wrong, you try to pretend nothing is wrong, because you don't want to burden them with your feelings about your life or your relationship to the world.  You put on a mask to the world that everything is fine, but inside you're in the dark.  You feel everyone's pain around you, and take it on as your own, which depresses you even more.  Something inside of you knows something is not right, something is terribly wrong with the way the world operates, and how you operate, and you feel helpless to do anything about it.

By the time I was an officer in the Air Force, I was suffering from chronic depression, it was plaguing my life, and nothing I was doing offered any escape from the sense of hopelessness and despair I felt.  And then, I experienced my trauma by working on the GPS/NDS program.  I was in charge of the operational readiness and capability of these mobile ground units that would only be used for Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment and Nuclear Force Management.  End-to-end nuclear war.  Under my leadership, my team and I executed all mission essential testing which resulted in full operational acceptance and turnover of a new system - a first for the NDS survivable ground mission.  You can find all this stuff on my Officer Performance Reports, so nothing I am telling you is classified.

I remember the moment my soul was wounded by the work I was engaged in.  I was sitting in one of these units doing some testing with one of our contractors, and as I was sitting there, I looked around, and imagined what would be happening if this machine was actually being used.  There would be all out nuclear war.  Life on earth, as we know it, would be over.  And I had contributed my life in service to our nation to ultimately see to its destruction.  I saw images of nuclear bombs going off; I saw the people using this machine that I and my team had made operational and ready to conduct the war, and it made me sick.  I remember a big knot in my stomach as these and other thoughts consumed my mind, and I said to myself, 'This is not what I signed up for.  I wanted to preserve, protect, and defend our nation.  Not participate in the planning for the destruction and annihilation of mankind.'  I received a deep, moral, spiritual wound in that moment.  We all want to contribute something to this world.  That what I did served a higher purpose, it added to the continuity of life, and made life better.  No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't see how what I was doing served any higher purpose.  To me, it was premeditated mass murder.  And there was nothing I could do to change what I believed at the time was the inevitable outcome of the work I contributed my life and talents to.  My soul revolted.  And my depression about the future of humanity reached new depths never before experienced.  I sought to 'numb out', and, as I will explain later in another blog, that is exactly what I did.

Depressed people literally have depressed cells.  Happy people have happy ones.  And the reason why we are depressed is because we have placed the source of our happiness as being outside of ourselves.  There is an internal emptiness inside so deep and pervasive, nothing seems to satisfy this perceived lack - you can see the beauty on the outside, but not inside.  There is this intolerable feeling that we have built up a veil of morality on a amoral reality.  Nothing is as it should be; violence, death, and destruction rule this realm, and all we can do is stand up to it as best we can.  For some of us, this is too much to bear, and we medicate ourselves or consider suicide as the only option to free ourselves from the suffering.  I'm sharing with you my personal experience with PTSD and depression; others may have a different experience with it, but the essence is the same.

Beneath these disturbing thoughts and feelings I was having about my life and the world I lived in was all the pain, the loneliness, the hopelessness, and despair of my life that I carried with me from the genetic and historical transmission of trauma passed down to me through my father and mother.  Traumas get passed down through the generations.  It's not anybody's fault.  We are all innocent at birth, and the world we are brought into gives us the experiences we have.  Whatever is not consciously contained by one generation gets passed down which then necessarily and largely unconsciously plays itself out through the next generation.

I was completely unconscious of what was going on with me on the inside, in my inner world.  I didn't know why I was always depressed.  I didn't know why I felt the way I did, I didn't know why I couldn't seem to fit in, I didn't know why I felt so disconnected to all of life and the people around me, I didn't know where this pain came from or why it came to me.  Of course, I didn't show it, or let anyone know I was so severely depressed because I didn't want to seem weak or unmanly.  As a matter of fact, I put on the opposite face, the happy party guy, to cover up what was really going on.  But by putting on a face and burying the pain I felt on the inside only made things exponentially worse.  I didn't have the tools or resources at that time to face my depression and everything else that was in me that needed to be faced and healed.  Instead, I coped with my depression and my traumas, by 'drowning out my sorrows' through alcohol and later drugs.

