🎧 Chapter Thirty-Six | Close the Gates
How trauma crosses our protective boundaries, and how we learn to restore them
What you need to know:
Like a piano out of tune, the heart can have its protective wires crossed by trauma, teaching us to trust those who harm us while shutting out those who heal. In the careful hands of a healer who understands this discord, Jennifer begins to learn the difference between walls that imprison and boundaries that protect.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Close the Gates
The following week, I tell Abrams these details, feeling as bad in the recounting as I did at the time. A good person gone so horribly wrong.
Abrams, in his usual outfit of a sweater and slacks, listens, intently. Once done, he only sighs, wearily, heavily and then tells me to change. Soon enough, he’s back with a clipboard he tosses at the far end of the exam table, its edge at my heel.
Abrams presses at a foot peddle. The exam table cranks up, then stops. In the quiet of a man focused on his work, he takes my pulses in that careful, exacting way. Right. Left. Right again.
I watch everything but remain quiet, too. Sad for bit, then embarrassed and finally infuriated with myself. My typical pattern.
Finally, Abrams tugs me to sit up on the table, nudges a stool under my bare feet. Taking the clipboard up, he leans his hip into the table.
“I want to show you where we’re going,” he says, eases a pen off the top of the board and draws the shape of a heart on a blank sheet of paper. Around this, he draws a square. Around both, he draws a rectangle with an opening on one side.
I study that bristle of whiskers along his chin, the white wires of hair that sprout around his ears.
“Your heart belongs in a safe place which can be visualized as being inside this first square,” he says, taps the tip of the pen on the sheet. “When you’re centered and your energy is free to move, your heart knows it has its primary safe place. Outside,” here he points to the larger rectangle, “is like a courtyard where those you want in are allowed to visit but they don’t get to stay because you have energetic protectors here and here.” He sketches two X’s at the opening of the rectangle. “Think of these as bodyguards who keep undesirables out,” he says, looks at me pointedly. “The protectors know who to let in. Your kids, for instance. Maybe a parent.” Abrams circles his pen over the space outside the rectangle. “This is the outer region for those who cannot be trusted. You can care for people, love them, but don’t have to bring them into your courtyard or your inner heart. Does that make sense?”
“Sort of,” I say, look from him to the simple, almost child-like drawing. “Yes. I suppose.”
Shifting to stand before me again, he hugs the clipboard. “I’m going to do a treatment that focuses on these boundaries in your heart.”
“Okay…” I say but something feels odd about this…confusing. I search myself for what it is and while I do, Abrams once more drapes me with a sheet, measures along my back, and marks the points he will needle.
He steps around the table and in his hands, carries a heavy-duty gas mask with rubber head straps.
“We are going to do something called moxa now,” he says, lifts the mask between us. “I wear this because of the smoke.”
I eye the freaky mask, remember those drills as a child in the “duck and cover” era. “Should I be scared?”
“No, no,” he says. “It’s just when I do this all day, it starts to bug my lungs. You’ll be fine. I’ll light the moxa tabs that I fix to points on your back. Your job is to let me know when each gets too hot. Then I pluck it off. Got it?”
“Got it,” I say.
Extending the rubber straps with one hand, Abrams slides the mask over his head. He now looks like a giant fly. Hand to my mouth, I cover my laugh but he laughs, too.
“I know. I know,” he says, voice muffled.
Stepping behind me, he presses a small something on my back. The moxa, I suppose. Then does it again.
Facing forward, I study my shadowed reflection in the framed painting on the far wall. That’s what this whole process is like, I’ve come to realize. You can’t really see yourself, or the energy within your body, but you have a sense it’s there.
With the flick of a lighter, Abram lights one of the cylinders stuck to my back, then another. A pungent earthy smoke rises.
“Okay,” I say over my shoulder. “That one in the middle is hot.”
“Got it,” he says, from inside his mask which is more like an arg sound. Still, he plucks at something. The heat gone. Another heats up.
“Left side,” I say.
“Yar-up,” he says and it’s gone.
I am about to say it is hot on the right but Abrams is on it.
This goes on for a long while. Two people working together toward healing. True reciprocity, I think.
Finally, Abrams sets aside the lighter, and lifts off his mask.
“Now we get to the real work,” he says, voice clear again.
This time there is no need to inhale, visualize a nickel, and exhale. The moxa did the work of opening the points.
The faintest of pokes and tugs on my back.
Then it hits me. “Don’t I, innately, have these boundaries in place like everyone else?” I ask over my shoulder.
Silence follows. More pokes and tugs.
“It’s like a piano,” Abrams finally says. “A body gets out of tune but in your case, all the wires have been moved around and crossed.”
I turn my head, try to see him but only make out a ghosted image of him in my periphery.
“Was that Rick?” I ask.
Another long pause. Another few pokes.
“He didn’t help things,” Abrams says. “But I think this has been your normal for a long time. Abuse, trauma, and loss add up inside a person. We aren’t meant to carry that heavy of a load all of our lives. We need help to readjust. To balance out.” He taps down my spine. Another slight poke here. A tug there.
Then, like a tide rushing in, waves of exhaustion move through me. I feel heavy inside, like I’m filled with sand.
Coming around the table, Abrams takes up my right hand and feels my pulse.
“There you go,” he says, a warm satisfaction infused through his voice. He lowers my hand, takes up the other, taps a bit more. “Good. Good. We’ve closed the gates. Go ahead and rest for a bit.”
Helping me to undrape, then lie down, Abrams adds a second blanket. He dims the light and strolls out of the room. I fall into a deep sleep.
Next:
Chapter Thirty-Seven ~ Busted
In the ongoing story Jennifer tells Abrams about the evolving romance between herself and Dr. Rick, she shares how she has to tell the truth to her former husband, and in doing so, account to herself for her dishonesty, but also face a truth that even he knows. Jennifer has a history of being someone easily “taken for a ride.” Can that pattern be changed?
