trauma informed care

Curiosity and honoring our own wants and needs

August 10, 2020 By gwynn

Darling girl,
follow that white rabbit
and fuck what they say.
~Ann Marie Eleazer

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit. ~audre Lorde

say yes
to new
adventures.
~unknown

There will be people in our lives who when we meet them, we know that we are going down a rabbit hole and when we come back up, we will be forever changed. People who we know will break us further open, who will gently guide us back to our Self, who will inspire so much feeling within us that at times we feel we might burst.

If we are lucky we get to meet multiple people like this in our lifetimes. People who push us lovingly outside our comfort zones, people who, when we are around them, we want to push ourselves outside our comfort zones. People who, simply knowing them is truly an adventure. People who we feel alive with, free with, connected with, at peace with.

Sometimes these people will be in our lives for a very long time, decades, maybe even most of our lives. Sometimes these people will be in our lives for a very short time: a few hours, a day, a couple months. Sometimes it seems like these people show up exactly when we need them to, to get us through a very specific phase in our lives.

Sometimes these people are our Forever People and sometimes they aren’t.

Just because a person isn’t a Forever Person doesn’t make them a “bad” person. Sometimes relationships end not because harm has been done, rather because it is simply time for it to end. Because one person has grown into needing something different than what the other in the relationship can give and to stay would be to keep both people stuck and stagnant.

Letting go of these people who touch us so deeply, so intensely, who forever change us, is not an easy task. It is understandable that we want these people to stay forever. It makes sense that we try to cling to them, that we lose our minds a bit in the trying to somehow backtrack and change course “soon enough” for the inevitable to be avoided just a bit more.

It makes sense because our attachment wounds and complex trauma run deep. Because learning new ways of being, which includes new ways of grieving, can feel so uncomfortable and even at times overwhelming. Because we want the stability and relative safeness of things staying the same. Because while change is unavoidable, we humans sure do try to keep it at bay as long as possible.

All relationships have their ebbs and flows. Their expansions and contractions. Their beginnings and endings. Being able to move with these shifts is an act of courage and love. It is brave and loving to do differently, to break patterns and cycles that inevitably cause harm, to allow for the autonomy of the people in the relationship and that of the relationship itself.

What is most important, always, in all ways, is that we are able to stay true to who we are, to stay in our own integrity, to do our best to not cause harm and when we do to be accountable and do the work of repair.

Sometimes that looks like walking away or staying still while the other person walks away.

And whoa can that hurt like hell.

A thing is, when we try to force a relationship, any relationship, to be something it can’t be, we begin to lose our Self. We become so focused on the relationship and the other person that we lose sight of us. We allow fear of being alone, of having to meet new people, of change, to be in charge instead of sitting in the discomfort of grief and change and allowing space and time to consider how we, ourselves want to move forward.

Staying in relationships, or trying to keep a relationship, where both people aren’t fulfilled, aren’t having their wants and needs for the relationship met and respected, ultimately causes harm to ourselves and to the other person. It may not be intentional, and any time we to twist ourselves into someone we aren’t, anytime we comprise what is most important to us, anytime we expect the same of another person, we are causing harm. We are not allowing for growth, expansion. We are acting from fear and not from love.

And.

When we are in the place of not having our needs or wants met in a relationship, I invite us to be curious. Have we asked for what we want or need? Have we communicated in a way the other person understands how important these things are for us? Have we checked in with the other person to see if their wants and needs are also being met? Have we heard the other person when they expressed their own wants and needs?

Have we stepped into our own vulnerability, sharing parts of our Self that feel scary to share? Have we allowed space for the other person to do so, without our judgement or comment?

Have we made assumptions without actually confirming with the other person? Have we set expectations that are unreachable? Have we made demands, trying to “force” the other person to our own will? Have they done similar?

It is true relationships ebb and flow, expand and contract, begin and end.

And endings don’t have to mean something is over completely. Endings can mean a new beginning, a shift, an opportunity for honest, open communication. More intimacy, more vulnerability.

And also, sometimes, endings do mean a thing is completely over.

The important thing, I believe, is that we remain curious. We remain honest, with ourselves and with the other person(s). We ask questions and we state our needs and wants and ask if the other person can meet them. We need to honor ourselves, recognize our wants and needs are valid, and not try to shrink ourselves in the name of not being alone.

And we need to allow space for those we are in relationship with to do the same.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weeklyish newsletter on August 2, 2020. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, 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.

