childhood trauma

Emotional intimacy & complex trauma

July 30, 2020 By gwynn

I’ll never try to keep you,
but I’ll try to be
the kind of place
that makes you
always want to stay.
~J. Warren Welch

I want love,
passion, honesty,
and companionship…
sex that drives me crazy
and conversation that
drives me sane.
~steve maraboli

love fearlessly,
for Your heart
beats brave.
~Matthew Spenser

When we live with complex trauma, entering into new relationships, be they platonic or romantic, can be activating. We can want to dive into the depths too fast, reveal our past too quickly. We may be impatient to allow things to unfold as they will. We could want guarantees, promises, to know exactly what is happening. We want a sense of control, not to be controlling, rather to calm the chaos that is living within us.

Our systems may not have the ability to tolerate the unknown and liminal space that is required for new relationships to unfold in a ways that are beneficial for all, not rushed or pressured, slow and steady. The slow and steady growth of a relationship may activate our anxiety, as things aren’t moving “fast enough” or we don’t actually know where they are heading.

This makes sense given our histories. Unknowns almost always led to harm in some way. We learned from a very early age how to recognize patterns so we could navigate abusive and neglectful situations. When we are early in a relationship, patterns are being established and not yet known – this activates our stress and trauma responses.

We also may want to jump in and have our selves be “seen” and “known,” which may lead us to revealing parts of our selves or our history too early in a relationship before real trust has been established. (This is what we call trauma bonding.) We want to feel connected so desperately that we do whatever we know to try and “make” that happen.

One of the issues with this is we actually can’t “make” connections happen. We cannot force intimacy. True intimacy, emotional intimacy, is something that needs to be cultivated and nourished; it is something that grows and deepens over time with trust.

In order for emotional intimacy to grow we actually need to have good boundaries. We need to know and defend our limits. We need to be able to speak up when we are hurting, not in a blaming or accusatory way, rather in a way that is vulnerable. We need to be able to be comfortable enough with the idea of rejection and endings.

This is all counter intuitive when unprocessed complex trauma is running rampant in our systems and being. Our boundaries tend to be either overly soft or overly rigid (and sometimes depending on circumstances both). We are afraid of communicating to another when we are hurting, and then when we do we place blame and accusations instead of showing the tender, soft, hurting side. We are so terrified of abandonment that we do whatever we need to smooth things over and not have confrontation… which builds up over time until we finally explode or implode.

Emotional intimacy is challenging for most of us. It means being vulnerable. It means not having an agenda or endgame. It means releasing expectations and assumptions. It means putting a stop a to making demands. It means allowing space and time for things to unfold naturally and not forcing things in the directions we think we want. All of this goes against what the trauma living in us wants us to do.

This goes against what our neural pathways, our brains, know and understand.

Which means, in order to get to this place of emotional intimacy, we literally need to grow new neural pathways. We can do this in a number of ways. Embodiment or body-centered mindfulness can be part of the path. Taking baby steps in learning and doing different, practicing over and over. Learning to regulate our nervous system. Reclaiming our body as our own. Finding ways to expand the pause between being activated and reacting to a situation. Practicing all these things over and over and over again.

And even with all this foundation, we still need to actually communicate our wants and needs. To share parts of ourselves, in the right time and space, that feel tender, vulnerable. To take a breath when we are activated and to look at it and decide if old wounds are being poked at or if new ones are actually being created (or perhaps a bit of both).

All the embodiment practices in the world won’t replace actually speaking and sharing our wants, needs, boundaries, desires, or hurts.

The more we are able to speak, to communicate without trying to manipulate, limiting our expectations of responses, letting go of our assumptions about what the other person will or won’t do or say, the more we bolster those new neural pathways. The more we do this, the easier it becomes.

Though I’m not sure it every becomes easy.

Unlearning our old ways of being in relationship, and learning new ones, takes time, practice, and compassion. There is no quick fix or easy way to do this. It asks us to be self-aware, accountable, and vulnerable. It asks us to let go of harmful stories of what relationship “should” look like. It asks us to come home into our bodies, into the present moment. It asks us to process our childhood trauma.

It asks us to do things that were likely never modeled for us, to do things we’ve never done before and that feel foreign, strange, even wrong (even though in our logic brain knows it is right). It asks us to go against what is known and comfortable and move into the unknown and discomfort. It asks us to be accountable for our words and actions, without shame.

