Yes, yes it has been.
Curse broken. Perhaps for good.
The ball got rolling on a Wednesday night in a coffee meetup. Had you been there and heard the deep sharing and easy laughter between me and the couple I was with, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’d known each other longer than we had. The man had been in significant pain since I’d met him. A family picture later that summer had shocked me into wondering what a stroke for me would do to our family. But no one could explain to my friend exactly what had happened to him to produce that half slack, half frozen face. And the pain continued unabated for months, specialists all across North America mystified. Until one doctor put down her instruments and said, “Tell me the whole story.”
At the end of it, her conclusion had not been remotely suspected. “I think you’ve been cursed.” She followed by asking if they wanted to join her at her church’s prayer meeting that night. Sure, why not? Who would have guessed––that night the shroud lifted. Pain-free for the first time in six and half months.
Say, WHAT?
“Wow, I really don’t have any kind of neat box to put that in,” I admitted out loud.
“Yeah, neither do we! Someone cursed me. That curse has now been broken.”
They even figured, looking back with 20/20, where, when, and via what object the curse had come. Still, our Western, excluded-middle minds struggled to accept what it meant. But who can argue with suddenly re-straightened face muscles?
The six months of debilitating pain had never been illness. The summer’s stroke-like event…wasn’t. All along it was a real, honest-to-God––well, some very different Being, to be sure––curse. Too weird. My friends laughed in assuring me that this was the most natural and self-evident explanation for every last member of the First Nations community in which they lived, eh? Way up there where only the Ice Road takes you.
“Of course!” Of course someone cursed you.
Really?
The next day I found it hard to stop thinking about.
Come Saturday, I was still thinking about it, and while listening to a podcast, my ears perked up as curse was brought up there. The host meant it more like I understood it. Curse, the opposite of blessing. Curse, the negative, untrue thing I say about myself, even if only in my head. Curse, the result of experiencing harm.
Then this landed like a ton of bricks:
“Curse will never be fully gone until it is replaced with blessing.”
In that moment, I knew what I needed.
In that moment, I saw myself in some sort of ritual done in community. I’d ask Tammy to lead it. For I, like my friend, hungered for release. I wanted curse replaced with blessing. I’d been entirely sick of my trauma still affecting me for awhile now. Really, really fed up.
I’d processed. I’d dealt. I’d healed. But not enough, cause here it was, hanging around. Waking me up. Dragging me down. Filling up brain space. Unshakeable.
I wanted to be done with it.
I didn’t want to dwell, anymore.
I didn’t want those men any longer encroaching on my mental space.
I was more than satisfied with the number of times I’d chosen and re-chosen forgiveness.
I no longer cared what actual lies had been told about me, or why so many people believed them or did nothing about them.
I. Just. Wanted. To Move On.
Really and truly. New life, new job, new community, and fine enough with forgetting the old. I’d embraced the new start but was failing, still.
And sick of it, did I mention?
I have no interest in wondering ‘Why…’ or ‘What if…’. So why can’t I stop?
Cause curse.
Curse in my life had become a curse on my life.
I preferred sleep. I wanted rest. I love peace.
Stop the Regret-A-Whirl, I wanna get off. Bring the floor back up to my feet, please, so I can get off this wall.
Sleep, rest, and peace eluded me more than I liked, which only piled on an anxiety about being some kind of failure, so I cursed myself for not being able to stop. Which made me believe more lies. Which confirmed that feeling of failure.
One particular lie had always topped my list, especially in those months after the groundless firing. My battle with it had been more difficult and more damaging than all battle with all the rest, together:
I must be some sort of high-functioning, half-______.”
I dare not even put the actual accusation in writing.
But from the inside––and some of you will know this––“believing a lie”is a poor description of what is actually going on in our heads.
Sure, with some things, we’re aware it’s a lie. We can face the mirror and prepare ourselves to face the day. You might need to be a certain age to say this exact phrase, but we self-coach with some version of a daily, “I’m good enough. I’m smart enough. And doggone it, people like me.” It does the trick.
But other things are way more insidious. In fact, we’ve been convinced: It’s not a lie, something’s wrong with me. It doesn’t feel anything like believing a lie. Not on the inside, for we think what we’ve actually done is accept an unfortunate, but unshakeable, truth. We are self-aware! And making the best of things. We swallow the shame and move forward.
Or so we believe.
More than once through tears I’d asked my wife, “Why has no one in my entire life loved me enough to shoot straight with me on this [and tell me I’m defective]?”
Yup, trauma.
