Category: Cultural Relational Trauma

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My grandmother

But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin. ~ Mitch Albom, For One More Day

The last few days I have been going through a bin of pieces of my grandmother’s life from before she married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother. There are a lot of old photographs of a a lot of people I don’t recognize. And of course there are a lot of images of my grandmother as a child and then a young woman.

I wrote this piece on Instagram a year ago:

I’ve been looking through the rubber maid bin that contains the pieces of her life before she married my grandfather and gave birth to my mother. There are a couple pictures that have someone cut out of them and I am guessing it was her first husband. And there is this picture that reached out and stole my heart and breath. She must have been in her early 20s or maybe late teens. I’m guessing this was before she lost her son before he was born because in later pictures there is a shadow in her eyes that isn’t here. I didn’t know the woman in this photo. I only knew the woman she became decades later. After her son was born dead and she divorced her first husband and a world war raged and she had a career as a business teacher where she met my grandfather and after she married him and gave birth to her daughter who lived for 59 years. I only knew her after a lifetime. Our eyes met each other for the first time when she was 61 and had been a mother to a living daughter for 22 years. But the egg that makes up half of me was made and nurtured in her womb. We are connected by blood and tears and wombs. She made half of me, both literally and perhaps figuratively. I love her even knowing her imperfections and probably because of them. And oh how I wish I could have known this woman in this picture before the shadows and still holding within all the possibility that would become my mother and me. #liberatedlines #startingmoments #inherskin #storieswithin #awakeningourwomanline #embodied #dare #grandmothersroar #amamaslife

I’ve been thinking a lot about the women who have come before, how they shaped me, how parts of my life trajectory were begun before I was even conceived. I have been thinking about my great-grandmother, a woman I never met and don’t even know the name of, and my mother and their relationship. I wonder about my grandmother and her relationship with her mother and her own grandmother.

I grieve for the too short relationship my mother had with my daughter and my niece. I look at these girls and see the fire of my mother, her independence as well as her simply wanting to be loved. I wonder how much of this was passed through our wombs, grandmother to grand-daughter and how much is in our relationships with these women who came before us and before our own mothers.

I wonder about the spider web of connections that has been woven over the generations. How each woman was partially created inside their grandmother’s womb. How laughs and attitudes and facial expressions can be passed down without ever knowing.

And then I get to wondering about my grandmother’s womb itself. The place that my mother was created and incubated and where the egg that later became me, was first formed. A womb that carried and grew a baby boy and was the place of his death before he was able to take his first breath in this world. I wonder if there were other deaths within my grandmother’s womb. I wonder what scars and grief and pain she carried within that organ.

And so my mind wanders and wonders. I know many stories of my mother’s womb, the deaths within it and how ultimately that system was the cause of her death when the tumors first born on her ovaries spread throughout her body a second time.  And of course the stories of my own womb, the deaths within, the sickness, the wounds. What about the stories of my great-grandmother’s womb? Or my great-great-grandmother? Or the female ancestor who live 500 years ago? Or 5000? What stories did their own wombs hold? What hurts and joys and wounds and healing lived within their uniquely feminine organs?

What pieces of those stories were passed down to their daughters? Were grown in their granddaughters?

It all comes back to the stories. Our origin stories do not begin with us. And I do not believe they begin with our mothers either. Our personal origin stories begin thousands of years ago with women we never knew and likely rarely, if ever, think of.

And what does that mean?

Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe it’s somewhere in-between nothing and everything, that this in-between is where the meaning lives. Or maybe the meaning lives in the nothing and the everything and in-between, perhaps the meaning is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Of course in thinking about the women who came before, their wombs, my own womb, the ideas of oppression, patriarchy and misogyny and how they deeply impact us, over and over, across the generations, also comes to play in my mind.

I want to make sense of it all and I also know there is no sense to most of it. The women who came before me lived their lives and carried their wounds just as I do today: as best they could. Perhaps some were able to heal a bit more, passing down a bit less to the next generations and perhaps others did more wounding than healing, passing down more pain, and shame and wounds.

This I do know: they were each perfectly imperfect woman and they each live within me, not only as markers in my DNA but also as my own deep knowing and truth.

So I continue to look at these old photographs of women who in some way are related to me, if not by blood then by experience and shaping the lives and psyches of the women who are my genetic ancestors. I wonder about them and wander down this path of unraveling the stories, of healing the wounds, of dancing with the shadows and finding my own sense of peace, being and embodied knowing.

 

If you would like to explore your own relationships with your female ancestors, I have a six month circle that will begin on April 1.  You can learn more and request an application here.