I want to conclude this by suggesting depression might be our friend.  If looked at in the right way, perhaps this is nature's way, or our own psychology's way, or God's way of pointing out to us that something is not right in the way we see our life.  And, it's my belief now, after years of battling with depression, it is our psychological, biological, and spiritual way of putting on the brakes and addressing that within us that needs to be re-examined.  It's as if our own soul is saying to us, "Please look at this.  Please understand me out of your compassion.  Just love me.  Heal me, heal all of it."  When we address the fear underlying the depression, we give ourselves a chance to finally be free of it.  Having the courage to look at what is depressing us with the eyes of compassion and non-judgment, having the intention to at least look at the subject as promising and hopeful, changes our relationship to depression.  We are no longer at the mercy of it.  We know it is trying to teach us something.  It wants us to come back to ourselves and be the source of our own happiness regardless of the circumstances on the outside.  And, if we can look at it and discover that "there is a benefit in here for me, not only for this particular situation, but for the rest of my life.  When I solve it, I solve it for all time within myself."  With this in mind, you empower yourself.   You lift your energy up, you give yourself a chance to find the gold in the dark.  And when you finally do find it, like a bird set free from its cage, you will miraculously be free to be yourself again.
  

What to do to break free from Depression without having to resort to alcohol, drugs, or pharmaceuticals:

• Be the source of your own happiness
• Fill yourself up with love by doing things you love that are not dependent on anyone else
• Look at the 'worst case scenarios' and face your fears
• Learn to be content with being by yourself; you're going to be with you your whole life, might as well be your best and most loving friend
• Surround yourself with people who will inspire and motivate you; join groups that get you out of yourself and into life
• Stay active; exercise regularly
• Spend time in nature
• Meditate
• Treat yourself the way you deserve to be treated, it makes you feel good
• Laugh a lot; smile.  That alone can lift up your energy and pick your spirits up
• Have a life coach, therapist, or trusted friend whom you can talk to whenever you feel down.  These are people who have earned the right to hear your story.  They can be your greatest resource for empathy, connection, and can help put things in perspective and offer solutions
• Enroll in a Tai-chi, karate, or movement meditation class.  You want to move the negative energy lodged in the body caused by the depression or trauma and release it through active movement
• Start a yoga practice
• Get plenty of sleep to re-charge your body and mind
• Cultivate gratitude in your life.  Have a gratitude journal that you write in everyday 5 things for which you are grateful for, and 3 things for which you are grateful for not
• Find a way to be of service
• Always learn something new.  You want to be growing all the time
• Treat your body like a temple.  Feed it only good things
• Remember: your life is a gift!    

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Understanding the Difference Between Pain and Suffering

What is the difference between pain and suffering?  Can pain and suffering lead us to a more purposeful life?   Is it possible to find the courage within us to let go and surrender to whatever might be happening or has happened in our life in order to transcend our suffering and return to a state of bliss?  I know this might be a hard thing to grasp, especially if you are in the middle of the storm right now, but let's take a look at what pain is.  Pain is essentially a range of unpleasant bodily sensations that are produced by an illness, an accident, etc.  A hurtful word can cause pain.  Pain can be momentary, a pain that passes; or it can be chronic, an injury or illness that affects us for long periods of time, perhaps our whole life.  Pain forces us to slow down and return back to ourselves;  it remind us of what's important, and often we must take time to heal our wounds.  Suffering, on the other hand, is significantly different.  With suffering, we're undergoing some kind of pain, grief, trauma, experience, or damage that is agonizing to the individual and is experienced over an indefinite period of time.  Suffering is contained and finds its sustenance in the mind.  When we suffer, we keep reliving the past in our minds, and our emotions are dominated by the feelings of guilt, shame, anger, regret, grief, and blame.  It's as if a part of our soul has been trapped and locked down by this event or experience, and our lives are forever altered and damaged by what has occurred.  We can also suffer over the future, and this is rooted in fear - fear of what might happen or could happen.  As a consequence of suffering, we are both our own jailer and prisoner.  Our thoughts and memories attack us from the inside, we are continually bombarded with intrusive, disquieting, tormenting remembrances or fantasies, and at times, it feels the suffering will never end.

By understanding the difference between pain and suffering, by breaking it down and looking at what is actually happening, we might be able to find a key to having that long lasting, self-maintaining natural happiness we all want.  This idea comes from the brilliant work of Roman Braun.  Roman Braun is a master trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and is a disciple of Vicktor Frankl's work, Logotherapy.  After many years of research and work in both fields, Braun has developed a model which incorporates both Frankl's emphasis on finding meaning in the experience, finding its purpose, and his own work in NLP.

Braun discovered that one of the difficulties with Frankl's model is in putting it into practice.  How does an individual take these big, deep, philosophical ideas about the meaning of one's life and apply it to their everyday experiences?  How does he or she incorporate and weave this into their daily life and habits?  For example, we might discover the meaning of our existence is to love all life without judgment, and yet, we often find ourselves challenged by people who's behavior is unconscious and unloving.  It becomes even more difficult to sustain a high level of love for others when you have experienced violence, war, and cruelty, in whatever form.  And yet, you must find a way, regardless of circumstances, to discover and live out the creed in your heart.  This is a challenge we all face, no matter what stage of life we are in, where we live, or what we do, to put into practice the meaning of our lives, and not get sucked into the enormity of suffering everywhere on this planet, our own and others.

