Gwynn Raimondi, MA

We need each other

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The world of intimate bonds is the world of emotions—a field of reactions and hidden desires for safety and acceptance that we all long for.  All of us. ~Joseph Schaub, Divorce (or not): A guide

One of the things that trauma does is encourage us to isolate.  It encourages us to be away from our family, friends, intimate partners, and communities.  How this looks for each of us is different.  It may look like us actually appearing to be a hermit and not interacting with people or it may look like we are incredibly social, with many friends and connections, yet all of those relationships are only surface level and we never reveal (much of) who we truly are, our fears, our wants, our needs.

Both scenarios (and a million in-between) are isolation.  When we do not allow ourselves to deeply connect with others, that is one way our trauma shows up.  Our not allowing this deep connection is a signal for our desperate need for a sense of safeness and acceptance, our need for love and a sense of belonging.

When we have unprocessed trauma living within us, it means our ability to have a sense of safeness — with others or with ourselves — is stilted.  For many of us living with trauma, the traumatic events we experienced were perpetrated by people we trusted, people we possibly literally depended on for our actual literal survival.  These types of betrayals, especially when perpetrated over and over throughout our childhoods teach us that we can’t rely on another, that the world isn’t safe, that those who claim to love you will only cause harm. 

We internalize these lessons and they form the development of our neural pathways that then inform us as adults, once we are far from the harm, how to be in relationship with others.

David Richo, in his book How To Be An Adult in Relationships, talks about the “5 A’s” that make up our emotional needs as humans.  These are: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

We all need someone to pay attention to us in a way that builds us up.

We all need to feel accepted, just as we are, in all our messy and complicated human glory.

We all need to feel appreciated for our contributions to our families, our friendships, our communities, our world.

We all need affection, be that loving words or begin physically held.

We all need allowing, to be allowed to shift and change and grow, allowed to be complex, complicated, and even contradictory.

All humans have these needs.  For those us who did not have most or any of these needs met as children, we have that much more of a desperation to have these needs met as an adult.

But even though we have this requirement to have these basic human needs met, we don’t trust that anyone will ever meet them.  

Trauma is a complex and contradictory thing in and of itself.  As a survival mechanism we isolate and yet isolation can literally kill us.  Without the love and support of our community (be that chosen family, blood relatives, competent trauma informed professionals or hopefully a bit of all of the above), we slowly or sometimes quickly will bring about physical disease, intense loneliness and hopelessness,  and sometimes a depression so deep there feels like there is no way out.

But our early life experiences have formed the ideas that we cannot trust other humans to have our basic human emotional needs met. And it takes a great act of courage and strength to reach out and ask for help.  And frankly, some days we don’t have that courage or strength.

So how do we shift this?  How do we find the resources to move through and past the fears of betrayal?  How do we develop our own sense of safeness and trust?

It takes work.  Patience.  Time. Intention.  Mostly, it takes work.

I deeply believe that we need to do the work of calming our nervous systems, connecting deeply to our boundaries and reclaiming our bodies as our own, finding our ways to our own center and ground.  And then we need to continue this work through deep embodiment and trauma processing work.

Then slowly that sense of safeness, and our ability to trust others and ourselves, will grow.

We are not meant to do this processing and healing work in isolation.  In fact, we actually cannot successfully do it in isolation.  We need others, we need to do this work in relationship.  This is the point of therapy, to help a person heal in a safe relationship so they then can take what they learn (and the ways they have shifted) out into the world and apply it to their other relationships.

Of course, therapy is not for everyone and frankly not all therapists (sadly) are competent.  

However, that does not change the reality that we need to do this work of healing, of developing our sense of safeness, of cultivating trust, within relationships.

It does not make us weak to need other people, it makes us human.  It does not mean we have a character flaw when we yearn for deep connections with others, it makes us human.  It does not make us “less than” or “too much” to ask another for support, it makes us human.

Where this is tricky perhaps, is that we can’t rely on any singular person to fill all our emotional (or any other kind of) needs.  No one person will ever be able to do that. We need a community of people and we need to be able to rely on ourselves in way that is helpful for us and not harmful.

Stephanie Bennett-Henry wrote :
No one is going to love you exactly like you imagine.  No on is ever going to read your mind and take every star from the sky at the perfect time and hand it to you.  No one is going to show up at your door on a horse, with a shoe you lost.  Do you understand?
That’s why you have to love yourself enough, so that any other love just adds more candles to the cake you’ve already iced.

