Category: being & becoming

Posted on

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving

Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. ~Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

And I feel like the Queen of Water. I feel like water that transforms from a flowing river to a tranquil lake to a powerful waterfall to a freshwater spring to a meandering creek to a salty sea to raindrops gentle on your face to hard, stinging hail to frost on a mountaintop, and back to a river again. ~María Virginia Farinango, The Queen of Water

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. ~Anaïs Nin

According to Merriam-Webster to renew has the following definitions:

  • to restore to existence : revive
  • to make extensive changes in : rebuild
  • to begin again : resume
  • replace, replenish
  • to become new or as new
  • to begin again : resume

If we look in the thesaurus, some synonyms for renewal are:

  • awaken
  • transform
  • metamorphosis
  • revolution
  • shift
  • radical change

When I think of renewal I think of the story of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess of Heaven and Earth.  The very condensed version of the story is that Inanna travels to the Underworld to be with her grieving sister, Ereshkigal. Inanna had to travel through seven gates on her way down into the Underworld, leaving a piece of clothing behind at each gate to enter into the Underworld completely naked.  The descent into the Underworld and removal of layers of clothing represents Release.  Her time in the Underworld represents Renewal.

Ereshkigal was not happy to see her sister and had her hung on a hook to die.  Inanna’s handmaiden, Ninshubar came after three days and helped Inanna back up through the gates, reclaiming what is rightfully hers at each gate, and back to the land of living.

This time in the Underworld, hanging on a hook dead, was the time of Inanna’s renewal, her own transformation, her incubation that lead to her rebirth.

It was her time in The Goo.

If you are new to me and my work, The Goo is the time in the cocoon when the caterpillar has fully disintegrated and decomposed yet not yet formed into a butterfly or moth.  My feeling is that this is a very uncomfortable time.  The Goo is no longer what it was (a caterpillar) and also isn’t yet what it is to become (a butterfly or moth) and honestly I believe The Goo has no idea what the future holds for it, and so it is a time of unknown, a time of needing to trust in the future without being able to see it. It is the time of great change, great shifting, profound transformation.

While The Goo is uncomfortable, likely terrifying, it is a time of quiet restructuring.  To the outside world when we are in our own versions of The Goo, it may look like we are doing a whole lot of nothing or that we are resting.  This is because The Goo is not a time doing, it is a time of being.  It is a time of outer stillness in many ways.  Not stagnant, for there is much movement internally, but stillness to allow for the internal restructuring and integration to take place.

The Goo is when we learn what it is to tolerate discomfort, to accept the unknown, to be able to be in the in-between spaces of life without trying to force things in one direction or another.  It is a time of acceptance.  Of surrender.  Of allowing what needs to happen to happen.

It is not an easy time.  Like the stage of release, but to a greater degree, it is a time of unlearning, unraveling.  A time of allowing old neuropathways to atrophy and new ones to sprout and take root.  It may be a physically painful time, it is always an emotionally painful time, and there may even be moments of psychological pain as we let go of old coping mechanisms that no longer serve us, but in fact are now causing us harm.

The Goo may feel unbearable at times, but it does not last forever.  Even the most profound of transformations do come to an end (to allow us to move into a new time of transformation).  The discomfort doesn’t last forever, pain does pass.  The person we become on the other side, I believe, is worth all the work, and discomfort.

I talk more about these ideas in the 8-minute video below.

This essay is the third of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

In case you missed the other essays and videos in this series, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving (this essay)

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

Posted on

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

You cannot let go of anything if you cannot notice you are holding it.  ~Neale Donald Walsch

Letting go helps us live in a more peaceful state of mind and helps restore our balance. It allows others to be responsible for themselves and for us to take our hands off situations that do not belong to us. This frees us from unnecessary stress. ~Melody Beattie

We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle. ~Marilyn Monroe

Last week I shared with you where these stories of being too much and not enough and the shame we carry originates.  Not a one of us were born with these stories, and yet they seep into our skin, bones, and sinew and impact the ways we are in the world and with ourselves.

Here’s a thing though: we don’t have to hold onto these narratives.  We don’t have to allow the shame to continue coursing through our being.  We can do the work of release, renewal, and reclamation – over time, with patience, practice, and self-compassion. It is work that is done in layers, over and over throughout our lifetimes.  It is work that is perhaps never actually done, and yet the more we are able to move through the process the more we are able to move ourselves from a space of living only to survive and into a place of living to thrive.

As I mentioned last week, naming the narratives is a vital first step in this work.  Until we name those stories that spin through our heads, and consider where they came from, we can never move into the work.  After we name the narratives and realize they are not our own but were given to us by our families and culture, we can move into the space of release.