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the basic idea of this model is that humans are pain-avoiding and pleasure-seeking beings.  It is possible to get very quick results with NLP, however, usually, it is not long lasting.  Why?  Well, one of the biggest problems with this model is that a lot of the most important aspects of what it means to be human it doesn't explain.  If we are pain avoiding and pleasure-seeking machines, as NLP suggests, this doesn't explain why a child will deliberately put his hand in the cookie jar when he knows he'll get in trouble for doing so;  or why a human being will deliberately run into a burning building in order to save a person or a beloved animal's life; or why a soldier will jump out in the middle of heavy cross-fire to rescue his wounded brother wounded on the field of battle, or dive onto a live grenade to save the lives of his brothers so they may live, and he will die.  These examples do not support the idea that all we are is pain avoiding, pleasure-seeking creatures.  There's another motivation deep inside us.

Roman Braun was seeking a common denominator for both models concerning the soul and human behavior. He was driving one day on the highway and was stuck in traffic, and while they were parked on the highway, he looked over and he saw this woman who was yelling and screaming in her car at someone who wasn't even there!  Now, how many of you can relate to this?  Have you ever found yourself in an argument with someone who wasn't in front of you, who wasn't even there?  I certainly have.  During the darkest times in my crisis with PTSD and trauma, I was having arguments and fights with people all the time in my imagination.  I would have long, melodramatic dialogues with these individuals; I would rerun certain events in my memory, and then imagine meeting this person, whether it was male or female, and give them a piece of my mind.  Very often I was having arguments with God, or with myself, and screaming, literally, 'What did I do to deserve this?  Why did this happen to me?  How can people be so cruel!  How could I be so cruel!'  Looking back on it, had someone looked in on what I was doing, they might of thought I was crazy.

Braun realized there was a problem.  Seeing this woman yelling at someone who wasn't even there doesn't fit in with the Logotherapy model of Viktor Frankl.  There's no purpose behind it.  And, it didn't fit into the NLP model which would suggest that we are pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking beings, because, if we were, we wouldn't yell and scream at someone who's not there.  We wouldn't be obsessing about past traumas, old dramas, reliving past memories and the things that had happened to us that were hurtful or painful.

Here's a question I want to ask all of you: have you ever noticed that when you experience pain, say for instance, someone said or did a hurtful thing to you, you feel the pain in the moment, the moment passes, but the suffering over it is huge?  You could be thinking and suffering about this for days, weeks, months on end, maybe even years!  Why do we do this??  This is what Roman Braun set out to uncover.

When Roman Braun combined the two models together, this is the model he came up with:

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

PAIN                       PLEASURE

Purpose     FULL Surrender                    Joy                                       

        LESS  Suffering                 Distraction                      

To understand this, you must combine the Purpose (Full or Less) with the NLP attributes of Pain or Pleasure.  What you come up with are four combinations:  Purpose-Full Pain, Purpose-Less Pain, Purpose-Less Pleasure, and Purpose-Full Pleasure.  Let's break it down even further so you fully grasp the meaning behind each combination.

Purpose-Full Pain:  To many of you, this might seem ludicrous.  However, after interviewing many new mothers who had just given childbirth, Braun discovered something fascinating about each mother's response to the pain endured and how much they suffered.  On a pain scale of 1 to 100, 100 being the most excruciating pain you can imagine, childbirth ranks at or above 100 (sorry guys, but the gals got us on this one!).  Every new mother he interviewed, though they experienced a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, in the moment, not one of them looked back and said they suffered any pain.  So, here you have this extraordinary amount of pain, delivering a child, but no suffering.  Braun asked why?  What he concluded was that the reason they didn't suffer was because this pain adds something to the continuity of life.  As a consequence, the women experienced no suffering.  In Braun's model he calls this surrender.

Purpose-Less Pain:  This is what we would call, and Braun identifies in his model, as suffering.  This can be caused by the smallest of pains.  For example, someone says something to us that offends or insults us.  A simple look can cause suffering.  In these situations, both parties lose, because it doesn't serve their best interests, and it brings out the worst in each person.  Usually, deep down, both parties want to make something better of the situation than what actually happened, but their suffering prevents them from being able to see things with new eyes, and atone and forgive whatever errors may have been perpetrated or experienced by both parties.

