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Hello! Who are you?
My name is Dr. Constance Scharff. I live in NW Washington state, right at the border crossing to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I’m the author of four books: fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I’m also the founder of and principal investigator for the Institute for Complementary and Indigenous Mental Health Research.
I have spent most of the last 20 years researching complementary practices to treat addiction and trauma. I am very interested in trauma related to climate change and travel the world to learn how various communities are dealing with the psychological impacts of a changing climate.
I have two cats and a miniature schnauzer. My passions are storytelling and planting flowers in my garden. I especially like flowers with strong fragrances, like lilacs and roses. I don’t know that happiness is a sustainable emotional state, but I am content and filled with gratitude for all that I have.
And while that is all grand, I come from experiences of horrific abuse that were so upending emotionally that I started considering suicide at the age of eight. But as I like to remind myself, “We don’t have to have a great start, to have a great finish.”
What is your struggle and when did it start?
I came to addiction and trauma research because I suffered extreme sexual abuse and trauma starting at age seven and continuing for three years.
I remember almost nothing of that period. I recall when the abuse began and when it ended, but the rest of those three years is extremely hazy. I developed what would later be known as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD).
To deal with the symptoms of hypervigilance, fear, flashbacks, body memories, amnesia, difficulty sleeping, nightmares, etc., I began drinking at age 11. One day, I just walked into the house from the barn, poured about five fingers of different liquors into a tall glass, and drank it down. I learned that I could feel absolutely nothing, and chased that feeling for the next decade, until I had developed a habit of drinking two liters or more of hard liquor a day.
At 22 years old, I knew that I was dying of alcoholism. I accepted that. The trauma symptoms I experienced were too overwhelming to stop drinking. When I was sober, I would sometimes experience 30 to 40 body memories of being sexually assaulted–again and again in succession. I drank to feel numb.
My father died suddenly, unexpectedly. In the days that followed, my drinking got worse. I realized that I wasn’t drinking because I was afraid of him. He was gone and couldn’t hurt me. I made a decision to live.
I went to a 12-step program. Keep in mind, this was 1995. There was little quality treatment for trauma and rehab wasn’t what it is today. The problem I had wasn’t quitting drinking. When I was sober, the trauma symptoms were overwhelming, so I’d drink to quell them.
A mentor of mine understood my problem and loved and encouraged me even when I was drinking. He got cancer and told me that I could not come to his house if I was drinking. I figured I could stay dry longer than he would live.
I asked what he wanted from me. He said to see me get 100 days sober. He died when I had 102 or 103 days. After his death, I was struck sober and have remained such for 25 years and 11 months. I will celebrate 26 years at the end of June 2024.
The CPTSD symptoms did not subside. It wasn’t until about five years ago that I received good treatment for the trauma symptoms, which radically changed my life.
How did this struggle make you feel at your worst moments?
I was miserable after getting sober. I was depressed and at least mildly suicidal through the first decade of my recovery.
I didn’t kill myself in large part because I didn’t want my father to “win.” I didn’t want him to take anything more from me, particularly my life. So I did the best I could, which honestly was pretty good. I stayed sober and did loads of volunteer work and tried to be a positive force in my family.
My change began in graduate school. I was in a PhD program learning about change – how to evoke and maintain it – when a veteran I knew killed himself. I had seen the veterans start to come back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We connected over our experiences of trauma. The details of our stories were different, but our experiences of how trauma manifests were similar.
When this Marine died by suicide, I got really angry. Our veterans were often dying by their own hands and not getting sober, and I was constantly miserable–all because of trauma. I didn’t get sober and stay alive to be miserable. I knew there had to be better treatment for us.
So I changed everything I was studying in graduate school. I began to investigate complementary therapies for addiction and trauma treatment. I quickly learned that there had been advancements in the field that could lead to recovery
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Was there a moment when you started to turn things around?