Did you enjoy this essay?  It is actually a copy of a love letter I sent out last year.  If you’d like to sign up to receive future love letters, you can do that here.

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Unleashing Our Self :: Mothers, daughters, and generations of trauma

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

~Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

The other day I googled “mother daughter relationships” just to see what would pop up.  Unsurprisingly there were pages and pages of How to Fix Your Mother Daughter Relationship types articles with some Signs Of A Toxic Mother Daughter Relationship pieces mixed in.  The truth that mother-daughter relationships tend to be challenging is relatively well known, at least to any women who have mothers, which is, well, all of us.

My own relationship with my mother was traumatizing at its worst and complicated at it’s best.  She was both physically and psychologically abusive during my childhood.  There was abuse yes and there was also neglect, and these formative years have had their impact on me, for sure.

When I was fifteen my mother got involved in the then popular “Tough Love” movement and by the time I turned 17 she stopped talking to me.  Her silence lasted for six years, and I know it only ended because of the pressure my grandmother (her mother) put on her to make amends.

We spent the next decade plus trying to find our way together.  My mother did apologize for the abuse she inflicted on me and to her credit she truly did work hard to repair our relationship.  In truth it was only after the birth of my own daughter that I began to truly forgive my mom and understand the challenges and hardships of what it means to be a parent.  For the fourteen months immediately after the birth of my daughter our relationship did deepen in ways I would have never thought possible.

And then she went out of remission, the cancer she had fought mostly on her own five years prior came back and all too soon she died.

There is more to the story of course than what I have written here.  There always is.

I grew up never knowing if my mother loved me or even wanted me.  And then when my own daughter was born I knew that she did, she always had, and she simply didn’t have the tools or support to be the mother I needed let alone the mother she actually wanted to be.

This is not to make excuses or to minimize my own pain and trauma.  Rather it is a statement of facts.  Facts that took a very long time for me to see or understand.

My relationship with my mother of course informs my relationship with my daughter today.  From the beginning of my daughter’s life I knew exactly what I never wanted to do but didn’t always know what I did want to do or rather, how to do it.  Throughout her almost ten years the young woman born from my womb has given me lessons and pushed me and expanded me and healed me in ways I never knew possible.  And, thankfully, so deeply gratefully, I am in a place where I can receive those lessons, where I can learn and stumble and make mistakes and make amends and do everything I can to do different the next time.

I think if my mother would have had a husband who was actually supportive or had the support instead of the ridicule of her own mother she would have done the same – she would have fought for us and our relationship from the beginning.  But that was not our reality, it was not to be our experience as mother and daughter.

And so I have taken those painful lessons and apply them as best I can today.

This work of unraveling the pain and trauma of my own relationship with my own mother and trying to create a different paradigm with my daughter, has lead to a deeper understanding of how our culture does not support women, and perhaps especially mothers.  I have learned about intergenerational trauma and the wounding that is passed down generation after generation, both in our DNA and through the ways we relate with our mothers and they with us (and in turn the way we relate with our own daughters).

What I have come to realize is that the strife and frustration and trauma of the mother daughter relationship is both an act of survival and an act of oppression.  In understanding how our own mothers, and their mothers, and theirs, and theirs, and so back several thousand years, were disregarded and dehumanized and in understanding what they, our feminine ancestors, had to do to not only insure their own survival but also the survival of their daughters, it is clear that this wounding that is passed down – from physical abuse to psychological abuse to all in between and beyond – was a way of trying to keep the daughters in-line so they would survive.  This is something that scholars call the “Patriarchal Bargain” – what we give up for a sense of safety; what our mothers gave up and what they taught us to give up.

And while our mothers are responsible for their actions and inaction, they were also pawns and victims in how our misogynist culture seeks to isolate and dis-empower us as women.

We live in a culture that is terrified of women.  This terror shows up as hatred.  It shows up in the fact that we are paid a lessor wage.  It shows up in the ways we are told over and over that we don’t know or understand our own bodies.  It shows up in the ways it tells us over and over that women are untrustworthy, are manipulative, are sinful, are evil.

One of the most powerful messages our culture gives us are the ones about how women are untrustworthy.  These messages show up in our media, through the encouragement of “mean girl” behavior, through the very facts that our own mothers in many ways betrayed us to a culture that hates us (as did their mothers, and their mothers, etc), in the ways we encourage competition and have a cultural scarcity complex (there isn’t enough for everyone so you’d best step on everyone else to make sure you get yours).

This message isolates us.  It isolates us from our mothers and our daughters.  It isolates us from our sisters and our aunties.

And in this isolation we lose not only relationships with other women, we lose our relationship with our Self.