Purpose-Less Pleasure:  Is there such a thing?  At first sight, this may seem absurd.  But if we dig deep enough, we discover that yes, there is such a thing as Purpose-Less Pleasure.  Someone who is depressed or suicidal after having experienced a traumatic event, who is experiencing PTSD, might resort to using medical or illegal drugs and/or alcohol in order to medicate themselves from the pain and suffering that they are experiencing.  This helps the person to 'numb-out'.  There is pleasure in reducing one's pain, one's suffering.  And for a time, this might be exactly what is called for to survive.  The danger of using this means as a way of escaping the suffering is the possibility of addiction.  Very often people become addicted to the substances their using.  Many suffers will recognize this eventually, and attempt to stop, then they realize the suffering is still there and has been made worse because of the addiction.  Why is it worse?  There are a lot of reasons.  Perhaps their relationships have broken off; there might be a loss of self-esteem and confidence; there's added guilt and shame for the things they did; there are so many reasons that make the matters worse.  What then often happens, is the sufferer returns to the drugs, alcohol or medications to reduce the pain and suffering.  This becomes a vicious cycle.  All drugs have this, whether its legal or illegal, or whether its alcohol, you have a momentary pleasure now, you feel good, but then afterwards, you feel so much worse.  Braun calls this distraction, because you are distracting yourself from the suffering.  Most people move between suffering and distraction.  You are suffering, you're in pain, you distract yourself, you feel good for a while, and then you move back into suffering.  I know this was my pattern.  Can any of you reading this relate?  I know I'm not alone in this.

Purpose-Full Pleasure:  Simply put, this is joy.  Joy is extreme pleasure or gladness.  Joy comes from knowing what connects you to that which makes your heart sing, which fills you up with so much love you can barely contain yourself from the exuberance you feel for your life.  Joy can come from the pleasure that you seek by doing things with others that help you grow and be of service to others.  There exists a natural process of giving and receiving, where no one feels used, and that everyone gains from the connection and interaction.  There's joy that comes from doing the things you love - swimming, hiking, yoga, singing, dancing, horseback riding, etc.  These examples are activities you do that resonate in the deepest part of your soul and adds to the richness of your life.  Joy can also come from the sharing of ideas.  It brings me great joy to share my thoughts with you about how you can heal and transform your life after PTSD and trauma.

Many, if not most people who suffer from PTSD and trauma, are vacillating between suffering and distraction.  How, then, can you get to the next level where you are living between surrender and joy?  Is it even possible?  From my own personal experience, there is a magic that starts happening when you begin to seek answers to these questions.  When I made the decision that I was going to heal myself of all the pains, traumas, and sufferings of my past, when I decided I was no longer going to distract myself from the work that needed to be done, I was able, after dedicating years of personal effort, to move up to the level between surrender and joy.  I faced what was in me that needed to be faced, I grasped the courage to move through all the suffering and pain I had accumulated over 39 years of my life, gave myself the tools and permission to allow all this stuff to be processed, and healed.  I reclaimed my life.  You can do this too.  I have the program when you are ready.

When we re-frame our story, in order to extract the good that came out of it, to learn the lessons hidden in the traumatic experiences, to find the treasure, it enables you to stand taller, free from the pains and sufferings of your past, and move up to the level of surrender and joy, ready to create a new future unlike anything you have yet to experience.  We have to be willing to ask ourselves this question for whatever suffering we've gone through:  Are we willing to pay the price for it?  When you discover for yourself that it is possible to move from suffering and distraction to surrender and joy, you start to participate in life that feels so magical.  You're happy for no reason at all.  Why?  Because that's where we all started from, we all began this journey through life living between surrender and joy.  As children, we all had this.  Children have a lot of surrender and joy.

Did you ever think about how many times a child falls down before he or she learns how to walk?  A child may fall down 300 times before he or she walks.  They have no sense of failure, no sense of suffering that we adults have.  If a child fell down the first time he or she tried to walk and began suffering over it - 'Oh, I'm never going to get up, I bumped my head, my legs don't work right, it's just too hard' - none of us would have walked.  The child keeps going regardless of the challenges and struggles he or she may have and does it without suffering.  Why do they do this?  Simply stated, because they are adding to the continuity of life, its own life and all of life in general.

