Calm in the Chaos: A Therapeutic Coloring Book for Living with C-PTSD
by Janel Mirendah
a 5 volume coloring and meditation art book series featuring never before seen one-of-a-kind abstract, intuitive Soul Portraits.
The nearly 150 images in this five-volume series are autobiographical art.
The art represents a profound time of healing over a two-year period in which I also created the process of merging my craniosacral-based trauma healing practice with my art.
It is the work I did in my own journey of dealing with - again - the impact of emotional abuse, domestic violence, and systemic/workplace abuse.
The therapeutic coloring books focus on the journey of dealing with the reality that the world is chaotic and we have to find the calm within.
The series represents the cycles of violence that too often we don’t even realize we are living with, even though things keep happening to us. People keep showing up after we think we’ve solved that, healed that PTSD. We find ourselves in situations that we thought would never happen again.
“You won’t always recognize your trauma as trauma. For a long time, perhaps too long, you’ll simply see it as part of your. ‘life’.””
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment. ”
“Though we can never get out of the chaos and violence of a chaotic and violent world, we can integrate our neural imprinting that keeps one in the cycle so we can be the calm in the chaos.”
Janel at The American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial, Washington DC
My “Calm in the Chaos” series expands the 3 stages of the “cycle of violence” that we are all familiar with in domestic violence.
My stages and volume titles of the first “3 stages of violence” are in parenthesis:
Stage 1 - Tensions builds up
(Volume 1: Escalation: I See the Pattern)
Stage 2 - Violence happens
(Volume 2: Eruption: I Stand Strong in My Power)
Stage 3 - Honeymoon stage
(Volume 3: Engagement: I Stand Strong and Take Action)
My process adds the two stages of the cycle of violence that are necessary for - “getting out of the cycle”.
Volume 4 - Ease: I Step into My Power
Volume 5 - Empathy: I Serve Myself and Others
“Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic - this is the spiritual path. ”
I know that this information, message, is present for all of us to also know for ourselves when we look at, meditate upon, or color them. The love and the lesson, the journey of pain to joy in each portrait is for everyone.
Volume 1:
Escalation: I See the Pattern (tension)
We all experience feeling like we've finally resolved that PTSD. Whew, did that work, and, then ... it comes around again. Sometimes it sneaks up on us.
That's what happened to me in 2015-17. After ten years of living life peacefully post domestic violence, after 17 years of post systemic work violence, I experienced a big, surprising event.
I was seeking "my art" process, how to merge my energetic trauma healing and art. Be careful what you ask for, right? As I doodled through the chaos I realized that I was healing myself on a new level.
Volume 2:
Eruption: I Said No! I Mean No. (violence).
I really couldn't figure it out for a while - then I realized that I was in the circumstance to support my daughter. She was in a situation - with college housemates - that was an experience for her to work on her own childhood trauma issues.
For me, it was the opportunity to use my skills to support her in how to speak her no. Not think it, not wish it, and not make passive-aggressive gestures hoping the other gets it. And, suddenly changes.
But to say no as many times as it takes. My no means no. And, I was also there to support her in the current experience to create new neural wiring by doing it differently.
Volume 3:
Engagement: I stand Strong and Take Action (honeymoon)
Stage three is called the honeymoon cycle in psychology and domestic violence. This happens in the workplace, in cults, and with extended family.
This is the post-abuse stage when the abuser is sorry and makes promises. These promises sound like the person, the boss, the spouse, the sibling really gets it.
We decide to not get a divorce, quit the job, and not ignore family. People are often on best behavior, based on their own fear of losing the relationship. We tend to know what to do or say, or not do or say, to keep the other engaged and prevent them from “leaving us.”
Nothing is resolved and the honeymoon does not last long. The abuse or trauma does not stop because we say no and stayed after threatening to quit the job, leave the marriage, call the cops, never come to a family gathering again.
When the No! was ignored, for me, in this period of time with my daughter, it was also the opportunity to use my decades-long, well-developed skills and to rise up and address the abuser. Sure, it meant engaging in court processes where I refused to give in, refused to adjust my life to accommodate.
We were stopping the cycle of violence, in our brains, in the intentional process of staying calm in the chaos. Not accepting the circumstance as normal. We were learning how to live with - calmly - the chaos of the world.
““Years as a healer and trauma therapist have taught me that trauma isn’t destiny. The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and joy, and where we process most of what happens to us.”
”
In reality, this is no honeymoon. And, the traditional understanding of violence that is practiced in professions of helping, like talk therapy, and in our legal and family court systems drop off here.