Our work in processing our trauma is loving ourselves, it is the cake and the icing of our making.  But we don’t need to, and I would argue can’t, do this work alone.  We build ourselves up as we build our relationships, our relationships grow as we do, we learn to trust others as we learn to trust ourselves.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum, honestly.  The point being however, we need both.  Both our own willingness to do the work, and people to support us and or guide us in this work.  

It is true that no one person is ever going to meet all our emotional needs.  Knowing this is part of our own maturation process.  However, we can have a community of people, even a relatively small community of a handful of folks, who together can help us get our needs met.

That’s how we are supposed to be.  In community.  Serving each other and ourselves.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly newsletter on June 10, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.

*Now posted on substack

Allowing space & managing anxiety

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The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. ~Carl Gustav Jung

I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together. ~Lisa Kleypas, Blue-Eyed Devil

We all deal with stress and our emotions differently. Some of us need to hide away and process in solitude, others of us need to talk things out (and then talk them out some more), some of us need to write things out to get clear, and many, but not all of us, need some combination of these.

When we are in relationship, be that friendships or sexually intimate relationships, we tend to want the other person to process things in the same ways we do. It can be confusing in the least, and jarring and anxiety provoking towards the other end of the spectrum, when they don’t. 

So what do we do, when in relationship, our own anxiety (and therefore attachment needs, sense of worth, etc) is activated because a person we care about is managing their own stress and emotions in a way that is not our way, or not in a way we are familiar with?

Well, if you are like me, we initially freak the fuck out. 🙂

This especially can show up when one person in the relationship has a more anxious attachment style and the other person in the relationship has a more avoidant attachment style. But it doesn’t have to be about attachment styles. It can also be about personality types.

Introverts tend to need solitude to process. Extroverts tend to need their village to process. 

Of course these are all general statements. Each of us are unique individuals, with unique histories and ways of doing things. Yes, there is overlap, yes many of us experience similar things; and we are also all still unique.

This includes our ways of dealing with stress and highly emotional situations.

When we see our loved ones are in pain of some sort, be that stress or emotional distress, our initial instinct tends to be to fix it, to make them feel better, to do whatever we can to make the hurting stop.

On the surface this is about our love of the other person and not wanting them to be in distress.

However, if we go a little deeper, this manic need to stop the other person from feeling bad is more about our own inability to tolerate difficult or painful emotions. So, when another is in distress, it raises our own uncomfortable feelings of anxiety and so in order for us to feel better, we need to make the other person stop feeling bad. Now. If not sooner.

But others get to feel their feelings and process them in the ways that work for them just as we also get to feel our feelings and process them in the ways that work for us.

So what do we do with that anxiety, with those uncomfortable feelings of seeing someone we care about in pain? How do we manage our own discomfort without trying to force the other person to change?

Well if I had an easy five step program for this I bet I could make my millions and retire in the next few years.

A truth is, there is no easy way to learn how to manage our own feelings of anxiety and discomfort. It takes time, it takes actually sitting in our own discomfort and learning how to tolerate it, first in tiny bits, and with practice more and more.

Coming into our bodies is part of this process. Learning to feel all the sensations that our bodies express when anxious can give us the clues we need to signal that we need to regulate our own systems in that moment, to take a moment, to slow down and breathe. To bring our frontal lobe online and not allow our limbic system hijack things and put us in instinctual reactionary mode. To allow ourselves to consciously and intentionally think through what is happening in our bodies and why it is happening.

I know for me, my immediate response to situations where another person is processing in their own ways that are anxiety provoking for me is to flee. To walk away. To shut down. And then I jump into fight mode. And then I go on a pendulum ride back and forth between wanting to bolt and run far, far, away and wanting to pick a huge fight just to get the other person present with me, regardless how that “presence” shows up. I want to take action. I want to either fix it or completely break it.

At least that is my immediate, primal, wounded response.

Thankfully, over the last few years I have been learning to slow down. To breathe. To check-in with myself and my own defense mechanisms and how to self-regulate and self-correct so that I don’t turn an already stressful time for the other person into an even more stressful time by freaking the fuck out all over them.

Am I perfect at this? Hell no. It is a practice and it is ever evolving. And I can see the progress from where I was five years ago, one year ago, six months ago.

Remembering that those we love have their own ways of doing things, and that as long as they aren’t causing physical harm to anyone or lashing out and causing emotional or psychological harm to anyone, then they get to just do things in the ways that work for them, regardless of what it may or may not trigger within us.