Good news is this is hardwired into our brains, this place of surrender and joy.  When you realize you don't have to avoid pain, you don't have to avoid suffering, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel of your suffering, you soon discover you don't even have to look for happiness, because it wells up from within.  Once we have transcended and transformed our suffering and distraction, we can learn to live with the right amount of joy and surrender in our lives.  You're doing this right now just by reading this blog.  There's a certain amount of joy that comes from learning and understanding something new about yourselves.  And, there's a bit of surrender, because I'm sure there's a lot of things you could be doing right now that would probably give you a lot more pleasure than reading my thoughts.  You're giving up a little bit of your pleasure right now in the hopes that it adds something to your life's purpose.  We want to make this moment the rule, not the exception.

As Roman Braun states, "Let the days of suffering and distraction, let that be the exception in your life."  We can fill our lives with meaning and purpose on a daily basis, we just have to want it more than we want suffering.  There is a balance between having the right amount of challenges in our lives and the right amount of joy.  We must find this for ourselves.  We can live meaningful, purposeful lives that adds to the continuity of life.  My challenge to you is to fill every moment of your life with everything you got, don't waste a second.        

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

  

Can Traumas Lead Us To Becoming the Great Leaders We Were Meant To Be?

Is it possible that your traumas came into your life to allow you to be the great leader you were meant to be?  This is a question I've been pondering in light of the events in my own life where I experienced deep, moral, piercing, traumatic wounds to my soul.  The profound wisdom gained from those experiences only those experiences could teach me.  They are now the fuel and inspiration guiding me on what to do and who to become.  Naturally, I think, we look to others who have come before us to serve as examples of what is possible when we take what has happened to us and transform it into an instrument of good in the world.  Many of the great men and women who have contributed the most to the betterment of our society have suffered through soul distress and trauma.  Regardless of what form the trauma came in as, it was their personal trial, their moment in time where they would never be the same, and, for all intents and purposes, their 'old self' died.  Their greatness was birthed in the intense fires of transformation brought about by the traumas, and today, we are immeasurably grateful for their great sacrifices and contributions.  Some prime examples from the 20th Century of people who suffered for causes greater than themselves, and who's suffering was an indelible part of their identity include:  Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, Rosa Parks, and Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor.  On 25 September 1942, Frankl and his wife were deported to the Nazi Theresienstadt Ghetto in Bohemia.  His father, mother, and brother were also arrested.  His father died of starvation.  His mother and brother were later killed at Auschwitz in 1944.  His wife died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945.  Only Frankl and his sister Stella survived, his sister having escaped to Australia before the Nazis began the implementation of their plans for the genocide of the Jews.

Frankl endured unimaginable suffering and extreme losses in his life, and yet, he was still able to transform his traumas and soul distress by his ability to find meaning in the experience.  In his internationally famous book, Man's Search for Meaning, his personal account of being a concentration camp inmate, Frankl clearly articulates that even in the midst of extreme suffering, in the most absurd, painful, and dehumanizing situations, there still exists a potential to find meaning in the experience.  One particular episode changed him completely.  His epiphany came to him while under the most grueling and harsh working conditions of the Nazi concentration camps.  The inmates were stumbling in the darkness.  The guards were shouting and driving them like cattle, treating them like inhuman slaves, relentless and unmercifully cruel with the butts of their rifles.  People were leaning on each other for support.  The wind was blowing icy cold against their lean, sallow faces, and hardly a word was spoken.  There was a man standing next to Viktor covering his mouth behind his upturned collar.  He whispered to Viktor saying, "If our wives could just see us now.  I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

Frankl thought about his wife.  And though he was miles away, slipping on the ice, and not knowing what was going to happen to him on that day, he clung to his wife's image, seeing every detail - her smile, her laughter, the way she answered him, her supportive and encouraging look - and this image was more brilliant to him than the sun that was beginning to rise.  In that moment, Frankl learned this profound truth:

The salvation of Man is through love and in love.  I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.  (1963, p. 59)

 Frankl recognized that there was one key difference to those who would survive and those who wouldn't.  A vision for the future - be it significant or personal.  Those that had a vision for the future - whether it was contemplating their beloved, their life's work, or things they still desired to do or experience - if given a chance to survive, they survived.  But those who collapsed into the suffering, who had no meaning, who had no purpose to live, died.  So he learned through his suffering that their was meaning to be gained from it.  That it doesn't matter what's happened to you, it's how you respond to it.  You're attitude is everything.  In Man's Search for Meaning Frankl says this:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.  (1963, p. 104)

This falls very much in line with what the philosopher Nietzsche said about a man's will.  Nietzsche believed that if a man has the 'Why' for his existence, he can endure just about anything.  When you focus your attention on a vision for the future, and connect to what brings value and meaning in your life, you give yourself the primary motivational force to overcome and transcend your suffering.