Through this process we need to remember we will mess up. We will get it wrong at times. We will fall back on our old harmful patterns and cycles. This is where our self-compassion can come in, where we need it to come in.

Learning to relate in new and different ways takes effort. It takes bravery. It takes a willingness to be wrong.

It takes love. Real love. Without expectations or assumptions or demands. Without promises or contracts. Without cages or prisons or obligations.

Love for others. Love for our world. Love for our life. Love for our Self.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter on July 26, 2020. It has been revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays and learn about ways to work with me, you can subscribe here.

We will be exploring these ideas, and how to change the ways we are in our relationships with others and with ourselves in my new six month group Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Relationship. You can learn more about it here.

Wanting to be loved, afraid to be loved

July 27, 2020 By gwynn

She believes that she isn’t pretty enough to be loved, so she pretends to be not the kind who falls in love. In reality she is just afraid to trust her heart to those who could easily tear it apart. Therefore she begins building a wall. To create a world, where no broken hearts exist and not even the pretty girls get kissed. ~Lina C.

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. ~bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

When we put our running shoes on and fight tooth and nail to hide from someone, it’s because that’s the person who really matters. That’s the one person you fear will see what’s inside you and cringe. You’d rather live with the not-knowing than to give it a chance. ~Rebel Farris, Pivot Line

All of us want to be loved. We want to be accepted. We want to be seen, held, adored. We want to have someone else look at us in that way, with those eyes, that say they see us, all of us, and they want us, all of us.

We want to be loved not despite our “flaws,” but because of them.

We want to feel at home, to be able to rest, in another’s arms. To set down our masks, to let down our walls.

We want emotional intimacy, to be understood, to deeply connect in ways that are beyond words, beyond sex, beyond the now, reaching out into the infinite.

We want all of this.

And because of our complex trauma, because of our attachment wounds, because of fear, we, consciously and unconsciously, prevent any of this from happening.

We close ourselves off.

We bottle up our hurts.

We keep our masks on and our armor up.

We don’t express our needs. Our wants. Our desires.

We don’t share who we are, what we like, what we enjoy.

We bend, and bend, and bend, until we break.

We push people away when they offer help, when it feels like they are getting too close, when it appears they are starting to actually see us.

This is a survival response.

We relate to others in this way because that is how our brains were wired to respond to people who love us. Because when we were young, the people who loved us caused harm. They hurt us – physically, sexually, psychologically, emotionally. They abandoned us, either physically or emotionally. When we would try to express ourselves, our wants or needs, we were silenced. We were told we were too much, too needy, too demanding. We were told we weren’t enough, not smart enough, not good enough.

Because of all this, our internal survival systems did everything they had to do to make sure we would survive, to makes sure our caregivers actually took care of us, to make sure they kept loving us so we wouldn’t die.

Neural pathways grew during critical times that taught us how to hide, how to protect ourselves, how to detach, how to expect disappointment, pain, heartache. Over and over and over.

These neural pathways are still active. They probably will be active for our entire lives.

And.

We can grow new neural pathways. We can encourage these old ones to atrophy. They may never disappear, but they can have less influence, we can learn how to manage them better and move more and more quickly into new, more connected ways of being.

These old neural pathways are based in fear. Literally based in the fear of death. It’s not conscious. It is instinct. These neural pathways kept us alive as children, because in different ways our lives were at risk.

And.

We aren’t those little ones anymore. We are adults now. We aren’t living in those chaotic or neglectful homes anymore. We live in the homes of our creation. We aren’t reliant on caregivers who abuse or neglect us anymore. We are reliant on ourselves.

But our systems don’t understand this. Our neural pathways, what informs the ways we are in the world, the ways we are in relationship with ourselves and others, they want to keep us safe because they don’t fully understand that we aren’t in those situations anymore, that we aren’t dependent on those caregivers anymore.

So we close off. We lash out. We push and pull.

All the while longing to connect. Longing for love. Longing for intimacy.

Growing new neural pathways, learning to do different, calming our fear response… this is intense work. Embodiment is one of the keys.

And we can be fully embodied and still emotionally closed off.

So we need to practice vulnerability. We need to practice sharing what we want, what we need, with the people we care about.

We need to practice sharing parts of ourselves we have hidden.

We need to practice receiving love, compliments, adoration.

