Holding On and Letting Go

The mark of a wild heart is living out the paradox of love in our lives. It's the ability to be tough and tender, excited and scared, brave and afraid -- all in the same moment. It's showing up in our vulnerability and our courage, being both fierce and kind.

—Brene Brown

On a recent Friday morning, a young adult client and their dad walked through my office door. This client, with whom I’ve met for six months, has bravely turned toward the repeated sexual abuse they survived as a child. The perpetrator of this ongoing violation is an extended family member. Getting to the heart of how this trauma has impacted them, then, has involved the brutal unearthing of how several family members, whom my client loves dearly, were not able or willing to protect them from harm at such a vulnerable age or seek justice on their behalf when this family secret was eventually exposed.

Site of the Magic: My Office at Night

As we were exploring options for transforming the intense freeze that not infrequently paralyzes their legs, I mentioned my sensorimotor psychotherapy trauma training. In that model, trauma reprocessing can involve reinstating the active defenses of fight or flight, which our bodies deactivated for survival at the time of the harm. I mentioned the experiences I have had with clients mindfully pushing me across the room to complete the action of defending themselves from threat. Their bodies’ present-day, voluntary ability to mobilize and exert force helps their brain to integrate that the past threat no longer looms as powerfully if at all. The feeling, when this experiment works, is triumph. My client liked the idea and also feared that they would hurt me. With their bright, inquisitive eyes, they asked if they could invite their dad to a session and push on him. “If he’s willing to do this with you, I think it’s a great idea,” I enthusiastically replied.

A Vulnerable and Courageous Child in the Wild

On that Friday morning, I therefore welcomed into my office a father who clearly wanted his child to heal. After we established an after-care plan for both of them in case intrusive flashbacks or unprocessed ick emerged following our session, they both stood up. We talked through the experiment, and I emphasized that at no point did we want my client to forget they were pushing against their dad in 2025. The point was not to go back to the scene of the original trauma and re-live it. My client requested that their dad not go easy on them, and he swore he wouldn’t. As they grew more comfortable using their full body strength to move him away, I mentioned that sometimes sounds or words arise. I encouraged my client to let those come if they felt safe enough to do so. On maybe the sixth pushing experiment, they used their arms, legs, core, back, and head to victoriously shift their dad backward. A primal scream erupted from their lips followed by the exclamation, “Get back!” After they stood several feet apart and made eye contact, my client spontaneously ran into their father’s arms. They held each other, time stopped, and I wept.

Witnessing the fierce compassion my adult client and their father showed toward the past unprotected child within them, as well as the subsequent tender love expressed between father and child in the present, was nothing short of sacred. When I find such embodied experiences of tough and tender love, my wild heart springs to life. As the current U.S. executive branch seeks to overwhelm and destroy resistance to their cruel and power-hungry plans, I cannot think of a more important moment to simultaneously gather fierceness and kindness.

Gratuitous Eddie Photo

To reiterate how much more powerful this love paradox is when we embody it, I’m going to turn to sex—this time the kind rooted in affirmative consent and pleasure rather than coercion and violence. I call on the brilliant Emily Nagoski to make this point with her definition of orgasm: “the spontaneous, involuntary release of physical tension generated in response to sex-related stimulation.” Six specific words grab my attention in that description: Spontaneous. Involuntary. Release. Physical. Tension. Stimulation. If I sequence what Nagoski is saying, we need the stimulation of physical tension in order to spontaneously, involuntarily release it. This paradox of needing the tension so we can relax it is helping me to understand and rewrite my own relational healing map with a lot more grace and gentleness. More specifically, instead of willing myself to get rid of physical tension, I have been opening to what I learned from my sensorimotor psychotherapy training: tension is a precursor to action. The challenge lies in studying the tension long enough to find out what kind and intensity of movement is needed since letting that tension be there and observe it is definitely uncomfortable. We also need a certain amount of faith that letting the tension guide us will indeed be beneficial in light of our common human fear of uncertainty. Nevertheless, now would be a great time to get clear on what kind of action is needed and to secure whatever support can mobilize that movement.

If connecting to the body feels unreachable right now, when so many of us are dissociating in response to the chaos-drenched environment, I have good news and a different starting place. A favorite teacher, Martha Beck, offers a concrete way to study the mental tension of painful thoughts so that we can illuminate how their opposite is actually our true nature and reconnect to that truth. As she recently described it in her distinctive Martha Beck way:

The opposite of the most painful thought in your head…is your next step toward awakening…You have to really listen to the suffering ‘til the point where you're sick of it, because before that, you're going to cling to this thought. It's part of your ego trying to defend itself. But as we know, trying to cling to things to defend yourself is the way into misery.

‘I'll never find love again.’ It will sound radical, but the opposite would be, ‘I will always find love again.’ Now, if you sit with that and start to look for ways it could be true, Oh, I will always find love. I love that tree outside the window. I love my cat. I love my mother. I love... Oh, [there’s] just love everywhere. When you say, ‘I'll always find love; I'll find it everywhere,’ everything starts to love you back…If you are constantly saying, ‘I'm not going to find love’…the only things you'll see will be things that make you jealous and hurt and sad. If you walk around thinking, I'm going to see love everywhere always, it happens. The other thing is mirror neurons…Our brains are constantly moving to reflect one another. When you walk around going, ‘There's love everywhere,’ a person meets your eyes and suddenly sees love everywhere. You're giving them a different brain by going around thinking, ‘I'll always find love.’

Nature’s Paradox: Frozen and Moving

A few days ago, I tried out this practice on a walk with the dog after outwardly expressing frustration to a longstanding client. In addition to wanting to repair this rupture with her, I also wanted to better understand my reactivity. I therefore asked inwardly, “What is so threatening to you about her unwillingness to commit to practicing compassionate curiosity?” I listened and waited with the same compassionate curiosity I was peddling to my client. What emerged was a memory of me as a young child receiving the message from the outside world, “If you do not manage to help distressed adults, you will lose your own light.” No wonder, then, that my client’s refusal registered as dangerous to that child’s continued existence in the world. I happily considered what the opposite belief would be and came upon this, “I am in charge of my light and can freely expand it.”

Thank you, Pinterest!

The next day, I had therapy and excitedly told my therapist about this revelation. She helped me to embody this transformational belief by inviting me to consider how I could take into my own system what I offer to others, even if they cannot receive and integrate it. I have therefore been envisioning myself on the edge of a field full of Himalayan blue poppies. On the other end of the field is a person whose defenses block the reception of insight and compassion, both the tender and fierce kinds. So before I offer my light, I see clearly the protective bubble around them. I then send out my truth or compassion like a boomerang. Instead of repeating the long held pattern of taking into my system the rejection, criticism, blame-shifting, gaslighting, and other toxins expressed by highly defended adults, the light arcs behind and around their armor and gently returns. It asks me to surrender my own defenses so I can receive it. The relief! And the possibility.

Shared with Permission from My Client

I have been sharing Beck’s strategy with clients who are open to it and received the gift of the photograph to the left of these words just two days ago. A client whose enormous heart consistently awes and inspires me has long believed that they do not matter and are all alone. This is not their fault. As Gabor Maté would say, it’s what happened inside of them in response to the abuse and neglect that happened to them as a child. Upon my suggestion that the opposite of these beliefs are their true nature, we considered two contrasting beliefs. Although they rolled their eyes, and I ribbed them light-heartedly about their utter Gen X’ness, they wrote down the words on a piece of paper. The following morning, they sent me this picture with the accompanying message:

Walked into my office this morning and this is the first thing I saw when I sat down at my desk. I made an audible noise that was a mix of incredulity and resistance followed by warmth and acceptance.

Another sacred moment that I would not have experienced had this client not been willing to let us contact their suffering.

I went on another walk with the dog yesterday and listened to Tara Brach’s latest talk on courageous love while strolling along the creek. She did not disappoint and yet again illuminated the paradox of love. Instructing us not to waste suffering, she spoke of the importance of love being both soft and fiercely protective against harm. She reminded me that I cannot will myself past aversion and anger and instead need to honor their intelligence, as both are alerting me to an obstacle or threat to something about which I care. She also borrowed from Ruth King to emphasize that anger is initiatory, not transformative. Instead of bathing in the flames of anger, I am treating it like a sparkler that has important information to share before I allow it to burn out. Brach also drew on Thich That Hanh’s teachings to reveal how the forces of fear and delusion are really what drive humans to believe false truths and behave badly.

Hazel

If you, like me, didn’t get the instruction we needed while growing up in this culture to organize our experience in ways that expand love rather than fuel fear and delusion, I’ll close by offering Bruce Perry’s sequence of engagement: regulate, relate, THEN reason.

He first emphasizes the restoration of safety for emotional regulation. If you’re reading this, I doubt you’re presently on a battlefield or in a cave with an attacking grizzly bear. Therefore, there’s some actual safety to which we can direct our attention. For me, in this moment, I’m attending to the dog exposing her belly, the Brandi Carlile playlist streaming in the background, the taste of the hot tea I just sipped, the fragrance of the scented candle next to me, and the feel of the warm blanket covering my lap. We also can visualize a safe or peaceful place if that’s easier, like that field of blue poppies for me, or allies who can care for and protect us, like the faces and presence of the various healers I’ve mentioned in this essay.

Once we’re regulated enough to perceive the safety that is here right now, we want to relate to ourselves and/or our beloveds in ways that connect and buffer stress. What are the qualities of this relatedness? The eight C’s of Dick Schwartz’s internal family systems model come to mind as a kind of flashlight to guide me: calm, clarity, compassion, confidence, connectedness, courage, creativity, and curiosity. All of us need to find the specific environments and practices that help us to tap into these qualities. And if we need a menu, the internet abounds with them. The various teachers to which I’ve linked in this post offer their ideas and practices freely. Martha Beck, for example, emphasizes the importance of kind internal self talk (KIST) and proposes that we relate to ourselves like we would a cold and hungry kitten or puppy on our doorstep.

From this more regulated, related place, we can reason with greater accuracy and receive and integrate the wisdom available to us, from within and outside ourselves. Perry emphasizes that this kind of relational contagion promotes the much more effective resolution of complex problems than emotional dysregulation and disconnectedness.

Where the Dog Whine Led Me

I would only add that as I feel the warm air from the nearby vent, pet the gray tabby snoozing to my right, see my 9-year-old roommate’s song lyrics on the coffee table about sticking together to rise up during this difficult time, and hear the dog beckoning me to go on another walk with her customary terrier whine, I feel more capable of holding this wild-hearted truth from Pema Chodron:

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

Skin Cancer, Surgeries, and Lessons in Love

Troubled? Then stay with me, for I’m not.

—Hafiz via Martha Beck

The end of 2023 involved three skin biopsies. My daughter, who is terrified of needles, was present at my dermatology appointment when these incisions took place. So I put on a nonchalant mask as the doctor injected the first dose of lidocaine. I do believe a gasp escaped from my lips despite my best efforts to keep a lid on it. That shit hurts going in!

All three lab results were positive for basal cell carcinomas, a thankfully less pernicious form of cancer than melanomas. This wasn’t the first time a doctor removed cancerous cells from my body. It was, however, the first time that one of the biopsies, the one on my ear, didn’t clear them. So I began 2024 with a Mohs surgery. The first excision didn’t get all the cancerous cells so the surgeon went in with the knife again. I was less in touch in that moment with the removal of body parts than thoughts and fears about the health insurance estimates I chased before the surgery. Each cut cost more money. With that particular surgeon, I made the mistake of voicing my financial fears out loud. She told how many people she’s seen people with chunks of their face missing. So I should count myself lucky. Nothing like a good shaming on the surgery table! Thankfully, the removal of a second skin layer resulted in a cancer-free lab result. Several stitches later, I was sent back into the world and set up a payment plan with my insurance company.

I kept a bandage on my ear for several weeks that made me look like a doberman following an ear cropping (a horrifically inhumane procedure, yes, and an image etched in my mind from childhood). I was and remain a very good patient. I made sure to carefully apply sunscreen to the tops of my ears and wear hats that cover them while playing in Colorado’s UV-drenched outdoors. And I began taking Nicotinamide, a supplement the surgeon said would help to prevent future cancer. “Go me!” said my internal achiever.

In the last year, I also learned about Ruth Cohn’s work on the character patterning that results from neglect. This pattern consists of three P’s—passivity, procrastination, and paralysis—as well as self-reliance. As Cohn writes,

The hallmark of neglect…became clear only secondly, after the unmistakably consistent P’s: A ferocious self-reliance. In the US, with a cultural history and iconizing of ‘rugged individualism,’ self-reliance is admired…Being pack animals, humans are by nature dependent and interdependent. Attachment is a survival need, and interpersonal need is nature’s design. Neglect is the failure or absence of reliable care. A child left alone too much has nowhere to turn but inward…Self-reliance is a defense mechanism and a survival strategy originating with pain. It may evolve to become a haven of safety and the only comfortable way to be in the world. It may also be a point of pride…Self-reliance, although exquisitely adaptive, also makes havoc in the world of relationship. Satisfying relationship involves reciprocity, and if we don’t let the other give also, they may feel unequal, rejected or unsafe. Or they might also appear to take advantage, which ultimately results in messy and often terminal ruptures. It took me decades before I could keep anyone in my life for long, before I learned how unsatisfying and controlling my over-giving might feel to the other, and how disempowering of them my inability to receive could feel.

I said, “Oklahoma,” and Cohn delivered hard (see Ted Lasso). I like to say I am fierce not ferocious, having asked a tattoo artist to create a small panther on my back with that description. To hear my self-reliance described as ferocious underlined with a thick marker how very not-neutral this adaptation is. Until learning about Cohn’s take on neglect, my mind’s eye associated it with a soiled, starving child in a basement, chained inside a cage. I hadn’t connected neglect to the emotional loneliness we experience when we feel disconnected in our relationships with others and ourselves.

Even though I’m a four on the enneagram, I also know I’m not the only one who struggles with allowing interpersonal need. As cultural truth teller Martha Beck points out, it’s a U.S. phenomenon to rely almost singularly on the left hemisphere of our brain, which involves being analytical, detective-like, and fear-stoking. This is NOT the land of relational needs. In contrast, and in her words, “If you go to the right side of the brain—the awe-inspired, non-mechanical, non-material, uncontrolled part of your brain—you will find that you can drink in inspiration, courage, love, joy, beauty, and that these things actually feed the soul.”

So back to skin cancer, which is a very material thing to which I have brought a lot of left-hemisphere activity. I have loathed my skin from the time I was in a very white, wealthy, and so competitive elementary school. I looked around at the popular kids who regularly went to places like the Bahamas for spring break and came back bronzed and beautiful. In comparison, my fair, freckled skin made me ugly and defective. I definitely read Freckle Juice but didn’t internalize the lesson from Miss Kelly that my freckles looked wonderful on me. Instead, I got the message, and reinforced it with that left hemisphere, that I was much cuter when there was only a smattering of freckles on my nose.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I experimented with cutting freckles out of my forearm with a pair of scissors. Turns out those spots came back even bigger and darker much to my chagrin, with scarring to boot. I had enough sense in that environment to know this behavior was bad. So I stayed mum about it and the shame grew. I did not yet know about the phenomenon of cutting as a Gen X’er with no internet. Still, I discovered a physical way to momentarily release the pain of my self-hatred. As Dick Schwartz might say, I burned down the house to put out the fire.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, my immediate family and community didn’t take calls for sunscreen seriously. I recently heard some family folklore about how we all got burned to a crisp during a childhood vacation. Years then followed of me unsuccessfully trying to tan my stubbornly fair skin and so abusing it. When I went to Senegal for the Peace Corps after college, I also began to take doxycycline as my malaria prophylactic after experiencing the insomnia, wild dreams, and anxiety that mefloquine induced. Doxycycline was definitely easier on my system but also made me more sensitive to Senegal’s blazing sun. (Non sequitur as wildfires blaze in Los Angeles and climate-change-denying oligarchs vie for more power: Wikipedia just let me know that mefloquine was the first public-private Venture between the U.S. Department of Defense and a pharmaceutical company, and the FDA skipped the phase III safety and tolerability trials.)

As skin issues began to crop up following my return to the U.S., I began visiting the dermatologist more regularly. I had some great experiences with them and some horrible ones. One particularly bedside-manner-impaired doctor asked me where I grew up during our first appointment as she looked me up and down in my skin-exposing gown. “Colorado,” I answered. “That explains the damage,” she replied.

Fast forward to me doing a bunch of therapy, becoming a therapist, and completing sensorimotor psychotherapy trainings. During my second training on healing developmental wounds, I volunteered to be the client for a clinical demonstration with my trainer. Because of Covid, we were online. So I could mostly hang on to my self-reliant delusion as I exposed my internal wounds to this seasoned therapist in front of the other training participants. Nobody could see my squirmy legs outside the video camera frame.

She helped me to contact the little girl inside who used to express her uniqueness by wearing brightly colored elastic headbands laced with gold threads over her braids. We connected with her spunk and curiosity, and my trainer assigned me the homework of calling her to mind on a daily basis. When I look at her, I see her bright eyes and smile, not her flaws. After this session, I didn’t wear concealer or other make up on my face when I went out into the world for the first time since middle school. I remain amazed at the impact of receiving this skillful healer’s warmth, acceptance, and genuine delight in that child part.

