Member-only story
How to Heal Trauma the Hard Way
Healing from trauma means processing it and integrating it. To do that, you might first have to explore it deeply and that really, really sucks.
There’s one part of the Navy Seal training called “Drown Proofing” that scares the ever-loving shit out of me.
Drown Proofing works like this: your hands and feet are tied behind your back. You’re thrown into the deep end of a pool. And your job is to survive for five minutes. Most fail. Few pass. Some die.
The purpose of drown-proofing isn’t to weed out weak swimmers. It’s a test of emotional control. It puts you in a life-or-death situation to see if you can suppress your biological imperatives in favor of your training.
The natural human response, when bound and thrown into the deep end of a pool, is to struggle to keep your head above water. If you do that, you wriggle and scream, slip below the surface and you’ll drown unless someone fishes you out.
How do you survive Drown Proofing? You Sink.
You take a breath in and you hold it while your head slips below the surface. And then, you exhale slowly and you sink to the bottom of the pool. Then, you push off the bottom and glide back to the surface where you take another…