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the research showed how to help people consistently recover from addiction. There are great methods available, but insurance still doesn’t cover most of them. What there wasn’t good treatment for was trauma.
I resigned myself to a lifestyle that would minimize triggers and symptoms. I moved to the country and created a writer’s retreat for myself. I literally wrote books with my back to a wall in a rural home where no one could hurt me. I still woke up screaming many mornings.
Then I was introduced to and asked to investigate a form of somatic experiencing called Radical Aliveness. It works from the premise of all somatic therapies, that traumatic experience gets trapped in the body. Healing comes from moving it through. Though I lived in Washington and my practitioner was in Southern California, I worked with her diligently for months, including visits for in-person work at least once a month. I have had a complete recovery. Though I have had no trauma symptoms for more than two years, it still feels like a miracle. I hardly recognize my life.
That said, the work was horrific. I completely fell apart emotionally. I could work only because I worked from home and could pull myself together for thirty minutes or an hour to take a call, then crawl back into my bed.
I spoke to my somatic practitioner every day. I’d wake up and sob into her voice text for six or eight minutes, then try to keep myself together until mid-afternoon, when I did the same thing again. I would cry while my practitioner held me, with snot drenching the shoulder of her sweater. I was crippled – literally barely able to move – when my back would clench up.
But after six months, I didn’t sob into her text messages anymore. I didn’t have to have two sessions a week. I was better able to work and socialize. The pain in my body was less frequent and persistent. The dreams weren’t as bad. In short, the feelings passed.
It took time, but after three years, not only did I have no symptoms at all, but I lost 70 pounds. It just fell off and has stayed off. I’m not afraid of men. I don’t have nightmares or body memories. My research productivity has improved tremendously. In every way, I live the life that I wanted, but didn’t think was possible.
What steps did you take to overcome your struggle?
Foremost, I had to be sober to do the trauma work. When I was able to check out, I couldn’t feel the feelings. I get it and respect it when people say that the feelings are too awful and they aren’t willing to do the trauma work. I get it. But if you want freedom, my experience is that you have to be all in, and that means feeling it all.
I had to build a support network. I had plenty of people around who loved me, but the somatic experiencing was literally debilitating for me.
I had to trust people to love me no matter how ugly the experience looked. I had to share what I felt with people who were strong enough and willing to be with me. I remember asking a friend to go with me to an in-person session. He stood behind me, “had my back,” but didn’t quite touch me. He’d try to step away, and I needed him there, so he’d step back in. He helped me learn that his presence was something I could count on.
I learned to “titrate” my experience. I’m terribly dissociative. The slightest hint of a trigger, and I’m out of my body, floating around in the cosmos. I could be the image for “the lights are on, but no one is home.”
The practitioner learned how to help me “stay” in my body. She could tell when I was starting to drift and bring me back. I learned to go slow. That was frustrating! I wanted to get all the garbage out. But going very slowly was the key to being safe enough to feel what needed to be felt.
I also learned to trust people and share experiences that I didn’t think others would understand. And the truth, sometimes my experience was outside what they could comprehend, but they showed empathy and believed me when I said it was my experience.
For example, because of the way I was groomed, I was a target for predators. Horrible men would come up to me in public and say horrific things–things that my friends never heard. I never saw it coming. One of the men in my life couldn’t relate to that at all, but he was keenly aware of situations in which I was missing all the clues.
First, he protected me. Next, he started to point out the ways in which I was tuned out. In those experiences, I changed. I stopped attracting predators. I’m no longer who they are looking for.
While it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, somatic experiencing, feeling the stored remnants of the traumatic experiences of my past, is the thing that set me free.
Have you shared any of this with people around you in real life?
I work in the field of mental health, so I have a lot of people around me who are rooting for people like me–people who have been through very difficult experiences and want to recover.
I also have had friends who found my healing to be too much. It triggered their own traumas or they had little capacity because of what was going on in their lives or they just “didn’t want to deal with it.” They faded out. I don’t chase people. If you want to be in my life, you will.