Our work is in managing our own anxiety in these situations. Of course we can let the other person know we are there if they need/want our support (assuming we can actually hold the space for their own pain and not have that activating us to the point of trying to fix things). Of course we can check in every few hours or days or whatever is appropriate and simply say “thinking of you” or “I know things are rough right now, just want you to know you are on my mind/I’m here/etc”. 

And in those in-between spaces of our reaching out and them responding in some way (and remember silence is actually a response), we need to find the ways that work for us to manage our own stress and anxiety around our loved one’s discomfort and what it has brought up for us.

/../

This essay was originally published in my newsletter on June 16, 2019 and edited for publication here. If you’d like to receive my weekly(ish) newsletter with my most current essays and offerings, you can do so here.

The pursuit of pleasure while living with Complex Trauma

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Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.  ~Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.  ~Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.  ~Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Living with complex trauma in our bodies is not an easy or fun experience.  Many of us dissociate from our bodies entirely, not feeling the various sensations that are part of every day life.  Some of us dissociate and live with chronic pain or anxiety (or both) and only are able to feel painful and uncomfortable sensations.  Living in a state of constant pain and anxiety, or not being present at all in our bodies, is a cage many of us have felt, or still do feel, trapped  in.  We can feel there is no escape from the discomfort and so will find even more ways to numb, to escape.

And those other ways of numbing may work for a while.  I’m all for pain relief.  I’m also fully aware that some pain is more about trapped trauma than anything else and no amount of medication is going to help in the short or long runs.

When our only experience with our body and its sensations is that of discomfort or pain or not feeling it at all, it’s challenging to imagine what pleasure is, what it could possibly feel like.

We also assume that pleasure should actually be pleasurable.  It’s a relatively reasonable expectation, right?  Except when we’ve lived a good portion of our lives outside our bodies, feeling any type of body sensation is strange and uncomfortable at first.  This includes pleasure.  

So, if pleasure initially is uncomfortable, why bother?  

Well, because with patience, intention, and practice, pleasure can become pleasurable – and a life without pleasure is not us living our best lives, it is not thriving, it is merely surviving.  

To feel pleasure we need to come back home into our bodies.  Or for some of us be in our bodies for essentially the first time in our lives.  And this means feeling all the sensations of our body – pain, anxiety, discomfort and pleasure, peace, and comfort.  We can’t experience one without the other.  We can’t pick and choose which sensations we are going to allow ourselves to feel and which we aren’t.  It’s an all or nothing type of deal.

And in order to really feel pleasure, peace, and comfort in our bodies, we need to first go through the initial discomfort of beginning to feel them.  This may seem like an oxymoron, and yet it is part of the process.  

Complex trauma impacts our whole body.  It impacts our nervous systems; our brain and the neuro pathways within it; our sensory receptors and how we notice sensations.  When trauma occurs at a young age it sets our minds and bodies on a course of constant survival.  Being aware of pain is an important part of our survival as a species.  

Feeling pleasure on the other hand, is not necessary for our survival as a species nor as individuals.

I would argue however that feeling pleasure is necessary for us to thrive in our lives, to find joy, to live and enjoy our lives to fullest.  I’m not only talking about sexual pleasure here.  I’m also talking about the pleasure of eating certain foods, of wearing certain fabrics, of being hugged by and hugging those we love, of appreciating art in its many forms, listening to and feeling music and how it lights us up.

Moving from a place of surviving, where many of us have lived most of our lives, to a place of thriving, a place that is wholly unknown and foreign, is a process in an of itself.  It is a part of our trauma processing work, in fact I believe it is the entire point of our trauma processing work. 

Of course it takes time, patience, intention, and most importantly practice.  

And as I have said many a time before, and will say many more times in the future, I believe all the work involved to move from surviving to thriving is totally worth it.

Not settling & discovering our wants

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As a child you received messages from your family to keep your mouth shut and remain invisible. You also learned to become invisible in order to protect yourself. You no longer need to be invisible to survive. If people do not notice you, they may not abuse you, but they also will not love you or attend to your needs. Make yourself and your needs known. ~Beverly Engel, The Right to Innocence

I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want. ~Stanley Kubrick

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves. ~Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves. ~Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

Be you, love you. All ways, always. ~Alexandra Elle

There is a truth, that often in life we settle.  We settle for things that don’t fill our souls, that don’t make us feel alive, that don’t spark in us a sense of joy or wonder or peace.  We settle for things that are mediocre, okay, fine (we guess).  And sometimes, even worse, we settle for things that make us unhappy, that break our hearts in a thousand different ways, that make us sacrifice our own values, wants, our very Self.