Frankl could very easily have used his experiences to remain in perpetual and constant suffering.  He could have blamed his oppressors, the Nazis, attacked them, shamed them for murdering his family, and lived in anger and hatred for the rest of his life.  But Frankl chose not to.  Instead, he found meaning and purpose in his suffering, he personalized it, which neutralized the suffering, and allowed him the space to transcend his pain and weave it into his life's work.  Thus, ironically, his traumas became the essential ingredients that helped him to shape and develop his system called Logotherapy.

Logotherapy.  The word Logos is a Greek word that has multiple meanings.  It means Word, Spirit, Meaning, God.  Frankl differed from Freud and Adler in that Freud thought pleasure and satisfaction were the driving forces behind man while Adler thought it was power.  Frankl saw the driving force of our existence as a will to meaning.  That we must give meaning to our lives in order to imbue them with purpose, fulfillment, and hope.

In order for us to transcend our traumas, and emerge greater than we were before, we must find the meaningfulness it has for our lives.  We give meaning to everything.  Nothing is meaningful or everything is meaningful.  In those moments Frankl could have been like others and been looking at the wrongs that were being done to him.  Instead he utilized what was available to give his life meaning.  Utilizing what's available in your trauma holds the opportunity to make the biggest transformation.  In what way can you look at your trauma to see things differently?  As human beings, we are responsible, we are existentially responsible for the meaning of our own existence.

You are responsible for the meaning you give to everything in your life.  Those living without meaning, living in hopelessness and despair, must conjure up the courage to dig deep and make contact with the light within them.  What is this mysterious 'light within' that everyone talks about?  Is it an invisible light, a flame that burns in the darkness, or is it an idea or feeling one has for one's own right to exist in love and freedom?  Only you can answer that question for yourself.  You don't need to know anything beyond what lights you up.  Viktor Frankl had the image of his wife to light him up.  I had my love for my own life and my love for humanity to light me up.  You've got something in there that may or may not be connected to the moment you are in that lights you up.  Traumas can show us where we need to look.  It's not outside, but inside where we will find the treasure.

Thank you for reading this for it gives meaning to all that I went through.  You're contributing to my meaning.  Whether you know it or not, your reading it, it being available, has given meaning to my life.

In the next part, we'll dig even deeper.


References:

Frankl, V. E. (1963).  (I. Lasch, Trans.)  Man's Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy.  New York:  Washington Square Press.  (Earlier title, 1959:  From Death-Camp to Existentialism.  Originally published in 1946 as Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager)

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

The WOOF-WOOF Performance for Veterans and PTSD Survivors and Panel Discussion

Recently, I produced a show, a play, with my production company partner, Paul Hoan Zeidler, called WOOF-WOOF.  Sewer Socialist Productions produced the play in the Hollywood Fringe Festival, a two week festival celebrating the performing arts.  Our show received many accolades and praises from the audiences who came to see it.  The houses were sold out and the actors received standing ovations.  The organizers of the festival decided it would deserve an encore performance, and they asked me to put together a panel discussion following the show highlighting solutions to PTSD and trauma.  The question the panel was answering was what we can do to help our many veterans now who are suffering from this problem all over the country and the world.  Through the gracious plug of our show by the incredible and amazing Gail Soffer, executive director of the non-profit organization Operation Mindful Warrior, many different people connected with veteran organizations as well as vets called in and wanted to see the play.  In just a few days, we were getting so many responses from people who wanted to come see the show, Paul and I were both humbled and thrilled.  One of our missions for our production company, Sewer Socialist Productions, is to bring intelligent, compassionate plays that speak to the challenges our society is facing, and bring healing and catharsis through the incredible power of theater.

WOOF-WOOF is an original piece.  It's about a young man coming back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he suffers from PTSD and TBI, and after being dismissed from Walter-Reed Medical Hospital, instead of going home, he visits his childhood friend in New York, as he tries to re-connect and re-integrate back into society.  One of the reasons I was so excited about this play was because not only is it timely but the play speaks to a whole generation of young men affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both directly and indirectly.  It's not the kind of play that's in your face "this is a play about PTSD and the wars"; no, it's more subtle, more human.  On one level, it is about the war and how it affected a whole generation of young men; on another level, it's about one young man coming back from the war and trying to find someway of re-connecting to the world he feels so disconnected to.  On another level, it's about friendship.  Each of these characters represents an aspect of our society that has evolved since the 9/11 attacks.  Paul's approach in the writing was not to beat the audience over the head with someone who has PTSD; rather it is someone who has it, who just wants to feel good again, and hopes that by reuniting with his best friend from high school, he might get to do that again.  Why I think it's relative is because it speaks the language the young men in our society are now speaking, on their level, without moralizing about whether the war was right or not.   The actor who played 'Jimmy', the Iraqi war vet, allowed the audience to see his pain, to feel what he was going through, and how much he longed to go back to being "normal".  We watched how this hope within him is dashed as the impacts of the war leak out, and puts the friendship on the line.

