Category: boundaries

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Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

When we contemplate the miracle of embodied life, we begin to partner with our bodies in a kinder way.

~Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

I have a confession.

I actually love the winter holiday season.

I love all the lights and glitter. I love the promise of snow.  I love the food we eat this time of year.  I love the hustle and bustle and the quiet snuggling in.  I do.  I love it.

And.

This time of year is also challenging for me.  My mother’s birthday is in mid-December and so there is a triple reminder of how she is not here to celebrate this time of year with us.  I notice how certain family members don’t call.  I think of friends who have moved away.  I consider the things and opportunities in life that I have lost.  I think about the life I wanted, or thought I wanted, compared to the life I have.

And while I do love the bright energy of the hustle and bustle of this time of year, I also am acutely aware of how that bright energy can become heavy and oppressive.  How what is supposed to be fun can become overwhelmingly stressful.  How one moment I may look at my full calendar with excitement and anticipation and the next I may look at it with dread.

Basically, I am human.  Which means I am complex.  Which means I can have a mix of seemingly opposing emotions and feelings all at once.

Just like you.

To me, it’s never a question of my complexity.  Rather, it’s a question of how I hold all of me at once.

How to do I allow all my complexity to flow and be?  How do I sit with the bittersweetness of this time of year?  How do I not only allow myself, but also encourage myself, to feel all the various and opposing emotions, thoughts, and well, feelings?

For me, that answer is being in my body and the present.  Not leaving it, not sitting or hovering outside of it.  Rather, being in it, in the now, and finding ways to tolerate and process all the complex sensations and emotions that I may be having.

In short, while I love this time of year, it is also a time of grieving.

Embodiment is both simple and challenging.  Coming home into our bodies, and deeply feeling and sensing our lived experience can feel overwhelming at times.  It can feel too much.  And also, with practice, we learn to tolerate those challenging emotions and sensations more and more.

We stop stuffing them down, only to wait for them to explode.

We stop ignoring them, only to have them crop up as various illnesses.

We start connecting to them, dipping our toes into them at first, and in time and with practice, going further and further in, finding new ways to embrace our own complexities, our own disparities, our own both ands.

I talk more about this in this 6 minute video below.

This is the third and final essay in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for the Holidays.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.

Did you miss the first two essays and videos in this series?  You can check them out at the links below::

Holidays, Trauma & Our Nervous Systems

Boundaries: Physical, Emotional, & Psychological

Stress, Grief, & Embodiment (this essay)

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Boundaries – Physical, Emotional, & Psychological

 

Boundaries define us.  They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and where someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership.  Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom. ~Henry Cloud

Boundaries.

We talk about them a lot.  In fact we talked about them as part of self-care on the Open Office Hours call on Sunday.

We talked about what a boundary is.  What they mean to us.  What some of our “obstacles” may be in honoring or defending our own boundaries.  What some of our stories are when others honor their own boundaries. How boundaries run both ways.  How they are fluid.  How they are complex.

There are many things I believe about our boundaries.  One is that they are fluid and living and breathing; they change from day to day and person to person.  In a phrase, what our boundaries actually are depends on All The Things.

In my experience there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to boundaries.  What may be a firm boundary with person A today may not be a boundary at all tomorrow with person B.  Many of our personal boundaries change with time, and some never change at all.  This is part of life – we all change and grow and it makes sense that our boundaries would do so too.

I also deeply believe our emotional and psychological boundaries,are directly tied to our bodies and our physical boundaries.  What I mean by this is that I believe we can sense when a boundary is being violated long before we are fully consciously aware of what it happening.  Our body reacts, in one way or another, to this intrusion.  It could show up as a knot in our stomach or literal pain in our neck.  It could show up as suddenly feeling agitated or anxious, without any “real” or “logical” explanation.  It could show up in any number of ways.  The point being, our body is giving us information, long before our brain can comprehend what is going on.

Our boundaries are also tied to our histories.  If we have trauma in our past, how our caretakers modeled boundaries when we were children, both inform what our boundaries are as well as how we react when our boundaries have been violated.

Our culture also informs our boundaries, and more importantly, how or if we defend them.  We all have messages about “being nice” and “not hurting people’s feelings” in our psyches and bodies to unravel.

We have all been told in one way or another that our Noes don’t matter, aren’t valid, and should never be voiced.

Most of us learned at a young age that when we say no to someone or something we are giving them a message that we don’t love them.  And of course, while we internalized this direct message, we also internalized the reverse :: that if someone says no to us it means they don’t love us.

Again, boundaries go both ways.  There are our own boundaries for us to connect to and consciously and intentionally decide to defend (or not!) and there are the boundaries of others that may stir up some of our own stories of worth and value and instigate an unconscious response from us.

There is so much for each of us to unravel around our boundaries, including becoming consciously aware of where they come from and when and if we want to honor  and defend them (and I’ll tell you now, the answer isn’t always yes, there can be many different reasons why we don’t defend our boundaries and none of them have to do with us being “weak” or having “poor judgement.”)

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

This essay is the second in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for the Holidays.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.