We need to practice setting boundaries and respecting boundaries without creating stories about what it means or doesn’t mean about our own worth, about how lovable we are, about how much or little the other person loves us.

We need to practice curiosity. Asking questions. Of ourselves. Of others.

We need to practice having uncomfortable and even terrifying conversations.

Practice. Practice. Practice.

And while we do this, we need to remember to love ourselves. To have compassion for ourselves. To know we aren’t going to always get it right. That it will come out wrong. That sometimes those old neural pathways will keep us in fear.

And to keep practicing.

Because that connection we long for, that intimacy we crave, those kinds of relationships we desperately want – won’t happen if we don’t do the work of allowing it in.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter on July 12, 2020. It has been revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

Trauma, collective liberation, & doing our work

July 6, 2020 By gwynn

Over and over we are told we don’t know our own body. We don’t know our own mind. We don’t know our own boundaries or wishes or consent.

And, because we are told so often and from such an early age, we believe them.

And in the believing we allow others to have control over us. Over our body. Over our voice. Over our being. Our lives. ~ Gwynn Raimondi

The flip side to us not being connected to our own boundaries, to our own consent, and that is that we do not recognize the boundaries and consent of others. We don’t accept that No means No if that No isn’t something we want to hear. We touch people, no matter how lovingly, without their consent. We disregard others wishes and wants because we think we know better.

This happens almost daily in my home. I am still constantly unlearning and relearning power dynamics, consent and boundaries thanks to my two children, constantly being reminded of the responsibility of being the one “in power” and how to not be oppressive or authoritarian. Some days I am open to all the lessons they have for me and honestly, other days I am not. Some days I can patiently talk with them about their Noes and why I need it to be a yes (getting shoes on to get out the door to an appointment) and other days I just really want them to stop and blindly obey me because I’m tired and overwhelmed and have been running on empty for days (thinking about those great times in the past when my then-preteen told the then-toddler he can’t have something of hers and he screams in that screech-scream that both made my ears bleed and head feel like it was going to explode and I just wanted her to give him whatever the thing is to Make. It. Stop.).

It happens when I ask either of them if they want a thing, and they say no, and I then continue to ask approximately five hundred million times if they are sure they don’t want the thing, questioning over and over their No.

It happens when I take a bit of food off the younger’s plate, a plate he has abandoned at the table, and he sees me and reminds me I didn’t ask if I could eat his food.

It happens when we’re trying to get out the door.

It happens when I’m trying to get the house cleaned up.

It happens when one of them says they don’t want to do their homework that day.

And while it happens a million times over the week with my kids, it happens with adults too.

Truth is, I’m much better at not violating other adults consent. I tend to automatically respect their Noes and because of my own history I am perhaps extra sensitive about physically touching others grown-ups without their explicit consent. I’m also better about not questioning the whys behind their Noes, unless there is a philosophical conversation happening where my curiosity would be well received. Doesn’t mean it never happens, only that it happens less than with my kids.

My kids?

Well, I am better now than I was a few years ago at respecting their autonomy, their Noes, their boundaries and consent. Even so I am still far from perfect.

So I have the privilege of receiving daily lessons on all the ways we are trained to give up our autonomy, our authority over our own bodies, our consent over our own lives.

And let me tell you, this training and conditioning runs deep.

Because this training and conditioning runs deep it isn’t going to be dismantled and dislodged in a day or a week or even a year. It will take a couple generations to unravel and dislodge and heal the collective relational trauma we all carry within us and all are complicit in out in the world.

And.

This is exactly why we need to begin our work now. It is exactly why when we realize we have violated another person’s boundaries or consent or autonomy or authority over their own damn bodies and lives we need to make amends as best we can, learn the lesson as best we can, and do different the next time. We must start this work now, or it will not be dismantled in the next generation or two, if ever.

If we don’t start our own work now, we are complicit in the delaying of liberation for all people, for another generation.

If we don’t start our own work now, we are complicit in our own oppression as well as the oppression of other peoples.

If we don’t start our own work now, we are complicit in allowing the status quo just keep on keeping on.

If we don’t start our own work now, we are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

Each of us need to do our parts in tearing down the oppressive culture that we live in.

Even if it is uncomfortable.

Even if it shows us the ways we have wronged others along the way and we need to go back and be accountable for our actions.

Even if it means being in a space of unknown and in-between and mistakes and stumbling and trying to figure it all out.

