Cultural Relational Trauma Archives - Page 2 of 6

Safeness vs. Safety

June 18, 2018 By gwynn

The pearls weren’t really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart. ~Janet Fitch, White Oleander

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves. ~Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

We live in a world where mass shootings at schools is almost a weekly occurrence. A world where children are being torn from their parents with a flimsy reason given of “immigration status.” A world where women are still raped daily. A world where women are killed by their intimate partners daily. A world where black boys and men are murdered by the police daily. A world with war, poverty, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism… you get my point, I’m sure.

For those of us living with trauma in our bodies, minds, and being, it is validation for our anxiety and other trauma symptoms. Each of these types of events is like a nod to our own individual systems saying “See! I’m not paranoid! The world isn’t safe!! Being in hyper-arousal is the ONLY way I will survive!”

It is true that the world is not safe. It is less safe depending on the color of your skin or perceived gender or sexuality or ability or class or age. It is less safe for some than for others, and it is not 100% for anyone.

The first phase of trauma processing work, no matter what kind of work/model/approach you are using, is always developing stabilization and a sense of safeness.

But how can we feel safe when we know we are most definitely not actually safe?

First, there are degrees to safety itself. Living in a home where there is physical, sexual, or psychological violence is not safe, and also living in such an environment does not allow for developing a sense of safeness.

And, living in the world is not safe. However, it is a different level of not safe, it is a different level of constant threat. It is an unknown (whereas living in an abusive home is a known). We cannot predict when we will be mugged or be in a car crash. Often, when living in abusive environments, we can become very good at predicting when shit is going to go down.

Second, there is a difference between being actually safe and having a sense of safeness within our body, mind, and being.

Anxiety has physical manifestations. For some people it shows up as a vibrating feeling or like your skin is crawling. For others it’s stomach pain or feeling like your stomach is tied up in knots. For some it’s headaches. For others muscle tension. Rapid heartrate and shallow breathing are also symptoms of anxiety. These are all also signs that our sympathetic nervous system – the part of our system responsible for fight-flight-freeze – has been activated.

When our body systems are in a state of hyper-alert, our systems are constantly telling each other we are not safe. We are not safe in our environment. We are not safe in relationship. We are not safe within ourselves.

It means we constantly second guess ourselves. It means we don’t trust ourselves.

Having a sense of safeness within ourselves means that we trust our Self – it means that we know we’ve got our own backs. It means we can confidently tell ourselves that should something happen out in the world, we will survive it. It means being able to detect, hear, and respond to the subtle messages our bodies give when we are actually in physical danger.

It is knowing that we live in an unsafe world and still being willing to walk out into it without constant fear and anxiety.

Developing a sense of safeness within our Self requires having a relatively safe space to explore this idea. It requires having our home be a safe space (where abuse is not currently happening). It requires being in relationship with another that is safe enough (more on this in a few), be that person an intimate (sexual or not) partner or friend or a trusted therapist.

What do I mean by safe enough? The reality of being human is that sometimes we unintentionally cause harm to others. When in relationship – be this parent child or intimate friend or partner, we call this misattunement. It means we are not attuned. Someone said something they thought was funny and we internalized it as very hurtful.

Misattunement happens. In all relationships. With our children, with our parents, with our best friends, with our lovers, with our therapists. Misattunement happens because we are all human and each of us carry our own unique set of stuff, and no one can ever know all the stuff another person carries.

This is where re-attunement comes in. It is where we apologize for harm we have caused. It is where we state in a non-blaming way that we feel hurt by the other persons words or actions. It is where the opportunity to repair is present and it is vital for the relationship that both sides take full advantage of that opportunity. This is when a relationship is safe enough: that when harm does happen (and it will), we are able to repair in honest and loving ways.

We live in an unsafe world. This is a fact.

We can still develop a sense of safeness within ourselves, within specific environments, and in relationship.