I couldn’t see that at the time, though; instead I was battling to integrate and make sense of the messages of my trauma.
Because IF this is a lie, wouldn’t more evidence to the contrary be forthcoming?
When it isn’t, we believe it’s the truth. And if we ever want to get over whatever hump we’re stuck on, the sooner we admit that the better.
Except I’d been trying that for a long, long time.
Why wasn’t it working?
Simple. It wasn’t the truth.
It was curse.
And one does not rid oneself of curse by integrating it.
One rids oneself of curse by replacing it with blessing.
On that Saturday––with the perfect storm of my friends’ story and a podcast––I knew: Time to take the bull by the horns, Dann, and get help. Replace curse with blessing.
Via texts and calls, I gathered a trusted community. A group of seven to bear witness with me.
Tammy led our ritual. (My simple definition of ritual is just some kind of solemn ceremony which includes bodily, sensory actions.) Together, sitting in a circle, we would take on these curses that I had been unable to shake alone.
I named that first and biggest lie. The first person wrote it on a slip of paper.
I imagined I’d probably make it all the way ‘round the circle and give everyone something to write.
It wasn’t long and a number of them were crying.
They knew me, but they hadn’t known this about me.
Even I hadn’t consciously known all of these lies. They began to tumble from me.
Dann deserved this treatment.
So-and-so truly knows and understands Dann. They were wise to do this.
Dann is not wise, he’s blind. Dann does not understand.
Dann’s kids deserve the trauma they have undergone (and still are)––that’s how bad Dann was.
When I was done, there’d been enough lies for every person to have filled out three slips.
Then Tammy had me start over at the very beginning.
First person, first lie. I read it aloud, then listened to the group in unison:
“This is a lie; this is not the truth.”
Burn the paper. Hear the noise. Watch the smoke. Smell it. Hug the person who’d written it.
Next I was instructed to declare the opposite of the words I’d written and just watched burn. Tell the truth.
Some were easy:
Hell no, Dann’s kids did not deserve this. Doesn’t matter what he did. (Indeed, “Heaven, yes” could have been chosen by any number of people during our family’s hellish journey.)
Others required a deep breath. And trust in my present community that they could see clearer than I could:
Dann is beloved and wanted.
One at a time. Round and round the circle.
On my second go-round, after burning a slip Tammy had written, I got My Bonus Gift.
Since before Thanksgiving, I’d oft repeated out loud a conclusion I’d reached in counseling: “I think my body is telling me I need A Really Big Cry. Something purging, cathartic, body-wracking… And move on from there.”
I wasn’t going to force it, but I was constantly on the lookout for it, because tears get triggered by the funniest things, sometimes, don’t they? Yet along with anticipation came fear that it would come at the wrong time. I wasn’t afraid of crying in front of anyone, for who cares? It’s human. But I was, I decided, totally not up for uncontrollable sobbing in front of a big room full of people, for instance. That kind of situation where everyone can hear the blubbering? But has to crane their neck to figure out where it’s coming from…?
I wasn’t cool with that.
But weeks and months went by, and though my tear ducts made a number of modest efforts, nothing ultimately satisfying ever really materialized.
Now, standing in front of Tammy, it was here, unlooked for.
The group just waited. Tammy just held me.
When it had passed, I completed my third and final round.
“This is a lie; this is not the truth.” Burn. Hear. Watch. Smell. Hug. Tell the truth. Repeat.
I finally sat down.
Slow breaths.
“I think I feel good,” I cautiously reported. I knew I wouldn’t really know until I got some distance.
But sure enough, the next day, driving around, I had two distinct realizations:
Oh! Today is the third anniversary of Day 0. The Day That Started Everything. That’s crazy.
And:
I feel something… What is that feeling? Lemme think for a sec, this is familiar… Oh, my word!!
I feel like… MYSELF.
It had actually taken time and effort to identify it. How faint the familiarity had been.
I have not fully felt like my own self in three years?! What the…
Tell your stories, people. Your stories of pain, trauma, church hurt, all of it.
My replacing curse with blessing was a great, great day for me, and I feel grateful and relieved over how it all went. It has lasted. Your story has been different, and your healing may come different. I tell my story simply so that it may stand on its own for what it is. Yours is yours. You don’t need my ritual, you need…well, decide in your community what you need. Because at the bottom of it all, we’re the same. Image bearers seeking to live more fully into our own agency, voice, and value. Silence… advantages the status quo and usually the wrong people. Speak. Pull back the curtain on your trauma, and do not do it alone.
Displace curse.
Replace it with blessing.
God be with you.