Several times, I had to stop talk therapy. I have found in my research that a lot of talk therapy just reinforces negative stories. I needed to move what was trapped through and then build a new story for my life. I also had to set boundaries with therapists who wanted me to do work that I didn’t have the support system for.
If I was going to be with the therapist for an hour a week, how was I supposed to get through the other 167?
I did not share anything about my father until he and both of his parents had passed. Though I did write about some of it in my doctoral dissertation, I finished it less than three months before my grandmother died and told her it was too complicated when she asked to read it. My grandparents would have been devastated and there was no point in causing them emotional harm. They loved and supported me in every way they could.
More than anyone, it was the practitioners of Radical Aliveness (and other similar types of somatic experiencing) and those who had used somatics for healing, that I trusted. My practitioner especially seemed to genuinely see me. I didn’t feel like she had an agenda or a theory she was superimposing on me. She was simply with me, and for whatever reason, that made all the difference.
Once, my flight was late. I got to her office as quickly as I could, but I missed a big chunk of my session. Of course, I had been in communication with her, but still, I felt beyond miserable. She met me in the lobby of her office. I hugged her and wept uncontrollably for about ten minutes. It was one of the most cathartic experiences of my life and was a tremendous shift for me.
More than anything, I needed solid people to just “be there.” I had the good fortune to find those people.
If you could give a single piece of advice to someone else that struggles, what would that be?
Feeling the feelings trapped in my body was in some ways worse than the initial trauma. I don’t know that I would have done it if I had known how hard it would be.
And yet, I have NO trauma symptoms. How is that even possible? Trauma doesn’t generally have a great recovery rate. Yet, I have no trauma-related nightmares, body memories, or hypervigilance. I don’t have to be “content” to hide away from the world. I’m learning how to speak up for myself without anger–set a boundary without threat. This is a level of healing I never imagined was possible.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, YouTube channels, or other resources for you?
Anyone who has trauma needs to read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Whatever you might think of the book, it’s the groundbreaking resource that changed the way trauma is treated.
I also like What Happened to You by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey, because it helps the reader to think of trauma in terms of experience instead of what’s “wrong” with me.
Finally, while an older book, I like Trauma and Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman MD. This book helps one to understand what trauma is. If we understand something, we can better treat it.
Because of my own work and research, I also read heavily in anthropology and consciousness studies. Non-western communities look at issues of mental health very differently and often in non-pathologizing ways.
In anthropology, concepts like “shaking medicine” and community rituals are used in trauma treatment in Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Through consciousness studies, we can understand experience as an illusion and use storytelling to rewrite response to experience. – Assuming that the body is cleared of stored trauma.
Where can we go to learn more about you?
I am available through all the “regular” social media channels: TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also read more on my website.
I’ve written the nonfiction books Ending Addiction for Good and Rock to Recovery, they are available from Amazon.
My poetry book, Meeting God at Midnight, and my novel, The Path to God’s Promise, are also available on Amazon, under my pen name, Ahuva Batya Scharff.
Is there anything else you think we should have asked you?
Recovery from addiction and trauma has given me a life I never could have imagined.
As a little girl, I dreamed of being a PhD anthropologist and writing books. I have a PhD in a field related to anthropology, traveling the world learning about complementary and indigenous mental health practices to help people who suffer horrible life experiences to heal and live vibrant lives AND I write award-winning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
I am the principal investigator of a research institute I founded and a member of the Explorer’s Club. In the last year, I have been to seven countries conducting research on bravery, including being with indigenous groups in the Amazon, the Andes, and the Pacific.
I am an auntie and a god-mother. I was able to press my head against that of my beautiful horse and be present when he died.
When I chose life, I chose it all – and my life’s dreams have all come true. I don’t know if you’ll live out all your dreams, but I do know that recovery is possible.
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