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Introducing Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you. ~John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. ~Anne Lamott

They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite. ~Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

Grief is a complex emotion. We usually associate grief with the lost of a person through death. And there is so much more in our lives that are losses that deserve, and require, the time for us to grieve.

Ends of relationships, be they intimate or platonic. Loss of a job. Loss of a home.

The things we often don’t think of as associated with grief, because they represent beginnings. And in truth every beginning also represents an ending of some other aspect of our lives. Birth of a child, marriage, moving to a new home, starting a new job.

Then there are the losses that we can’t really quantify or qualify in many ways. The loss of possibilities. The loss of potential. The losses of what could have been, if only…

These losses, the losses of the roads not taken, the possibilities, the potentials… those are losses associated with many of our life experiences. And they are most prevalent in the losses we suffer because of childhood abuse and neglect.

When we experience abuse and neglect at an early age, it shapes us. It determines the ways our brains develop. It dictates, in many ways, who and how we are in the world.

There is always a question for many of us, Who would, who could, I have been if these things hadn’t happened to me?How would I be able to interact with the world differently than I do now? How would my life be different? How would my choices in friends, lovers, careers have been different?

It’s not that this alternate reality would have been “better” than our lives now. But it would have been different. And perhaps, in some ways, we believe it would have been better. If only those things that were done to us hadn’t happened. If only the people who were our caretakers had loved us the way we needed. If only those people who harmed us so deeply hadn’t been deeply wounded themselves. If only they hadn’t hurt us in all the ways they did.

There is a grief in pondering these thoughts. There is also anger. Frustration. Sadness. And a full range of other emotions and sensations.

This kind of grief, the grief of the possibilities we never had, isn’t spoken of. It’s not talked about. We talk about trauma. We talk about the impacts, including chronic illness, anxiety, depression. We talk about how we feel unsafe in the world, in our own bodies. We talk about the horrors of the things that were done to us, done to too many people. 

But we don’t talk about the grief associated with all of that.

In Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief, we will step into this work. We will acknowledge the deep sadness, resentment, rage, and grief that comes with the possibilities that were lost. The futures we were never able to have because of what happened to us. The sadness of how we live our lives, in pain, loneliness, constantly needing to do the work of processing the trauma that is in our bodies, in our minds, and fighting to find our ways to happiness, to move from a constant state of survival to one of thriving.

We’ll spend seven weeks in this work, focusing on different aspects of the grief we can process. We will acknowledge the pain of this grief, find ways to sit in the discomfort of it, and then find ways to reclaiming parts of ourselves that we believed were lost, and yet have been with us, hidden beneath our trauma, all along.

I would be over the moon if you decided to join us. We will begin in just under a month on Monday, September 2, 2019. You will receive three emails a week, each with an essay, an embodiment and/or self-regulation exercise, and writing prompts. This time I am opening the program to all humans and will not have an online group space. As this work is so private, so complex, that it is best done in our own private spaces, and if we want to share any of the work we can turn to our therapists, close friends, and or family for the support we want and need.

If you’d like to learn more you can click right here.

/../

If you’d like to subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter, you can do so here.

If you are interested in working with me individually, you can learn more about that here.

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Allowing space & managing anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/../

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

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On being an adult in relationship

Our work, then, is not to abolish our connection to the past but to take it into account without being at its mercy.  The question is how much the past interferes with our chances at healthy relating and living in accord with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. ~David Richo, How To Be An Adult In Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

David Richo states in How To Be An Adult In Relationships, that in order to be an adult, we need to be self-aware and mindful in our actions. 

 In other words, self-awareness is vital on it’s own, but until it is coupled with mindful and intentional action (or inaction), we still aren’t fully acting in our frontal lobe, or “adult” brain.

Those of us who experienced chronic trauma in childhood have a lot to be angry about.  We have a lot to be sad about.  We have a lot to rage and scream and wail about.  I don’t believe anyone would deny that.  The atrocities that were done to too many of us as children are horrifying and all of it is held in our body and mind memory. 

The trauma doesn’t want to stay trapped within us however, it wants to get out.  This is great news if we are in therapy and doing a combination of talk and somatic therapies to help move that trauma on out of our systems and being.  It’s not so great news if we aren’t and so we try to stuff it down and eventually it bubbles up and out and we spew it all over an unsuspecting passer-by.

That passer-by could be our children, our intimate partner(s), our friends, other family members.  It could even be ourselves.

It is understandable that we have so much hurt and torment living within us.  I makes sense that it all needs to get out.  It is not okay for us to lash out at others.

Even when they cause us harm.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Even when  a person causes us harm, it is not acceptable for us to lash out and cause them harm.

The whole “two wrongs doesn’t make a right” thing.

Here’s a thing, though.  For most of us, I don’t think our “eruptions” or “lashing out” are intentional.  I know for me it mostly certainly isn’t mindful.  It comes from a primal place within that only cares about our survival. And so when we are already wounded, like any animal, if we get poked or prodded we go into fight/flight/freeze because we see any hurt as an attack and we need to protect and defend ourselves.

Rollo May wrote: “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness.“

The work of self-awareness is to be able to grow that capacity to pause and allow space for us to mindfully choose the response we want to to actually have.

This is not to say there isn’t a part of us that wants our response to be screaming at the top of our lungs and stomping our feet.

It is to say however, that we need to take the moment to consider the longer term impacts of us screaming and stomping our feet.  And if the longer term impacts actually cause us and other (more) harm, then perhaps we could consider a different response.

Shifting from a space of automatic, mindless, response to one where there has been space created between being activated and actually responding, is no simple task.  We cannot undo the habit of a lifetime of automatic, mindless responding simply because we decide we want to do so.

It takes time.

AND.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, learning to regulate our systems: calm our sympathetic nervous system, activate our parasympathetic nervous system, move the stored up cortisol out of our system.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, connecting to our boundaries and coming into our bodies.  Learning to truly understand, on a very visceral level, where we end and another begins, physically, psychically, emotionally.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, finding our ways to ground and our own center, being able to find our way to not only be in but stay in, the present moment, despite any and all the discomfort we may be feeling.

And after all of that, it takes practice, a LOT of practice, to break the patterns and cycles that we have become so accustomed to.  To actually not engage in an argument even though we may be being provoked, to walk away, to calm ourselves in the moment, to bite our tongues, to actually feel empathy for the person causing harm.

None of this comes easy.  Or at least, none of it has come easy to me.

Changing life long, if not generations old, patterns and cycles takes effort.  It requires compassion.  And we will all screw it up along the way, slipping back into old ways of being because that is what is known.  

And.

It can be done.  With practice.  

What is interesting about changing these patterns and cycles is that as we begin to do so on our end, the person(s) on the other side may try to up their game. When this happens it can be so tempting to engage.  Believe me, I know!  And, it is all the more important for us to continue practicing our own work, to continue growing that “pause”, to continue our own work of breaking harmful patterns and cycles.

Eventually those who try to engage us will change too.  Either they will simply go out of our lives because they aren’t getting the emotional charge from us anymore, or they too will begin to create space, to cultivate and grown that pause, to break their own patterns and cycles.

We can’t do any of that for them though.  We can only do our own work.  Even in those moments when, right then, we really just want to scream and stomp, and perhaps, especially in those moments.

In rebellious solidarity, always.

/../

This essay was originally written in May 2018 for my weekly newsletter and has been updated and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

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The pursuit of pleasure while living with Complex Trauma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, if pleasure initially is uncomfortable, why bother?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Not settling & discovering our wants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both and.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/../

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

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