Release does not happen over night.  It does not happen simply  because we think it or wish it.  It requires intention, ritual, practice.  It requires patience, self-compassion, and time. It requires a deep, visceral understanding that these stories are not yours to carry.

A truth is we can know, logically, in our minds that these stories are not ours; that they are not actually true; that they have little to actually do with us, individually and everything to do with us collectively.  However, knowing in our minds is not the same as deeply knowing in our bodies, in our core being.

To move from a mind knowing to a body knowing means… you guessed it… coming home into our bodies, finding where those stories live in our muscles and cells, and inviting them to leave, allowing for an openness to be where these stories once lived.

Coming into our bodies and releasing these stories that affect us in so many ways, is challenging work.  It is uncomfortable in the beginning.  And yet the shifts that come from this work can be amazing.

When we intentionally do the work of acknowledging those stories that do nothing more than cause us harm, we are able to begin to move into new ways of being with ourselves and others. This new way of being takes time to integrate into our bodies, minds, and spirit.  It requires space for shifting which means that we need to learn to tolerate that sense of openness, that may mistakenly feel like emptiness, so our new ways of being can take root and grow.  (More on this next week.  Stay tuned.)

I talk about these ideas in the 9-minute video below.

This essay is the second of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

Links to other essays in this series:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame (this essay)

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving 

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

Posted on

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

You cannot heal what you will not unveil.

~Sanjo Jendayi

You will be too much for some people.  Those are not your people.

~Unknown

The most important day is the day you decide you’re good enough for you. It’s the day you set yourself free.

~Brittany Josephina

Let’s talk about our stories of how we are too much; how we are not enough; and all the shame we carry within our bodies.  Super fun topics, right?

Here’s a thing about these narratives we carry in our minds and bodies and spirits need to be named.  They need to be brought out of the dark shadows they live in and into the light.

Naming these narratives we all carry is powerful.  It actually helps us to claim power over these stories instead of allowing them to run rampant in our unconscious and impact the ways we connect (or don’t connect) with others and with ourselves.

Naming these narratives, admitting that we each carry them in our minds and bodies and beings, is only the first step however.  Once we have named them we need to find intentional ways to release them from our systems; to create space for our own incubation and transformation (and learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, because believe me, transformation is very rarely, if ever, comfortable) and to reclaim those parts of ourselves that we hidden, stuffed down, and or ignored: our own strengths, power, and daring.

Before we can move into this process however, I believe it helps to understand where these stories may come from, how they get under our skin and into our being.

I believe these narratives come to us from two different types of trauma.

The first is inter-generational trauma.  I define inter-generational trauma as the trauma that is passed down to us by our family of origin through their words and actions.  It is a lived experience trauma and we all experience it to varying degrees starting when we are very young.  It is passed down in the ways we are told what we “can” or “can’t” do, how we “should” or “shouldn’t” act. It is passed down in the language used in our families and the ways we are told we are wrong, told we can’t trust our own inner wisdom, told we don’t know what we are talking about (even if we are actually an expert in the particular topic).

It is passed down in the ways we are silenced by our families, in the ways we experience from our primary caretakers that we require too much of their time or energy, that we are too loud, too opinionated, too fat, too thin, too quiet, too sexual, too studious, we take up too much space, we are simply too much.

It is passed down in the ways we are told we aren’t (good) enough by those who are supposed to love us unconditionally.  It is passed down in the ways we are encouraged to compete, how we are reminded that our sibling/friend/neighbor/enemy/person we have never met is better at this thing or that thing (or all things) than us.  It is passed down in the ways we are corrected (often “for our own good”).  It passed down in the overt and subliminal messages we receive that our best efforts are never good enough.

All of these messages are passed down to us both unintentionally and intentionally by our caregivers.  Likely all these messages were also passed down to them as they were passed down to our grandparents by their parents, and so on up our family tree.

These messages are most damaging because they come from the people we rely on for our very survival.  These messages impact the ways we are able to form attachment bonds with not only our caregivers, but in later life with our intimate partners and close friends.

These messages are then solidified through what I call Cultural Relational Trauma (CRT).  CRT is the trauma we experience living in our current patriarchal, white supremacist, misogynist, ablist, hetero and CIS gender-normative, capitalist culture.  It is in the ways we other people not like ourselves.  It appears in the media, in our homes, in our schools, in our places of worship.

It also shows up in the ways we judge ourselves.  If we do not meet the “standard” or “normal” or “expected” ways of being in this world, due to our gender, the color of our skin, the ways our body functions, whether we have “enough” financial resources, etc, we internalize the message that there is something wrong with us.  We internalize the message that we are not good enough.  That we are too much in some ways.  And the shame of who we are, how we exist, burrows deep into our bones.