Jimmy:  I just wanted to come here....And feel good.

                  (beat)

Jimmy:  Woof-Woof.

Chuck: (sympathetically)  Woof-Woof.

Brett Donaldson, who played 'Jimmy', was nominated for an award for his performance during the festival.  Jay Seals and Devin Skrade played the other two characters in the story.  Each character is struggling with something, it wouldn't be a play without the interweaving of the relationship and history of these other two characters, but the play was about Jimmy.  And the actors we had for this play were phenomenal!  All of them are incredibly talented, gifted actors who's passion for the craft is second to none!  We were absolutely blessed to have them on our team.

This was a deeply personal play for me.  As you all know who read this blog, PTSD had marked me and my family as a consequence of three generations serving our country.  I'm now working towards healing soul distress and trauma in all our veterans, families, and others who suffer from this, and producing this play, unknowingly, had been extraordinarily healing for me.  I didn't know this when Paul and I decided to put it up, but after I came back from my sacred pilgrimage to Greece with Dr. Edward Tick, something had changed within me, and I was suddenly immersed in the play on a much deeper level than before.  I worked with the actor playing Jimmy personally, coached him through what it was like for someone who suffered from PTSD, what they did, how they behaved, and what was going on on the inside.  He took the notes brilliantly.  When the guys were performing, I would stand in the back watching the play, and when certain moments came up, I could feel this well of tears fill up my eyes.  When you're on the other side, and you see and know the pain someone else is experiencing, deeply understanding the pain, it's hard to hold back emotions.

It was such a joy, a blessing to be a part of this production.  And producing this play taught me something extraordinarily valuable.  It helped me to recognize once more how powerful theater can be to help our veterans and others who are or who have experienced PTSD to be able to access feelings inside of them they've buried deep within.  What I witnessed and experienced was the power of the story giving people permission to feel vulnerable, something they often don't allow themselves to feel in their 'normal' lives.   By access those parts of us that have been damaged by a world that can be cruel, destructive, and violent, by experiencing through the lives of the characters on the stage hope, pity and fear, we, the audience, who bear witness to the tragedy on the stage, experience a momentary catharsis, a release of the pent up, toxic emotions connected to the traumas we have experienced in our own lives, and heal our souls just a little bit.  We feel connected to the greater story of humanity, we understand we are not alone in our suffering, and we recognize ourselves in the characters on the stage.  This is one of the reasons why I love the theater so much: because of the immense power it has to transform and heal our wounds.  I know we can continue to share this story with others, and put on other productions, that deal with this issue.  Jimmy's story is our story, just like every veteran, friend, and family member of  a veteran out there who has a story about their experiences, is our society's story as well.  We must find a way to bring these stories out into the light, to collectively experience them, so the veteran, friend, or family member of a veteran doesn't have to shoulder the burden of his or her pain all on their own.  We have an obligation as a society, as a community, to give voice to the voiceless and to help those in pain find freedom from their pain through the telling of their stories.  The reason we share our stories is so they no longer hold power over us.  Then, we can once again become free to express ourselves in kind, constructive, and loving ways.  Theater is one of the best ways in which we can do this.

    
Reviews - 

Here is one of the reviews we had of the play.  Bob Leggett writes for the LA Examiner, is a former Navy veteran, and after the performance, he stood up and gave a resounding applause.  He hugged me afterwards.  I've taken out the part he wrote about our play.  These are his words:

For my last two shows of the night I headed back to Theatre Asylum. The first of those two shows, Woof Woof, continued the theme ofPTSD begun at We Can be One. As I mentioned in that review, though, Woof Woof came at the subject from a totally different perspective.

Woof Woof tells the story of Jimmy, a veteran of the Iraq War who suffers from PTSD and traumatic brain injury as a result of an IED attack on his unit. Recently released from the Warrior Transition Unit at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., he hitchhikes to NYC to see his childhood friend, Chuck, who he hasn't seen in eight years.

Jimmy is played by Brett Donaldson, who breathes life into the character, making the audience feel his pain and suffering as a result of his service to his country. Mad Men's Jay Seals likewise truly inhabits Chuck who, although not a veteran, suffers from his own form of PTSD as a result of a childhood incident with Jimmy. Rounding out the cast is Devin Skrade, who plays Chuck's roommate and friend, Brandon, and is hiding a dirty secret from Chuck.