Our nervous systems are not addressed. The real issues - our primal wiring of fear, loss, separation, and scarcity - have not changed. Our brain is still wired for the same relationship we’ve always had.
This stage involves some serious neuropeptide hormones that feel really good. We learn to call them love. This cycle of violence relates to our everyday life and how as a culture we’ve been domesticated how to believe about ourselves and the world.
We each have our own neuropeptide cocktail, our own recipe, that was formed in our prenatal, birth, infancy, and early childhood years.
We can get out of the cycle. We have to learn about energy and how our emotional brain works. How it is the “operating system” for developed pre-frontal cortex, thinking brain. We have to get into the body where the memories actually live.
Fear of losing our home, our children, our job, going through one or all of those is related to our earliest years. Then we connect with others who make us feel - trigger us, trigger that feeling we need, that we call love, or value, or worth, or acceptance, or safety. Even when we know it is not. Even when we try our best to not get into that relationship, job, or situation again.
“It’s part of our job, I think, to immerse ourselves in the chaos and the rigidity that’s where the suffering is. As our wonderful poet, Leonard Cohen, said ‘Everything has a crack in it and that’s where the light gets in.’ I see these chaos and rigidity moments as cracks that literally let you illuminate the path forward.”
The reality of the drama of our lives is that there is no arriving at being trauma-free, PTSD-free, or abuse-free or even materially abundant in a Limbic Capitalistic world of war and competition - without working to re-pattern or rewire our early brain.
The world is chaotic. I write this the first week of 2020. Never in our lifetimes has it been this chaotic.
Our true job - as souls in a meat suit on Planet Earth - is to evolve, to learn how to live in chaos, calmly. To learn to Be. In ease. And do our best to cause/create ease not chaos.
We can step out of the cycle by getting in and being in our body, in relationship to our soul and early self.
My books and process add two important stages to help you do that on an unconscious level.
Volume 4:
Ease: I Step Into My Power.
As I followed through and didn't give in to fear, didn't give in to loud, aggressive people willing to lie or to harm with passive-aggressive gaslighting, and threats of violence, my nervous system learned to meet the threat, no flee or freeze or fight.
While staying “calm in the chaos”, through my years of skills and now my art, I stepped into my power as I never had.
I watched my daughter, a young woman newly graduated from college step into her power as well.
We can find and be in ease, calm, peace, regardless of what is happening in the environment near or expanded. Personal to global.
We can do this by being in our body, being in charge of our own nervous system (triggers), and setting boundaries based on what we want and need.
This is the way we can move out of the repeated danger of the cycle of violence. We can find ease, even when we aren’t in peace in every moment. We can find our Inner Presence. Our Calm. No matter what is happening, we can be the calm and in the process, we can use the experience to rewire our brain. We can Evolve.
I have a process you can see in my offerings. You can get your personal soul portrait, and you can engage in a process of learning with your portrait how to be that calm in the chaoes. Coming soon, I will create a deck of divined personal cards for you to use to teach yourself to be in this calm. You don’t need an outside person, place, or thing to get embodied.
Volume 5:
Empathy - I Serve Myself and Others (is coming soon)
I am willing to be in a state of evolving, presence and tracking myself, my nervous system and find the ways and moments in which I can shift my survival imprints to create thrival imprints. This is empathy and what serves the self, others, and the world.
“Spending 30 minutes creating art, especially free-form painting, was associated with reduced anxiety levels.”
This is what happens when we are able to be in our own embodiment, and to accept our early life experiences as both traumatic, yet designed by our Soul’s contracts coming here. When we go from the pain to the joy, we are seeking and will find the nuggets of gold that are ours.
This is what shifts us from the Victim-Perpetrator-Rescuer mentality of our culture. Realizing and then embodying the truth one can give up these roles and know “I am not a victim, I am not a perpetrator, and I am not here to be rescued nor to rescue anyone. I am a spiritual being here to have an amazing human experience. I am worthy.”
This final volume is mostly Soul Portraits I have done for others. People who were in emotional, physical, psychic, spiritual, and mental pain. They have lost loved ones, were struggling with career, work, and relationship issues, sexual assault, and dealing with the neverending chaos of this world. It really serves my Soul to support others who are in pain and seeking their truth.
This is the only way we can personally be the human we wish to be, seek to be, and create the planet we say we want. Supporting people to find their inner calm regardless of what is happening and to be present with others on their journey, is the intention of my art and my heart.