Our mothers and grandmothers treated their daughters the way they did because of a deep trauma and thousands year old fear of what will happen when their girl-child goes out into the world.  The knowledge and fear of how women are raped and beaten and murdered by the men who claim to love them.  The knowledge and fear that we are not only not safe out on the streets or at a bar or at a party alone, we aren’t safe in our own homes.  The knowledge and fear that statistically speaking the pains and secrets of their own lived experiences will also be pains experienced by their daughters.

I talk even more about the complexity and intricacy of mother-daughter relationships in this 20-minute video below.  I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the first in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves.  We begin April  1.  If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

If you’d like to read the second essay and watch the second video in the series, you can click right over here and you can read and view the third one right here.

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Mothers and daughters

Love her but leave her wild. ~Atticus

Most of us were tamed as children.

We weren’t allowed to run wild. Or if we were, only in certain circumstances.

I remember longing to be a tomboy in some ways, although I was very much a girlie-girl. The tomboys always looked like they were having so much fun climbing trees and getting muddy and having snarled up hair. I watched them, intently, with my brushed neat hair and pressed dresses, sitting as lady-like as possible on the porch steps or the sidewalk.

I think my mom longed to be a tomboy too. She wore jeans and it seemed like such an act of defiance. Her jeans and t-shirts were her own special fuck-you to my grandmother I think.

I know she, my mom, was raised to be lady-like too, to be girlie, to wear dresses and always have her hair neat, to speak properly and only when spoken to. And so, as an adult, she wore jeans and tied her hair back in messy pony-tails and swore like a sailor.

But not around my grandmother, her mother. Never then.

And of course, we were never allowed to be anything but proper around our grandmother too.

And so the lessons were learned early on to hide parts of myself. To hustle for love and acceptance. To bend and mold myself to another’s liking, no matter what.

This all came to a somewhat abrupt stop when I was pregnant with my own daughter. And the vows I made so many years before that all the abuse and shame and neglect would end with me came crashing forward and I claimed those vows again.

I wanted different for my own daughter. Hell, I wanted different for me.

I saw the pain in both my mother’s and grandmother’s eyes when they tried to connect, to interact with each other. My mother always on guard for the next criticism, my grandmother having the best intentions but always picking and pointing out all my mother’s “faults”.

I saw the pain in my own mother’s eyes when she tried to connect with me and I knew my own reluctance and resistance to letting her in for all the reasons I had.

I knew their heartache and I knew my own.

I didn’t want that for me and my girl. I still don’t.

Some days are better than others and some days my grandmother’s harsh voice comes out of my throat and some days my daughter watches me with weary eyes and some days we connect in ways that I never knew possible for a mother and daughter and my heart swells and I know that cycles are breaking.

These cycles that go back beyond my own grandmother. Back generations and generations. Back to the times when patriarchy took root and women began to be disregarded and de-humanized. Back to a time when women first learned the lessons of what they must do to survive, what they must do for their girl-children to survive.

The cycles, the trauma; the looks, the tones; the violence, the neglect; the complicity, the compliance. Passed on and down, over and over.

All leading to isolation and loneliness; anxiety and depression; disconnection from the women who came before and the women who came after. Passed on and down, over and over.

I was very young when I made the vow that it all stopped with me. Maybe five or six. And for a time I thought that meant never having children, as it was the only way I knew to guarantee none of it would be passed on and down again.

And then biology and wanting and the meeting the right man and well, here I am today.

Ten years ago I renewed my vows that it all stops with me. And every day since I renew them again and again.

Part of the renewal is continually finding ways to connect to the women who came before, to continually re-examine my own relationships with my mother and grandmothers and their relationships with each other. To step outside myself and see what is still being passed on and down and doing as much of my own course correction as I can.

This is one of the ways we burn it down. This is one of the ways we change our culture and world for future generations. By doing our own work of unearthing and unraveling and dismantling and dislodging and embracing and being.

On April 1, an intimate group of women will begin to gather for my next six month online women’s circle. (CIS, Transgender, and AFAB non-binary all welcome). We will explore our relationships with other women, with our mothers and grandmothers, their relationships with each other and connect to our female ancestors to heal wounds and trauma and embrace their strength and power. If this sounds like part of your own journey of self actualization, of social liberation, of becoming unleashed, then I invite you to learn more and request an application here: http://gwynnraimondi.com/unleashingourself

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Self Care and Community

I’ve spent most the last few days offline. And while there is a part of me that has the pull to check in and see if we have launched nukes yet, I also know that there is a long game here and I need to be able to play it.

