Category: Attachment

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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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Slowing into the pause & breaking harmful patterns

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the 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. ~Rollo May, The Courage to Create

she learned to walk away
from everything
that didn’t inspire her
toward greater things
~Mark Anthony

a successful life is created
with two words: yes and no
have the courage to say yes
only when it feels right
and no to the old patterns
that do not serve you
~yung pueblo

One way that complex trauma impacts us in our adult lives is in our relationships, be they with friends, family, or intimate partners. Many of us with complex trauma are not good at tolerating painful emotions, like sadness, frustration, or disappointment. 

In fact, most of us don’t have a lot of tolerance for the more “positive” emotions like happiness, joy, and pleasure either.

Any feeling – sensation and emotion – can feel too much and can trigger our fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The feelings can be overwhelming and so we need a way to release them, to get them out of us, because actually feeling them is intolerable.

So, we start fights. Or turn away and cut people out of our lives. In the moment we may freeze and feel stuck or placate and people please and then later move into the space of either wanting to fight or flee. Depending on the situation we do one or the other of these or we do some in rapid succession. 

Our reaction is generally immediate and coming directly from our back (or reptile) brain. There is no thought that is going into it. We don’t slow down to engage our front brain and are fully in our survival instinct. Because feeling our feelings feels like our actual lives are in danger. It feels like they might consume us. It feels like we won’t survive the sensations and emotions that are swirling within us.

I know for me a go to reaction was always to flee. And by flee I mean turn my back and cut people out of my life. One disappointment, one time of feeling rejected or abandoned, and it was “proof” that the person wasn’t trustworthy and therefore I needed to shut them out of my life. My armor would go up and if need be I would start fights if they wouldn’t “let” me leave. 

It has taken a lot of time, therapy, practice, patience, and self compassion to find my way to pause between the action of an emotion being activated and responding.

Because for most of my life I reacted, immediately, and without thought. What I want for my life, for my relationships, is for me to be able to thoughtfully respond, to slow down and evaluate the facts of the situation and previous situations so that I can respond intentionally and mindfully.

This has meant coming into my body. This has meant learning to tolerate all those intolerable sensations and emotions. This has meant practicing keeping my front brain (where logic, reasoning, creativity, problem solving, and compassion live) online while also experiencing the sensations and emotions that live in my back brain.

It hasn’t meant stuffing my feelings down. 

It has meant allowing myself to experience them and learning to know they won’t actually kill me. They will be uncomfortable, I may not like it, but I certainly won’t die.

When we are able to engage our front brain while also experiencing our feelings, we can begin to look at situations more objectively. We can look for patterns, for habits, for cycles. We slow down not to make excuses for the other person, but to see if our own pain is actually stemming fully from something they did or said or if it also stems from a long ago wound that never healed. 

And then we can decide how we want to respond to the person. We can intentionally decide if this is an opportunity for our own personal growth and processing. We can decide if it is an opportunity for us to communicate our needs, to repair in relationship and to stay. Or to communicate our needs, set a boundary, and possibly leave.

It is true that when another person triggers our feelings of disappointment, frustration, abandonment, and or betrayal that it was indeed their action or words that did this. It is true that our hurt is in part due to the what the other person did or said.

And.

They don’t deserve the full force of our fury or rage or pain, most of which comes from past hurts from others we trusted.

Sometimes when another person triggers our painful feelings it isn’t intentional, or may be a matter of circumstance or what they did or said is actually a perfectly reasonable or normal thing, but it sets off our alarms anyhow. Sometimes these triggers are not an indication of who they are as a person.

And honestly, sometimes it is.

Which is why we need the pause. So we can slow ourselves down and determine what we actually know about the other person. What we actually know about ourselves. What patterns we have seen. What other actions and words we have witnessed or not. 

We need the pause so we can engage our frontal lobe and respond in a way that lets us stand in our own integrity and authenticity. Without needing to cause another pain. Without lashing out. Without cutting people out because in that moment we are hurting and find it unbearable.

The pause requires us to be in our bodies, to be able to tolerate uncomfortable even painful emotions and sensations. It also allows us to enjoy the fun and pleasurable emotions and sensations that can also a part of living as a human.

Learning to live embodied, to tolerate, experience, and sometimes even enjoy the sensations and emotions of our fully human lives is a life long process. There are not five easy steps and then you are done. It is not a one time thing we can check off. It is a constant practice that will have its own ebbs and flows.

The pause will not come to us quickly. It will take time. At first you will notice while you are reacting that you are indeed having an immediate response. With time you will be able to “bring yourself down” more smoothly and quickly. Then, you will begin to notice that you are about to lash out and eventually stop it. In more time, with more practice, you will be able to catch yourself at the very beginning of being triggered. You will be able to feel the sensations and emotions and also be able to explore them, analyze them and the situation logically. And then intentionally decide how we want to respond.