Some of us have some pretty challenging and painful circumstances. I watched ABC’s 20/20 show named “Trapped”, the story of the three Cleveland, Ohio women who were held for years by a man in his basement. The first woman, Michelle Knight, is now in her 30s. Her story had me on my knees, my heart cracked open, and tears flowing: who she is today had me in pure admiration.
So many people want to stop the struggle but their nervous system doesn’t cooperate to give up the victim-perpetrator-rescuer cycle we are in from childhood that we carry into our adulthood. Be like Michelle. It serves you. If it serves you, it serves the planet.
How it works. How I came to be doing Soul Portraits.
The Calm in the Chaos series focuses on my experience of finding myself supporting my daughter in her senior year of college when she was in a dangerous, violent roommate situation. My daughter was doing her senior thesis on her experience of witnessing me being abused by her father. She had little contact with her father from age ten and through her teen years was very private him about him.
It was actually a welcome surprise to me to learn that she intended to do her senior thesis about her experience. I did anticipate it would require my support and for me to do another level of my healing. That it did.
I had been a maker and artist my entire life. As a child, I had wanted to be an artist. I had switched college majors to psychology and followed my other passion - ending child abuse, but was always making something.
After completing an independent film in 2013, I decided I wanted to follow my passion of being an artist. I had been searching for several years for “my art”. What is my art that I can not not do? I had been doodling my whole life and since 2010 had been doing it as a practice to warm up, to activate my right brain as an alternative to “morning pages”.
When I posted the doodles on Facebook people loved them. A friend thought I should make them into coloring books. One day my daughter said to me, “Mom, these are really good.” I was pleasantly shocked. “REALLLY?” She was adamant. Since she was about to graduate from a very expensive art school, I felt I had to believe her, right?
As I was working energetically and intuitively with my own and the other person’s Higher Self, Soul, Intelligence, and in the early part of the preverbal, emotional, and sensory brain, I began to feel, know, and see in others’ responses to their Soul Portrait that I was transcribing the energy, their knowing, their High Self’s message into a visual art form.
The need to stay calm in this situation we were in at the time and the realization that this was my art lead came together during the hardest of times. The Calm in the Chaos: Therapeutic Coloring Book for Living with PTSD series follows our journey together as I supported her to navigate, process, and integrate the experience.
One day, after I’d decided to do these coloring books we sat down in the back patio of the coffee shop where she was working - and would be sexually harassed by a manager. We brainstormed the title of the book which ironically, has been my life long mantra, even if not articulated. “Calm in the Chaos.”
The titles of the series of five flowed out, based on my knowledge working in mental health and domestic violence, and based on the well-known “cycle of violence”. When I worked in domestic violence prior to marrying her father and when I was later experiencing abuse, the three stages frustrated me. There was no out in our traditional view of the cycle of violence: Build up/tension, Blow up, Honeymoon. There is no out in our culture the way the court and support systems work.
Twelve years later, going through another cycle with my daughter, while doing my doodles to stay calm and focused to support her, I realized how I had gotten out, how we’d broken the cycle, but how the world is chaotic, and PTSD is real. It was a very hard time and experience for both of us. We had lived peacefully together since the divorce when she was young.
That journey involved engaging in and then learning and practicing craniosacral therapy (CST), a profound healing modality. After fifteen years of practicing CST, and years of studying neural healing of trauma, with my gift of energy and hands-on healing, and supporting her, and myself, in this situation, this process of transcribing one’s inner knowledge into symbols emerged.
In Memory of Samantha Hou
Feb 1, 1975 - Aug 19, 2016
Calm in the Chaos: Living with PTSD, my first book, is dedicated to the memory of Samantha.
Sam was the first person to encourage me in 2015 to make a coloring book of my art doodles. I am forever grateful to her for this, and for always inspiring me.
Samantha is a beautiful soul, for sure. She was a beautiful human who touched so many lives. She was dedicated to her own sons and husband, to all children, and to the promotion of home birth and attachment mothering and fathering, and toall boys through her work with the Boy Scouts.
Sam was also instrumental in my attachment and birth trauma practice with women and babies, and fathers in the Peoria, Illinois area. People trusted Sam when she said “You need to take your baby to Janel.” She invited my nine-year-old daughter and me to the home birth of her son above. I am very grateful to Sam and to her husband and son - that the first birth my daughter (of an OB) witnessed was a powerful home birth.
The world is such a better place because of Samantha and she is deeply missed by all of us who were so blessed to know her.
In Sam’s honor, I will donate a $1 from every sale of Volume 1 to The Samantha Hou - Peoria Humane Society / PAWS Endowment Fund.