How I moved my frozenness in this masculine body

I walk this world in the body of a cishet man. I can always hide behind my own race card and the war traumas that came from being a refugee, and yet this mask I wear on the outside is mirrored after the colonizers that held my home country and bombed Southeast Asia.

I’m angry.

I get triggered, and I unconsciously reach and demand through my behaviors, attachment to people, addiction to substances, and even imaginary delusions.

The arc of my healing doesn’t end at any one modality or event but in the spaces between the inhale and exhale.

My most recent journey began with the news from my physician that I was pre-diabetic and that my cholesterol was through the roof. Family life was falling apart, and my foundation was not stable.

So this next arc of my healing began with a commitment to finding my core wounds. I got a continuous glucose monitor, worked with a nutritionist, got on an exercise plan, and engaged with a therapist.

Brick by brick, I laid a new foundation on shaky ground, reinforcing it was parts of it crumbled around me.

I cut back on social media, and another vice would pop up. I’d take parts of my coping out, and new things popped up. At moments, I’d find myself doom scrolling late into the night, and each time, I’d be kind to myself.

I accepted an ADHD diagnosis and worked with an ADHD coach to accept support. My survival adaptation was to do it all alone, because deep at my core, I believed that I was alone. I believed that I was superman, an alien on this planet with super powers, but all alone.

As the foundation of my life began to solidify, the ground always shifting but I find stability in myself, I opened myself to my grief.

I worked with a massage therapist to find tension in my body, the parts that are hiding from the world. My front left chest represented my sadness, an immense outpouring of of sadness and grief. In that work, I also found where my anger and rage lived, in my left scapula. There was a twisting of muscle fibers, desperately trying to hide the anger. When she pressed onto that spot, it pushed the rage through and an outpouring of tears came.

All of this was coming from months of work, days where I dwell in my void, lost from it all, and days where I push past into touching bits of joy. I stumbled, so many times. I fell, so many times. I failed, so many times.

At the insistence of a friend, I attended a grief retreat led by Laurance Cole and Ahlay Blakely, the ritual work passed on by Malidome Some from West Africa. My body resisted the sounds of the drums, the signing of songs, and the wailing cries. I felt the resistance jump in, trying to shut it all down.

On the second day, it cracked. Hearing the story of how Laurance Cole would never know the holding by his father broke me. I sat at the grief altar, and the tears flowed, a little boy, sitting alone, with no support.

Again, it wasn’t a moment, but the expansion that happened between the inhale and exhale over the course of months.

As I approached the vastness of Alaska, the peaks and valleys that go on forever, I feel the constriction of being important in my own small world collapse into the insignificance of being nothing.

The format of the retreat was a ketamine assisted psychodrama. Over the course of the week, we would journey together with low, medium, and high doses of ketamine, and in between, we would be doing psychodrama structures.

In my first low dose, I felt my guard come in, strange because I though having prior experience would open me up, but instead, I saw bits of machinery try desperately to cover up the burning jungle images.

I went first, 1 of 8 to do our deep inner work. I casted my plushy as a control part, the part that held on with a death grip, trying so hard to script everything so that everything would be fine.

It was the only part that I scripted this time for my experience, and in my rehearsal, it was easier to let go of that part to someone else to hold, but I sat there, with 13 other eyes staring at me as I struggle to let go.

When I finally found the support I needed, to hand over the control for safe keeping by another person I trusted, I felt the silencing of the inner voice. It was just me, sitting in the mat, by myself.

I had one person sit behind me, pushing against the anger behind my shoulders. I let the moment sit, even asking for more time to let it be.

I asked another close friend to sit in front of me, with her hand over my heart, giving containment to my sadness. The grief started to move, the cry emerged.

And as it passed, we finally had this gigantic man, another friend of mine, sit behind me, and hold me as I leaned that right body onto his. When that emptiness found the support, my body started to shake uncontrollably, my legs kicked like I was running, and the sounds of anguish erupted.

They all died, I said.

The group repeated it back, they all died.

The agony of family members dying, the searing sound of burning flesh, and the silence of voices as they drowned in the ocean.

I named the family members that died a few years after we came to the US, who made the same attempt.

Hoang Trong Lai

Hoang Trong Luan

Hoang Thi Hang

I would’ve been held by my uncles. I would’ve been held by my aunt. I had my village, they were coming for me, and they lost their lives trying. I lost the village that was meant to be there.

After an experience like this, the felt sense of relief pours out, the lightness of the weight carried, and the connection to something bigger than me flows. And yet, there was something wrong. I had came to work on my own frozen terror, and yet what emerged was not mine.

On the final high-dose ketamine day, I entered into a deep experience. I saw literally the control, strings slowly snapping, and then seeing one final thread drop and the complete release into nothingness.

I had lost my ego, but the moaning and crying sounds from another participant pulled me back into my body. The gigantic man held me, big spoon, with his hand over my heart. My limp body curled into a fetal position, and whimpers turned to cry, which turned to silent screams. My legs kicked violently, like a fetus in absolutely existential annihilation.

The terror response finally was complete, 44 years from when it first happened. I held this energy in my body, at the corporate board room, around the water cooler, and just hanging with friends. This was in me.

One final experience happened at the end of that journey, and some experiences aren’t meant to be shared nor written down. That one, I’ll keep in my own heart, as something special just for me.

And to top this all off, the northern lights came out to play. Or as I would like to believe, the spirits came out to acknowledge me, that they’re always with us, watching over us, and cheering us on.