By Cam Scholey, Compassionate Listening Community member
"Did I just actually heal from the trauma?", I asked myself as I bolted upright in bed.
"I really, truly feel healed. Is this healed? Or am I just wishful thinking?
No... no I'm not wishful thinking. It really worked!"
This was the back-and-forth running through my mind on that cold night in January 2022, at that moment right after I'd combined a compassionate listening technique with a self-help podcast concept to experience a monumental moment in my life.
"Mix them together and stir and see what happens", I thought. "What can it hurt?".
That combination of spiritual wonders that night helped me heal from a severe beating flashback from childhood. For almost five decades, the flashback stalked and haunted me, randomly gripping me with fear and shame and cold sweats and heart palpitations. I always held out hope there could be relief.... but I seemed to be running out of options.
The event itself started about a half hour before the healing moment, when I tapped 'Play' on a podcast about calming the agitated mind. I'd first heard the podcast host as a guest on Oprah's SuperSoul Sunday. I liked what her guest Michael Singer was saying about calming the frantic mind by learning to detach from the incessant chatterbox within each of us. Since I'd tried everything other healing technique I knew of for childhood trauma and general uptightness, I thought I'd give this a try.
Within about twenty minutes of listening to the podcast I'd become a believer that the annoying chatterbox that criticizes us relentlessly and winds us up - it's really not a part of us. It's actually a separate entity, one very influential on what disturbs our mind. It can also play host to terrorizing flashbacks.
I reasoned that if the chatterbox is separate from me, it must be much smaller than me. And weaker - only a fraction of my power and strength. I can dig in to overcome and better control access to my chatterbox's museum of cruelty.
Then my momentum stalled. Because although I was convincing myself the chatterbox is separate, I need to imagine visuals for these abstract concepts to work and I couldn't visualize the chatterbox as being a distinct entity. I needed a way to try to picture it as being detached.
That's when Compassionate Listening (I'd taken a course a few months before) and the concept of the Fair Witness popped into my head. Stated succinctly, the Fair Witness is actually not a person, but rather a perspective: stepping outside oneself and observing from a "bird's eye view" during an intense interaction, with the ability to stay centred "in the fire" of intensity and strong emotion. It's as though the Fair Witness observes a situation "from a balcony" in a theatre.
Then the moment happened. Suddenly, as I sat there in a mystical daze, these abstract ideas came together, embraced each other and then proceeded to heal me from childhood trauma. I know this because I ran a test one moment later to be sure it was real: I decided to purposely summon and observe my nemesis flashback (risky business but I had to confirm the healing). I remember swallowing nervously, closing my eyes, then purposefully observing the flashback.
There it was. The view this time though was not from up close, through the eyes of a naked, helpless boy as it had always been. Rather, it was from about fifty feet away, as though I'm in a really good seat at a play that I'm looking down on - my seat is first row balcony! The very same balcony the Fair Witness uses in Compassionate Listening!
My newly gained skill permitted me enough thought control to visualize the flashback scene as now detached from me: like being at the theatre! No more up-close looks at it. No more being "in the fire". Instead, I'm safe, just viewing it from the best seat in the house. I'm seeing everything that's going on, but I am safely detached from it. No more difficult looks at it. No more pain or fear or anger tied to it. Wow!
That night witnessed a monumental and long overdue healing moment. One powerfully transformative enough to call an epiphany. Labels aside, I truly became a different person that night.
And the very next day, I restarted the memoir that had been started then shelved twenty years earlier. And writing the memoir led to even more healing. I'm even on an early path toward inner peace. And I am really into Compassionate Listening! So I'm good now. And the memoir is good. Life is good.
Cam Scholey is the author of the memoir, This Happy Home. A lifelong facilitator, Cam believes strongly in Compassionate Listening and travels regularly to inspire people to heal, develop, and move forward in their lives.
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