Another contributor to the erosion of my ferocious self-reliance occurred this past year when a friend told me she had recently gone to the dermatologist for a biopsy. The stitches from it were smack dab in the middle of her upper back. A fellow self-reliant master, she risked voicing aloud that she wasn’t sure how she was going to care for her wound as the sole adult in her household. I offered to help her care for it, and she consented. When we met for this care-giving, I first slowed down so I could be gentle and intentional. I made sure to get her permission around every step of cleaning and covering her wound. Her willingness to accept this help felt incredibly courageous, and I experienced the entire encounter as sacred. She inspired me to keep connecting with that little one inside and also to let in the care from the trustworthy relationships I have in my present-day life.

When I went to the six-month follow-up appointment for my ear, the dermatologist noted a red spot on my shin. She said the edges weren’t irregular and so she just wanted to keep an eye on it. The spot didn’t go away despite me again being a good patient and applying vaseline to it every day. Toward the end of 2024, I went back to the clinic. A nurse agreed we should biopsy my shin. Alas, the lab test revealed more cancerous cells and also a positive margin. Given the location of the cancer, I was referred to general surgery. Panicked about the medical costs of another surgery if I didn’t complete it while my deductible was met, I immediately scheduled the procedure.

The physician’s assistant (PA) who was available on December 9 told me that the skin around my biopsy was inflamed and angry. In addition to having sensitive skin, I had raked my biopsied shin against the Christmas tree my daughter and I set up the day before. She recommended waiting a month for the procedure. I said my bank account didn’t like that option. So we scheduled as late as she could in 2024—a week and a day later —to give my shin a little more time to heal before once again being cut open. Meanwhile, in the larger world, the public was having an online field day about Luigi Mangione’s recent murder of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson.

On December 17, I arrived at the clinic for the surgery. As the PA drew the path of the excision on my leg, my eyes grew large. I was unprepared to lose a silver dollar’s diameter worth of skin. I laid back on the table, put one hand on my heart and the other on my belly, and began to cry. Seeing the tears stream down my face, she asked if I was okay.

“Yes,” I replied. “This just sucks.”

She affirmed, “It does suck.”

Instead of stiff-upper-lipping it for her and the accompanying nurse’s comfort, I let the tears flow. I wept for the little me who hated her skin and so did not learn how to love and take care of it. I cried for the ways in which this neglect contributed to me being on that surgical table right before the holidays. I grieved the impending disfigurement of my leg and the temporary loss of mobility I was about to experience. I contacted the hurt under the anger about how healthcare is treated as a privilege rather than a universal human right in the United States.

Since then, I’ve done things a little differently. I did not mask the intense physical pain I experienced right after the surgery with my daughter or others in my closest circle. I therefore received hugs, care, and help. When a very attuned client saw the fatigue on my face a couple of days following the surgery and asked how I was, tears again surfaced. We were human together, and I’m allowing that perhaps this experience was healing for her, too. With a shaky voice and tears in my eyes, I also shared the news of the surgery with the parent support group that I’ve been facilitating since September. I gratefully received their compassion. Small changes, yes, that have been experienced internally as a big shift toward nature’s design.

When I walked into my wound-check appointment on Christmas Eve, my heart rate measured far above normal. I let the nurse know I was dreading this appointment. The PA had told me the wound shouldn’t hurt after a couple of days, and it had been throbbing. Having never taken care of such a large open wound, I found the bandaging process to be quite intricate. My utter lack of expertise in this arena triggered old perfectionism, and I was convinced that the intense physical pain I felt at night meant I had fucked up once again and probably had an infected hole in my leg. The nurse commended my wound care and said it looked great. I again began to cry. I verbally expressed that these were tears of relief and release after a very stressful week. Even though I sensed a little bit of “This lady is crazy,” I stayed connected to myself and grieved how infrequently I’ve held the more difficult parts of my human experience with gentleness and grace, especially in the presence of others.

As I write this essay, I still have the multi-step dressing on my leg and carefully reapply it every other day. My daughter observes that the wound remains disgusting, but the pain is almost entirely gone, and the hole diameter has shrunk to the size of a quarter. I have been tapping into the right side of my brain by offering Morrnah Simeona’s ho’oponopono prayer to my skin:

I am sorry for loathing, mistreating, and neglecting you for so long.

Forgive me for not committing to caring for you more fully until cancer took root.

I love you and the ongoing protection you offer me.

Thank you for reminding me that pain is impermanent and for waking me up to the deeper, fuller love that is here.

Given the wealth of evidence about mindbody unity, will this prayer help to prevent future cancer? I don’t know. That’s also not the point of my offering. As I approach the fifth decade of my life, I am actively relinquishing old beliefs and protective strategies that have limited rather than expanded my life and relationships. I no longer want to collude in the blocking of those beautiful right-brain qualities.

I still can hear the mean-spirited internalized and external cynics chastising all this woo-woo, sentimental bullshit. But their voices are muted. I increasingly trust the curious, compassionate, creative energy of this prayer and its ability to nourish chronic deprivation. I am leaning into the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure that make up vulnerability because that vulnerability does indeed sound like truth and feel like courage. Thank you to the growing chorus of voices that are modeling how to live and love out loud as the pack animals that we are.

Doing Less

Writer’s caveat: I am publishing this post on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court and other institutions, pundits, and profiteers posing direct threats to democracy here and elsewhere. So I want to dedicate this essay specifically to those of us currently caring for young children and additional truly dependent living beings. For us to stay well enough in mind, body, and spirit to be able to engage politically within and outside the walls of our homes, I maintain that many of us need to learn to do less.

Recently, I was working with a client engaged in criticizing herself for not speaking up to a family member who had, once again, ignored her wonderfully reasonable request. As I listened, what struck me—for what felt like the millionth time that week—was that this client would never be so negligent of someone else’s needs. So I asked her if she would switch roles for a moment and consider: if you were the one who had been asked multiple times to attend to this same request and had not found a way to absorb it and respond accordingly, would you be mad at the requester for not voicing it yet again?

“Of course not!” she declared, and began to contact the anger emerging from within. Within the blink of an eye, she turned that anger on herself. “Why didn’t I think of that!?”

So we explored the origins of this immediate reaction to blame herself. Turns out, finding fault with herself helped to protect against critical projections, gaslighting, and even aggression by various people with whom she was in close relationship, both in the past and present. Self-blame also elicited a sense of agency. If the lack of responsiveness from those in her inner circle was her fault, at least she could do something about it. I encouraged her to contact the legitimate anger inside of her in the current moment and feel it in ways that didn’t continue to hurt her or, as she feared, cause harm to others.

To help her hold such charged emotion, I sought to establish what we in the biz call a safe relational container. I especially needed to reassure her that I was not afraid of her anger and felt confident I could be with it with compassionate curiosity. Since she and I have a longstanding relationship built on trust, she was open to my promotion of allowing the anger to unfold, in her body, and organically reveal what she needed. Eventually the simple and seemingly impossible-to-utter, “No more,” came from staying with her anger—a natural and healthy response to repeatedly being unheard and unmet.

My new M.O. these days is to do less, and I am in the presence of very good company (I’ve listed some of the many resources I have found to be helpful at the end of this post). Here are some of the things I’ve committed to do less of: laboring, striving, achieving, defending, explaining, ruminating, worrying, cajoling, and serving others. Perhaps most importantly, I am dedicated to spending less time and energy understanding others’ perceptions of reality and giving more attention to identifying and trusting my own.

There are countless reasons why we’ve learned to over-function and multiple contexts, from the micro- to the macro-level, that demand such disproportionate giving. Here’s another abbreviated list of contributing causes and conditions: being slotted into a parentified role when we were children, being inducted into gendered expectations and roles in a patriarchal society, needing to please and appease to keep someone with whom we have a close relationship from hurting or even killing us, learning early and often that we have to perform to be loved and belong, and confronting unequal power dynamics in hierarchical systems. I could go on and on about contributing factors because I’ve over-studied them for much of my 48 years on this planet. What I want to concentrate on now is transforming these systems into which vast inequality has been baked for millennia.

In our daily lives, those of us adults who have learned to over-do can interrupt this nonsense by refusing to be what Jen Hatmaker’s friends call the clean-up crew and human spotlight. Unlearning these roles is no small or easy task, and supportive community is often the best facilitator of our evolution. If we’ve spent decades attaching our value to what we accomplish, how skillful we are, and how much we care, the pull is strong to take responsibility for others’ messes as well as uplift folks regardless of the costs to ourselves.

Please don’t mistake me for saying that I’m advocating for turning into a cold-hearted, passive stone. No. Not at all. What I would like is more mutuality and more encouragement for those adults who have learned to be under-functioning in these imbalanced structures to self-reflect and, as a consequence, be hit with the insight that they’re not pulling their fair share of the weight. And then for those individuals to use their capacity as grown ups not to turn toward the over-achievers among us for help but, instead, to go seek out (actively!) the abundant resources that already exist and use them to practice being more equal collaborators in relationship and life. As we also like to say in my line of work, what we practice grows stronger.

So many of us remain attached to the idea that if we just say the truth a little more skillfully or improve ourselves just a little bit more, then maybe those adults in assisting roles will finally hear us and willingly step into the role of being a fellow system builder. On this front, Lindsey Gibson’s work on emotionally immature adults has been life altering for me and so very validating. I often remind myself of her statement: “If a person wants to understand what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter how you say it.” SELF-reflection grows emotional maturity, not the perfectly articulated explanation by a hyper-functioner.

So how can we best support releasing all this over-responsibility? I am not claiming to have some magical elixir here. Ideally we would all have access to the resources that teach us how to go inside and stay connected with our personal experience long enough—and with enough safety, empathy, and curiosity—to name and attend to our needs and wants rather than neglect or reject them. I can, however, offer what I’ve learned about doing less while accompanying clients on their healing journeys and setting out on my own.

First up is the sequence for growth that a client learned from a 12-step program and recently shared with me: acknowledgement—> acceptance—>aligned action. To acknowledge that something is impacting us is the first step since without this acknowledgment there’s no awareness that anything is amiss. Most over-functioners that I know don’t struggle with this step. Insight barriers are the least of their problems. Here’s the tough pill to swallow, fellow hyper-doers. We want to jump straight from recognizing the issue to aligned action. But accepting the situation as it is, including an honest assessment of our own limitations, is what makes our actions more aligned with what we actually need and can handle. Acceptance is often where the difficult feelings arise, like anger, grief, shame, resentment, envy, and fear. So of course we want to skip over this part of the process. But we likely will choose a superficial or misaligned action if we don’t first more fully understand what the issue before us actually is. And challenging feelings offer some of the best data for illuminating what we need in a given situation. The pain is worth it as long as an empathetic adult witness, whether within or beside us, is present to be with it.

In the realm of unburdening ourselves of what is not ours, the first aligned action may be the establishment of a boundary. There are SO MANY great resources out there about boundaries. What I’ll underscore here is that I’ve really appreciated the folks who stay focused on the central kernel of what a boundary entails: determining what is and is not okay. So fellow busy bees, stillness is our friend if we agree that clearly ascertaining what is and is not okay is the initial goal. If we can’t see clearly what we want to let in and keep out, the boundary is probably not going to be very effective, right? Unfortunately multitasking and moving a 1,000 miles a minute doesn’t foster lucidity.

The good news about this definition is that boundaries are first and foremost an inside job. We can keep our attention on identifying what’s okay and not okay rather than being swept away by what we should say out loud or do about it in the outside world. If we do decide to generously offer clear communication about our boundaries to other people, particularly when something is not okay with us, that utterance can be short and sweet and requires no defense or even explanation.

One boundary script that I like follows this sequence, which can be said firmly AND kindly: “This particular behavior is not okay with me. If you continue to do it, here’s what I’m going to do.” That is not an ultimatum, by the way. It’s the succinct expression of the acknowledgment, acceptance, and aligned action sequence I mentioned above when we’re seeking to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It’s also not trying to pull someone along or control them. It is an assertion of what is going to happen if the behavior that is not okay with us continues. In my experience, the challenge is to muster the courage to stay loyal to that boundary, regardless of internal and external pushback, unless or until something changes in our conditions or relationships that renders it unnecessary.

Giving Up the Fight for Self-Respect

When you understand every opinion is a vision loaded with personal history, you will start to understand that all judgment is a confession.

—Nikola Tesla

Recently I found myself back on the massage therapy table after an unfortunate glute strain (less formally known as a pulled butt cheek) during a fierce pickleball match. As the therapist explored what was happening in the rest of my body, he nearly exclaimed, “Do you feel that!?” He moved my hand to the place on my abdomen he had been touching. He continued, “Your psoas muscle is so engaged that if you were to do sit ups right now you’d likely injure yourself.” He next moved his hands up my back and invited me to feel how tight those muscles were, too. This very intuitive healer asserted, “It’s time to stop fighting for self-respect.” Damn.

This simple statement illuminated so much for me about my life to date. I historically have prided myself on being an advocate for those who are the most vulnerable, my clients, and those closest to me, especially my 7-year-old daughter. More recently, I have spent a lot of time and energy learning how to self-advocate. The two months preceding my injury, in particular, had involved intense, explicit boundary setting in some of my most intimate relationships.

The costs have been high to my body, as this advocacy has been enacted in a fighter’s stance—braced, constricted, and hyper-focused. With the massage therapist’s words, I realized I had not yet been able to embody surrender. He wisely reminded me that my body will let go when she feels safe enough to do so and not a moment beforehand. Alas, my numerous ways of applying effort were not going to make relaxation happen and, in fact, would send the opposite message to my nervous system, which most needed to hear: “It’s okay to be tight. That makes sense.”

Eventually, I want to be a person who does not try to make people see me. In particular, I want to give up the fight to be understood by those who regularly deal with their own internal strife by undermining and destabilizing me (aka gaslighting). If letting go on that massage table was not yet possible, I could still have the intention to let be whatever was happening in any given moment. My body was holding on to dear life for a reason, and I could validate that.

As we talked about recent life events during the rest of that massage therapy session, I remembered my favorite definition of dignity—our inherent value and worth—and wondered what conditions would allow me to rest in rather than fight for it. I also remembered the Tesla quote above, which stopped me in my tracks when I first read it.

My journey has taught me that what judgment often confesses is a perceived need to defend. Said differently, judgment acts as part of an intricate defense system, frequently developed in an earlier, scary environment. Judgment pushes right out of awareness that which we do not want to face. If I judge you as bad and wrong, I do not have to reflect on my own contribution to whatever has happened between us and, potentially, feel the shame there if I have caused you harm. I can spin a yarn of powerlessness that moves me away from self-responsibility and toward a constricted view of the universe as an always unfriendly place full of two-dimensional victims and offenders. If there’s one thing I regularly push against, it is a victim mindset. And if there is one thing I regularly have not allowed, it is the possibility that when someone I love projects an offender role onto me, they are inhabiting that victim stance.

Turns out, there is such a thing as healthy shame. It is true that we only need a drop of it, as this emotion, when not tied to past relational trauma, powerfully alerts us to when our behavior has threatened our belonging to a group and/or connection with others. As Chris Germer teaches, avoiding shame is the issue, not the shame itself. Shame wants to be addressed and transformed. If my behavior has hurt you, a speck of shame lets me know that repair is needed. I do not need to believe its stories, which are never true, that I am unworthy of love and respect. And, in fact, restoring connection and rebuilding trust through a skillful repair process challenges the shame-based story that I am bad. However, if someone has little to no investment in tuning in and turning toward their shame, avoiding it will very likely land us in the gaslighting scene described above, possibly with some DARVO sauce ladled on top (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender).

In contrast, if I turn that judgment on myself and determine I am bad and wrong, not only have I potentially internalized the harsh voices of those with whom I have been in relationship, but I also can avoid feeling the pain of how I have been inadequately loved in important relationships—an unfortunately familiar experience for many of us. That unprocessed pain, like healthy shame, has important lessons for us about dysfunctional relational patterns and can help us relearn how to be in relationships with ourselves and others that uplift more than they diminish us. For example, and as Eleni Stephanides so beautifully articulates, if we leave unexamined the pattern of seeking out emotionally unavailable people, “the breadcrumby path” to their hearts takes us far from the integrity of our own.

On that massage table, I realized my body had been fighting others’ judgments of me rather than detaching from their life histories and accompanying confessions. While a very young me was rightly terrified of feeling powerless since powerlessness was associated with physical and emotional danger in early childhood, my 47-year-old body was being invited to consider how embracing the powerlessness to change other people’s perceptions of and behaviors toward me—especially those who do not have the willingness to change those perceptions and behaviors—could be radically liberating.

As I have been actively decolonizing my mind from others’ judgments of me and unlearning the ways I have reinforced them via self-judgment, I have been imagining possibilities for my life that were previously hidden from view. So as not to bright-side this process, I also want to acknowledge that through it, I have come into contact with a lot of suppressed anger and unprocessed grief. If we have been buying hook, line, and sinker the stories told to us about ourselves by others, we very likely have not contacted the truth of our own experience. It is excruciating to face how small we have made ourselves to keep peace with an outside world that is threatened by our authentic selves. And infuriating.

Gabor Mate powerfully reminds us that without the ability to feel healthy anger—the kind that doesn’t hurt others or ourselves—we cannot have an effective boundary system. And without an effective boundary system protecting us from external toxicities, our bodies will say no in all kinds of ways. As he wrote, “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.”