Having patience and compassion for ourselves during this process, while learning to come into our body and to tolerate all the different, varied, and nuanced sensations and feelings and learning how to find that breath, that pause, when some or all our old wounds are triggered is vital and part of the process.

It is true that what was done to us by others is not our fault, we are not to blame for their actions. And we are responsible to learn to respond to new hurts in ways that hold us in our own integrity, in a way that does not continue to pass on harmful patterns, in ways that allow us to break painful cycles for ourselves and the generations to come.

/…/

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Trust, needs, vulnerability, & Complex Trauma

What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful. ~Brene Brown

What happens when people open their hearts?
They get better. ~Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important. ~Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy. ~Frank Crane

I’ve been feeling a lot lately. Emotions and sensations swirling around in me, creating chaos, or perhaps expressing the chaos, within. They have been happy, joyful, pleasurable feelings on the one hand. And completely terrifying on the other.

Terrifying because they are new and different.
And.
Terrifying because I am actually feeling them. 

And terrifying because I am beginning to be emotionally vulnerable with another person. I am learning what that actually looks and feels like. I am doing it in small steps and most certainly keeping much still to myself, and also with each little step of expressing my emotions to them, I am finding new, not harmful ways, of caring for myself and the overwhelming feelings of all the experiences I am having.

I’m trying on adulting.
Clearly stating boundaries.
Telling the person how I feel around them.
Not running and hiding or putting all my armor on with extra reinforcements.

It has not been easy. I have probably misstepped. I know I have gotten caught up in conversations in my own head that didn’t go well and lead me to tears (hello INFJ).

And still. I am doing things differently. Which is new and different and feels strange and yes, is terrifying in moments.

As humans we have very real needs of attachment and belonging. We actually need to feel loved, adored. We need to be respected in having our autonomy and our autonomy needs to be not only respected and accepted but also rejoiced and celebrated. We need to be physically safe, and also we need to feel emotionally and psychologically safe. We need to feel connected, understood by another, and to feel they feel connected to and understood by us. 

Having these needs met, to even a minimal degree, allows us to survive as infants and children. They are absolutely necessary for survival. In some ways it doesn’t matter who meets these needs. Ideally it would be our primary caregivers, but it can be secondary, or even tertiary caregivers. And we only require these needs be met just enough for our actual survival.

That means as children we can be neglected, abused, disregarded most of the time, but as long as there are moments of feeling like a person, even our abusers, actually care for us, we will survive.

As adults, the needs are the same, but the requirement to have them met for our survival isn’t as dire. As adults having these needs met means the difference between simply surviving and beautifully thriving in our lives.

We all have these needs, and yet expressing them can be incredibly delicate and feel overwhelmingly vulnerable. 

And vulnerability in our culture is considered a weakness.

And when we have had childhoods where there was abuse and or neglect, expressing our vulnerability could have literally meant our deaths.

So. What are we to do, as adults, with our wounding, our pain, our fear, our trauma, to have our needs actually met?

First I want to note that it is important that others meet our attachment needs, yes. That is part of thriving in our lives and being in a loving relationship. However, it is equally important that we know how to meet these needs for ourselves too. That we are able to build our resilience when those we love inevitably hurt us in some way.

I say inevitably because we are all human. We all cause unintentional harm. We all have our own “stuff” that we need to work through. And so, part of being open to a loving relationship where another meets many of our attachment needs also means that we are open to them sometimes hurting us. It also means that we will inevitably hurt them also. What matters here is how we come back into relationship through repair.

When we are able to process the traumas we have experienced as children and are able to come back into our bodies, we learn what it actually means to fully experience our emotions and their correlating bodily sensations. We begin to learn how to titrate so we don’t go into overwhelm. We learn how to hear our bodies long before they are screaming at us. 

And.

We learn to trust ourselves. To have compassion for the people we’ve been and the person we are today. As we learn to trust ourselves, we can also begin to trust others. 

Learning to trust another is yet another piece of our trauma processing. So many of us were abused and or neglected by our primary and or secondary caregivers, starting at such early ages. These experiences train us to distrust those we love and those who express that they love and or care for us. Part of our trauma processing is also allowing these old distrusting neural pathways to atrophy while we build new paths that allow for us to trust, and know who to trust in the first place.

It is important to note we need to be connected to the feelings – emotions and sensations – of our body to move into deeply trusting relationships. Being embodied means we can actually hear the appropriate alarms, and trust that they are correct and act accordingly when it comes to relationships. It also means that we can trust another when those alarms don’t go off.

And once we can trust another, then we can begin to be vulnerable with them.