We do this through connecting with our body, its sensations, its emotions. We do this through trial and error. We do this by learning ways to calm and soothe our nervous systems when we are in safe enough environments. We do this by learning to sense our physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries and how they interconnect. We do this by learning to find center and ground and be present in the here and now with ourselves, with our environment, with our relationships. We do this by acknowledging our own inner and outer resources.

We do this slowly and by being brave. We do this by not gaslighting ourselves. We do this by becoming curious.

As we each learn to develop our own sense of safeness within ourselves, we can then begin to help others do the same. This shifting allows us to move from the reactive states of fight-flight-freeze into the intentional, mindful active state of creativity, empathy, and compassion. This shifting within ourselves allows us to create shifts within our world.

Perhaps the world will never be 100% safe all the time for all persons. And we can sure make it more safe for all persons, including ourselves. But first we need to have a sense of safeness within so we can more fully connect with our frontal lobes and create change out of love and curiosity instead of fear.

…

Originally published on February 18, 2018 as a weekly newsletter and revised for publication here. Did you enjoy reading this? If so, I invite you to sign up to receive my weekly love letters right here.

Wants, Needs, & Unraveling Cultural Relational Trauma

June 15, 2018 By gwynn

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime. ~Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. ~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Time has always been an anxiety producer for me. I wrote a bit about that over on IG a while ago. Being on time, having enough time, spending quality time… all those things can send me into a bit of a tailspin of not enough, not enough, not enough.

Because a truth for me is, and for many I know, there simply aren’t enough hours in a day. There is always So Much To Do. There is always so much I Want To Do. There is always so much I Need To Do. There used to always be so much that Others Expected Me To Do but I left that list on the side of the road a long while ago.

Anyhow, all I need and want to do in any given day, never seems to fit into the 24 hours I have that particular day.

This has been leading me to consider what is truly important to me, what do I actually want to do and be doing with the time that I do have.

I’ve been slowly working through Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map workbook to figure out what it is I do want, how I want to feel, in my work, in my life, where are my wants and needs and how am I meeting them and how am I not and how could I meet them more often and perhaps even better?

What is it that lights me up?, as Danielle asks.

It is one thing to know what I don’t want, what I want less of, what I don’t need or desire. I can find my clear no very easily. It is the finding the yes that can be a challenge for me.

Finding the yes is the vulnerable thing. Finding the yes is revealing. Finding the yes, the want, the need, the desire… that is when we put who we really are out there and on the line.

That is when we own who we are.

And that can be terrifying in so many ways.

Noes are less vulnerable. Noes don’t reveal a whole lot. They set a line, yes. They create a boundary, absolutely. They often close doors, of course. And those are such important things to be able to do, to be able to find and honor within ourselves.

And.

When we start to look at those wants, those cravings, those needs… Well we are opening ourselves up to be told no – by others, by our culture, by the stories that whisper and scream inside our heads, by life itself.

Which then leaves us in the wanting or needing… and then what?

Well, I don’t honestly know, because I’m still at the stage of even acknowledging what my wants and needs are!

Here’s a thing: We have all been raised in a culture that tells us wanting is a sin and needing is a sign of weakness. And none of us dare to be sinners or weak.

This is part of Cultural Relational Trauma. It is part of what harms our psyches, what traumatizes us, what leaves us in a space of loneliness and disconnection from our Self and other humans.

This is our socialization. Our training. Our conditioning. It seeps into our minds and bodies and being.

It is not such an easy thing to shake. Because even when we know in our logic mind that these stories are all a bunch of crap, those messages have been ingrained and internalized. They have their own neuro-pathways in our brains, and they live in our own cellular and body systems memory. It takes intentional, mindful, and relatively consistent work to undo the training, to create new neuro-pathways that say “It is human to want; it is acceptable to want; wanting is part of living; needing is part of being reminded we are alive; asking for our wants and needs is part of our surviving and thriving.”

