Integrative Therapy for Attachment Trauma
Pam Dillon, M.Ed., RMFT. | 579-539-0147
“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
―Rumi
It had always appeared self-evident to me when looking into the eyes of babies and young children that they had not yet forgotten where they come from! My very earliest memories of myself in the country of my birth, British Guiana, South America were ones of what I might now call conscious observation. At age six, a novel and brief encounter however gave me my first experience of that same felt sense of wordless reciprocity and belonging that I had always known with Nature.
Apparently, I had wandered off while awaiting the start of yet another charity peformance that my stage-mother had organized for me. In my short-lived exploration, I had come across a dozen or so beings like none I had ever seen before. They sat or lay strewn on the hard earth just in front of me. Their bodies seemed different from the familiar. Yet, I was much more captivated by the fact that we were all somehow magically at my own eye level.
Though to my child’s mind these interestingly-shaped beings seemed curiously my own height, their unmistakably adult faces beamed smiles of delight back at mine. I felt lit up and alive on the inside. As with my regular communion with Nature, the experience felt simple, honest and real but new for my six year old self with adults. My mother’s alarmed voice and desperate clutch to remove me from my new friends both surprised and confused me. I preferred to stay. I had felt absorbed and connected similar to how I had always felt at home and at-one with the plants and animals.
“I am a limited spark of the limitless flame.”
–Pam Dillon
Years later, I was to learn that these special beings were patients. My charity performance that day had been organized by the Sisters of Mercy of the Mahaica Leprosy hospital of British Guiana. I had never heard or known the word leper. All I knew was that something special and joyful for me had been abruptly interrupted. Still, the felt honesty and intensity of that moment’s connection etched itself indelibly inside my psyche as the first awakening to my calling as a healer in this lifetime.
My early childhood years were a curious admixture of navigating visible but unsafe and distracted adults while simultaneously feeling known and held by a safe and abiding invisible energy both within and around me. Parents were there in body but absent for me in any way that mattered.
On the other hand, invisible but benevolent energies remained ever present for me. This was all I had ever known. And so, I lived and grew, privately straddling two very different worlds; one outer and precarious and the other interior and sacred to me.
“We inhabit an invisible, spiritual environment from which help comes, our soul being mysteriously one with a larger soul whose instruments we are.”
–William James
This private connection to what I have now come to call the invisible realm became nothing short of a life cord at times in my adult life. For instance, in moments of unspeakable pain and loss in my early thirties, archetypal visions powerfully appeared to me transforming frantic despair and grief into quiet reassurance that all was well and all would be well. In their immediate wake, there was even an overnight healing of my cat who the vet had urged me to put down less than 24 hours prior. He had no medical explanation for the cat’s sudden and dramatic improvement, he told me. In later years, I also seemed able to heal my own body in ways that surprised my doctor and stunned my periodontist.
When my father suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in 1997, the doctors in the hospital were puzzled but later grateful when I told them that my father needed a second MRI. I had noticed that he was having a minor seizure that the nurses had missed. He did receive that second MRI at my request, and was then immediately rushed by ambulance to the neuro-intensive care unit of a major teaching hospital in Toronto. That obseration of mine saved my father’s life. Later, his neurologist appeared incredulous when I pointed out that my father had been incorrectly diagnosed and had therefore received an inappropriate medication that had caused the bleed in his brain. He and the team of neurologists ultimately agreed remorsefully that this had indeed been the case.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
–T.S. Elliott
I have no idea how I knew what I knew. I just knew. The irrepressible call of my life’s work as a healer was now piercing into consciousness in ways that seemed both strangely effortless while also somewhat incredulous with afterthought. This was the strongest appearance of what I later came to learn was called medical intuition.
In my therapy work with my patients, both of my feet are always securely connected and rooted to the ground beneath me while I intentionally collaborate with what Carl Jung has referred to as the pre-existing, mytho-poetic realm. My patients and I refer to this realm as the Bigger Belonging.
I suppose you might say that I work to help my trauma patients reconnect with what they have always known but may have forgotten; their own transcendent belonging. I help them remember not only who they are but also what their infant eyes knew once upon a time. And, in that remembering, everything then becomes possible at a quantum level!
“Present, compassionate, optimistic… These are a few of the qualities that come to mind when I think of Pam. I am grateful for the ways in which she cultivates and shares her innate gifts of curiosity, delight, and devotion to others’ well-being. She carries her vast experience and knowledge lightly. I am inspired by Pam’s holistic approach to living and to serving others.”