Metta Meditation: Using Love to Help Heal Trauma

I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD and I have a severe history of abuse and neglect.  I have learned many techniques over the years and many have been exceptionally helpful.  These include: support groups, psychodynamic therapy, DBT, CBT, yoga, and vocational therapy among others.

All of these things are like different exercises that you might do at the gym, and like those exercise have some benefits in relation to some aspect of my trauma, but none of them can solve all my problems. Furthermore, each of them has downsides. Psychodynamic therapy is expensive. CBT can get me too into my head. Overall, like exercising your body you often need multiple methods to keep you fit.

There is however one technique that seems to always work for me on some level. This is the meditative practice of cultivating love and compassion called metta. We try to think of people and develop a feeling of warm hearted compassion for them.

Do not confuse this with open acceptance of the rights and wrongs or letting people take advantage of you. In my case, I can develop a feeling of warm heartedness towards my deceased mother who hurt me dearly without supporting the harmful things she did. Developing compassion is about being able to wish the best for any person and develop respect for them even if you don't agree with their point of view.

Here is what I like to do. First, every day I try to set aside at least 15 minutes. I find I can do this when going to bed, during a middle of the night waking, first thing when I wake up in the morning, or anytime I have a few minutes to spare.

Second, I try to come up with a group of people to think about. It could be all of my family members. It could be that I go through the alphabet and try to find one person whom I know for each letter of the alphabet.  It could be old girlfriends, old classmates, people I met yesterday, or parents at school. I like to mix it up to keep it fresh and always be reminded of all the people in this world who I have known.

Then, person by person I bring the person to mind as vividly as I can and I imagine saying the words to the "May you be happy. May you know peace. May you know all the causes and conditions of happiness. May you be truly happy." Sometimes I follow this with personal loving comments directly related to them. Sometimes I add a prayer.

What also helps, is that after each person I also think about how my physical body feels. I notice the entire feeling in my body from my head to my toes. The feelings in my face, my arms, my back, and all over. Sometimes the improvement is almost not noticeable, but as I go through more people and practice regularly there is definite improvement.