Essentially, if we are not a white, CIS-gendered, hetero-sexual, able-bodied, wealthy male who has a strong dose of toxic masculinity running in our being, well… then we are certainly considered by our culture to be “not normal” and thereby not good enough and to take up too much space.  Furthermore, we also receive the message of how we should feel shame for not meeting these “normative standards.”

I want to quickly clarify that something being normal does not make it right or just.  Racism and misogyny are normal in our current culture.  Neither is right or just.  

We receive these messages from our families and the messages are compounded by the outside world.  It is no wonder how we have internalized these narratives.  Culturally speaking, this is intentional.  What I mean by that is the status quo requires us to buy into the messages of how we aren’t enough, how we are too much, and how we should feel shame, so it can keep on keeping on.  If those narratives weren’t running through our minds, bodies, and being 24/7, can you imagine the world we would live in?  I am highly doubtful it would be in the authoritarian oppressive world we currently have.

I talk more about these ideas in the 11 minute video below:

This essay is the first of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

To view the other essays and videos in this series, go to the links below:

The impacts of inter-generational & cultural relational traumas (this essay)

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, & Re-evolving 

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

Posted on

The Traumas that live within us

(This is a revision of a post originally published in December 2017)

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

~Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

~Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss

Let’s talk about trauma.  Because it lives within all of us.  Whether it is trauma from our own lived experiences, trauma from our ancestors, or trauma from our oppressive culture, we each carry trauma in our bodies and psyches and spirits.  So let’s explore the different types of trauma that we each have within us to better understand what I mean when I say “we all have trauma” and so we can all better understand our own Self.

TYPES OF TRAUMA

Lived Experience Trauma.  This is the trauma that lives within us as a result of the traumatic events we personally experienced in our lives.  It can be chronic (multiple events, like ongoing childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse by a caregiver or later in life an intimate partner, neglect, living in poverty, etc) or acute (one time events like a surgery, car accident, a one time assault like a rape or mugging).  This trauma is based in our own personal history and story.  We may remember or not remember events consciously, and either way they occurred during our lifetime, and our body very clearly remembers them.

Ancestral and Inter-generational Traumas.  These are the traumas that are passed down to us from our family.  Ancestral trauma, in my definition, is what is passed down through our bloodline – it appears in the epigenetic markers of our DNA and our cellular memory.  Inter-generational trauma is passed down by our family too, however it is passed down through actions.  The impacts of a trauma experienced by a mother for example would include how she was able to care for her children, and could impact attachment bonds.  Additionally inter-generational trauma can also be passed down through language (we all have specific “trigger” words that either we don’t want to be associated with or we desperately do want to be associated with and our reactions to these words influence our own actions and thoughts; these words are often passed down through generations).

Cultural Relational Trauma.  This is the trauma of living in a white-supremicist, misogynist, ablist, homophobic, capitalist, patriarchal culture.  It is a trauma that lives in all of us, but to varying degrees.  It is the trauma we need to explore when considering intersectionality and remembering that not all of us are having the same experience in our world.

All of us carry at least two of the three traumas in our own bodies and being : inter-generational and ancestral trauma and cultural trauma.  Most of us also have our own lived experience traumas coursing through us too.

Having an understanding of these different types of trauma allows us to begin to understand what is impacting us, what our triggers are, how some of the ways we view world are from our own experiences and also much of how we view the world is from those who came before us.

As we are able to unravel and decipher our traumas, we are able to dismantle and process them out of our bodies and being.  This is intense work and cannot be done alone in a vacuum.  It is work that needs to be done in community, with some parts worked through in settings with only one other person and others in larger groups.

We are relational beings and trauma impacts our ability to relate with each other.  As we learn more about trauma and our own trauma we can also begin to understand how others are also impacted and influenced by trauma.

I talk more about this in the 7-minute video below.

This essay is the first of a four part series I have written exploring trauma, what it is, how it impacts us, and how we can begin to process it.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1.  We begin August 1.  You can learn more here.

Also the main focus of my individual work is trauma and utilizing trauma informed embodiment with my clients.  If you are looking for an individual therapist, you can learn more about me and my individual therapy work here.

And finally, I facilitate a free online group on Facebook where we explore trauma, grief, embodiment,and their intersections.  It is called Trauma Informed Embodiment and you can join us right here.

Links to the other essays in this series:

The Traumas Living Within Us (This Essay)

The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

The Psychological & Emotional Impacts

Processing or Healing Trauma

Posted on

Defining Ancestral & Inter-generational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.

~Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

I spoke on a panel once with a famous new age author/guru in leather pants and she said that the problem with women is that we don’t “speak from our power,” but from a place of victimization. As if the traumas forced upon us could be shaken off with a steady voice- as if we had actual power to speak from. 