One of my favorite ways to express suppressed anger without aiming it at someone else or myself is to imagine the response of the adolescent part in me to whatever harmful thing happened or is currently happening. Since I’m a gen x’er, I envision her wearing a Violent Femmes t-shirt, jeans ripped at the knee, Doc Martens, and some sparkly coral eye shadow to boot. Since my imagination is not constrained by the actual chronology of events, she’s also listening to Taylor Swift’s “I Forgot That You Existed.” This teen is self-righteous and impulsively declares the brutal truth without considering how it might impact others. A practitioner of wise speech she is not. I encourage her to tell adult me all the things she is pissed about, and she is outraged about so much. When I listen—and believe her—I have yet to hear her inaccurately identify mistreatment or injustice. Her harsh methods of reacting to those harmful behaviors, however, are not what I want to support as someone who agrees with Pema Chodron when she says,

Honesty without kindness, humor, and goodheartedness can be just mean...pointing to our own hearts to discover what is true isn’t just a matter of honesty but also of compassion and respect for what we see.

So I let her know that I’ve heard what she has said and will take it into consideration when I confront whatever issue is on my plate. Because she’s not an emotionally mature adult, I encourage her to let me handle the issue and go make some mix tapes or get an Orange Julius with her friends. Through this process, suppressed anger gets expressed (often in hilarious ways), and I give that adolescent part of myself the missing experience of having an adult present who has her back rather than burdens her with more adult responsibilities and expectations. The necessity of going into that fighter stance no longer exists.

As for unprocessed grief, I am learning to lie down on the floor and let it move through, mindful of the ground supporting me in the present as I feel that grief. My therapist recently clarified for me that this is precisely what yielding with, rather than pushing against, entails. When I do this, I do not feel collapsed, which has been a fear I have held (i.e. “I will never get up!!!”). In fact, I feel more peace and less constriction. Earlier this week, my client shared a poignant story of a woman and a cactus that captured this part of the healing process.

For 40 years, a couple took care of this cactus. When they could no longer care for it, @theplant_rescuer took the cactus and paid close attention to how it grew. The cactus wanted to keep leaning toward the ground. Instead of propping it up with some kind of brace, she got curious. She realized through observation and study that some cacti best grow horizontally, along the ground. So she created a set up for this plant that supported its lean. A year later, the cactus flowered.

What if those of us who have fought our whole lives finally flourish when we lay down? What if the process of unwinding the harmful conditioning that has blocked the path to liberation looks less like a fight and more like the cactus that has received support to follow its own line of growth? If animals rather than plants are your thing in the natural world, maybe freedom looks like the bald eagle I recently saw, soaring downward in slow, large loops. This majestic movement reminded me of the spaciousness, slowness, and gentleness that have best supported my own healing. I am not sure when my body will finally feel safe enough to let go of the tension it has held for decades, but my confidence is growing each day that attuning to my immediate experience with curiosity and kindness feels so much more peaceful than fighting for that experience to matter. One of the previously unimaginable possibilities for my life that is taking root is that I can consistently, reliably walk through the world with a calm nervous system that actually feels—rather than only intellectually believes—the universe can be a friendly place. Maybe that explains why I woke up to this Bonnie Myotai Treace quote in my inbox yesterday morning:

Intense times call for intense practice. But intensity does not mean straining or pushing; rather, it is a willingness to begin fresh.

When I Laid Down

Early in my divorce process, I vividly remember saying to myself, “I need to learn how to surrender.” During that time, I went to a massage therapist to address chronic hip pain. “I’m trying to surrender,” I told him. He laughed and reminded me with tender amusement that the energy of effort and surrender are in direct conflict. Most memorably, he told me my hip was experiencing collateral damage from all the constriction happening around my heart. He asked if he could hold my rib cage to help my upper body know it could stop using such intense bracing to protect me. I consented, and he gently and firmly placed his hands in the places he felt the most tension. And he breathed. Grief hit like a tidal wave and immediately, reactively, I suppressed a guttural sob before it could escape my lips.

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Fast forward a year and a half. Amidst the ongoing pandemic malaise, I have been officially divorced for a year this month and very imperfectly juggling parenting my precocious seven year old, friendships, a full client caseload, business and home ownership, dating, and last—and yes least—self-care. Worn thin, recent heartbreak hurled me right over the edge of a cliff I didn’t know I was on. Despair emerged as a vise squeezing my heart to the point that I was confident it was going to implode. So I came downstairs from my bedroom on a recent morning holding my upper chest. My daughter looked up at me and asked, “Why is your hand on your heart? Did somebody hurt you? Is your heart actually hurting?” Nothing gets past these kiddos. I’m grateful I had enough internal resources on board that day to tell her that I was hurt and that she wasn’t responsible for that hurt, that my heavy heart didn’t mean hers had to be heavy, too, and that I had good friends and my own therapist to help my heart to heal. Before returning to drawing on a white board, she said matter of factly, “So it’s not about me.” The little girl inside of me exhaled.

Given the hard-won trust my therapist has established with me, I let her in on just how dark everything was feeling inside later that day in a telehealth session. We experimented with various practices, including reestablishing some boundaries with my arms to get space from the harsh, critical voices invading my mind. But that took a lot of effort, and I was tapped out. With the support of her patience and skill, I eventually broke through the shame to say aloud, “I just want to lie down and curl up in a ball.”

She encouraged me to do so and although the vulnerability of collapsing in her presence made me want to throw up, I did. I laid horizontal on the couch and wept as she let me know through gentle utterances that she was right there with me. And just like my daughter does when I’ve held her in my arms while she is upset, I wanted to sit up and be facing my therapist again after a couple of minutes. Before we signed off, she encouraged me to allow myself to lie down when possible—to self-soothe with a cozy blanket and hot water bottle as I did so and to imagine her holding me through it. She said to me, “You are so loved,” and I could take in a few drops of her offering.

I have processed ad nauseum an experience of being threatened with violence while I was in bed, on my back, as a young child. I am grateful to the multiple healers who have taught me that we return to these traumatic memories because, like a movie, they have different frames, each of which often needs to be reprocessed differently for us to heal.

The moment when an arm menacingly held a belt over me, for example, I needed to reinstate an active defense to get the threat away from me. The triumph I felt when, as an adult, I used the strength of my legs to complete the fight response by intentionally and mindfully pushing them against a wall in the presence of a therapist is still palpable. But there was also the aftermath of the physical threat for that young child who felt terrified, overwhelmed, and alone in her dark bedroom after the danger had exited. This present-day moment with my therapist of surrendering to the enormous grief I felt in the presence of another didn’t exactly feel like a triumph but there was peace. And safety. And care.

As someone who knows the ins and outs of betrayal like the back of my hand, I am grateful to have found resources that explain how betrayal by a loved one is experienced as a trauma. Debi Silber, who coined the term post-betrayal syndrome, says this,

Because [betrayal] feels so intentional, we take it so personally. The entire self needs to be rebuilt. Rejection, abandonment, confidence, worthiness, belonging, trust—they’re shattered.

Her work has helped me to normalize the multiple impacts of betrayal, especially when first experienced as a child. She also emphasizes that in addition to us rebuilding trust internally, human “bricklayers” can slowly and carefully help us to rebuild interpersonal trust by respecting and valuing us.

Kalen Dion writes, “The truth will set you free…but first it’s going to fuck you up.” Recently, my therapist suggested that I was bullied as a child and also have been bullied as an adult. Wow, did this shake up my sense of identity. I clearly have internalized the message from others—usually the ones who have behaved harmfully without owning that behavior—that I am fierce, intimidating, and hard. I definitely relate to Brene Brown’s statement, “When I am scared, I get scary.” But when I slow down enough to back up and look at the scenes of my life with more curiosity and less fear, my armor has rarely showed up as cruel and vindictive. Dysregulated, yes. Angry as hell at the abundant injustices in the world and the dehumanizing acts by which I have directly and indirectly been impacted, for sure. But the raging teen inside me is always standing in front of that terrified young child, trying to protect her from more injury. My fear of becoming that violent figure with the belt has blocked me from seeing what is truer: I have spent my life obsessively looking outward, trying to understand aggression so I don’t become it. In so doing, I have missed how often my body, mind, and heart are assuming the position of that bullied child—shoulders hunched forward, my torso braced for impact, my voice sewn shut, the shame stories loud in my head, and my core collapsed.

Another fuck-you-up truth is that no longer shrinking myself into other people’s experiences is extremely taxing when my body has perceived threat around every bend. Given my propensity to erase my needs and leave my body to get to safety, I often do not realize just how much I have overridden my nervous system until well after the fact. For example, when I have stood up to someone, whether that person can significantly and negatively impact my well-being because of their closeness or because they are a stranger, I feel a whoosh of panic in my body as soon as the words leave my lips. My mind then starts churning about both how skillfully I used my voice and what horrible thing is going to happen next.

I am grateful to Tracee Ellis Ross for vulnerably sharing the following about her own “risk hangover,”

[My mind] gets dangerous when I get connected to the really bad horror story that I have been stitching together since I was young. And somehow if I fall back into that groove, it is so dangerous up there. And then everything’s colored by the wrong information…I don’t get scared of stuff until after. I’m a girl that jumps off a cliff. Right? I’m like, “Oh my God, let’s do it. This is the scariest thing in the world. I’m going to do it”…And then I go and I jump off the cliff and up there and I’m like, “I’m flying, I’m flying off the cliff. I’m fine. It’s so good. It’s everything I wanted it to be. This is the best cliff I’ve ever been off. Oh. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” And then I land and then I’m like, “What the fuck did I just do? Who would do that? Why would you do that?..Oh my God, you’re so dumb. This is actually evidence. Put that in the fire of unlovability. That is going to roar. We’re going to make sure that we go back through every single thing that you did with a fine tooth comb and we’re going to prove to you that you are exactly the most unlovable, stupid, humiliating person in the world. How could you ever? You are filled with shame, you are riddled with it.” And then that’s what happens on the next day. It’s out of control…when left unchecked, without compassion and tenderness and kindness, and when I’m alone with it…One of the things I learned from Pema Chodron…was if I can’t take the information in, there’s times when it’s not the time for me to look back. And I can wait until I can actually look back constructively, and not in a way that’s going to create another wound…And I’m learning as I’ve gotten older to be deliberate about my aftercare…And one of the things I do with my therapist is before something, we now ask the question, “How do you want to feel after?” And what do I need to put in place to support myself in the after? And I’m such an independent person. One of the things I really am not good at is I think I’m good and I need to better plan being not alone. Because I’m always, I like to go places alone, but I need the partnership in it.

Gentleness, grace, generosity AND partnership. Offerings these “G’s” to myself in the presence of others can feel so unfamiliar and thus scary after a lifetime of pushing myself to get where I want to go without vulnerably letting others in on the plan. To understand, with compassion, tenderness, and kindness, that all these self-preservation strategies did indeed keep me alive AND no longer are serving takes some serious courage and spiritual resolve. I also am softening to the urgency I feel to heal both that wounded child and raging teen. After all, my daughter is soaking up so much of what I do and don’t do, and I want to show her what embodying gentle power looks and feels like RIGHT NOW. The truth, however, is that more pressure on an already frazzled system is also a form of violence. As Amanda Doyle beautifully articulated when summarizing Jennifer Freyd’s research, “…you come out of betrayal blindness when you’re able to handle the information, when you have built the internal resources to be able to look at it squarely and survive it.” Luckily the tender loving care available within and outside of us, if we are willing to keep our hearts open and gradually let in the bricklayers, makes this wild ride worth the ticket.

Here I Am: On the Journey from Detective to Explorer

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

—William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching

Once again, Amanda Doyle took my breath away when describing her life journey. She also introduced me to the above poem. Years ago, when I was pursuing my doctorate in not one but two programs before the age of 30, my therapist suggested I would feel less anxious and depressed if I could learn to find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

1998 Stanford Graduation

At that time, I could absorb only a drop of this message, as I was a high-achieving woman with something to prove: High school valedictorian. Check. Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford University. Done. Peace Corps Volunteer and Volunteer Leader. Yep. Doctoral Research Program Fellow. Uh huh. TEDx talk. Complete. Most recently, I was hellbent on finishing the very grueling certification process with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute. Never mind that I was still going through a divorce and trying to carry my young daughter through that brutal chapter. The striver in me could not stomach quitting. So I didn’t.

In hindsight, my perpetual achieving does not feel admirable but devastating. As I have learned more about our nervous and stress response systems, I see how all that striving involved a consistent override of what was happening in my body. Said differently, I was frequently in a freeze state, disconnected from my immediate, embodied experience. I pushed through life, no matter the consequences to my soma as well as my spirit. Frequently, I squashed a flight response that was doing its best to tell me to get the hell out of unsafe environments and relationships. What really matters here is that whether we are talking about a flight, freeze, fight, or fawn response, the problem is the environmental threat. The body bears the impact of the danger; it is not the source.

Refusing to continue the decades-long rejection of my embodied experience has been arduous at best and despairing at worst. So many external factors—both within our homes and workplaces as well as beyond them—actively suppress our efforts to wake up to our value beyond the services we offer and what we produce. To focus our attention on safeguarding and strengthening our own and others’ dignity seems outrageous despite overwhelming evidence that people rarely regret what they didn’t accomplish at the end of their lives. As Dan Pink reminds us, “Connection regrets are the largest category in the deep structure of human regret.” A connection regret sounds like, “If only I’d reached out.”

When I look back at my life thus far, I feel deep regret about missing a college best friend’s wedding and leaving behind budding relationships and community connections as I moved from one professional opportunity to the next. Like so many Americans, I have felt a deep, abiding loneliness in my continual chasing of externally defined success and my attempt to find adequate connection in a nuclear family model. As Marisa Franco argues, “We’ve always needed an entire community to feel whole, but we’ve begun to bury that truth with our narratives of just finding one person to complete you and that’s it.”

The good news is that my years-long investment in therapy as well as external catalysts like the pandemic and my divorce have spurred in me a paradigm shift. Yung Pueblo writes, “The first reaction is the past. The intentional response is the present.” I am gradually learning how to slow down enough to recognize that when I feel bad about something, I do not need to resort to my first reaction, which is to blame myself and tend and befriend the person or people with whom I am interacting (which is part of that fawn trauma response mentioned above, a response that is wholly unnecessary when adequate safety reigns). The intentional response I am currently cultivating is to vulnerably self-advocate. And when I speak of vulnerability, I am thinking of Franco’s counter-cultural definition: “sharing the true parts of myself that I fear might result in my rejection or alienation.” I am a messy, bloody work in progress, but I am trusting more and more that neither my inherent value and worth nor my sense of belonging to myself and others are up for grabs.

Recently, my therapist invited me to consider when I am embodying a detective identity versus an explorer one as I go about my day. All that aforementioned, threat-induced achieving falls into the detective category. Viewing life and relationships as cases to be solved, my detective self is narrowly focused on chasing clues in the outside world. As such, she tends to be disconnected from my internal experience as she fixates, her magnifying glass in hand, on the bread crumbs immediately in front of her nose. She is great for completing taxes, not so much for forging sustained and sustaining bonds with myself and others.

The explorer, on the other hand, is full of curiosity. She tends to be sitting back with her head up, taking in a wider perspective of the world before her. From this yielded position, she can let things unfold organically, without so much vigilance and outward tending. She has the capacity to accept the mysteries of life. She also gets to clarity about what environments, people, and activities will nourish and protect her in ways the detective cannot. For me, pervasive fear of the external world is the biggest obstacle to embodying the explorer. Gratefully, in my experiences as a client and a therapist I regularly experience the balm of safe, nurturing connections that reconnect me to that wholehearted seeker.

About a week ago, for example, a client and I, who have invested five years into our relationship, tackled directly the overwhelming alienation he has felt since he was a young child. Together, we were able to reach for that little boy. My client offered him unconditional love and acceptance, and I said to him—slowly, intentionally, and using the nickname he went by back then—“I am here with you now. You are no longer alone.” He said my voice was like a medium that created an opening to the many people, including his ancestors, who have been with and loved him. We wept together tears of authenticity, our abundant defense mechanisms totally disarmed.

“Here I am,” declares Ingrid Clayton. “Explore you!” my therapist implores. “Not breath,” Sharon Salzberg gently utters, reminding me that I do not have to rush into naming and taming my experience with thought and action. May we rediscover and make our home the astonishment of an ordinary, embodied life.

Reconnecting to Awe During a Grueling Winter

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

—Walt Whitman, “I Sing The Body Electric”

The freezing January morning began with an agitated, late me getting into my car and careening through a stop sign at the end of an icy street. I remain extremely thankful for the absence of oncoming cars when I went sliding into the intersection. External factors beyond my control delayed my arrival at the office. Shaken, but still on top of my shit, I began my first telehealth session with my open laptop resting on one palm while I used my other trembling hand to open the office door. Welcome to fucking 2023.

By mid-afternoon of that Friday, I had enough presence of mind to find my way to Dacher Keltner’s recent appearance on his friend Dan Harris’s podcast. I had listened to an interview of Keltner this past summer about his experiences with and research on awe. The way he described bearing the unbearable after he lost his younger brother to colon cancer got me. I hoped this latest conversation with Harris, which followed the recent publication of Keltner’s book, could bring me back to my senses and, ideally, some calm.

Keltner and Harris delivered. They also revealed the depth of their connection through contagious, untethered laughter. Keltner made a compelling argument that awe is precisely the emotion that can help us to feel less isolated and more connected to each other and what matters most to us. As the relentless, noisy voices and violence vie for our attention and the pervasive disconnect from ourselves and each other is becoming impossible to ignore, we need awe more than ever. Given my commitment to becoming more embodied, I particularly appreciated Keltner’s emphasis on the physiological markers of awe: internal warmth, goosebumps, and tears coming to our eyes.

Hazel who rolled that window down all by herself

As I contemplated awe while walking the dog, my morning sessions came to mind. I recalled one of my clients imagining holding the neglected five-year-old boy within him as he and his young daughter exchanged goodnight “I love yous.” And the tears that came to both of our eyes when he did so.