Being vulnerable with another person is terrifying. We are opening ourselves up to being hurt by them. We are also opening ourselves up to being loved by them and see what it feels like to be truly respected and adored. 

It’s not easy. We will have many missteps. We will dip our toes in and share something deeply vulnerable and then immediately pull our toes back out and maybe even take several steps back or run away and hide for a bit. With practice this sharing of ourselves, the more raw and vulnerable pieces, becomes easier, but perhaps never totally easy (I have no idea actually, I’m still in the dip my toes in and try not to run away and hide stage!). 

And before we can share our feelings, we actually need to be able to feel them. 

/…/

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To learn about my six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors go here. The next cohort begins April 15.

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Sitting in discomfort

Revolution and rebellion and disruption looks like many things. Sometimes its work out in the world and sometimes its that inner work of unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging.

Most Monday afternoons I go to see my therapist. She specializes in two particular modalities of trauma therapy, which is why I chose her. To process and dislodge both some relatively recent traumatic events with my kids, and to process my own various childhood traumas.

For the first year plus, every time I sat down on her couch she asked if I want to do one of the two modalities. I would invariably tell her, No. No I do not. Because this particular form of trauma work, while gentle in many many ways, is also intensely uncomfortable. I literally feel the trauma shifting in my body and it creates a type of dissonance under and on my skin that is… well, uncomfortable.

It isn’t icky feeling or unbearably painful. It is simply not a pleasant sensation. At all.

And so no, No I did not want to do that. Because really, who would intentionally sit there in this intentional physical, emotional and psychological discomfort for 20-40 minutes at a stretch.

Anyhow, I would say my no, we’d laugh, talk about the short game of avoidance and the long game of actually dislodging this shit from my body. We’d do some breath work, I would get present and then I say, okay, let’s do this work.

And we’d do the work and it’s uncomfortable and things would shift and sometimes I *felt* emotions and sometimes I cried and sometimes I’d get an intense pain in a particular part of my body and we;d get curious about it then sometimes I would feel even more emotions and so it goes until I would say it’s time to stop. And we check in with that No More and see if it’s short game saying “I’m uncomfortable and I DON’T WANNA” or if I really have reached my capacity of processing for the day. And so it goes.

In the last six months or so, this has shifted.  Now when I walk in I state straight away “I want to do the trauma work” or “I need a lot of time to talk today.”  We don’t need to have discussions about avoidance.  The work, while uncomfortable, is now something I am more than willing to tolerate because I have seen for myself some of the short and long term benefits of the work.

My point however is that being uncomfortable isn’t fun. Not for me, and really probably not for anyone. By definition, being uncomfortable is NOT enjoyable. And for most of us, in our short game of fear or shoving it down or not wanting to deal or feel, we avoid discomfort like the plague.

Here’s a thing though: we need to remember our Long Game. What our real intentions for being in the world are. What do we have to do to make it happen.

I’m doing my own trauma processing and dislodging for a variety of reasons, many of them about other people (like my kids). But the real, the core reason I’m dealing with my own shit is because I don’t want to ever be frozen in front of a TV screen unable to move as a sexual predator stalks about ever again. I don’t want to ever be frozen in inaction again. I want to be able to move and act and roar and fight.

And, well, I also need to walk my talk. Because I invite all of you to sit in your uncomfortable feelings, to push outside your own comfort zone, to learn that even if we *feel* our our emotions and their physiological sensations or make mistakes or feel uncomfortable because we are challenging our racist uncle at the family feast or defending a boundary with our mother while visiting, we *will* survive. And we may even learn a little bit about selves in the process.

In the all the work I do, facilitating groups and individual work, I invite the participants to push themselves outside their own comfort zones. To become curious as to why they don’t want to “go there.” To expand, contract, then expand a bit more. I always offer tools to help titrate or process or soothe, as needed. And then, when ready enough, we bravely push out into discomfort again, get curious again, ask the whys and start to unravel all the stories that have kept us stuck and small and frozen.

Because I deeply believe that we have remained frozen for far too long. And I deeply believe all of us are carrying trauma in our bodies, be it the trauma of our own lived experience or the trauma passed down to us through our ancestors and in our DNA.

Our trauma impacts us in many ways. It impacts our ability to set boundaries and know our consent. It impact how we relate to other people, and especially as women how we relate to other women.

This is why I do the work I do.

This is why I offer the TIE™ for Sexual Trauma group each year.

Why I work with the individuals I do.

Why I continue to do my own work of unraveling and dislodging and learning.

Because while there is the macro work out in the world of tearing this shit down, we will never build something new and different until we do our own inner work of dismantling and dislodging.

In rebellious solidarity, always.
xoox