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About P3 Technique

About Pamela Jackson

I grew up in a house of domestic violence and because of this being present is one of my biggest struggles. I don’t like surprises. Surprises when I was little were a big puddle of blood on the floor of the vestibule before stepping into the living room of my home. Surprises were a sudden shattering of glass as a fist rammed through the screen door. Surprises were death threats from one family member to another and at night being taught by an older cousin how to touch and be touched in private areas.

Forget surprises. I’d rather run through a series of what ifs and every possibility under the rainbow of why my self-employed life will fail, why my marriage to the most amazing man I have ever met will fail, why my new friendship with my twin sister as we hit 30 years old will crash into some wall if we keep spending all this time with each other. I’d rather have these possible outcomes ready in mind than wait until they happen. I worry to avoid surprises because the anything that could happen has happened in my life. I know this phrase is not a vain threat. So I assume all of the anythings that could happen to protect myself. This is what takes me out of being present, in the moment, as I busy myself with picking out a tone of voice, a cough, limited eye contact, elements in the present moment I use to predict the disaster that could happen because of them.

I share this story about myself because it is why I do my work around moments. Trauma survivors can come to a place of being able to thrive rather than simply survive because they have at some point been able to recount, play by play, the event that stayed within their emotional body and shocked them as it happened. They can at some point allow the picture of the event to play through their memory like a movie they are narrating. But it’s a narration unlike any other in that as it narrates, as it says aloud the feared moment, it in some degree diffuses the power of that event in the narrator’s emotional, physical and mental life. Sometimes standing in what happened releases it. Or standing in what happened is the beginning of the release from its control over us. This release then frees us up to be more available to the moment happening right now.

The present is powerful because it is the facts of what is happening. I’ve learned that the facts can hurt like the facts in the beginning paragraph here do, but just the facts also heals. Just the facts of right now are that Miles Davis’ song “So What” from Kind of Blue is playing in the background in my bedroom on a Sunday morning. I have dreamed of living my adult life with jazz in the morning. The sun is breaking through the trees. Bits of light rest on my wood floor. I feel good. No fists or blood or abusive touch is here. Just Jazz and Sun. The trick about worrying and ‘what ifs’ is that THE WHAT IFS DON’T STOP THE WHAT IFS FROM HAPPENING. I said earlier that the anything could happened has occurred in my life which means the what ifs did not cure unwanted surprises from happening in childhood, teen hood, and on: my father’s pancreas busted and he died when I was 16, my boyfriend had a heart attack when I was 21, my best friend/grandmother died when I was 27, three deaths occurred in two months a few months after I turned 28–the rest of the living members on my father’s side including his mother. Life (and death) happens and will continue to. My worrying doesn’t stop it. What it does stop is my enjoyment of the unpredictable beauty of the present that can woo a soul into an unimaginable bliss.

Trauma survivors like me were traumatized because the shock never left us after the moment it occurred. Something in us held on to it. Choosing to stay present for us is an act of healing, protection, and release of what happened as we let ourselves feel and be alive to now. For some of us what is happening now is just a repeat of the trauma because we have cultivated a life normalized to traumatic conditions; since we expected them we attracted them. If we get present to the moment however, we become awake not only to what is occurring but to the patterns in what is occurring, to the negative histories we keep repeating as it dawns on us this looks just like many yesterdays that we have never loved. Or we wake up to a beautiful amazing life partner who rocks our world ever so gently, an abundant set of skills for manifesting our life’s purpose, friends, tons of spiritual and physical food around us or access to it. We wake up to, as Reverend Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith says, “I am and I have.”

Jackson holds a BA from The New School and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been trained in Mind Mapping, Compassionate Listening, Storytelling, Solo Performance Theater, and Creative Nonfiction.

Contact Pameala Jackson via phone at (347) 788-0193 or via email at pamela at storyistelling.com.

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