Another client described imagining several loving and badass women—her “power posse”—supporting her while she found the strong back to voice how she is and is not willing to be treated. In response to the all-too-frequent experience of others dismissing her perspective, she asserted on that day with such clear confidence, “Not today, not ever.” Goosebumps.

Turns out I get daily doses of awe as a therapist. I just was not naming and savoring them as such. Without intentionally enriching and absorbing these moments, I was missing the opportunity to integrate them and, so, to link the difficult moments with the awe-inspiring ones.

Hazel and her stick, which she will retrieve but not relinquish

Two days later, I decided I needed some soul medicine. Keltner had highlighted eight practical ways to feel awe, including going into nature. Given my proximity to abundant natural beauty, I headed to the nearby mountains, again with the dog. I wanted to connect more fully to something bigger than myself and drew on my new understanding of awe to help me.

North Saint Vrain Creek

These practices did not disappoint. Granted, the breathtaking Rocky Mountains meant I did not have to work very hard. But I did make a conscious effort not to get lost in my thoughts and instead to notice and delight in the wondrous details of my surroundings. The way the ice and running water collided, for example.

Above the Ralph Price Reservoir

When I got to the summit, I remembered an Internal Family Systems practice called the path exercise. Essentially, you are invited to go on a hike with your wise Self—the one who embodies the “C” qualities of compassion, connectedness, creativity, calm, curiosity, confidence, connectedness, and clarity. Upon arriving at the farthest point on the path, you inquire if the universe has a message for you. So when I crested the ridge, I turned toward the sun, closed my eyes, and asked. As I listened to the rushing water below and felt the warmth penetrate my skin, the Irish blessing I first heard when my sister sang it in her high school choir rang through my ears:

May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Now I had tears in my eyes. Dacher’s mention of mystical experiences? Check.

If only the story ended there. Or maybe not. One of the many things I appreciate about Glennon Doyle’s public revelations on healing anorexia is the way she resists waiting to share her process until some final, complete “ta-da” moment. She has let us into the messy middle. What a gift.

“Reptile-Face Rock”

Soon after I came down the mountain, old and familiar triggers bombarded my fledgling sense of peace and belonging. A little more than twenty-four hours after that “peak experience,” I was back in a dark tunnel, believing I was all alone. Whether it was my practice with mindfulness and self-compassion or something more mysterious that came to my aid, I eventually was able to connect to a larger awareness as I looked at the disgraced face staring back at me in the bathroom mirror. I realized I was neck-deep in the story that the world is super fucked up and so am I. Shame, that deep, ancient, relentless friend, had returned.

Having named what was happening, I was able to crawl into bed and begin to relate to myself more gently and generously. I also remembered Christina. From the first day I met this seasoned therapist and grandmother who trained me to treat trauma, I knew she saw me as I wished to be seen. I surrendered to my desire to fall into her embrace. And as I gave myself permission to yield into her imagined arms, I reconnected to that Self on the mountain who could hold the youngest, wounded parts of myself. With some peace restored, I fell asleep.

The next morning, I took the risk of saying aloud to actual loved ones what was going on with me. And I was met. When I saw my therapist later that day, she reminded me how hard the last three years have been. She declared, “You momentarily lost sight of your exquisiteness.” She invited me to think of my developing sense of internal goodness as a bud that needs regular tending and protection if it is to more fully and sustainably bloom.

I immediately thought of Galway Kinnell’s verse, a part of which I’ve long flirted with tattooing on my body. I looked it up right after my session ended:

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

Feeling not only gratitude for this wise, loving therapist but also feeling warmth in my body, I remembered Keltner’s portrayal of encounters with moral beauty. Another experience of everyday wonder.

Exactly a week after my mountain adventure, several mass shootings and the heinous police beating of Tyre Nichols have taken place. I am more grateful than ever for those who refuse to give up searching for awe in the face of such horror. As adrienne maree brown instructed on her Instagram post this morning, which was, not incidentally, full of musical awe, “Stay soft.”

Awe will not eradicate police brutality or heal the power-hungry narcissism and greed of our political leaders. But it just might remind us, as Clint Smith remarkably does, that rebirth is possible and, also, that we are part and parcel of the wonder all around us.

“Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.” —Roger A. Caras

Healing Complex Trauma

I didn’t need to come up with a treatment plan for myself. I needed to get out of my own way, to let the feelings come, to trust the truth in my body so I could begin to reclaim it. And it was witnessed by someone who could help me integrate this wisdom even further. Another layer of healing. Another layer of grief, sloughed away. Essential pieces of me uncovered, making me more whole.

—Ingrid Clayton, Believing Me

Here I am, adding my voice to the growing chorus who are highlighting the need to shift the mental health script in this country from one of disordered individuals to adaptive human beings who are regularly interacting with, and so being impacted by, dysfunctional systems.

So many of my clients search for diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that can help them manage struggles with their daily functioning and stuckness in their relationships with themselves and others. I am not a medical doctor and often refer clients and loved ones to this article by Tara Brach when they’re considering whether or not to medicate symptoms that are obstructing a fulfilling, joyful life.

I also do not oppose the biomedical model with regard to treating what hurts. I would, however, like us to step into something truer than the shame-based story that we’re all fucked up. That truth is articulately stated by Gabor Mate in his newest book The Myth of Normal:

A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment.

Our society’s reliable, consistent commitment to emotional neglect is what’s true, not that we are a hopeless, defective lot. And neglect, like abuse, is traumatic.

As I keep growing and learning about the intricate interplay between human beings and our environments, I am more and more likely to hypothesize that complex trauma, also called developmental or relational trauma, is at play when supporting people’s healing.

I appreciate Ingrid Clayton’s characterization of complex trauma, which, unlike single-event trauma (such as a car accident), involves repeated exposure to relational experiences—often but not always in childhood—that are distressing or disturbing and overwhelm an individual’s ability to cope. Importantly, part of the impact of complex trauma is “a distortion in a person’s core sense of self.” That is, what we come to perceive as character or personality traits are actually adaptations we developed at an earlier time to survive a hostile environment.

Here Is Brian Peck’s Thoughtful Article about This Statement

My own bias is that to effectively remedy this self-distortion, we would be wise to shift our attention from the “A” qualities (i.e. aggressive, achieving, alone, afraid, apathetic) of the pathological society mentioned above toward the relational, embodied “A” of attachment. In this realm, we can learn to reality check a perception of threat that no longer is actually dangerous in the present. We also can reconnect to the protective and nurturing relationships at the heart of a thriving human life. At the very least, we can stop adding “buts” to validating statements about our lived experience. Instead, we can create some space between the insight of “trauma is not my fault” and how we choose to respond to that insight. (And I feel compelled to add the caveat that I’m not endorsing narcissistic gaslighting with that last statement but instead highlighting how “buts” diminish insights and how healing complex trauma often involves a collective, interpersonal process rather than a solely individual, intrapersonal one.)

But I need to back up. I’m so grateful that the hosts of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast have brought the sage life detective, Dr. Becky Kennedy, on their show not once but FOUR times. In the episode explicitly about attachment, she not only talks about the power of repair but also shares the research findings that when we are born, our brain is 25% wired. At three years of age, our brains are 75% wired. THREE YEARS OLD.

So many of us don’t have memories or in-depth, accurate documentation about this time in our lives. We then dismiss this chapter as a critical shaper of how we see ourselves and relate to the world. However, if we start to bring compassionate curiosity to our reactions to particular external stimuli—without comparing ourselves to others—we can begin to understand to what extent and how often the glasses through which this young map maker learned to make sense of the world and herself are distorted.

My own map maker learned from her early environments how to dismiss, invalidate, and judge harshly her needs for emotional regulation and support. She also learned to override the signals of distress sounding from within her body. My material needs were well tended to so any complaints I had about how I felt inside were “extra.” Be nice, be good, be as thin and attractive as possible (ideally with big boobs and no freckles), and be happy. If you are not performing those ways of being with ease, there is something wrong with you.

Only in my 40s have I more deeply understood the extent to which my early childhood environment was jam-packed with the denied fear, avoided shame, suppressed grief, displaced anger, and chronic pain and disease that are part and parcel of intergenerational trauma. I no longer minimize how all that flight from the vulnerable, embodied, difficult parts of being human impacted my mind and body in profound, seemingly irreparable ways. Happily, it’s not game over. We can rewire our brains through missing attachment experiences and embodied actions and, in the process, transform the deeply ingrained ways we think about, feel, and sense ourselves and the world.

Sonya Renee Taylor poignantly illustrates an example of reclaiming her undistorted core self in the following story:

I was doing this meditation for shadow work or something like that. And in the meditation, like go visit my little Sonya. And I don’t say anything to her, I just observe where she is and what’s happening and it takes me back to this really root memory. And then once I observe and I spend some time in it, I go up to her and I ask her what she wants. And little Sonya said, I want to go home.

And I was like, oh, I’ll be your home. We are our own home. It was really sweet and tender and beautiful, and I practiced it a lot. And little Sonya was like, no chick. I want a plane trip to Pittsburgh, and I want a hoagie. Thanks for all your fluffy duffy therapized meaning. And it was this phenomenal moment of awareness where I was like Sonya, the adult who has been indoctrinated into so many things, including all of this wonder. But the core of me that didn’t need to think or do anything was like, no. That need didn’t come from my head, that need came from my soul, from my center, from the smallest parts of my truth. And so sometimes the work is to not be in our head at all. You don’t have no answers there. The answer is in the center of you. It’s in your gut, it’s inside the deepest, quietest, usually most disavowed parts of ourselves. And that part isn’t thinking.

Circling back to Clayton’s statement that opened this post, maybe we don’t need a treatment plan for ourselves (although I’m all for one if that helps). Maybe (re)valuing belonging and care, as Mate implores, and growing radical self-love, as Taylor teaches, is at the heart of healing complex trauma. I can say for myself that after many years of individual and couples therapy and the study and practice of mindfulness, by far the most effective healing experiences have been relational—moments when I have intentionally brought home the parts of myself that got shoved into a dark tunnel as well as interactions with others, when I took off the mask with those who had the capacity to meet me with grace and interest.

And, perhaps, only in growing our tolerance for paradox—that two or more contradictory truths can exist at the same time—can we hold that we are whole even as the distorted perceptions of ourselves continue to say otherwise. The inimitable Mary Oliver, who herself experienced brutal abuse as a child, beautifully captures the paradox of being human, without diminishing any part of it:

Integration

That’s what healing is. It’s a love offering to the world.

—Alex Elle

What a fucking ride. I keep wondering what U.S. historians are going to say about this particular chapter. More often, though, I wake up early and journal to find out what the hell is going on inside this jumbled body. What hasn’t happened in the last three years? I am one of the many clawing my way back from loss, betrayal, and an oversized sense of threat.

I also am incredibly privileged. I own a house in a close-knit community where I currently do not have to fear violence. I run a small business and, for better and worse, my services are in demand given how many people are currently traumatized. I also have generous friends, loyal family members, and a rockstar therapist who have held me through the multiple tidal waves of late. And last, but not least, I have a seven-year-old daughter who demands that I tap into my resiliency. EVERY. DAMN. DAY.

Along with all of these good things has been a lot of emotional pain. Like tons of my fellow Americans, I have known acute loneliness, including within what are supposed to be my closest relationships. And I have chosen a profession that, when I do it well, calls on me to sit with people through their darkest hours and meet them with compassionate curiosity. So what is my point? Simply, this: On the other side of the pain, if we can bear to go through it with grace and a fair amount of surrender, is wholeness. And light. And joy.

I used to be so afraid of my own pain. But this past year of adjusting to divorced life and simultaneously tackling sensorimotor psychotherapy’s rigorous (brutal?) certification process slammed me headfirst into present and past pain. I could have escaped. Lord knows this society peddles endless flight routes. Instead, I started buying nonalcoholic beer, gathered all my favorite teachers, and chose to go inside.

There I discovered a sexual assault I had never named as such. I learned how my body impulsively curls inward like a roly poly when I feel terrified and how, sometimes, to collapse and shake and cry is exactly what helps the most. I realized I felt not only different from so many people I love but actually unpalatable to them. And I experienced a therapist sitting next to me, silently and with their hand resting on my thigh, as I let the waves of agonizing grief pass through me in front of what felt like a stadium of people (it was more like five).

I also had my own Good Will Hunting moment with my therapist. Instead of telling me, “It’s not your fault,” until I fell into her arms sobbing, she said, “You are trustworthy.” At least EIGHT times. And I began to let that message penetrate, imagining her hand on my back while she said it. She also helped me to see how shame often acts like an 80-pound blanket, effectively smothering all the insights and goodness from view. But they’re still there, underneath it all. One day, she ended our session by saying, “You are exquisite,” and I only partially cringed and turned away from her. A total victory.

I got to see some of my clients in person again and receive the best hugs at the end of our sessions. My daughter and I had private Taylor Swift and Katy Perry dance parties, and I held her tight in my arms when she felt overwhelmed by the first grade social scene. I planted more colorful perennials and got to watch them bloom. I fell in love and laughed my head off. I co-created a playlist that unapologetically indulged my sappiest side. And, most recently, I took the armor all the way off and, standing there naked, risked saying aloud to a couple of my fellow highly sensitive friends, “I am love. We all are.”

Yes, healing brokenness hurts like hell. But there is so much more than the pain, both along the way and once it is metabolized. Healing is a lifelong journey to be sure. The losses, failures, and heartbreaks keep rolling through. But at some point, when we commit to sticking around through whatever comes flying to the surface or (perhaps more frequently) refuse to leave things buried, the courage regularly overshadows the fear. And the desire to live our life and love out loud triumph over the impulse to shrink, hide, and guzzle despair.

Since I just delighted in Taylor’s Folklore documentary for the second time on this frigid November night, I am giving her the last word on where to begin: “If we’re going to have to recalibrate everything, we should start with what we love the most first.”





When I Found Her...

It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.

—D.W. Winnicott

I am at an adult birthday celebration, and everyone is looking at me. I’m probably six years old. I supposedly gave a wonderful gift to the one being celebrated with a message on it about how we are the best of friends. Only I didn’t choose the gift. I definitely didn’t purchase it. I want to get away from all the eyes fixed on me. I don’t dare say, “That’s not from me!” I don’t risk running out of the room, which is what I desperately want to do. I am frozen. I do my best to plaster a smile on my face.

This time, I’m in the memory with a skilled therapist at an intensive sensorimotor psychotherapy training, and I am 46 years old. My eyes are closed, and I hear her kind voice asking what’s happening for this child. “She feels like a paper doll,” I say.

“It’s all so fake, huh,” she says so clearly. What a relief. Somebody gets it.

Compassion begins to wash over me for the many times I’ve felt wobbly in the world. A paper cutout isn’t exactly steady, or full of desire.

“And if this scene could tell her something about herself, what would it say?” the therapist gently asks.

“I have to hide,” I immediately respond.

I—adult me—am surprised. I’ve read so many self-help books and done so many cognition-centered therapy sessions. They’ve led me to discover false beliefs like, “I fuck things up,” and, “I am alone.” But spending time in this scene with that little one, I’ve hit upon something truer than I previously knew. Suddenly, the ways in which I reactively withdraw in intimate relationships when I feel emotionally exposed don’t seem shameful at all. They feel necessary, at least during this earlier time of my life and in scenes like that birthday party. And painful. So painful.

I open my weeping eyes, and the therapist is leaning forward. Her benevolent eyes are looking at my heart, and I swear she’s seeing that sensitive little kid inside me. For perhaps the first time in my life, I have no issue whatsoever holding her gaze. The familiar “See me, don’t see me!” impulse seems to have evaporated. I even want to make eye contact with the three other women observing this session, as I absolutely trust I will be met with compassion and grace.

I remember Albert Einstein’s words: “The most important question a person can ask is, ‘Is the Universe a friendly place?’” This moment is telling me it can be. Maybe I don’t have to hide so much, from myself or the world. The chronic freeze is thawing.

I joke with the group that the paper doll is becoming the Cabbage Patch Kid of my youth, with chubby thighs to boot. This child part who has been so far away, in some dark place, is actually here, inside me, and coming back to life as the full-fledged human being that she is. She is real. I now am remembering how I loved to wear multicolored elastic headbands with gold and silver threads woven into them as a child. I say aloud to the group, “I think my six-year-old daughter would enjoy six-year-old me.”

I recently met with my therapist, and we explored the shakiness that still appears in my body when big feelings arise. Instead of a paper doll, she suggested that my quivery adult body is more like a slack sail. That sail is not unmoored; it is anchored to a mast and a boom. And they are connected to a boat. Maybe I don’t have to work so hard to move my life in the direction I long to go. Ron Kurtz said, “If you find enough of the right kind of experience, the system will spontaneously reorganize toward health.” Perhaps, then, what is needed is to remember the internal structure that already exists—that I have actively built—to hold me steady. As far as the vast universe outside of me goes, I will seek out winds that allow the sail to billow. I am digging this metaphor. May I coast toward my deeper yearning in the light of day, embodying fierce vulnerability instead of stowing away parts of myself.

…

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.

—Maya Angelou

Can We Come Together Already to Explode the Abuse-Dependency Cycle?

I don’t want to keep arguing with people who find my death an acceptable collateral damage for anything. I don’t want to keep trying to plan the future with them. So, for me, so much of it is like how do I create something that’s more compelling than that? And the invitation is always available, the door is always open, any time you want to exit the death cult. We’re going to have vibrant options for life available over here.