Because the moment we actually start doing our work is the exact moment we start to do our part in tearing all this shit down. It is the exact moment we begin to become part of the solution and become less a part of the problem.

I look at my kids and I think about all the things I do wrong every single day. All the ways I am unintentionally complicit and compliant to our oppressive culture. All the ways I pass down the conditioning and training. I won’t lie, it often feels overwhelming and the uphill battle of it all can feel like all too much for me to even attempt to make a tiny chip in.

Then I have a conversation with another woman who reminds me that I have broken the cycle of abuse.

Then I have a conversation with a different woman about how I am teaching my daughter about the powerful women of color, trans women, differently able bodied women, in the world and how until they are free and safe, none of us are.

Then I have a conversation with yet another woman about how I encourage my kids to have and feel and express their emotions in healthy ways.

And in those conversations I am reminded that I am making a difference. And while it won’t mean the world will be changed tomorrow, it does mean I am guiding two young humans to being in the world differently than I was raised to be and to having their own ripple effect in changing it all.

Parenting and auntie-ing and uncle-ing and grandparenting -all caregiving- is important and vital work. It is how we have a long lasting impact. It is how we help create a world we want for these young humans who are temporarily in our care. And of course the way we do this work, is through also doing our own work of unearthing and unraveling and dismantling, so we can teach them not only through our words, but also through our actions.

Our inner work is vital, and our work with the children in our lives is a vital step in making change within the next generation, there is also the greater work we need to be doing out in the world.

This greater work can look like any of a million things. It could be donating money to organizations that promote social justice. It could be volunteering time for a specific cause you believe in. It could be calling your representatives and/or attending town hall meetings. It could be speaking up when that racist relative says something oppressive or degrading at the family feast. It could be speaking up when you see a woman in a hijab being harassed.

It could be any of those things and so many more things.

All of this work, both inner and outer, in my opinion, in many ways, boils down to boundaries and consent. Honoring our own boundaries and honoring the boundaries of others. Defending our own boundaries and defending the boundaries of others. Respecting our own boundaries and respecting the boundaries of others.

Inner work and outer work.

Both at the same time.

Because until we are connected to our own boundaries, until we respect them and defend them, until we know them, I’m not sure we can know or respect the boundaries of others.

This isn’t our fault.

We are trained and conditioned to disregard our own boundaries and to disregard the boundaries of others.

We are told our Noes don’t really mean No. And since our No doesn’t really mean No then their No doesn’t really mean No either.

We are told our body is not our own. And since our body is not our own, then their body is not their own either.

We are told and taught and trained in a million ways that we do not have autonomy or authority over our bodies, minds or lives. And since we don’t, they don’t either.

They can be just about anyone. That is, anyone who is not CIS, white, heterosexual, likely Christian, upper middle class (or more), able-bodied and always male.

No, it is not our fault that we received and internalized this training. It is not our fault this conditioning got deep under out skin into our very being. It is not our fault.

We didn’t ask for this training. We did not consent to this conditioning.

And.

As I said for literally years, while it is not our fault, it is absolutely and unequivocally our responsibility.

It is our responsibility to stop passing on this training.

It is our responsibility to stop passing on this conditioning.

It is our responsibility to unearth and unravel and dismantle and dislodge it from our bodies and minds and ways of being in the world.

It is our responsibility to learn to feel and know and respect and honor and defend our own boundaries and the boundaries of others.

No, it’s not fair. And as I tell my kids, forget fairness and instead ask if it is just.

Because fairness is a fairy tale. But justice… justice is something we can all believe in and fight for and make reality.

Inner work and outer work. We need both.

To stop passing on harm.

To stop passing on abuse.

To stop being complicit and compliant to a dominant culture and its systems that don’t actually care about us.

To create a world that operates from a place of love not fear; liberation, not authoritarianism, connection and intimacy, not disconnection and isolation.

It is not easy work. And it is necessary.

So let’s do it.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weeklyish newsletter in August 2017. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

We’ll be exploring boundaries and consent, our own and others, in my new six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Relationship six month group program. To learn more, you can go here.

Acting from fear or from love?