It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. It takes mind work and body work. It is simple and complex. As one ingrained and internalized story is unraveled another will pop up. There will be days we are too tired, there will be days we are impatient, there will be days we simply don’t wanna.

And.

There will be days where we look back and say, “Wow. That story doesn’t have the same grip it used to.” or “Holy heck I just used my words and asked for what I needed and I received it.” or “Woohoo I just allowed someone to care for me.”

This is the ebb and flow of this work.

It takes three to ten times more “positive” messaging to create a relatively permanent (knowing these are never truly permanent) neuro-pathway in comparison to what it takes to create a “negative thought” neuro-pathway.

Three to ten times. Three to ten times more effort, more intention, more practice.

So.

Yes it takes work.

Yes it takes intentional time and energy.

And to have our wants and needs met, to begin to feel safe and at home in our bodies, to begin to thrive in our lives instead of only surviving… isn’t that worth the time and energy?

Aren’t you worth it? (Let me answer that for you, YES YOU ARE.)

May we all connect to our wants and needs, acknowledge them, embrace them, ask for them, and have them met.

…

Originally published on January 14, 2018 as a weekly newsletter and revised for publication here. Did you enjoy reading this? If so, I invite you to sign up to receive my weekly love letters right here.

Blessing for the Unleashing Ourselves Circle & for all of us

March 31, 2018 By gwynn

On the eve of each of my circles and online programs I offer a blessing to the participants and to all of us. This is the blessing for the Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny circle, and truly, for each and every one of us.

May we…

Release the narratives of who, how, and what we should be

Heal the generations of wounding that has been passed down through the millenia

Process the inter-generational trauma that impacts our daily lives

Bring our unconscious motivations into our consciousness

Embrace our female lineage

Unearth the power, strength and daring of the women who came before and live within

Acknowledge our own innate, embodied wisdom

Connect to our true, authentic, whole Self: body, mind, spirit, and soul

Live mindfully and consciously into our interconnected futures

Amen.

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If you’d like to learn more about the upcoming spring circle, Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny that begins to gather April 1, you can click here. There are still a few spaces left and we’d be thrilled to have you join us. xoox

If you missed the educational essay and video series I wrote introducing the ideas and concepts we’ll be exploring and examining in the spring circle, you can find them at the links below:

Defining Ancestral, Inter-generational, & Cultural Relational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual & Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

I also wrote these essay to give more detail about the circle and our work together:

The importance of processing ancestral trauma & dislodging internalized misogyny

More About Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

The importance of processing ancestral trauma and dislodging internalized misogyny

March 20, 2018 By gwynn

Internalized misogyny does not refer outright to a belief in the inferiority of women. It refers to the byproducts of this societal view that cause women to shame, doubt, and undervalue themselves and others of their gender. It shows up even in the most feminist and socially conscious of us. And it’s insidious.

~Suzannah Weiss, 7 Sneaky Ways Internalized Misogyny Manifests in Our Everyday Lives (Bustle, December 18, 2015)

So just why is it important to process the ancestral trauma that lives within us and to put focus on dislodging our internalized misogyny?

Because we, as women, will never find freedom or equality if we don’t.

Sounds kinda dramatic, doesn’t it? Yet, it is true.

All women have varying degrees of internalized misogyny. It is impossible to not have it. When we are raised in a culture (and in families) that constantly tell us how we are inferior, how we are mere objects, how we don’t matter, how we are stupid, worthless, and not fully human, how we should feel shame about our anatomy and body shape, the only possible outcome is for those messages to find their ways into our psyches, into our bodies, into our very being.

These messages not only impact how we think of ourselves, it also deeply influences the way we look at and treat other women.

The so called “Mommy Wars”? That was (and is) all about internalized misogyny.

Every time we comment or judge the way another woman does something, that she isn’t doing it “right” or “good enough” or that she is taking “too much” time or space – that is all internalized misogyny.

When we judge the way a woman dresses. How she wears her hair. Whether or not she’s wearing make up.