—adrienne maree brown, On Being

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote, “For the first time in our history, rather than conveying rights, the court has explicitly taken a constitutional right away from the American people.”

One thing I have been contemplating is how grateful I am for the morning-after pill and my access to Planned Parenthood when I was 22 years old. At that time, I had just graduated from college and was dating a cisgender man with whom I was learning about sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake (hallelujah!). I also was not ready to raise a child or give up my plan to become a Peace Corps volunteer. When a condom broke one summer night, I went to Planned Parenthood as soon as its doors opened the next morning and proceeded to Senegal a couple of months later.

Then there’s my own reckoning with sexual violence that I experienced at 17 years old. Only recently was I able to process the shame and trauma of that event in therapy and begin to call it by its true name: sexual assault. I did not have to contend with unwanted pregnancy as a result of that violence. The three million people in this country who experience rape and rape-related pregnancy during their lifetime are not so lucky.

Clearly I’m craving some transparency and honesty about the countless ways women and additionally marginalized people in this country have fought for basic human rights and have had to continue fighting to safeguard those rights. If only a minority of people in this country would grow the fuck up and be accountable for their ongoing abuse of power and the Earth, including its inhabitants! Alas, I’m not holding my breath. After all, this small group of people lives on dirty pain, which reeks of denial, blame, and avoidance. Many of these folks also adhere to a cult of innocence in addition to a death cult. I don’t know about you, but I’m not trying to be a cult deprogrammer with my one wild and precious life.

Instead, I am turning to Grace Lee Boggs’ wisdom: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” So I’m going to talk about how those of us who have been inducted into various systems that feed on an abuse-dependency cycle can free ourselves from the dependency side of the equation that is literally killing us. In short, I want to encourage us to detach in healthy ways from toxic people and energy and to discern such detachment from the kind of separation that leads to disdain, apathy, and passivity. Thankfully, many very intelligent teachers have given us road maps to follow that are supportive of our struggles for justice, equity, and belonging.

First up, is Terri Cole. Last year, when Boundary Boss was published, I learned that I suffer from high-functioning codependency:

High-functioning codependency is behavior that includes disordered boundaries, where you are overly invested in the feeling states, the decisions, the outcomes, and the circumstances of the people in your life to the detriment of your internal peace and wellbeing. 

A high-functioning codependent is often smart, successful, reliable, and accomplished. They don’t identify with being dependent, because they are likely doing everything for everyone else. In a way, you make it look easy and like you have it all together. 

You might have an amazing career, run a household, care for children or aging parents, juggle all the extracurriculars, doctor’s appointments, plus you’re basically life coaching your friends through all their problems. 

You can do it all and the people in your life look to you to do so. But what is the cost to YOU? Overfunctioning can leave you burnt out and exhausted from trying to maintain an impossible workload and keep all the balls in the air. 

Around the same time, I learned about the human giver syndrome, which explicitly names how patriarchal, gender-binary societies have woven into every thread the belief that women are supposed to give everything to others, no matter the cost to themselves, so that men can be self-determining human beings who realize their dreams and aspirations. As the full-time working mother of a then five-year-old daughter and small business owner, both of these constructs were a gut punch.

I’ve been a feminist since I got away from my conservative childhood enclave and found out about feminism, soon after the sexual assault named above. But I had no idea how deep and strong the pressure to abandon myself would be upon becoming a mother. In some ways, I am grateful I didn’t know about the intensity of this mother as martyr memo or I might not have very deliberately conceived my daughter at the age of 39.

And, just to amplify our new reality, many people with a uterus no longer have the option of not becoming a parent when they do not want and/or are not ready to assume this monumental responsibility for another life.

A year ago, when I began my divorce process, I began digging into healing the human giver syndrome and divorcing myself from the high-functioning codependency, too, since I knew I would fall apart if I didn’t. I have since discovered just how much a sense of over-responsibility for others’ feelings and well-being had colonized my brain. I automatically would take on any number of time- and energy-depleting tasks and interactions without first asking, is this actually my responsibility? That I, like so many others, learned the please and appease trauma response at a young age to stay safe safe with unsafe adults further cemented my tendency to get too close to others’ distress in an attempt to understand and deescalate it. As if these adults didn’t have the primary responsibility to understand their triggers, regulate their nervous systems, and contain their words and behavior.

I loved and related to how Jen Hatmaker described being a “spotlight and cleanup crew” for others:

Thanks Sandy!

Essentially the central definition of codependency is that you just do not allow another person to sit in the consequences of his or her choices…You don’t want them to feel the discomfort of it. You don’t want other people to observe what’s true…You don’t want to live with a ticking time bomb. So you shape shift around somebody’s volatile personality just to steady the waters right? So that you’re just not constantly having explosions all around you. You’re basically taking on the effects of somebody else’s choices and you are crafting an environment around someone else so they don’t have to feel their own pain, their own discomfort, their own trauma, their own consequences, or even their own responsibilities…I did not know I was codependent. I thought I was just being a good person, right? I thought I was just being helpful. I thought I was just being in service to another person. I did not realize how much I stunted our own growth…And I took that to my counselor and she was like, this is your work…You made these choices one by one because you preferred a steady stable environment over whatever was true…And so, that’s been a lot of my personal work for the last year and a half is figuring out how to let other human people just be human people. All the way. Good, bad, hard, making good choices, making terrible choices. Because they’re a person and that’s their life. And it’s not my life.

After listening to Hatmaker so vulnerably describe her own struggles, I was finally ready to read the classic Codependent No More. Damn did Melody Beattie’s unflinching honesty hit hard. Her depiction of healthy detachment is what struck the deepest chord with me. As she wrote, “It (detachment) is not detaching from the person whom we care about, but from the agony of involvement.” Could she more perfectly sequence three words? I don’t think so. Agony of involvement captures so poignantly the felt experience of pursuing a relationship with a person, job, or cause in which only one party is assuming responsibility for their choices and the impact of those choices. We can scream from the rooftops, work ourselves to death, and come up with the calmest, smartest argument in the world. However, if the other party refuses to tune in and turn toward what is actually happening—ideally in a regulated and emotionally aware way—anticipate feeling very stuck and having oodles of blame and shame hurled at you.

And since those who dodge responsibility do not want us to make the distinction between blaming and assessing accountability, here is a little David Richo magic:

In blame, there is censure with an intent to shame and humiliate. The intent is to show that someone is wrong. In assessing accountability the intent is to right a wrong and restore a balance. In mindful, adult living, no one is to blame and everyone is accountable.

When we see clearly that we are not sitting across the table from fellow adults who are willing to be accountable, I want us to detach rather than work harder, give more, or explain what’s what until we’re blue in the face. I’ve been thinking about healthy detachment as backing up from the scene as far as we need to before we start getting curious about what’s happening. In the case of the Supreme Court, when I am detached enough, I’m no longer shocked or befuddled. I see that the system is working exactly as it was designed.

Image Credit: Jess Watkins

Now is my chance to recognize I have other options than to get seduced into shame’s inadequacy story (and it is a bullshit story) or a chronic state of powerlessness, both of which can take us deep into isolation, dissociation, and self-hatred. Enter another tough lesson from Beattie: those of us who are accustomed to assuming responsibility for other people’s messes tend to jump on the Karpman drama triangle in this order: rescuer—>persecutor—>victim. Yikes. brown unabashedly rejects the over-responsible, caretaker role when she says,

We can’t keep getting swept back into conversations that are nonsensical to be in. The idea that I would ever argue with a man about what I do with my body, like it’s such a waste of my miraculous life and time that…it’s just illogical.

Amen. So what are some concrete options for honoring our miraculous life and time? Here are a few:

  1. We can adopt the wise practice of transformative justice and support people in holding themselves accountable. Not hold them accountable, mind you. Sometimes I joke with my clients, “Are you a district attorney?” Certain individuals in specific roles have the responsibility and authority to hold people accountable. I do not and you probably do not either. But I enjoy thinking creatively about supporting people in holding themselves accountable. I might ask them, “Have you reflected on how your behavior is impacting them?” “Have you inquired into the belief driving that action?” “Huh, that reaction surprised me. Can you tell me where it comes from?” “How are you going to make this right?” I might even give a mere one word, “Ouch,” and see if the person is willing to go inward and consider how what they just said or did was hurtful. In none of the above examples did I exert energy I don’t want to spend on educating, mind reading, or walking on eggshells.

  2. “We need other people to see our own faces,” writes Cole Arthur Riley, and challenge the “intoxicating lie of individualism.” The transformation of ourselves does not happen in isolation. If we are considering leaving a family or partner or community that is harming us, we need to find additional people who will embrace and care for us. Reaching out is vulnerable and requires a willingness to put ourselves out there.

  3. We can choose to forge close relationships with adults who, as my therapist beautifully said, know how to hold themselves (or are intentionally learning how to do so—thank goodness secure attachment can be earned!). If our early relational map was marred by abuse, neglect, and additional kinds of trauma, we may need help knowing how and where to find such people. I promise they exist. An adult who holds oneself first and foremost has learned how to love themselves and hold themselves in high regard (e.g., brown’s words above). With their deep well of self-worth, they do not struggle to take responsibility for their thoughts, emotions, behavior, and happiness. And they contain and process their dirty pain rather than regularly unleash it on others. Since we’re all imperfectly perfect and inevitably hurt others in long-term relationships, these adults know how to repair relational ruptures.

  4. We can seek out, learn from, and support networks and movements, oftentimes founded and run by queer people of color, who have been challenging oppression and domination for generations. In this moment the National Network of Abortion Funds is one such organization.

  5. If and when we can, rest. “Rest is the only reliable gateway to wonder,” Riley lyrically reminds us.


Reemerging

Stop looking into the lake of life and seeing yourself. Look into the lake of life and see God.

—Michael Singer

One year ago, I turned more directly toward the end of my marriage and, because I love a good memoir, Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment. As I wrote at that time,

God in My Own Backyard. Photo Credit to @kswaynewilson

The wisest choice I can see is to surrender—to let go of the controls—and breathe my way through the unfolding of whatever comes next. I'm still in the fledgling stage of trusting that the universe is a friendly place and am committed to growing that faith.

A year later, I am divorced and finding my way into a new life chapter as the half-time single parent of a sparkling, precocious six-year-old daughter. Out in the world beyond my home, Ukraine is fighting tooth and nail for democracy, and the Supreme Court is preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade. It is definitely not a time to get lost in self-absorption, which, not incidentally, is a key feature of shame.

I recently heard an impressive talk by Chris Germer on healing shame with self-compassion. He wisely pointed out that shame is not the issue; avoiding it is. When no mindful observer exists to address the shame, it runs on autopilot, contaminating our inner body sensations, external physical expressions, thought processes, emotions, and behaviors. Unmitigated shame is, in short, a self-centered shit show. It is also at the heart of the narcissism—the cult of innocence to borrow from Richard Rohr—parading around the U.S. political stage, in my most humble opinion.

The solution, however, is not to heap more poo on the steaming pile. Rather, kindness and a sense of common humanity are the medicine. Like it or not, we are all imperfect, mortal, and vulnerable. But how to bring these ideas to life and embody them?

I think we need to back up and remember that shame is not some self-created monster. It is the result of relational wounding. So treating it like a problem to be solved simply does not work. Seeing shame as a solution to a problem, on the other hand, has been quite impactful in my life and the lives of so many others with whom I’ve come into contact. If I were to crystallize the deeper problem driving shame and our avoidance of it, I would say we are smack dab in the middle of a love deficit. Or a briar patch. As Brene Brown explained it,

I remember when I first started seeing Diana my therapist, I was… Golly, I was 10 years sober and I’m 25 now, so 15 years ago. And I was sober, but I was really leaning into food and work. And so I had just given up some of the food stuff and I was really working on work. And I remember saying to her, “I need some medicine. I need some medicine because I got nothing now. I got nothing.” And she said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “I’m like a turtle in a briar patch, and you took away my Bud Light, and you took away my cigarettes, and now you’ve taken away the apple fritter, and now you’ve taken away the 70 hours of work. I’m a turtle without a shell in a briar patch. Everywhere I turn, it hurts. I’m going to need something.” And she goes, “Have you thought about getting out of the fucking briar patch?”

Too many of us have been trudging through a love desert strewn with thorns. So we turn to control or numbing or shame or any number of additional strategies to make it through the day. But what would happen if, as Germer advises, we prioritized reconnecting with the universal, innocent human wish to be loved? Could we stop looking everywhere for our own reflection and connect instead to the miracle that is life?

Backdraft. Photo Credit to FireEngineering

As a body-based trauma therapist, I’m quick to point out that until there’s enough emotional and physical safety in our environment, we likely will be too vigilant to let in love, let alone offer it inwardly. There’s also the reality that as we begin to experience unconditional love, “we discover the conditions under which we were unloved.” Germer aptly calls this distress backdraft. And still, I am growing more confident in saying to the clients who are no longer actively in the throes of danger and active wounding, how about we try letting go of the controls rather than trying to manage everyone and everything to avoid pain? In her riveting memoir about healing complex PTSD, Stephanie Foo shared this wisdom from her therapist,

According to Dr. Ham, complex PTSD further clouds our perception of basic sensorial instincts. We are jumpy creatures, expectant of danger and conflict, and so that’s what we see. We’re often blind to what is actually happening. So Dr. Ham advocates for what the Dalai Lama calls “emotional disarmament—to see things realistically and clearly without the confusion of fear or rage.” For every narrow, fear-based C-PTSD reading, Dr. Ham said, there is a wider truth—layers and layers of truths. Of course it isn’t possible to always know that entire truth, because the people we love might not even be aware of that truth themselves. What is important is to approach all of these interactions with curiosity for what that truth is, not fear. He said I should approach difficult conversations with an attitude of “What is hurting you?” instead of “Have I hurt you?”

Credit to Melli O’Brien

My own therapist is helping me to identify when my perception has become fixated on one pixel of a much larger masterpiece. Instead of staring at that lake in a self-absorbed, fear-drenched, shame-filled way, I am growing more adept at using curiosity to widen the view on the simultaneously messy and extraordinary life before me. In my most recent session, for example, I told her about a relational trauma in my adolescence. When she tracked my body shrinking into the old, safe cloak of invisibility, she reached her hand out to me. I was able to take a deep breath, reach back, place my hand into hers, and say aloud, for the first time ever, “It really was that bad for me.” I’m still absorbing the relief of that grace, connection, and surrender, which feels so much warmer and relaxed than the story of my inherent unworthiness.

On this journey of learning to love ourselves and this life, leave it to the Nagoski sisters to offer some solid practical advice: 1) move toward people who take your well-being as seriously as their own, and 2) interact with fellow givers instead of those who feel entitled to your time, energy, and life. As I enter into new love with a fellow giver, I am experiencing the inner calm that comes from trusting her hand will consistently be there for me to hold. I may finally be getting this “relax and release” mantra that Singer so often declares.

To my fellow seekers who want to see the divinity in the lake of life and also stay in the ring of complex human relationships (aka be an emotionally mature adult), I leave you with a drop of Yung Pueblo’s wisdom and Chanel Miller’s poignant video, which was made almost entirely by women:

“love me well or leave me alone” energy is not selfishness, the point is to reaffirm your value and align with people who are emotionally prepared for a deep connection.

Working Moms, I See You; Let's Help Each Other Bring Ourselves Back to Life

Rage is the spark, not the fuel.

—Karen Walrond, Unlocking Us

What Working Mom Can’t Use Some Humor about Daddy Privilege?

Kaiser Permanente Rock Creek Medical Offices

On November 11, 2021, my almost six-year-old child received her first COVID-19 vaccination. Palpable relief immediately washed over me. When I went to the same clinic for my own booster shot the following day, I welled up with tears upon seeing the bulletin board pictured below. If only every time we turned to the outside world, we experienced this much love and care for each other.

Then news of the Omicron variant hit the airwaves, and my motivation to write this post died on the vine. Meanwhile , the Supreme Court weighed in on Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law, the Senate has not been able to move voting rights legislation forward, and ongoing obstructions are blocking the passage of the Build Back Better Plan. Thank you rage for prompting my return to the keyboard.

Given how hard it is to detect the water while we’re swimming in it, we likely won’t know just how impactful the last 21 months have been on our lives until several years from now. On November 11, however, I got a glimpse of the massive energy, time, and effort that have gone toward protecting and negotiating for the safety of my daughter since we first locked down in March 2020. Knowing I’m never alone in these moments of collective struggle and transformation, I feel inspired to give a shout out to my fellow moms and additional parents who may not be women but are largely, if not entirely, carrying the load of what remains heavily skewed as women’s work within patriarchal, gender-binary systems. That load includes but is not limited to the actual physical labor of caring for children as well as the mental and emotional weight of establishing and maintaining the systems that keep daily life afloat. Here are just a few examples of that systems maintenance: keeping track of what food is needed to fill hungry bellies and what bills need to be paid to keep those bellies dry and warm, enrolling in and coordinating children’s activities and appointments, transporting and/or organizing transportation for children to get to those activities and appointments on time, communicating with third parties like schools and doctor’s offices, and doing the due diligence necessary to determine which peers and community members are safe and hospitable for our little ones. During the pandemic, engaging in near constant cost-benefit analyses of how much we expand or shrink our children’s worlds to keep them safe has been yet another burden added to the already unbearable weight of being a mom. Parents with children under five remain saddled with this additional burden.