We may do this for any number of reasons, and I know for me in the past I have often done it because it was just easier.

It was easier to settle for less than to actually admit I was settling for less and doing something about it.

Hindsight is almost always 20/20.  We can look back at choices, at relationships, at events, and see all the things we did “wrong”.  We can see clearly how we would have, could have, should have, done things differently from the perspective of being on the other side of it all.  

With this hindsight and clarity we have the opportunity to do one of three things: spiral into shame or regret; nothing; or learn and grow. 

I have been looking back over the twenty plus years I spent with my ex-husband.  There was a time when looking back on it all filled me with regret or overwhelming grief or deep seated rage.  I could only see all the bad choices.  I could only see all the ways I sold myself short, I sold myself out.  I could only see the harm that came from that relationship.

With time, I’ve been able to see the good times too.  And the truth that without those twenty plus years with him, I would not be the woman I am today.  And for better or worse, I really like the woman I am and the woman I am becoming now.

And with all that I can also say that while I no longer regret in any way that relationship or our twenty plus years together,  and actually in many ways am grateful and glad for it, I can also very clearly see how we never should have been together in the first place.

Both and.  

Looking back at the beginning of that relationship, I rushed.  I didn’t slow down and take the time to determine what I actually wanted.  I mean, I knew what I wanted: I wanted to get married and have babies and have that fairytale romance with my soulmate that everyone was envious of.

The first two things, totally doable.  That last one though… tricky.  Because I didn’t know what I actually meant.  I didn’t actually know what I wanted out of an intimate relationship beyond the exterior appearance.  I never stopped to think about how I wanted to feel within the relationship.  I never slowed down enough to consider if I could be fully myself with this person, if I would feel at home within myself and within the relationship at once; if he would grow and shift and change with me or we would grow, shift, and change in the same general direction.  

My clock was ticking, I wanted babies, he wanted babies eventually and bam, that was was good enough; he was it.  I stopped looking, not only for other partners, but I also stopped looking within to determine if I was happy, if I was fulfilled, if my own wants and desires were being met, if I was still connected to me as our relationship grew.

It wasn’t just in that relationship that I stopped looking or questioning.  I also fell into a career that in many ways I loved, but in so many other ways was soul crushing.  I rarely questioned my career choice, I stayed with that job because it was easier than trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.  Until it wasn’t anymore. 

There have also been friendships over the years that I stayed in because it was easier.  Because I was lonely.  Because I would tell myself that they didn’t really mean this thing or that no one is perfect.  And while no one is perfect, it is also true that I settled for people in my life who’s values and life choices were in direct opposition to mine, and at the end of the day it simply wasn’t good for my own mental health.  So I settled until I couldn’t anymore.

When we look back we can see all the ways we settled, because frankly it was just easier.  We were doing the best we could at the time to get through our days relatively unscathed.

And there often comes a point in our lives when we do awaken a bit, when we suddenly (or very slowly) stop, look around, and see how unhappy we actually are.  We feel how unsatisfied and unfulfilled we are.  We notice all the overwhelm, all the frustration, all the non-right in our lives, within ourselves.  

In those moments we see all was don’t want. And sometimes we then want to take a torch to it all, to break all the relationships, to throw out all the things, be they people or stuff or jobs.

But the problem is that while it is very clear what we don’t want, we still perhaps aren’t clear on what we do actually want.  What we actually desire.  What would actually fulfill us.

We know what we don’t want, but we have no clarity around what we do want.

This is not to say that there aren’t times when we do need to burn it all down; to make swift and dramatic change in our relationships and surroundings.  It is absolutely true that this is sometimes a necessary part of our own shifting and growth and frankly discovering of what we do want.

And it is also true, that perhaps slowing down and truly examining the not-wants and then taking the time to discover our true wants and to consciously choose what to keep in our lives and what to set free may sometimes be better for us in the long run.  Not always. But sometimes.  

I am in a space of unearthing my own wants, my own desires, and even some of my needs.  I am in a space of learning that pleasure has so many forms, and that acknowledging and embracing my true wants in my life is a form of intense and radical self care.  That pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction, are not selfish or wrong or unnecessary, but in fact are loving, right, and absolutely necessary and important parts of thriving in this life.

To be in a space of not settling, or learning not to settle, has it’s own ups and downs.  This is an unknown space, an in-between space. These liminal spaces are often full of discomfort, sometimes fear, and a lot of two steps forward, two steps back cha-cha movements before we are able to make that third step forward and then only two, or maybe only one, back, making progress with our own shifting and transformation.