When we judge a woman based on whether or not she has children (or even wants children). When we judge a woman who has children about whether or not she works outside the home.

Internalized misogyny.

Anytime we look at other women and judge them as not enough, as too much; every time we don’t believe another woman’s personal lived experience; each time we criticize and ridicule women for the choices they have made about their own damn lives…

All internalized misogyny.

(Note: criticism and ridicule are very different from critique. Critique is loving and encourages growth. Criticism and ridicule is spiteful or hateful and encourages shame).

Our internalized misogyny goes further than this too. It shows up in the ways we insist on competing with other women, the ways we feel there are not enough resources for all of us, the ways we fight over men, jobs, minutia and technicalities.

It shows up in the ways we insist upon enacting revenge upon other women when we feel we have been harmed.

It shows up in a million different big and small ways, every day.

It lives in our consciousness and our unconscious minds.

It is a by-product of not only our ancestral trauma, but also our inter-generational and cultural relational trauma.

It is a part of us, whether we like it or not.

One of the ways we see our internalized misogyny is Mean Girl™ behavior. Think back to middle school and the “cool kids” and how the “cool girls” treated everyone else.

They were bullies.

Here’s a thing though, this behavior doesn’t stop at middle school.

I see this type of behavior happening all over social media, perpetrated by ADULT WOMEN who are leaders in the feminist movement.

Yes, I have witnessed bona fide feminists, women who fight for social justice, who insist on being treating as equals and tearing down the status quo, who have been doing this work for decades, using the exact tools of the status quo of domination, authoritarianism, shaming, and othering.

(And then witnessed their followers, who seem more like sychophants, cheering them on!)

This is why we need to focus on our internalized misogyny. Because tearing down other women will never get us to where we need to be. It will never bring us the world we want for ourselves, our daughters and nieces, our granddaughters and grandnieces. Or our sons and nephews for that matter.

Our internalized misogyny is deeply rooted in our ancestral trauma. It lives in our blood and muscles and cellular make up. It is in our very DNA.

For women of European descent, consider how it must have been to be a woman living in the time of the “Witch Trials” and watching your own mother or daughter or best friend being raped, tortured, and burned alive in front of you and others in the town square?

For women who are descendants of slaves, imagine the pain of having your children torn from you and sold at auction. Imagine witnessing beatings at the hands of other (white) women, or worse when the slave masters would insist the slaves beat each other.

We can find examples from across the globe and across history of this kind of brutality inflicted upon women – mostly for simply being women – that women were witness to.

Being witness to that type of horror has its impact; it is traumatizing. What our ancestors witnessed and experienced still lives today in our DNA. And it shows up in the ways we don’t trust other women, the ways we criticize them, the ways we try to dominate and oppress them.

It shows up in the cautionary tales we tell our daughters about what to wear or how to act or the stories about those types of women.

In many ways our internalized misogyny was originally a survival mechanism. It helped to keep us alive, it helped to keep our daughters alive.

But the tools aren’t useful or helpful anymore. And in order for true social change to occur, we need to start with change within.

This is why I believe as part of our own liberation we need to explore and process our ancestral, inter-generational, and cultural relational traumas and become curious and aware of our internalized misogyny so we can begin to dislodge it, do different, and stop passing it on.

This is why for the past three years, every spring, I offer this intimate online circle centered around our ancestral trauma and internalized misogyny.

Because this is one more piece to the puzzle that will help bring about our liberation. Is is a vital piece that will help insure we do not simply use the tools of the patriarchy against other women so we ourselves can be reap the benefit.

We are all in this together. And until all of us are free, none of us are free.

…

If you’d like to learn more about the upcoming spring circle, Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny that begins April 1, you can click here.

Did you miss the educational essay and video series I wrote introducing the ideas and concepts we’ll be exploring and examining in the spring circle? If so, you can find them at the links below:

Defining Ancestral, Inter-generational, & Cultural Relational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual & Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny (this essay)

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

Below are three essays I wrote prior to the 2017 offering of this circle.