All trauma is interconnected

August 3, 2020 By gwynn

Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin. ~Danielle Bernock, Emerging with Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, and the Love That Heals

When my son was five months old he fell from a changing table at an art museum onto a concrete floor. This led to him having a fracture in his skull and us spending a night for observation at the children’s hospital (which in and of itself was a frustrating and somewhat traumatic experience.)

My son was fine, with no long term brain injuries or impact. I’m sure there is trauma that is living in his body from this which we will work through when the time is right.

I know there is trauma living in mine.

One day, when my son was four, he was wearing a pair of my shoes and was about to go down the steps onto our (concrete) walkway to go look at the moon with his dad and sister. I saw him starting to do this and very quickly grabbed him and told him to take my shoes off, I’d carry him or he could walk outside barefoot.

Long story short, Little Dude wasn’t having it and ran away crying while my husband got upset that I had stopped him from going outside. The truth is my response was automatic with no thought beyond seeing how his head was going to meet the concrete. I reacted on impulse, my mama instinct for my child’s safety, rightly or wrongly, engaged.

My body reacted in that “I will save my young” way that mammalian mothers tend to respond, but it was more than that. It was a trauma response. Because, in my mind and body, I had failed to protect my child when he was 5 months, I will be damned if I won’t protect him now.

Of course in the moment I didn’t full understand why my reaction was so strong. I didn’t see the connection to his fall at five months. I only knew I had a strong reaction to potential harm coming to my child.

In the days following the shoe-step-moon incident, is that all of a sudden the trauma that my family experienced the year before, not related to my child’s safety, was front and center. I was overwhelmingly sad, anxious, scared. I felt alone and yet wasn’t letting others in. I didn’t even have words for what all was swirling inside, but my body was reacting and then my mind would race and I was bringing all my practices for calming and soothing into play as best I could.

And sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t.

Mostly though, I didn’t understand why I was hurting so much, now, from the trauma from last summer. There was nothing that related to that trauma that had happened. There was no apparent logic to why I was feeling so sad and angry.

I chalked it up to this is part of the cycle for this relatively new trauma, and perhaps it was simply time again for me to feel my feelings again and process another layer of it.

Then a week later, I had an a-ha moment and remembered the fall when my son was five months old.

This thing that had been evading me, coming forward as the most recent trauma in my life, finally came out of the dark recesses of my unconsciousness.

And I cried. And sobbed. And wailed.

For not being there for my son in the way I needed to be when he was five months old up on that changing table.

Something finally released. And I wasn’t feeling so sad and angry about the trauma from last summer.

I named The Thing. I processed a bit more of the The Thing. And The Other Thing was no longer at the forefront of my mind and body.

Our bodies and even our minds, don’t always understand separate traumatic events as distinct. When one is triggered, often others – and particularly the most recent – come flooding forward. For those of us who have experienced multiple traumas in our lives (everyone), this can be incredibly confusing. It means we can’t always see how the dots connect or even that they connect.

It means one trauma is activated, but it presents as a completely separate trauma.

This is confusing and frustrating. It is illogical to our linear ways of considering logic. It makes no sense.

And.

This is how it works. Our bodies especially can’t differentiate distinct traumatic events. It knows (perceived) danger and acts. It doesn’t matter what the (perceived) danger is or is about or is related or similar to.

It takes a while for our minds to catch up, too. Which is its own frustration and layer of confusion.

There is logic to the trauma from last summer “just popping up.” Sometimes that’s how trauma works.

But this time, my body and mind responses actually weren’t about that most recent trauma but were about an older one. My body reacted. My brain didn’t comprehend what the hell was going so, so pulled from most recent events.

It took me slowing down and thinking about the shoe-stair-moon incident in a more detached way to piece together that all my upset about last summer’s events wasn’t really about last summer, but about something that happened more than three years ago.

I don’t know that I could have done this, this slowing down and breaking down and shifting apart, two years ago. I don’t know that I ever would have had my a-ha, been able to name what was really happening, and then move on, at all and definitely not within a matter of days.

Which is to say, this work takes time.

All our traumas are interconnected within us. This can be confusing and frustrating and takes time, energy, patience, and connection (with Self and others) be able to unravel.

Sometimes what we think is making us “crazy” isn’t what is making us “crazy.” Taking the time to slow down requires practice. Being able to slow down and unravel requires curiosity. Learning to allow ourselves to feel and be curious about ourselves requires patience and self-compassion.

And a lot of un-learning of ingrained and internalized patterns and ways of being.

To our un-learning, together.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter in February 2018. It has been edited for publication here. To read my most recent essays you can subscribe right 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.

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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