Superpowers

THE ART OF FLYING

Photo credit: tkqJDKJRTed-unsplash, digital editing by Yours Truly

Having a superpower has nothing to do with the ability to fly or jump, or superhuman strength. The truest superpowers are the ones we all possess: willpower, integrity, and most importantly, courage. The things that make us different, those are our superpowers.

- Jason Reynolds

When I look back across the fields of my life, I can see how she measured it, how she made sense of it, how she moved through it. Cut up, laid out, and organized by city, and scattered across the Midwest, each block of life ran along an imaginary timeline; contained within a box, tied with a ribbon, and tucked away. It was easier to forget that way.

As a girl-child her aunt called her “Punk”. And Punk had a superpower that had stayed hidden inside her awareness. It hadn’t made itself known until becoming an adult when it spilled out into the room during one of many therapy sessions as she described what it was like to live as a child with six members of her blended family. She said, “looking back, it reminds me of seeing the guts of a golf ball. The experiences, the good ones, the bad, were rolled tightly in a springy ball, alive, yet there was always a lurking pressure to make that thing a perfect mirage, a childhood. My childhood. There was love, and violence, and not enough understanding, not fitting in, trying, trying harder and the brain just wouldn’t work sometimes. There was the moving - moving from one city to the next, from one trailer court to the next, making a snake across the Midwest.” As she reflected, the story took the shape of an impoverished life but not realizing she was poor. Surviving from some darkened threat that always seemed to be hiding under the bed. Learning to make do with what she had, learning what she needed to learn. Doing it herself. Crafting this finely-tuned skillset meant not depending on anyone. She identified with feeling lost, like maybe she was really, secretly an orphan; even though her parents did the best they could with what they had. Even though there were chunks of life that would, in today’s world, be labeled as domestic violence, abuse, and abandonment.

Photo credit: jez-timms-lIUIZJYHgUQ-unsplash, digital edit by Yours Truly

But Punk didn’t know. Because as a child, that was what had always been. Later the PTSD unraveled and was known, a label attached, the symptoms integrated - symptoms that had been her “normal” since forever. As a child, that was how it was. But Punk didn’t know. How could she? It’s how life had always been. Hard, not quite enough, hearing the words repeated, like drumbeats, “we don’t air the dirty laundry”, gotta make the brain work harder cause there aint no money to pay for things like a education an’ opportunities.

Somewhere between the focal points of there and now, she lost the zeal for wanting to tell that story. She didn’t know it then, even a few months ago, but I know it now. I just don’t want to stay in that story, tossing it over and over like a salad. I’ve learned there’s a difference between telling a story and being stuck in a story. And it had begun to feel like I was stuck in something I was ready to step out of.

Turning the page with a new story.

I’ve been on a hunt for the past several years exploring meaning-making, what that means to me, for my life, and how I want to go forward. I planted metaphorical seeds then stepped back and began allowing, seeing which ones might take hold and grow. And what sprouted was the recurring interest and passion I have for art of hypnosis, healing, change and how the brain works in relation to those things. As I’ve healed from C-PTSD I became acutely aware of the important role that neuroplasticity plays in the healing of the brain and in any kind of change-making. Hypnosis and self-hypnosis have been a couple of the tools I have been using to further my healing. I want to be clear, I am not making claims that hypnosis has “cured” me but it is a tool, one of many, that has helped. There is also research that backs it as a way of helping those with PTSD not to mention making changes in behavior, habitual patterns, and “stuckness”.

In January, I pulled out my hypnosis skillset from a few years back, dusted it off, and began a vigorous training to reinstate my certification as a medical or clinical hypnotist. I work within frameworks of change, which kind of puts it all into one pot and there’s much more to it than I can cover in this piece. Utilizing hypnosis, NLP and other modalities, I will be helping humans make the changes they want to make by creating new neural pathways and neural networks in the brain.

My Substack will still be titled Living in the Edges, at least for now. Hypnosis fits perfectly inside of it. And I will be bringing bits of info to the Substack-verse of what hypnosis is, what it does and can do, and how it works. I’d love to hear, in the comments, what you are interested in, hypnosis-wise AND what you think a superpower is in real humans living lives, or what your superpower is.

I’m leaning towards the idea that each of us probably has a superpower nestled under our wing. Some already know what their superpower is, some may have worked really hard at cultivating and embodying theirs. Others may be wondering if they have one, or where it might be, how to mine it.

I am in the process of creating a startup, a private practice, and will begin taking clients sometime this Summer.

I’ll leave the light on.