Which means, I need to take time to do the work to take care of myself. To calm my nervous system the fuck down. To see my therapist. To spend time cuddling with my little guy while watching Peppa Pig. To spend time with my becoming-a-young-woman learning about the women of American history and reading fairy tales from different cultures and talking about the archetypes and running themes within the stories. To do the laundry and pick up the toys. To read. And to write. To connect with friends, new and not new, for conversation.

Because the horrible shit will still be happening tomorrow. And today (and yesterday and Saturday) I needed time to breathe.

And we need to remember that while the short game is vital, and truly lives are depending on us being in the arena for the short game, the long game is also vital. And sometimes we can only be in one arena at a time and sometimes we can be in both and sometimes we truly have to tap out and sit on the sidelines for a moment.

And THAT there is the beauty of the collective and of community. It means that not a one of us has to Do It All. It means that we each have a role, a place and sometimes that looks like being a supporting character and sometimes that looks like being in the lead and sometimes it looks like being the understudy sitting off stage. And sometimes maybe, it looks like being the director or producer or the one who’s bankrolling the show. And maybe sometimes it means we are in the audience, giving witness to all that is happening. And maybe sometimes we are the ones sewing the costumes or building the sets or even writing the play itself.

My point is it takes a whole community of people for change to happen, for there to be true revolution. And because it take so many people, it also means that each of us can take the time to care for ourselves. Because if we are the lead, the understudy can step in for a night, to continue that analogy.

We can’t burn ourselves out one week in.

Pace yourself.

When and if you can be in the arena for the short game, do it. Call your congress people. Go to the marches and rallies. Go to the town hall meetings. Go to the community organized events that teach you how to be a revolutionary, how to be an ally, how to be an asset in this fight. Volunteer. Donate. Offer support in whatever ways, to those who are in the trenches, and have been – offer child care or take them a meal or pay for them to get a massage. Do what you can.

And we all need to be in the arena for the long game. Doing the things we each do to bring our consciousness shifts as well as working towards that 2018 election.

We will win. We have to.

And the only way we are going to is if we get in community, take our role, and remember to pace ourselves, set boundaries, and give ourselves breaks as needed.

We’ve got this. We do.

In rebellious solidarity, always.
xoox

I’m offering two workshops where we will learn and practice how to soothe our nervous systems, come into our bodies, and process and sit in uncomfortable emotions & sensations.  One is in-person here in the Seattle area, is six weeks long, and begins this Friday, March 3. To learn more about it and register click here.   The other is an online six month circle that begins March 15.  To learn more about it and register click here.

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Commitment, Consent, & Boundaries

A thing about personal change or growth or transformation is that it typically takes time. It takes time to do all the unearthing and unraveling and dismantling and dislodging. It takes time to see all the different ways not only we ourselves have been harmed but also to see the many ways we have actually (unintentionally, unconsciously) participated in harming others.

We don’t just wake up one day and suddenly no longer have any implicit biases or internalized isms. We may wake up one day and suddenly be aware of a lot of these biases and ~isms. And being aware of them and removing them from our being are two very different things.

This is why I now only have online groups or circles that are six months or longer. And it is why all my in-person work is for a minimum of three months.

Because this work takes time. And we need the space. We need space for the stops and starts. We need space to allow some work to settle before moving on to the next. We need space to experiment and try different things to see what fits us and what doesn’t.

Connecting to our consent and boundaries, and learning how to respect and honor the consent and boundaries of others takes time. In a “good enough” family dynamic, it takes about 20 years (the span from infancy to young adulthood). And so, if we are only beginning to dive into this work, we have however many years we’ve been alive worth of training and conditioning to unravel on top of actually learning what boundaries actually feel like in our bodies and how to honor them.

This is not to say we can’t learn some things quickly. We can. Absolutely. And “quickly” is a relative term. Six months is quickly in my book. And a LOT can be unlearned and relearned in that amount of time.

This is why Isabel Faith Abbott and I decided to have our collaboration, Body of Consent, have a six month duration. Because we want to take the time to truly get into this work, to allow space for the mess and exploring and experimenting. To give time for the retreating and coming back to it. To truly practice and get into our skin and being what boundaries and consent feel like and know when our own is being crossed and when we are crossing that of another.

And it is a commitment. A commitment to this work. A commitment to learning and unlearning. A commitment to understanding and feeling and knowing that we are all in this work for the long haul.

If this sounds like your next steps, if this sounds like a way for you to commit to the work of healing and shifting and unlearning and relearning, we’d be honored to have you join us.

You can learn more and register at http://gwynnraimondi.com/bodyofconsent