July 2, 2020 By gwynn

Despair, self-doubt, and desire cripple human beings. ~Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Frank Herbert, Dune (Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear)

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life. ~John Lennon

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds — justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner. ~Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

Learning how to actually ask for what we want, what we need, is not an easy task. We all have our ways of being “passive-aggressive” or “manipulative.” Of “hinting” at what we want instead of stating it clearly. We’ve all had times of being angry and hurt that someone didn’t pick up on our “hints” or read our minds. Attempting to relate with others is in these ways is much less vulnerable than actually asking for what we want, less risky, but ultimately more harmful to our relationships.

Another pattern in avoiding asking for what we want is what I call “playing detective: : We ask all the questions around the thing to try to deduce what the response will be so we can ascertain if asking is worth the risk. An example : Say you want to spend time with someone. Instead of asking if they are free to hang out or would like to spend time together, we instead ask if they have other plans, feel out if they are available, try to gather information to determine what their response will be and decide if we “should” ask or not.

I understand why those of us living with unprocessed complex trauma do this: We do this because of our fear of rejection, our fear of abandonment, our fear of not being wanted is so great, and is therefore influencing our decisions around how to relate with others.

A thing is, when we do this, when we either try to manipulate or are passive aggressive or go into detective mode instead of “simply” asking for what we need or want, two things happen :
1. We are letting fear be in charge and staying in well known and ultimately harmful patterns and cycles of relating; and
2. We are not giving the other person the opportunity to say yes to us, of their own free will, without guilt or feeling of obligation.

When we operate from a place of fear, from a place of letting our wounding be in charge, we actually prevent ourselves from getting our needs and wants met. When we make demands instead of asking another if they can fulfill our wants we cause harm to our relationship. When we have unrealistic expectations (think “If they loved me they’d know“), we prevent true intimacy with those we want so desperately to have a deep connection with.

There are reasons we do this. Our neural pathways that were grown during our early childhood, when we experienced abuse and or neglect, when we learned how to survive by doing whatever we had to do to get our needs met, direct us and our ways of being in the world. When we are stuck in survival mode, in our trauma responses, it can be almost impossible to move out of that place of fear,

Almost.

We can do it however.

It’s not easy. It is challenging. It will feel counter-intuitive. It will feel weird and wrong.

And it will have moments of feeling scary as hell. Downright terrifying even.

I don’t have a simple five step program for you to shift your ways of being, of relating with others. I don’t have a recipe for how to “simply” ask for what you want. And I will never, ever tell you that it’s simply a matter of mind over matter, to just do it, that if you really wanted to change you would already.

Because it’s not simple. It actually requires us to rewire our brains. Literally.

This entails us finding a sense of safeness within our own body. Within the present moment. To feel all the uncomfortable emotions and their physiological sensations, to learn to tolerate them, to sit with them, to not run away from them. To expand, and then expand some more, that pause between stimulus and response. To stay connected to our frontal lobe while allowing ourselves to feel our feeling but not let them overwhelm us.

This is not fun work. I don’t think any of us do it because we enjoy it. I know I do it to have better relationships with my children, with my friends, with my lovers and partners and with myself. I do it because I know the patterns and cycles that were passed down to me caused and continue to cause so much harm and that harm ripples out beyond my direct relationships.

And if the harm ripples out, then I also know the healing will ripple out too. Every pattern we break, every cycle we disrupt, every new neural path we nurture and grow and every old one we let atrophy, that healing reaches past us, past our direct relationships with our children, family, friends, lovers, and partners, that healing reaches out into the world, into the collective.

Every time we let fear stay in charge, we reinforce and bolster those old neural pathways that tell us we are not deserving of love, we are not worthy of connection, that no one wants us. We reinforce and remain complicit in our oppressive culture, in the status quo of harm, abuse, and disconnection.

And.

Every time we do the hard, sometimes excruciating, work of being in the fear and asking for what we want anyway, we nurture and bolster new neural pathways; ones that remind us we are deserving, we are worthy, we are wanted, we are lovable.

This work, when we do it, the benefits of it, they don’t stop with us. As we do this inner work and change the ways we are in the world, the ways we relate to ourselves and others, we have impacts. We create space for others to shift too, to do their own inner work. This ripples out and out and out.

Acting from a place of love, a place of seeking intimacy, a place of connection – with ourselves and others, is what will change this world. We do this one relationship at a time. We do this by coming back into our bodies. We do this by acknowledging and feeling the fear, knowing where it stems from, and reminding ourselves we are safe in this moment and can do differently than what we, and the generations before us, have done in the past.

The work of the individual impacts the collective, in small ways that lead to big the ways the more of us who do this work.