It is also a space of noticing, of learning, of curiosity, of discovery.  It is a time of not only discovering what I actually want – in my relationships, work, life – but also learning to speak up and have those wants and desires met.  Learning to become vulnerable and open in the asking, instead of demanding.  Learning to allow for the reality that the response from others may be a “no” for any number of reasons, and that those reasons often have nothing to actually do with me.  

This is all new territory.  Exciting and terrifying.  And a truth is, that it has taken a lot of work, intentional mindful work, to get here.  Work that wasn’t fun or easy by any means, experiences that shook me to my core and also put me in the crucible of change and transformation whether I wanted it or not.

I believe it is true that most of us, in parts of our lives, settle because it’s simply the path of least resistance.  That we continue to settle until, for whatever reasons, we can’t anymore.   When we come to this crossroads, I hope that we all have people, or meet people, who are willing to go on this wild ride of discovery and transformation with us, people who want to push outside their own comfort zones, who also want to explore and examine all life has to offer.  

We don’t need to carpe diem every day.  Sometimes what we want is quiet and peaceful and still.  It is important to recognize this too.  To allow for the both and, the multitudes of our own Self.  

/../

In Embodied Writing :: Pleasure Edition we will spend some time unearthing our own wants and desires and looking at how to shift in our own ways from settling into a way of being that is more fulfilling.   We begin in two weeks, on June 10.  To learn more click here. 

If you’d like to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, you can do that here.

Learning and relearning to trust our Self

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The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.  ~Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.  ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Within you is a fountain of wisdom. And you sell yourself short every time you allow some authority to define your limitations and cage your potential. Even if that authority lives in your head.  ~Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

Sometimes there are things we know.  What our next steps are.  Decisions that need to be made.  Changes that need to happen.  We know, deep down in our bones and being.  

And yet.  We don’t listen.  Or we don’t want to listen.  

Because the change feels to big.  Because the process feels too painful.  Because there is a part of us that doesn’t want the change, wants things to go back to the way they were.  

Also because we were taught, from a very young age not to trust ourselves.  Not to trust our own inner knowing.  

So we look for ways out.

We look to signs from the Universe, the cards, the songs on the radio, the grocery store clerk.  We ask everyone under the sun what they would do.

We talk ourselves in circles trying to find any way we can to not do the thing we know we need to do.  

We do all this in an effort to avoid doing what we know we need to do. 
We don’t listen to our own inner truth.
We seek answers outside of us when they are screaming at us from within.

We do this to avoid pain, discomfort, the unknown.
We do this out of fear.

We do this to try and escape the grief that is welling up inside of us.
Or the hurt.
Or the anger.
Or the frustration.
Or all of the above.

Regardless of the whats or whys, we don’t listen to our Self.  We don’t listen to our Truth.  

We stop our own metamorphosis.
We keep ourselves stuck.
We hide.
We put on fronts and masks.
We try to pretend everything is fine as it is.

But everything is not fine.

And if there is one thing that is constant and inevitable in our lives it is change.
Sometimes that means trying harder, trying different.
Sometimes that means letting go, surrendering, allowing.
It always means going outside our own comfort zones.
It means doing what we know we need to do.
Even if we don’t know what is on the other side.
Even if we are terrified of the process.
Even if it breaks our hearts that things need to be the way they need to be.

Trusting ourselves, trusting our own knowing, is no easy task.  It is not something we learn to do, in fact it is something we were born with knowing and then it was taught out of us.  We were conditioned to trust others over our own Self.  We were told we don’t know what is best for us or our own lives.  We were trained to seek answers outside of us and to never look within.

But here’s a thing: we were born knowing how to trust our Self.  We were born with the knowledge of how to connect with our own innate wisdom.  We were born listening to our own needs, wants and truths, and never, ever questioning them.

We were born with a blind faith in ourselves.

I don’t know that we can, or should, get back to that blind faith.  I am a deep believer in curiosity, questioning, analyzing, and understanding.  I believe we should always check in with ourselves and see if there are shadow pieces, hidden motivations, unconscious agitators, to what we see as our truth, as our knowing.

And all of that requires deeper looking within.  Not outside.  Within.

And a willingness to actually trust ourselves.  And then to honor that trust and do what we know we need to do.

/../
This was originally written for my weekly newsletter in September 2018 and was edited and updated for publication here. To receive my most current essays you can subscribe here.

*Post now on Substack