It recently came to my attention that my daughter thought she caused my exhaustion. Initially, I felt heartbroken. She’s not crazy for picking up on how limited my patience has been for the brilliant ways she delays bedtime. She accurately detects the irritability that emerges when I’m trying to get us somewhere on time and her freer timescape does not give a hoot about others’ rules, judgments, and rigidity. And she’s most certainly not making up the fatigue she detects in my eyes or the sadness she picks up in my voice on a regular basis these days. Of course she believes all of this is about her. That’s what kids do. So I at least have said and will continue to repeat to her that the depletion is not her fault or her responsibility. When I went through a list of reasons I grow weary that have nothing to do with her, I appreciated her solemn contribution, “Mama, playing hard makes us tired, too.” Amen to that.

As a bit of my worry about her has dissipated with her vaccination shots, that spark of rage has started to replace the heartbreak. I have been a psychotherapist throughout the pandemic, working with approximately 25 clients per week. This experience hasn’t exactly felt like a walk in the park. I look back at those first six months with incredulity, as I would see five clients for hour-long sessions from 7 a.m. to noon in the basement, come upstairs, and take over childcare for the afternoon. Now I understand that initial period as one of crisis, when my stress response system had enough reserves to tackle day after day with no time or space to nourish myself. And I was one of the lucky moms who didn’t lose my job or have to leave it because there was no one else to take care of the children. I also had a reliable co-parent and so was able to tag-team work and parenting.

Even with those resources, as 2022 fast approaches my reserves are gonzo. And a lot of people in this country—many of whom refuse to get vaccinated—deny there is even an issue. Re-enter the rage and our need for a different kind of fuel. Amanda Doyle poignantly captured the reality for too many of us when she said,

…in chemistry, fire burns when fuel meets heat and oxygen. You need heat and oxygen to turn fuel into fire. And I realized that I have that fuel in me. I do have fuel in me for fun and joy and desire and curiosity. And I think we all do. But I think because of the way our lives are structured, mostly for women, we don’t give those things heat and we don’t give those things air. And that is giving space and time for these things and allowing attention for them. And if you have no room or time in your life to live, you just won’t. And the truth is, is that the world is fine with women not living. And that means that we have to decide whether we want to live because not a damn person is going to require it of us, because that is how the world turns...And I think the key thing for me has been not viewing this as yet another duty that I’m failing to meet. Not just another way I’m jacked up, not just another way that I have a problem or my relationship has a problem, or I haven’t prioritized correctly, but it’s just that I have been doing the best that I can. And that best has been not making any fucking room to have these things in my life. And I’m just viewing them not as a something I’m failing to make happen in my life, but as a birthright that I want to reclaim. And so I’m taking back that room because I can either spend my time resenting the world for failing to ignite me, or I can make some time to give myself the heat and the air that I need.

So how do we reclaim this birthright of feeling ignited in life? I say we love the shit out of ourselves and each other. The isolation and self-reliance required by a toxically individualistic society are not badges of honor. They are our death knell. With the recent loss of Bell Hooks, it seems only fitting to return to her wisdom on the power of beloved community. As she said, “…people in oppressive institutions will not change from the logic and practices of domination without engagement with those who are striving for a better way.” Finding and loving those who want to address what is happening, rather than avoid it, as well as those who embrace the compassionate mess that is life, rather than judge it, will bring us back to life. With some vitality, we can mobilize collectively for transformation of those systems, which benefit so few and devastate so many.

In addition to engaging with trusted others when I can muster it (there’s been more cheesy holiday film watching this month than I would care to admit), I am paying closer and closer attention to the harsh voice that I’ve appropriated from various institutions and relationships across my life. That voice derisively says my first name before dismissing my struggles. Usually a negative evaluation follows as well as an order to be different. “Connie, why are you getting so upset over such a small thing? Pull it together.” This voice represents the colonization of my mind that would have me buy into systems designed to objectify me, exploit my labor, and violate my dignity. So I am committed to not giving that voice any more of my power, which I can do regardless of whether or not I have a beloved community to lean on just yet. And when I struggle to pull my attention away from that gaslighting voice, the following poem by Becky Helmsley reminds me of what is actually true:

She sat at the back and they said she was shy,

She led from the front and they hated her pride,

They asked her advice and then questioned her guidance,

They branded her loud, then were shocked by her silence,

When she shared no ambition they said it was sad,

So she told them her dreams and they said she was mad,

They told her they'd listen, then covered their ears,

And gave her a hug while they laughed at her fears,

And she listened to all of it thinking she should,

Be the girl they told her to be best as she could,

But one day she asked what was best for herself,

Instead of trying to please everyone else,

So she walked to the forest and stood with the trees,

She heard the wind whisper and dance with the leaves,

She spoke to the willow, the elm and the pine,

And she told them what she'd been told time after time,

She told them she felt she was never enough,

She was either too little or far far too much,

Too loud or too quiet, too fierce or too weak,

Too wise or too foolish, too bold or too meek,

Then she found a small clearing surrounded by firs,

And she stopped...and she heard what the trees said to her,

And she sat there for hours not wanting to leave,

For the forest said nothing, it just let her breathe.

Standing in the Truth Will Set You Free (And Hurt Like Hell)

…That’s what releasing all the trauma is about, is about being open enough, vulnerable enough to do the work to tell the truth about your own life. And I think when you can stand in the truth of your own life, you then get to rise to the highest, truest expression of yourself as a human being.

— Oprah Winfrey, Armchair Expert

The amazing podcast episodes released during the pandemic have saved my life. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe. I at least want to express my gratitude. On the days when I wasn’t sure how to keep going, I grabbed my shoes and the dog, headed for the creek near my house, and expanded my world. I still do.

In addition to inspiration, I find solace in the voices of those who so bravely have shared the truths of their lives, often with each other. Oprah Winfrey. Brene Brown. Resmaa Menakem. Glennon Doyle. Prentis Hemphill. Tim Ferriss. Rod Owens. Tara Brach. Gabor Mate. Kristen Neff. Richard Schwartz. Terri Cole. Sonya Renee Taylor. Terry Real. Brandi Carlile. Ashley C. Ford. Rachel Kaplan. And so many more. When we learn how to find them, the wises ones and helpers are abundant.

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So I decided, why not stand in the truth of my own life? I am here to practice Glennon Doyle’s bold claim: it is my job to trust my vision, even in the midst of a midlife unraveling. There is both no time to fuck around and no time to rush. Bring on the paradox.

These days, clarity about my own truth has come from inquiring into the impacts of growing up in an authoritarian world. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey wrote,

We elicit from the world what we project into the world; but what you project is based upon what happened to you as a child.

While participating in an intensive training on developmental injuries, an image emerged of a five-year-old child, with her hands on her hips, facing a bulldozer. With deeper insight into how young children make maps of the world that are based on their intergenerational family patterns and immediate landscapes, I began to honor the lifelong fear I’ve carried in my body. I understood that little girl faced extreme physical and emotional harm if she did not obey the rules of the adults in power and perform the role of a good girl perfectly. Anxiety and de-selfing became my primary ways of sustaining relationships and salvaging some semblance of safety. They were ingenious adaptations rather than inherent defects. In some contexts, these strategies still work.

As I brought compassion to the fraught blueprints I inherited, my struggles with trusting the friendliness of the universe made more sense, as did the association between vulnerability and powerlessness. So I began to honor rather than shame the shakiness in my body that arises when I am feeling vulnerable in relationship. What began as an awareness of a force pressing down on my neck and shoulders—a force that resembled one of those wall-mounted can crushers—released into a trembling when I could stay with it. With adequate safety, that quaking could complete. And liberate.

I recently had a hard conversation with loved ones and, instead of engaging in the tried and true habit of suppressing the trembling, I quivered—from my jaw to my toes. And I said to my beloveds, with the confidence that comes only from having mindfully experienced these sensations many times before, “This is what fears looks like when it’s allowed to move through and leave your body.” That was a moment of agency, not weakness. I have been savoring the shit out of it. With each passing day that I practice staying connected to my body, fear has a little less stranglehold over my life.

With the help of a therapist, I also realized that my nervous system immediately settles when a trusted person places a firm hand on my neck while I feel afraid. It’s like magic. Pediatrician Claudia Gold wrote,

What makes stress toxic is the absence of a safe, secure relationship to protect the developing child from the effects of that stress. The relationship acts as a buffer...this safe, secure relationship is one in which the caregiver has the capacity to hold the child in mind, one in which there is a process of mutual regulation. Stress and adversity are ubiquitous. Adversity becomes ‘trauma’ when it is compounded by a sense that one’s mind is alone.

Eddie

Eddie

So connection is beginning to replace the limited and limiting strategies of self-reliance and grit, which I have used to get through hard things by myself. That hand on my neck, hugs, words of affirmation from trusted loved ones—all of these gestures and additional ones, too—are allowing that missing experience of mutual regulation to happen. My cat’s adoring eyes and warm body on my lap also work, as does imagining an ideal parent.

And when I am adequately regulated and resourced, my adult self offers that love, compassion, and listening presence to younger parts of me. Every time I can do the latter, I actually feel self-trust grow in my core. It’s like the mercury in an old-school thermometer moving upward as the temperature rises.

When we stay with ourselves, we earn our own trust.

Glennon Doyle, I am here for it!

Despite years of therapy, I needed to arrive at midlife to understand the outsized role that shame continues to play in my life. The pervasiveness and sophistication of the “there is something wrong with me” narrative is downright astonishing. In a recent podcast episode, I heard Gershen Kaufman’s definition of shame for the first time: “the breaking of the interpersonal bridge.” My 45-year-old self was finally ready to allow shame to be seen as the relational injury that it is.

The other day, I went on a hike and was mired in self-blame about how imperfectly I stood up for myself. I managed to use the sacred pause. Understanding that his mean-spirited voice in my head was trying to protect me from re-injury, I asked her, “What would you have to face, feel, or experience if you stopped beating me down?” As I have learned to do, I waited for the response to come from within. From stillness and patience. There was nothing to figure out. Held by the natural beauty surrounding me, the bright, clear truth shone through before long: “If I let my true self be seen, I will be punished, rejected, or abandoned.” Grief immediately replaced the shame. With tears streaming down my cheeks, my Self replied, “I will do none of those things. I am here to love and protect you, and I promise I am not leaving. I am with you ‘til the end.”

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Fierce self-compassion is gradually replacing that shame, and the Boundary Boss Bill of Rights is growing muscle on previously exposed and brittle bones. It’s a process. As I often joke with clients, healing is not like ripping off stripper pants. It is about paying closer and closer attention to how the things that happened to us impacted what happens inside us. Abundant creative resources now exist to support us on this journey. For example, Margaret Paul offers this pearl of wisdom that has changed my life:

…at any given moment, we have only two choices regarding our intention:

* The intention to learn about love — starting with learning to love yourself so that you can share your love with others.

* The intention to avoid pain through various forms of controlling behavior.

To hold the former intention, we first need to build safe-enough internal and external containers. Then the alchemy of healing can manifest. With a strong enough foundation, we can remember this:

Reclaiming the Selfie, as Sonya Renee Taylor Invited Me to Do

Reclaiming the Selfie, as Sonya Renee Taylor Invited Me to Do

Who you are is so much more than what you do. The essence, shining through the heart, soul, and center, the bare and bold truth of you does not lie in your to-do list. You are not just at the surface of your skin, not just the impulse to arrange the muscles of your face into a smile or a frown, not jut boundless energy, or bone wearying fatigue. Delve deeper. You are divinity; the vast and open sky of spirit. It's the light of God, the ember at your core, the passion and the presence, the timeless, deathless essence of you that reaches out and touches me. Who you are transcends fear and turns suffering into liberation. Who you are is love. (Major bow to you for this poem, Danna Faulds.)

When "Tend-and-Befriend" Is A Trauma Response that Hurts More than It Helps

On an unseasonably warm November day, I took the dog for a walk. With COVID-19 raging, I suited up with a baseball cap, sunglasses, visible earphones, and a bright green cloth mask with white polka dots. I thought my presentation’s message was pretty clear: Not here to talk, just to walk.

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Alas, while strolling along a relatively busy street listening to Brene Brown’s latest podcast episode with Dolly Parton, a man on a bicycle, who was wearing a mask better suited for Nightmare on Elm Street than COVID-19 protection, waved as he passed me on the other side of the road. I responded with a slight wave, trying to be friendly rather than antisocial in this time of so much isolation and loneliness. Apparently this was all the go-ahead he needed to turn around and ride up alongside me.

I abruptly stopped walking, and he rode past, which is what I had hoped would happen. I believe in science and the infection prevention that physical distancing provides, especially when I have no idea where people have been or what they’ve been doing. When he realized I was no longer beside him, he hit the brakes. I saw a large knife in a sheath on his hip. About 15 feet away now, he told me he wanted to talk to me. I replied, “I’m not talking to strangers during the pandemic.” I waited, feeling grateful to have the dog by my side and the presence of several people driving by that I could flag down if necessary, although I noticed I was feeling fairly frozen. After what felt like an eternity, he began to pedal again and turned around to go wherever he originally was heading. I returned the earbud to its rightful place and began to walk again, the words he was now yelling at me as he rode away garbled by Dolly’s soothing twang.

When I got home, I headed straight to the stump and axe in my backyard, set up explicitly to metabolize the anger that has been stuck in my body for years. To borrow from my daughter when she was a toddler, “I have a lot of yellings in my body.” The swinging movement of the axe helped to thaw the freeze in my torso. As the stuck energy was mobilized, my throat opened, too, and the words came—the things I wanted to say to that man, that would have been appropriate to say to that man, but that could have resulted in violence to me if I stated them directly to his face. Other words came, too. About accountability. About entitlement. About wanting to be a person who isn’t expected to caretake adults and their feelings.

During this hellish year, some amazing women have delivered poignant and welcome truths:

I have a voice.

Started out as a whisper, turned into a scream

Made a beautiful noise

Shoulder to shoulder marching in the street.

— Alicia Keys & Brandi Carlile, A Beautiful Noise

I will not stay, not ever again - in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.

— Glennon Doyle, Untamed

Do no harm, but take no shit.

—Elizabeth Lesser, Unlocking Us

These singers, writers, and activists are not the white women who turned out in droves to vote for Donald Trump on November 3. As a trauma therapist who wishes everyone old enough to vote was required to read Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, I think there’s a lot more going on here than we want to acknowledge, let alone address, in the cries for unity following Biden’s win.

The day before I encountered Entitled Biker Man, I happened upon Heather Plett’s poignant blog post, “On trauma, abuse, and the justification that helps us cope with cognitive dissonance,” written after her own encounter with “Mr. Big Man” and published three days after the 2020 presidential election. As she wrote,

When I found the research that identified a fourth trauma response (tend-and-befriend), I finally felt seen and could finally begin to name my reactivity as trauma-related and not just something that made me weak. (I could also learn to soothe myself, and to experience my heightened reactivity with more mindfulness and less self-judgment.) Tend-and-befriend is most often seen in women, according to the research. It’s the instinct that causes us to gather the vulnerable around us and to befriend those who will help us survive the threat. The ‘befriend’ part can be a really healthy community-support piece (i.e. gathering other family members to help us protect our children), but the dark side of it is that we also tend to befriend the perpetrator of the threat in order to mitigate the harm.

Nowadays, when I observe this tend-and-befriend adaptation not only in women but also in people with additional marginalized social identities, individuals who have partners or parents who fall on the “higher” end of the narcissism spectrum, and life histories filled with violence and negligence (and often all of these experiences reside in a single body), I interrupt minimizing language, such as “people pleasing” or “peacekeeping,” when it is used to describe this trauma response. Instead, I emphasize the unmet need for safety that drives it.

If we are in homes and relationships that promote secure relating—that is we feel seen, heard, valued, and, especially when we are kids, protected in our close relationships—we do not tend to live in constant fear of physical and/or emotional harm. In contrast, in environments where we have repeatedly felt emotionally overwhelmed and alone in that overwhelm, whether as young children or later in our lives, a wise strategy is to keep the external environment as stable and harmonious as possible, regardless of the cost to ourselves. So we learn to soothe the volatile person who has power over us. To silence our truth so as not to not upset those around us. To give up our authenticity. To freeze.

Unfortunately, in a society founded on a caste system and filled with authoritarian religious communities, the tend-and-befriend trauma response abounds among those of us in one-down positions on the ladder. Healing this response first and foremost involves carving out safe-enough external and internal landscapes in which we can learn to tend and befriend our own experience.

It is hard to contact the wounded places in us if we’re feeling imperiled by threats of violence, humiliation, criticism, and contempt. We’re mammals after all, and our animal defenses (that is, fight, flight, freeze, and tend-and-befriend) will generally win out if our nervous systems perceive or experience enough threat. Boundary setting therefore is key to establishing those safe-enough spaces to tend and befriend ourselves first. Learning how to set boundaries that are firm, clear, and kind requires a lot of practice after a lifetime of shrinking the self to evade harm. When we have been terrorized as children, we may have an even harder time allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to stay kind when standing our ground, or keep a soft front to use Brene Brown’s language, since our brain so quickly associates vulnerability with violence.

I’ve found that the “take no shit” part of Lesser’s teaching can easily drown out the “do no harm” message in an interaction if I have not metabolized enough of my anger beforehand and/or I am interacting with someone who is scared of my anger and so tries to control or dismiss it, which is akin to throwing gas on a fire. Another boundary I therefore am learning to honor is to walk away from most people when I start to feel the upward and forward energy of rage in my body so that I can process that energy in a way that does not harm others or myself. For the record, containing our rage long enough to get to a safe refuge is much easier to do when we’re sober, have enough food in our bellies, feel supported by a community and got adequate sleep (the HALT acronym is a great tool for assessing how resourced we are at any given moment).