Let’s continue our work. Let’s move out of acting from a place of fear and wounding and into acting from a place of love, compassion, and inter-dependency.

Because we need each other. There is no shame in this. It is a fact of being human. We. Need. Each. Other. Period. Full stop.

So, remember, act from love. Always. All ways.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly newsletter on June 28, 2020. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays and learn about my current offerings you can subscribe here.

We’ll be exploring the ways trauma impacts our relationships and learning new ways of relating, regulating and co-regulating our nervous systems, connecting to our boundaries and coming into our bodies in my new six month Trauma Informed Embodiment (TIE)™ for Relationship. You can learn more here.

You can be right or you can be in relationship

May 28, 2020 By gwynn

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness. ~Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

You are not always right. It’s not always about being right. The best thing you can offer others is understanding. Being an active listener is about more than just listening, it is about reciprocating and being receptive to somebody else. Everybody has woes. Nobody is safe from pain. However, we all suffer in different ways. So learn to adapt to each person, know your audience and reserve yourself for people who have earned the depths of you. ~Mohadesa Najumi

Many of us who live with complex trauma from childhood have a deep need and want to be heard. To be seen. To be acknowledged. To be noticed. To be understood. Many of us as children weren’t seen or heard or acknowledged. Or worse, we were gaslit: being told our experiences weren’t “that” bad, or even worse than that, they never happened at all, that we were making it all up.

Our need for belonging, for being seen, for being heard, was not met when we were young. Most of us learned to become silent. But that silence was only on the surface, only the mask we wore on the outside. Our internal experience was loud, it was screaming and howling, whether we consciously acknowledged it or not (and likely, we did not because of dissociation and our need to survive).

We were never taught how to express our emotions in a non-harmful way. We were never taught how to have disagreements that don’t turn into screaming matches. We didn’t learn how to listen to others, only to shut down or to argue. Most likely as children we shut down. So, as adults, we argue. Loudly. Harshly. Cruelly.

Our need to be seen and heard and acknowledged and accepted comes out all sideways as we grow older. We need to be right. We need to be understood. But our desperate need to be seen and be right overshadows the other people we are in relationship with. It overshadows their own needs to be seen and heard and it tramples over our empathy for this. It actually keeps us out of relationship and getting those needs met for ourselves.

Not our fault. We were never taught different.

However.

We have a responsibility to stop causing harm to others, and in turn to stop causing harm to ourselves. To do the work of breaking life-long patterns and disrupting generations-old cycles. To process the trauma within us. To shift. To do different.

This is not an easy feat. We typically have generations of trauma and training ingrained in our bodies and being. We have our own lived experience and those wounds and hurts. We don’t know other ways of being, and even if we can get a glimmer of how to do something different, we have limited resources to make the internal and external shifts to make that happen.

This is where our work is. With our therapists, with our coaches, with ourselves. It is the slowing down. Learning to regulate our nervous systems, to understand boundaries, to be able to find our own center and ground. It is coming home to our bodies and becoming more and more self aware. It is in processing the many traumas that live within us.

It is a messy and hard road. We will make mistakes. We will need to be accountable for those mistakes, apologize, repair, and learn how to not make the same mistakes again. It will be incredibly uncomfortable as we step into the unknown, as we shed the layers of our own and our ancestors traumas and woundings. It will be terrifying as we unravel and dislodge those parts of us that aren’t really us, those parts of us that we carry around that were our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents. It will be discombobulating as we seek out who we are and who we want to be and untangle that from all the hurt and pain.

It will not be a straight journey. It will go in all directions.

It is important to acknowledge the unfairness of needing to go on this journey at all. Of needing to unravel the generations of trauma and wounding. Of needing to process and heal our own traumas and woundings. It is not fair. It is not our fault. We didn’t ask for it.

And.

If we want to live our lives in a place of thriving instead of surviving, in a place of connection instead of isolation and dissociation, a place of joy, contentment, and or peace instead of constant pain, hurt, and suffering, we need to make the decision to enter into this work, to do this work, to create the change within ourselves so that we can begin to see the change and shifts in our outer world and in our relationships.

And we need to keep making that choice every day. To break the patterns. To disrupt the cycles. To come home to ourselves. To feel good in our own skin. To have nourishing, loving, and authentic relationships with our Self and with those around us.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on May 20, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

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