~Jessica Valenti, Sex Object

Welcome to my new educational essay series On Ancestral Trauma & Internalized Misogyny.  Over the next four weeks I’ll be talking about Ancestral, Inter-generational, and Cultural Relational trauma and their various intersections.  It is a chance for us to explore how the past – both recent and millennia old – impacts us today, specifically how trauma has been passed on through the generations, particularly mother to daughter, and become curious about how we can begin to process and dislodge these generations old traumas and woundings.

First I believe it is important to start with defining what exactly I am talking about.  These are my own definitions, and while there are other therapists who would agree with these definitions and who use this same language, others may re-categorize and re-name the different types of trauma.  I don’t think there is only one way to define these things, however so that we are on the same page, so to speak, I will share the definitions of the terms I will be using, as I use and define them.

Even though other therapists, psychologists, and psychological researchers may use different terminology it is universally agreed that there are traumas that come from our ancestral past, those of our own personal lived experience, and those that are from the culture we live in.  This series will be focusing on all three, from a historical perspective.  You’ll begin to understand what I mean over the next few weeks.

Ancestral Trauma

I define Ancestral Trauma as the biological trauma passed down to us from our blood relatives.  This shows up in our DNA and cellular memory.  The field of epigenetics broke ground in the reality that trauma is literally passed down through our bloodlines.  It has been found that both DNA contributors – as in both the egg and the sperm – can pass on DNA “trauma markers”.  It is currently unknown how far back  (or rather how far forward) these markers are passed.  Current research has only been able to look at three generations worth of data.  However my own suspicions (and I’m not alone in these) is that these markers go back as far as any unprocessed was first experienced, so in theory this could literally go back thousands of years.

It is important to note that these trauma markers or “mutable” or changeable – in other words when we process our own traumas and those of our ancestors, these markers “switch off” and then are not available to pass on to the next generations genetically.

Inter-generational Trauma

This is the trauma that is passed on through our family of origin (so for those who are adopted, this is what has been passed on to you by your adopted family as opposed to those in your direct bloodline).  This type of trauma is inflicted through action, inaction, and language.  There are certain family “habits” or idiosyncrasies that we can see “passed down.”  For example, both my sister and I have our mother’s laugh.  We also both tend to have her drunken sailor’s mouth.

Not all things passed on inter-generationally are traumatic.

However, we can also look at child abuse as an inter-generational trauma, as more often then not if a parent physically abuses their own children they were also abused as a child.  Neglect is the same way.  This of course is not always true – which is to say it is possible to also break this cycle of trauma.

We can begin to see these sorts of idiosyncrasies, be they traumatic or relatively benign, when we look at our family trees and see where divorce, known abuse, child loss, early death, etc show up.  Also examining our own actual language – the words we use and the the words we don’t – to see different ways this is passed on.

The key to inter-generational trauma, is that while it is part of our lived experience (for example abuse), it is also not originally or wholly ours, which is an important aspect to remember.

Cultural Relational Trauma (CRT)

This trauma is what in inflicted on us by our culture, or in our meta-socialization.  It is how our culture encourages us to “Other” those who are not exactly like us.  I believe this is where racism, misogyny, ablism, homophobia, classism, etc all stems from.  In some ways CRT is from our families of origin also, however the messages come from beyond those who cared (or were supposed to care) for us.  It is the messages we receive from the media, from our neighbors, from our religion, from our laws.  It is a more wide spread, and therefore more insidious, message that we internalize.

This trauma is also something of our lived experience, but also not ours.  It can be unraveled and dislodged, just as lived experience and ancestral traumas can be processed and moved out of our bodies.

Internalized Misogyny

This, in a nutshell, is our hatred of women as women ourselves.  Men can be misogynists, but they can’t have internalized misogyny.  When we internalize the messaging of our culture and or family of origin, it is messages about ourselves that we are internalizing.

Internalized misogyny shows up in the ways we judge other women and also the way, as women, we judge ourselves.  It is the holding ourselves and others to essentially mythological beauty standards presented by our culture.  It is the way we judge other mothers and their parenting, and yet do not offer support for mothers to be “better” parents.  It is the way we shame other women, and ourselves, for being too much this and not enough that.

Internalized misogyny is the way we unconsciously do the dirty work of our culture – it is how we are complicit in and how we perpetuate the subjugation of women.  It is also part of our ancestral and inter-generational trauma, as well as our cultural relational trauma.

It too is learned, and I firmly believe what can be learned can also be unlearned.

All of these different traumas influence and impact us.  Sometimes consciously and mostly unconsciously.  These traumas are part of our “Shadow Self” and when we bring them into the light, examine them, and begin to understand them, we are able to then begin to make conscious choices about not passing them on to future generations.

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

This essay is the first in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, and cultural relational traumas and internalized misogyny.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

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

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

Defining Ancestral & Intergenerational Traumas and Internalized Misogyny (this essay)

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.