Paul Hoan Ziedler has written an impressive script that is truly brought to life by his brilliant direction and an amazing cast. I felt Jimmy's pain, understood Chuck's misguided attempt to help his friend, and even forgave Brandon's betrayal. This play moves you, and leaves you in a different place than when you first entered the theater.

If you want a better understanding of what a soldier feels like upon his/her return from a war time deployment, I strongly encourage you to see this show.

To see other reviews of the show, please click on the link below to the Encore Producer Awards website:

https://www.theencoreawards.com/projects/1494



Panel Discussion - Solutions to PTSD and Trauma

I have a vision of a world where people like you and me are Healed and Free from the PTSD and trauma each of us have experienced in our lives.  To support that vision, I organized, assembled, and led a conversation following the performance of the play discussing Healing Trauma and Soul Distress.  On the panel were some very distinguished and venerated experts who are helping those with PTSD.  I was so honored and grateful for their timeless contributions to the discussion; I chose them because I believe they are the best at what they do; many of them were instrumental in guiding me on my path to healing myself completely of PTSD and trauma, and creating the best program out there that I know of for healing PTSD and trauma that I have found.  I was blessed to have them come and share the stage with me.  Let me give you a quick bio of each of the members of the panel:

• Gail Soffer - is the Executive Director of Operation Mindful Warrior, a non-profit organization bringing mindfulness practices to our veterans.  Her background working with veterans and their issues is extensive including:  Director of Development and Marketing, Board Member at Wellness Works in Glendale; The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF), Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project, and The Soldier's Project.
• Sarah Larsen M.D. - A Third Generation Palm Reader, Medical Intuitive, and Transformational Leader.  Since she received a degree as a Medical Doctor from the Medical University of the Americas, she has taught tens of thousands of people to heal themselves, elevate the way they think, speak, and ultimately how they live.  Her areas of expertise and training include: Allopathetic (Western Medicine), Ayurvedic Medicine, Epigenetics, Edgar Cayce Medicine, Gersion Therapy, Homeopathy, Energy Healing, & Anthroposophic Medicine.  (Dr. Larsen is one of my mentors, and a dear friend.  She co-created my program.  Together, collectively, we have dedicated 20,000 hours of research into healing PTSD)
• Miguel Rivera - Elder and Executive Director, Western Gate Roots and Wings Foundation, has worked with at risk youth for over thirty years, including youth in the juvenile hall and detention camps.  In 2011, he was approached to work with the veteran population.  Miguel continues to serve the communities of Los Angeles with Rites of Passage work, including Solstice and Equinox gathering at the Wright Organic Resource Center, as well as sweat lodges for various populations in the surrounding communities.
• Miguel Gabriel Vazquez - a Vietnam combat veteran who experienced the challenges of living with PTSD for over 30 years before he was able to reclaim his health and happiness through natural supplements and EFT/Energy Psychology treatment.  He is a counselor and transformational healer.

My other dear mentor, teacher, and friend, Dr. Edward Tick, was not able to join in this time.  Dr. Tick is Founding Director of Soldier's Heart: Veterans' Safe Return Programs.  Honored for his groundbreaking work in the spiritual, holistic and community-based healing of veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Dr. Tick has been a psychotherapist for 38 years, specializing in working with veterans since the 1970's.  Dr. Tick is an internationally recognized educator and expert on veterans, PTSD, and the psychology of military-related issues and has conducted trainings, retreats, and workshops across the country and overseas.  Time and distance prevented him from participating in the conversation, however, his inestimable presence was felt, for he is one of America's and the world's leading authorities on treating and healing PTSD.  If you haven't gotten it yet, please read his best selling book 'War and the Soul.'

This panel I assembled and led to discuss modern day solutions to PTSD and trauma.  We spoke about our experiences, mechanisms, and principles for healing this very important challenge that is asking for help from us all.  According to Forbes magazine, every 65 minutes or so a military vet commits suicide.  Is one of your friends thinking about this?  Is this something that you're thinking about?  To me, this level of pain is simply unacceptable.  Please send this blog to anyone that you feel might be suffering.  Please reach out and call me or others that you know can help or that might be able to help.  Keep your eyes and hearts open to those who need our help and support.  Together, we can bring hope to the millions who are suffering.  Will you help me get the word out?            

Links:
Soldier's Heart
Operation Mindful Warrior
Dr. Sarah Larsen
Western Gate Roots and Wings Foundation
Fearless Therapy

Production Company Link:
Sewer Socialist Productions

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com