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

Unleashing Our Self :: The loss of sisterhood

Unleashing Our Self :: Disconnection, shame, & thinking it is us

Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

March 15, 2018 By gwynn

No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.

~Diana Peterfreund, Across a Star-Swept Sea

When we look at cycles of trauma, it is important to remember that often there may not have been a choice to not pass the pain forward. Talking about trauma at all is a relatively new development in our human (western) history, and in the early days of recognizing and trying to find ways to process trauma, we only looked at the trauma soldiers experienced and lived with.

It has only been in the last forty to fifty years that we began to acknowledge the trauma that comes with abuse and assault. And it has only been about twenty to thirty years that we began to recognize the impacts things like poverty, being witness to abuse, or living in a family where one or more members had addictions issue has on us.

Add to this that the somatic (body-centered) trauma therapies are also a relatively new thing. It wasn’t until 1997 that Levine’s first book Waking the Tiger introduced the wider public to the ways that trauma lives inside our bodies and how we humans prevent ourselves from processing it. That was only twenty years ago.

The amount of research and acknowledgment around trauma just within my own lifetime (46 years) is amazing. We have come so far since the early 1970s, and I believe we likely still have a long way to go. And I also believe we are getting there.

I share all that to remind us that we couldn’t know what we didn’t know. I don’t know how many times I have heard clients say “I wish I would have started this work earlier/years ago/when I was much younger.” But the truth is that this work, body-centered trauma processing work, is a very new phenomena and likely you actually could not have started this work earlier, because it didn’t exist.

And yet. While it is not our fault that information was not available before it was available, it is our responsibility now to do the work to create change, within ourselves, within our families, and in our greater communities and world.

Breaking cycles of abuse is something that has only been talked about for the last fifty or so years. And then it was only spoken of quietly. Greater social conversations didn’t begin to happen until the 1980s, in part thanks to Alice Miller and her body of work. We didn’t even consider that beating children would or could have long term, life-long, impacts on them. And it wasn’t until the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACEs) which was initiated in 1995 but then not really talked about until twenty years later, that we knew those impacts were beyond psychological and spilled into our actual physical health.

And even so, I know my maternal grandfather talked about his abusive step-mother and how he swore he would never treat his child the way she treated him (now I have no idea if he actually kept this promise to himself, but evidence says he probably did).

So, even though the greater social conversation was not there, I do believe we have within us the “moral” (for lack of a better word) compass to know abuse, domination, authoritarianism, and othering are not right, okay, or humane (or for that matter actually human).

We are in the infancy of truly understanding how the traumatic experiences of our ancestors are passed down to future generations. We are in the infancy of learning how to examine and process these traumas – especially the ones we don’t actually know about. There is still so much that is unknown, and frankly there is so much that cannot be known for several more decades as studies continue to watch families move through more and more generations.

And.

Even with this being true, I believe we all know deep within ourselves that the past impacts us. Historical past, ancestral past, and our own lived experience past. We may not have all the data and research to back this up (yet), and still we know.

And this is where our own responsibility comes in. It is not our fault what was done to us or our ancestors. It is absolutely our responsibility to make the change within ourselves so that change out in the world can occur, so we can end the cycles of abuse, oppression, and domination.

So we can all find our ways to freedom.

So we can all be a part of creating a world where all of us are free.

I believe part of that work is for us to look at our ancestral, historical, and personal pasts and to unearth what we have internalized; to examine it; to unlearn what we know is not right or just; and to create space for change and doing different for ourselves and for the world moving into our futures.

I talk more about all of this in the 10-minute video below:

This essay is the fourth and final in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, historical and cultural relational trauma and internalized misogyny. I hope you found the series helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the spring circle I facilitate: Unleashing Ourselves: Processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny. We begin April 1. You can learn more here.

To read the other essays in the series, go to the links below

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future (this essay)

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.