After decades of doing no harm and taking a lot of shit, we are undoubtedly going to make mistakes on the path to doing no harm while taking no shit. Ironically, the more we can practice tending and befriending ourselves, the more resilience we will have in the face of the shame that arises after unskillfully standing up for ourselves. Simply put, more self-compassion creates more capacity to effectively engage in the art of repair.

Ultimately, if we want adults to grow up and be responsible for their own words, feelings, and actions, we are, as Lama Rod Owens puts it, going to need to let people “have their agency to be in the dark.” The process of transforming the tend-and-befriend trauma response to a more fulfilling life is a winding one with a lot of cognitive dissonance. Shadow work is not for the faint of heart. And I cannot think of a more liberatory experience than consciously choosing to no longer betray myself. Having attended to my own wants and needs, I now understand I am not my trauma. Nobody is.

A Love Letter to Marginalized Community Members in Late October 2020

Feel the pain of it, not the disgrace of it.

—Sharon Salzberg, Shelter for the Heart and Mind

Me. Unicorn and butterfly face painting by 4 year old.

Me. Unicorn and butterfly face painting by 4 year old.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and I feel like a steel-toed boot just kicked me in the face.

Before that confirmation, I decided to speak with family members about Barrett. As both a cisgender woman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I figured empathy would prevail. My family members would see, hear, and value me, my partner, and my almost five-year-old daughter enough to link Barrett’s confirmation with the loss of hard-fought protections and rights. In that moment, my yearning for deep connection blinded me to an intergenerational reality that is steeped in white supremacy, misogyny, heteronormativity, and unbridled self-interest. There’s a lot of addiction, anxiety, and perfectionism in my ancestry, too, which I would argue are the family-level version of the more macro-level forces I just named.

So what I got in return for bringing up Barrett was what Resmaa Menakem would call dirty pain—pain that uses denial, avoidance, and blame to block trauma from metabolizing and, therefore, healing. They denied that she will contribute to economic and cultural harm for many through a judicial position of power. They blamed the “liberal media” for painting her in such a negative light. And, perhaps most agonizingly, they avoided responding directly to the anguished question I posed, “How can you say you love me and support her nomination?”

Here’s the deal. Yes, we need to fight the oppressive conditions in this country that have existed from its inception. AND it is going to be much harder to engage in that struggle effectively and over the long haul if we don’t do so from a foundation of self-love. Assertiveness, confidence, and resilience do not emerge from the trance of unworthiness.

I am 45 years old. This past year I finally allowed myself to experience—not just think about but actually feel—being delighted in by another. Did you know that being delighted in is one of the primary conditions of secure attachment? Until recently, I did not. Yes, I “knew” we need to feel valued to experience a substantial sense of connection and belonging. I did not yet feel, in my body and with emotion, that the path to believing in your value is feeling delighted in by those around you. I have received plenty of accolades and pats on the back for my accomplishments; that is not the same thing. To truly be delighted in is to experience someone lighting up simply because they are in your presence. You do not have to say anything, do anything, or feel a certain way. You—your whole, glorious, messy self—is celebrated for being here, with me, in this moment. Over and over and over.

Developing the capacity to allow in someone else’s delight in us is no joke after a lifetime of oppositional messaging: “You need to obey to belong.” “You need to perform to be loved.” “You need to not be needy to keep me from leaving.” Getting these toxic beliefs out of our system is a process that requires time, patience, and heaps of self-compassion. In other words, we need a lot of support. The good news is that oodles of amazing people and resources exist to assist us if we learn how to let them (I’ve linked to some of my favorites below). In case my own long and winding journey can support yours, I want to offer this:

Before we can generously feel our own value, we need adequate safety—of the physical and emotional kind. It is nearly impossible to give ourselves undivided, loving attention if we simultaneously need to be vigilant about protecting ourselves from judgment, shaming, and humiliation. How we get to safety is going to depend on our circumstances (what resources are available to us) as well as our willingness to try something different. When we have a lot of experience with staying silent to remain safe, anticipate a lot of “Yeah…buts” coming up. “Yeah, I would love to be delighted in, but that’s childish.” “Yeah, I get what you’re saying about this radical self-love idea, but I need to spend all my time getting out the vote.” “Yeah, I see how this system that focuses only on my performance is exploitative and dehumanizing, but it’s all I know.” Unfortunately, those “buts” dismiss the insight in the first half of the sentence and keep us stuck. I invite you to engage in an experiment: see what happens if you can catch the “but” as it comes out of your mouth and replace it with “and.”

If we are not in a life-threatening situation and can stay with the truth that we need safety to take in love, so many possibilities emerge. As someone who has struggled with feeling like a burden to others if I ask for support, I’m grateful for the existence of practices that require only our imagination (linked resources on this below). For example, I recently imagined a dome of blooming clematis vines surrounding me and blocking out any voices that were critical, taunting, and demeaning. While sitting on a soft cushion that rested on soft grass within the safety of that living shelter (all of this imagined, by the way), my ideal parent appeared. For me, my ideal parent is a trainer I had, but they do not have to be someone with whom we have actually interacted. What matters is they know how to delight in us, exactly as we are. So my trainer showed up on a cushion, sitting across from me. She looked at me with her kind, twinkling eyes and reached out with her baby-blue-painted fingernails, inviting my hands into hers. And once we settled in to being with one other, she said to me, “You are lovable just as you are.”

Because I have allowed myself to enact these practices, I am more and more able to take in the nourishment from my trainer and savor it. And the more I take in this nurturance from an imagined ally, the more possible it feels to receive it from real, live sources available to me in my current life—the cat sleeping on my lap as I write this post, a 20-second hug from my partner, my child’s snuggles, the beauty of the fallen red maple leaves outside my front door, and the loving friends with whom I have built reciprocal, trusting relationships. And, yes, the more I experience being delighted in—not merely tolerated or even accepted—the more I step into a loving and fierce presence that has the capacity to use my voice to fight for collective liberation and justice. In my everyday interactions as well, I am growing better at clearing the FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt) and embracing a practice of love that is rooted in honesty and acceptance.

An important note: if the substantive nurturance I highlighted above has largely been missing from your life, please know that tidal waves of grief are going to accompany this process of learning how to love yourself. Hence the opening quote from Sharon Salzberg—feel the pain without adding the second arrows of judgment and shame to it. Seek out and receive the support you need to feel this grief all the way to its end. I promise you can:

Breathe in the pain

breathe out the love.

Come to see

right here

right now

you are a goddamn miracle.

Resources

Transforming Self-Reliance into Interdependence Right Here, Right Now

What comes to mind when you think about self-reliance? Until recently, my academic training steered me toward a critique of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her daily newsletter on March 18 (was that only 9 days ago!?), “After more than a generation of a culture that idealized individualism and said selfish greed was good, the coronavirus is forcing us to evaluate whether that is what we want to be as a government, and as a nation.”

That critique remains sound, to be sure. Now that I am a psychotherapist who is ever more interested in the significance of our attachments to each other, I also see self-reliance in a more intimate, devastating light.

During the past six months, I have been blessed to participate in an intensive sensorimotor psychotherapy (SP) training that focuses on healing developmental wounds. The sources of this pain are frequently our earliest relationships with caregivers and other individuals who were consistently in close proximity to us, such as siblings, peers, and teachers.

Attachment research shows us how infants orient toward what invites a caregiver’s attention. Infants also learn to mute or shut down the behaviors that result in their caregivers turning away. In light of how dependent we are on our caregivers for survival as a species, the strategies we develop to ensure that our caregivers attend to our basic needs are vital. According to SP, self-reliance is a particular adaptation that forms in response to our needs not being met during the developmental period when we experience separation anxiety. This phase begins as early as infancy and can last until we are about five years of age.

Part of the rub in convincing people that self-reliance is linked to early unmet needs is our society’s stubborn refusal to treat emotional needs as critical, not only to our survival but also to our flourishing. So many of us believe that if we had our material needs adequately met, in a country and world where many do not, we are fine. This is exactly the self-reliant mindset that is born from not having sufficient nurturance. The young child who is not adequately seen, heard, and valued wisely learns not to need these forms of connection. We learn to do things on our own—“I’ll figure it out”—and do not practice asking for help from others when we are struggling.

Moreover, we develop a wall of distrust (a nourishment barrier to use SP terms) since we have not been able to rely on those around us to consistently meet our relational, emotional, and additional needs. As children, we do not yet understand that this necessary self-reliance is specific to our earliest relationships. We therefore generalize the need for self-reliance to the world at large and, in so doing, inadvertently cut off connection from people who have much more capacity to be present with us, even in our most vulnerable, needy moments, than the individuals involved in those early-childhood relationships.

Here is the real kicker. Because we are not robots and have real physical, emotional, and mental limits, the ongoing insistence that we do not have needs means that eventually we collapse. Maybe we get sick or have a mental breakdown. Maybe we relapse into addiction of one kind or another. Maybe we even die.

I have been reflecting on how the most self-reliant among us are potentially more at risk of death in this era of the coronavirus. Surviving COVID-19, as well as preventing the contraction of it, often requires support from others rather than going it alone. One of the most self-reliant people I know recently had coronavirus symptoms and didn’t know what to do about the fact that they were running out of food and didn’t want to risk spreading the illness to others by going to the grocery store. The idea of asking someone to shop for them or, less vulnerably, using the delivery service that many stores offer had not occurred to them.

I personally suck at identifying and attending to my own needs. The weekend that I had the training about the self-reliant adaptation, I was repeatedly slapped in the face with the limitations of this strategy. I had just seen 30+ clients the previous week and also thrown a 50-person surprise party for my partner’s birthday (the planning of which I chose to do almost entirely on my own). I came to the weekend with a respiratory infection that greatly diminished my capacity to speak, let alone breathe. When our trainer asked if we all could withstand watching a video about a 17 month old who was significantly and negatively impacted when his parents left him for 9 days while his mother was birthing his sibling, something in me screamed no. Since I was on the verge of collapse, I couldn’t contain that refusal, and said, “No,” loudly enough for the people around me to hear it. Almost all my peers were up for watching the video so I hunkered down to endure it, knowing I’d likely be fighting back tears through the entire thing. At the time, I attributed the overwhelming emotion I felt to the fact that I had a four-year-old child at home who was the age of the boy in the film not so long ago.

I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder by one of the trainers who had heard my no. I quietly said to her, “You are going to tell me to leave for this part aren’t you?” She nodded her head. I left the room, feeling ashamed of my inability to toughen up and stay with the group. That same trainer soon came to find me and ask if I needed anything. I was in the stairwell of the training facility. “I’ll just walk up and down the stairs. I’ll be fine.” I was not fine. The remainder of the weekend hammered that home a million times over. I am grateful to my trainer for having the wisdom and presence to instruct me not to watch the video since I could not do that for myself.

I had the luck of going to my parents’ house soon after the training and finding photos of myself during the age when self-reliance takes root. Because my mother is a diligent photo-album keeper, I found pictures of my parents on a two-week vacation, without us kids, when I was 13 months old. It was a different era, and I’m not here to blame anyone. What I felt was vindication that I hadn’t been over-reacting when my intuition told me not to watch that video at the training. The documented evidence of my own separation from my parents at such a critical developmental stage strengthened the growing belief within me, “It’s not my fault.”

Little Me

Little Me

Realizing just how self-reliant I am has been rough. Time and again, I have gone to almost any non-human resource I can think of to figure something out or get through a tough moment. SP would say I’ve learned to auto-regulate instead of interactively-regulate. Had a tough day? I’ll take a bath or do some deep breathing. Need to understand why I’m out of sorts? Solitary meditation or a Google search to the rescue! Feeling overwhelmed? Off to the pantry for some chocolate or maybe the refrigerator for a beer. Experiencing conflict with someone? I’ll journal about it or delve into a psychological thriller to distract me. Feeling anxious? I’ll run, walk, or hike, by myself, with my favorite podcast blasting through my earbuds.

I am learning to interactively regulate, however, and I invite you to do so, too. When I am feeling a lot of arousal in my body, which shows up as trembling, racing thoughts, and fast speech, a hug from my partner soothes my nervous system like nothing else can. The challenge has been to acknowledge the nourishment barrier between him and me, bow to it, and ask for the hug anyway.

Two days ago, I had an opportunity to interactively regulate in the coronavirus era. An accident occurred, while I was solo parenting my daughter, that resulted in a gash on my head and momentary shock about what had taken place. Touching my head and finding blood on my fingers scared the shit out of me, and I was not able to be the grounded, calm presence for my daughter that I do my best to be. I told her I needed physical space from her. Although I did need a moment to calm myself, I sure wasn’t kind or gentle in the way I demanded it, and she ran to her room and began crying. She was scared, too, since she saw the blood on my fingers and the emotional flood on my face. I immediately heard a critical voice in my head. She told me to get it the hell together so I could be there for my child.

On this particular day, I was able to say to that voice that it’s okay to ask for help from others. I turned to the Slack “workspace” that my partner set up for a group of us working parents in the immediate neighborhood who are trying to keep our shit together while we maintain physical distance from everyone outside our households. We help each other with grocery runs, childcare activity ideas, and additional needs. I went to the “general” channel and told my neighbors about the injury. The response was immediate and nurturing. Not only did I take a deep breath after receiving this support, but I also was quickly able to invite my daughter onto my lap, embrace her, and repair the relational rupture that occurred when my head injury happened.

I am finding the COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect opportunity to break what for so many of us is an intergenerational pattern of doing for ourselves regardless of the cost. And some days we are better at letting others support us than others. Self-compassion and forgiveness are key. After all, the young mapmaker in us is the one who wisely learned to turn only to ourselves when no one else was available or responsive.

We recently had another weekend training, this time online due to the risks of meeting in person. This experience taught me that deeply meaningful connection is possible across a distance and using video-based interactions. In one of the practice sessions, when I assumed the role of client, I realized that despite my years of therapy and practice with self-acceptance, I have kept that young mapmaker at arms length—I see her and offer her words of comfort, but the relationship is one of sympathy more than genuine empathy. With the support of the therapist, I found myself capable of offering her the intimate nurturance she craves. An image came up of holding my four-year-old daughter on one knee. My current adult, parent self invited that child part of me onto the other. I drew them both to my chest and kissed the top of their heads.

During an interview on NPR, Jennifer Michael Hecht, who authored Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, stated in no uncertain terms, “We belong to each other.” And we do. May we (re)learn to act from this belief and remember that in this wild, sometimes harsh, and beautiful world, we need each other more than we need to be self-reliant.   

The Power of Being Believed

“You are telling the truth.” A long pause. Then, spoken again, “You are telling the truth.”

My hand signals stop. My arm pushes away the message. “No,” I say aloud. I am startled by the certainty of my response. I was, after all, the one who identified these were precisely the words I longed to hear.

We are encouraged to stay in our bodies for this exercise, but my mind is racing and several memories surface:

I’m in South Texas with my paternal grandmother, maybe five years old. We are at a restaurant, and my father is teasing me about something. I start to cry. My grandmother tells me to lighten up. “He’s just joking.”

I leap ahead to my teen years, when I choose to take a social studies class focused on race and prejudice in the very conservative high school I begged to leave as a 16 year old. Maybe it’s then or when I’m in college, and first exposed to the writings of Karl Marx, Malcolm X, and Rigoberta Menchu, that I am called Commie Connie. I laugh at this label still. And yet…

I remember being a freshman in the fraternity house bedroom of an upperclass athlete at Stanford University. He demands that I make him orgasm. I refuse. He calls me a tease. With my hand on the doorknob, I tell him, “Call me when you start thinking with your other head.” Trembling, I flee. A partial victory at best as I feel that same trembling in my body years later, when Brock Turner makes the news and, soon after, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing hits the airwaves.

A memory of coming out as queer in graduate school emerges. I hear, “You always did want to be the under dog.”

As an assistant professor, I risk telling a senior faculty member that he didn’t hear me during a meeting; that he gave credit for an idea I expressed to a male participant. He denies any of this happening and accuses me of something—probably being a victim.

More recently, I express anger at the systemic mistreatment of marginalized community members in the university where I am working. My boss says equanimity is welcome, my anger is not.

All of these memories form a channel in my brain. Intellectually, I understand that when I dared to disagree with the authority figures in my life or passionately challenged oppression, I frequently was told I was too sensitive or that I was out of line. The truth I carry is, "You are too much.” But this is all so cognitive, and I’m in a training that emphasizes coming back into my body and feeling my emotions.

I look out the window and gaze at a giant oak tree. The therapist across from me asks if I can begin to take in the message, “You are telling the truth,” from the tree. I can begin to absorb this message from the natural world, but the idea of taking it in from another human being seems impossible. I am a therapist, a partner, a mother, and I do not trust that anyone believes me. I weep.

Since that training, I have been experimenting with wholeheartedly believing my own experience before allowing in the abundant doubt. As Krista Tippett would say, “What we practice we become.”

I’m beginning to feel—rather than think—that my heart can soften when I see myself and believe her. I notice how often my defensiveness is a response to not being believed. After enough of these experiences, defensiveness becomes a way of managing a non-affirming world. Additional behaviors that are a reaction to being disbelieved include digging in my heels and getting rigid about my point of view, exerting heaps of energy trying to prove I have a legitimate perspective, and trying to get others to share my opinion. Once again, I’m intellectualizing an excruciating experience and, in so doing, minimizing it.

Since that training, I have been more directly and clearly saying to my clients, “I believe you.” “You are sane.” “Of course you had that response.” Frequently, they push these words away, just as I did. Grief also swells.

