When I meet with my therapist over the phone he’s very reluctant to assist me through trauma when it comes up. Since I’m not in the room with him and he can’t observe me he generally stops me, slows me down, changes the topic in some way. In most cases I just want to dive in and drag the trauma out. And he’ll say, “Walter, listen, this is not the time. You don’t need to go this fast.” But sometimes it just goes that fast.

During today’s session I laid in the sun on an open meadow in Golden Gate Park. As I held the cellphone to my ear and looked up at the sky I told my therapist about a situation at work where I became very defensive. I was surprised by the intensity of my defensiveness over quite a small matter. As I talked my therapist sensed some trauma was emerging and he did the usual thing where he redirected me away from my emotional inner landscape. When he suggested I simply apologize for my reaction at work I protested that that wasn’t enough for me—my insides were turbulent and I wanted to iron that out! When I have intense feelings the last thing I want is a practical real world solution. What I want is to rip out the pain by the guts, to exorcise it from my body completely. So I waved away his suggestion and continued on. And, unusually for him, he became very firm with me. He said, “Walter, listen to me. You are not here with me in my office. I don’t think you should go here right now. I know you want to go back into your past and dig around but what I need from you right now is to come back to the present moment.”

Oh, but it was just those words that made the whole thing click. When he directed me to “come back to the present moment” it shifted my awareness from the story in my mind to my body laying there on the grass, my body that I suddenly realized was in pain from one end to the other. It was an intense and very full and very old pain. A dozen forgotten memories flashed across my mind so quickly that I couldn’t grasp any but the last of them. All I gleaned from the flash of memories was that my grandfather Walter starred in all of them. Only the final memory lingered in my mind. I was hiding in the shed, probably 4 or 5-years-old, standing at the center of my grandfather’s many lush geraniums, doing my best to be as far away from him as possible. Doing my best to feel safe.

My grandfather died when I was 6. He terrified me. In my experience he was quick to yell, to hit, and to react. When he was present us kids weren’t allowed to talk, make any noise, or play. Everything that came natural to me as a child had to be shoved down and repressed. Those stifled emotions fermented into resentment and rage. My defensive reaction at work was a burst of steam let out from an overheated system. Steam let off from the rage and resentment inside. Steam that demanded: “I HAVE A RIGHT TO EXIST, TO BE NOISY, AND BE FREE.”

As I laid on the grass I cried and a sense of resolution came quickly. Immediately a strong sense of compassion flooded through. I found compassion for my father, whose entire childhood would have been shaped by my grandfather’s presence. I found compassion for my grandfather, who died shortly after all my memories of him took place, who could have been sick and dying even at the time the memories were created for all I know. I found compassion for my young self, the one who hid among the geraniums, the one who just wanted to feel accepted by the world. And I found compassion for my adult self who simply had a little defensive reaction at work.