One client poignantly names the emotional truth she learned in her earliest years that burdens her adult life: “For me to feel safe in a close relationship, I need to hide my difficult emotions and perform whatever the other person wants.”

Me, age 2.

Me, age 2.

Six weeks later, I am attending the next module of this training and another memory keeps poking through. Because I have been practicing believing myself, I trust that this one is core to the fear I feel whenever I risk vulnerability in the presence of another.

I am four or five years old. I am asked a question. I genuinely do not know the answer to it, so I reply, “I don’t know.” The grown up above me becomes enraged. I don’t know what to do. I keep saying, “I don’t know.” I feel trapped. Helpless. He whips out his belt. I do not know if the terror in my eyes makes him stop, but the belt does not touch my skin. For that overwhelmed child who feels so alone, a strategy and belief are simultaneously born: Know as much as you can but understand that even with that knowledge, you won’t be believed.

I risk letting that young child be seen by the same therapist in the previous experience mentioned above. She holds the trembling with me, and I can let it be seen by another for a few seconds. For the first time in my 44-year-old life, I feel the wisdom of that small child’s terror. I am ready to stop gaslighting myself and name that experience for what it was: relational trauma. With an appropriate name, compassion for the significant impact of that experience and others begins to seep in. Such relief in this mercy I finally can offer myself as well as a reckoning with the truth that allowing that small child to be seen by trusted others is central to the deep healing I so crave.

This week, Zoe Fenson published the following words about the Trump impeachment trial:

Many of us have been engaging with news media only glancingly; others have been diving in deep, coming up exhausted and enraged. It's so much, we say. I'm so tired…When women speak about our experiences, the burden of proof is on us; when we fail to adequately convince an audience already disposed to disbelieve us, we are called snakes. And meanwhile, the men who violate our bodies and dismiss our minds are ensconced in positions of power all across the land.

Yes. And I feel some hope. Here is why: What we practice we become.

As I practice believing myself and others, my capacity keeps expanding. My refusal to explain, defend, and justify my experience is also becoming more resolute. These fragile systems and egos around us are collapsing or are on the verge of collapse. I do not know when they will fall apart and frankly I am sick and tired of putting my energy into trying to figure out their next move. And I recognize for many, hyper-vigilance is a necessity, not a choice.

I realize terror and distrust have motivated so much of my action on the outside world. The difference between defense—an act of war—and protection—an act of love—is also clear. I have spent my life trying to restore safety by frantically (re)acting and have resisted being, with myself and others, to assess just how much defense is necessary in this moment, right here right now. So I am practicing yielding—sitting back and observing, with both curiosity and a chair supporting my back. This position is much less exhausting and is helping me see clearly which people and systems are ready, who have the capacity, to meet me where I am and collaborate. Those are precisely the individuals and organizations toward whom I want to turn my attention and energy. They will welcome and protect a diverse group of people rather than dismiss or retaliate against them. And yielding is much more possible for those of us not currently in the throes of trauma. Those children being separated from their parents at the border? Neither the parents nor the children can afford to yield.

While writing this post, I had an experience with my own daughter that also gives me some hope for the future. A boy at her preschool has repeatedly hit her, and my partner and I have been advocating for her as well as collaborating with the school staff and leadership. First, I made it clear to the director that we believe our child. If there are distortions to her story, we will explore them after she feels adequately seen, heard, and valued. We also are actively practicing with her how to respond when someone violates her body. My partner role played this scenario with her and encouraged her to yell, “No! Stop touching my body!” Already at four, her first response to this course of action is to think she will get in trouble if she yells. She also thinks she needs to add a “Thank you” to her “No.” And her white body means she’s generally granted a lot more leniency if she shouts or ignores other rules of respectability. We will keep supporting a deepening into the practice that her body is not an apology. Affirmative consent—“Yes means yes”—is the intention rather than merely “No means no.” What we practice we become.

Tolerating Shame to Heal Narcissism and Restore Justice

Recently I had a revelation. My three three year old has been chest deep in developmentally appropriate narcissism. That was not the revelation.

When I use the word narcissism, I’m mostly focusing on a sense of grandiosity that can quickly morph into passive-aggressive or outright aggressive victimhood and that is accompanied by little to no empathy. I’ll say more about this in a minute.

Credit to: The Mum’s Group

Credit to: The Mum’s Group

When my daughter is not demanding that she can have and do whatever she wants, she frequently is telling us, “I already know that!” If we would just get with her program, life would be sweet and peaceful. Until I did a u-turn and inquired into what was happening in my inner world around this parent-child relationship (and the book Parenting from the Inside Out has been my favorite guide for learning how to do this), her behavior was triggering me daily. I had to use all the restraint I could muster not to yell at her or run from the house screaming as each new ultimatum and dictatorial order shot out of her mouth.

Upon going inward, however, I recognized that when I was my child’s age I would have had my ass kicked, literally, if I puffed out my chest like she does. In the significantly more authoritarian and perfectionist household of my youth, I knew well before three that being a compliant, nice, and polite daughter was the way to stay physically and emotionally safe. Not disappointing my father and the other adult authority figures in my life was my number one priority. So my own inner toddler was utterly terrified by my spirited child’s behavior.

This epiphany meant I could reassure the younger parts of me, including the protectors that developed to avoid further wounding (such as my inner critic), that my daughter is being raised very differently than I was. For one thing, my partner and I are doing our best to give her structured nurturance—the structure being boundaries and limits that seek to honor her own and others’ dignity. This form of nurturance is rooted in empathy and compassion, rather than fear, and focuses on unconditional love for who my daughter is, which does not always mean accepting what she does.

The tension in my relationship with her has significantly diminished now that I’ve made explicit the implicit, fear-filled memories of my youth. That growing awareness has allowed me to repeatedly convince those younger parts of me that it is safe to go on letting my daughter be who she is. I seek to connect with her experience first and subsequently redirect her behavior when necessary. If I inadvertently shame her in a given moment for behavior I don’t like, I repair that relational rupture as soon as possible. I am once again feeling confident that this developmental period will morph into something more reasonable and empathic if my daughter’s emotional, physical, and cognitive needs continue to be met.

What does all this have to do with shame, narcissism, and justice? A whole lot I am coming to see. At present, my caseload is teeming with people who have faced severe narcissism within their inner circles. Accordingly, I’ve spent a lot of time studying narcissism and how to heal from it. What I have come to understand from my work with clients as well as resources like Therapist Uncensored, The Covert Passive-Aggressive Narcissist, and Out of the Fog is that adults who are significantly narcissistic have virtually no tolerance for shame. Their immense defenses against feeling shame usually developed in response to early childhood wounds that are related to their relationships with primary caregivers and that often involve trauma of one sort of another. Here, I’m particularly thinking of Juliane Taylor Shore’s definition of trauma: feeling overwhelmed and being alone while experiencing that overwhelm.

As a recovering perfectionist, it’s been a painful and terrifying experience to take in how closely related perfectionism and narcissism are. I’ve come to see that my aversion to narcissism rests on an incisive truth: when we cannot be with shame, we cannot face the harm we have done to others and ourselves. Without an acknowledgment of that harm, we are not able to repair those ruptures, which is necessary to restore trust and justice as well as strengthen connection, both with ourselves and others. Steve Finn beautifully articulates how we learn toxic shame (i.e. “I am a mistake”) while young. I’ll say here that caregivers leaving relational ruptures with children unacknowledged and unrepaired is central to the origins of toxic shame.

Finn says the path to moving from toxic shame to healthy shame (i.e. “I made a reparable mistake”) as adults requires revealing to trusted others that of which we are the most ashamed. As Brene Brown said, “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.” Importantly, if a narcissist is willing to do the gut-wrenching work of acknowledging and feeling their own shame (after all, they usually have a lot of behavior of which to feel ashamed), the audience who can hold their shame with empathy will likely need to be people other than the ones they have harmed, such as a therapist or support group. The harmed ones need reparations that center their experience, not more witnessing of the narcissist’s pain.

Now a benefit that perfectionists can have that extreme narcissists do not is empathy. Empathy is what allows me to contact those younger parts I mentioned above and meet them with understanding and forgiveness. That internal healing process means those younger parts of me, such as my temper-tantruming toddler and adolescent inner critic, do not need to take over as I navigate the external world. My true self—my adult self—who has a greater capacity for compassion, flexibility, calmness, and clarity, can run the show.

Empathy also allows me to step into others’ shoes, such as my daughter’s, and imagine what they’re experiencing. So when I have hurt someone, I have gotten more and more practiced at listening closely to the impact of my actions—without defending my good intentions—and both formally apologizing for that negative impact and then offering a plan of action so that I do not enact that same harm again. I’m certainly not perfect at this process, but perfection is not the goal, effective repair is. I also still struggle not to over apologize, a behavior that indicates the ongoing presence of my own toxic shame (there’s plenty to say about the role of gender in this over-apologizing, too). Growing my tolerance for shame will be a lifelong process, as I certainly did not learn healthy shame as a child.

So what do we do with the narcissists in our lives who are so defended against shame that they disconnect from their adult selves and others to the point of feeling no remorse when they wreak extensive havoc on others’ lives? For one thing, I think we need to shift the focus back to assessing and growing our own tolerance for shame rather than trying to change them. I have sincere compassion for those individuals who are so wounded that they cannot see, hear, or feel how their actions impact others. I also view them as responsible for their own healing. To borrow from Juliane Taylor Shore again, it is respectful and benevolent to ask fellow adults to process their own emotions, including shame.

Too often, I see family systems and additional institutions focus on protecting the narcissist rather than setting firm boundaries that disallow further mistreatment and holding them accountable for their harmful behavior. The narcissist’s abusive bullying and victim stance are much more likely to go unfed when people refuse to be within their self-centered reach and/or do not allow their gaslighting to go uninterrupted (if they have enough power to do so). When people cannot create a lot of distance from a narcissist because, for example, they have to co-parent with one, the gray rock method has been a strategy that several of my clients have successfully used to stay sane and safe while within their proximity. Sadly, children of narcissists by and large learn this method, which essentially involves being as boring as a gray rock, to survive. No one has to teach it to them.

Clearly the interpersonal dynamics I’m describing cannot heal the institutions and nations that are founded on having little to no tolerance for shame (academia and the United States come to mind!). I do, however, believe that if more and more people learn to accept our own imperfections, we will be able to repair mistakes when we make them and so create more humane families and work places. We also will develop a greater and greater capacity to deal with systemic, historic injustices that thus far remain largely unaddressed. In Kiese Laymon’s poignant words, “America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.”

"Who Taught You to Live on Crumbs?" Reclaiming Nurturance as a Core Value

That Esther Perel. She knows how to ask questions that get right to the heart of the matter. In a podcast of a couples therapy session, for example, she inquired of one of the partners, “Who taught you to live on crumbs?”

As more and more clients have brought into our therapy sessions horror stories of sexual and additional forms of abuse, and I’ve braced myself for the next hateful, violent act to appear in my newsfeed (such as the Pittsburgh mass shooting of Jewish congregants), I keep returning to Perel’s simple and searing question. Lately, I’ve been asking myself, at least when thinking about the emotional and relational realms of life, Who hasn’t been taught to live on crumbs in the U.S.?

I’m not planning to take you down some sugar-coated road of sentimental nonsense. I am going to suggest that nurturance—or more precisely, our frequent deprivation of it in this society—is a subject with significant political, sociocultural, and economic implications. In the poignant words of attachment scientist Louis Cozolino, "We are not the survival of the fittest; we are the survival of the nurtured."

What I witness day in and day out in my therapeutic work is the impact of relational trauma. I intensely desire to dispel the myth that trauma only includes time on a battlefield, near-fatal accidents, or violent abuse. I appreciate Ruth King’s description of trauma as

an experience of severe emotional shock that causes substantial and lasting damage to our psychological well-being. Trauma is experienced as being intensely overwhelmed by a perceived threat or actual harm. Trauma can be a single incident of devastating loss, violation, or injury, or a chronic atmosphere of fear and neglect.

One of the things we as a society continue to minimize or flat out ignore is the pervasiveness of neglect in our culture and the trauma it begets. Because we are mammals whose survival depends on reliable and available caretakers when we are young, many of us experienced some level of neglect and, so, of relational trauma. In other words, the emotional attunement of a caretaker to our young is critical to those children’s well-being and often is disregarded in a society that prioritizes competition and self-reliance over connection and belonging. What do I mean by attunement? My favorite definition comes from the University of New Mexico’s Center for Development and Disability: “Attunement is being aware of, and responsive to, another.” Sounds so simple doesn’t it?

Clients often express disbelief when I relate the symptoms associated with a significant relationship injury or loss (e.g., racing thoughts, rapid pulse, sweaty palms, numbing, and memory loss to name a few) to the PTSD symptoms commonly associated with veterans of war. To return to King’s point, if we experienced a relationship breach as a threat to our being, our body is going to react in kind, usually with some form of a fight, flight, or freeze response. We did not have to be hit to know trauma; it is enough to be unseen, unheard, and devalued by people that matter to us.

The relational trauma experienced by so many relates to Perel’s beautiful question, as most of the people I meet in and outside of my office have been taught to live on crumbs. Oftentimes, the helpers in this society have learned to give nurturance but not to receive it. Their stories frequently rest upon a trance of unworthiness and a sense that their value is only as significant as the external recognition they receive for their do-gooding. The heavily armored individuals I meet usually view nurturance as weak, “feminine,”* and of little to no worth. Underneath all that shielding, which often developed to protect them from harm, lies unacknowledged terror (of the vulnerability required to engage in holding others and being held) and grief (about not having received adequate nurturance or even knowing what nurturance feels like). In both of these cases, social conditioning—that is, lessons learned in relationships with others and the world—are the culprit. As such, and in the words of Bessel van der Kolk, “our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being.”

I therefore am arguing that in addition to the “doing” of voting and engaging in social activism, we also need the healing of nurturing relationships to generate positive social change. A most challenging aspect of this process is the painful reckoning required when we cannot go to the source of the harm for the healing.

For example, many of us yearn for unconditional acceptance—“I love you no matter what”—from a primary caregiver and do not receive it because our caregiver does not have the capacity to give such nurturance. If they could have attuned to us and met our emotional needs by now (when we’re in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond), they would have. To face such a truth is excruciating.

Cheryl Strayed offered one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve read about this reckoning in her Dear Sugar letter “The Empty Bowl.” As Strayed responded to the letter writer “Could Be Worse” about her abusive narcissistic father,

[Your dad] will be the empty bowl that you’ll have to fill again and again. What will you put inside? Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time. There is absolutely no way around them. By cutting off ties with your father, you incited a revolution in your life…We want to believe healing is purer and more perfect, like a baby on its birthday. Like we’re holding it in our hands. Like we’ll be better people than we’d been before. Like we have to be.

It is on that feeling that I have survived. And it will be your salvation too, my dear. When you reach the place that you recognize entirely that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them. That you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them. That you have the two empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them.

Our capacity to heal one another in adulthood often involves the seeking out of people who are capable of being aware of and responsive to us. We also have the capacity to heal ourselves through the kind of spiritual reparenting that Strayed so eloquently captured in her letter. Returning to a sense of wholeness by giving ourselves what we did not get in our prior relationships may precede the ability to seek connections with people who are able to attune to us. Transforming the narrative that we only deserve crumbs into one that authentically declares, “I matter,” shifts the field of whom we attract and whom we pursue.

Sylvia Boorstein has wonderful, concrete advice for cultivating self-nurturance. In this current moment, when far too many people face immediate danger, I feel compelled to underscore that the following advice is for when we are not under direct threat. We do not need to slow down and reflect when our lives are at risk—we need to survive, which involves actively fighting or fleeing the sources of the threat.

On the other hand, if our limbic systems are reacting as if there is a saber tooth tiger breathing down our necks but there actually isn’t, and if we are aware of how over-sized our fear is (both of these are big “ifs” that may require additional legwork), Boorstein’s wisdom can come to our aid:

Sweetheart, you are in pain.

Relax.

Take a breath.

Let’s pay attention to what is happening, then we’ll figure out what to do.

In these four simple sentences she articulates how we can nurture ourselves and, in turn, others. We first acknowledge that we are suffering. There is no minimizing, neglecting, negating, or gas lighting our own experience. We name our pain. Period. This validation is a radical act in and of itself, especially for those from marginalized communities who have repeatedly received the message that our experiences do not matter.

Then we attune to the fear body and remind ourselves we are, in this moment, safe. Here, we can experience the relief and spaciousness that arises with letting down our guard—the connection associated with vulnerability. Only after validating our experience and making some space for it do we begin the inquiry process.

Crucially, we do not jump into fixing anything. We first observe—we pay attention—to what is happening right now. Having gathered information about our current situation within a welcoming, relaxed environment, we finally are ready to figure out what to do.

How radical to end her advice with what for so many of us is a habitual starting place—problem-solving. Boorstein encourages us to take the time to identify and explore what we are going through before doing anything about it. These are not selfish or unproductive practices. They are nurturing ones. If we are to become skillful at self-nurturance, it requires repeated, disciplined practice.

Can you imagine a world in which we took to heart that feverishly figuring out an action plan only makes sense when we are facing imminent danger? How much untapped creativity, empathy, and love might be expressed?

I will forever be grateful to my own therapist for looking me straight in the eye and declaring, “Connie, life is not a problem to be solved.” And it isn’t. Neither are relationships. Nor emotions. They are experiences to be lived and, of course, nurtured.

*Feminine is in quotes because evaluating as weak the qualities associated with femininity is straight out of the misogyny playbook.