To read the other essays in this series click on the links below ::

The Holidays, Trauma, & Our Nervous Systems 

Boundaries: Physical, Emotional, & Psychological (this essay)

Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

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The Holidays, Trauma, & Our Nervous Systems

When we self-regulate well, we are better able to control the trajectory of our emotional lives and resulting actions based on our values and sense of purpose. ~Amy Leigh Mercree

We are entering into that time of year again.  That time here in the northern hemisphere where the light recedes and we enter into more and more darkness as each day passes.  It is also the time of year of the fall and winter holiday celebrations, which can for some of us, bring their own darkness with them.

I have always declared that the winter holiday season begins with my birthday in mid-October.  Then quickly follows Halloween and All Souls and All Saints Days.  Next is Thanksgiving.  And then we move into December when most religions and spiritual traditions have a festival of lights celebration of one kind or another.  With all these holidays often comes gatherings with family – ones that we either attend or avoid.  With these gatherings come all the stresses of connecting with our families, be that in person or in spirit.

There is also the truth that for many of us this time of year is a painful reminder of the people we have lost in our lives, either through death or severing of ties.  It can be a reminder of those we loved who aren’t here to celebrate with us, and the grief that comes forward has its own way of showing up at a time of year we are told over and over we need to be joyous.

There are a million plus different reasons why this time of year can be challenging in many ways and why we all need to remember self-care, real self-care, during the coming season.

One of my frustrations with our current culture is how the term self care is defined. For many this term has a very white, privileged look to it.  It looks like spa days or mani-pedis, or days at the salon, or weeks at some tropical local.  It’s looks like, according to many, something only the wealthy can afford.

I have a very different definition of self care.

For me, self care is first and foremost about calming and soothing our nervous systems.  It is self-regulation and being able to bring ourselves back from a “triggered” or highly emotional state.  This can look like many different things, including drinking water, getting sleep, any of the numerous Nervous System Soothing tips I share with you in the weekly love letter and on social media, drinking herbal tea, locking ourselves in the bathroom for five minutes of solitude… all of those things are self care. These are the small, non-glamorous things that keep us going and keep us feeling calm and sane.

And, self-care isn’t 100% regulating our nervous systems.  Another big piece of self care, for me, is boundaries.

You know, that whole being able to say No thing.  (I’ll talk more about boundaries as self-care next week.)

However, I do believe that before we can really connect to, and then honor and enforce, our boundaries, we need to be able to connect to our bodies and calm and regulate our nervous systems.

What do I mean by “calm and regulate our nervous system,” “triggered state,” or “activated nervous system”?

I deeply believe that all of us have trauma living within our bodies.  It could be a trauma (or multiple traumas) of our personal lived experience.  This could look like abuse, neglect, rape, or car accidents, surgeries, living through natural disasters.  Any and all of those events that we may personally experience our bodies can experience as traumatic events.

In addition, we have ancestral trauma living in our DNA. Epigenetics has shown us how these “trauma markers” are passed down through the generations and how they are “mutable” or “reversable”.  This means that the unresolved, unprocessed traumas of our parents, grandparents, and back to the beginnings of time, live in our bodies today.

Finally, there is what I call Cultural Relational Trauma.  This is the trauma we experience living in a white supremacist, capitalistic, misogynist, patriarchal culture.  This is the trauma of isolation, of being told we are less than, not enough, too much, that we should feel shame for who we are and for existing at all.  This is the trauma that tears us from our communities and teaches us that one “group” is somehow superior to another.  It is the trauma we hold in our bodies that is put in us every day.

Because we all carry trauma in us, our nervous systems are generally all out of sorts.  What this looks like day to day is that we are easily irritated, or anxious, or depressed, or have rapid and far ranging mood swings, or feel like we want to crawl out of our skin on a regular basis – but with all of these things happening we can’t always pinpoint the why or what actually caused the dysregulation or what is also called an “activated” nervous system or a triggered state.

Calming or soothing our (sympathetic) nervous system brings us out of this activated state.  It allows us to feel good in our bodies, to be in our frontal lobes (where empathy and logic live), and eventually to respond to stimulus (or triggers) in a way that isn’t harmful to ourselves or others (and by harmful I mean not only physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically).

I talk more about this in this 7 minute video.

This essay is the first in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for the Holidays.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.

Other essays in the series:

The Holidays, Trauma, & Our Nervous Systems (this essay)

Boundaries: Physical, Emotional, & Psychological

Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

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Secular Blessing for Becoming Unleashed 2018

The work of a lifetime, the process of individuation, is widening of that spotlight so much that everything is illuminated and you are conscious of and can see your All.

~Sera J. Beak, The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark

May we…

Unravel our stories of not enough, seeing in them the lies we have been told that have nothing to do with us.

Revolt against the idea that comfort at any and all costs is necessary for our survival

Dismantle the shame we carry in our bones and being

Embrace our beauty, our power, our voice

Realize we no longer need to compromise our integrity, our values, our love for our Self, in order to be loved by another

Release the tales of how we are too much and allow them to scatter on the wind like so much dust

Reclaim our birthrights of respect, honor, and real, honest, and mature love.

Learn to be accepting of the in-between spaces and unknowns as we move through this work, through our lives, through this world.

Find the ways of being that strong, resilient, soft, and loving that have always lived inside us.

Amen.

…

There is still time to join the Becoming Unleashed Circle 2018.  Registration will close at 10pm PDT Monday October 1.  To learn more and register you can go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/becomingunleashedcircle .

In case you missed the essays exploring the topics and ideas we’ll be examining in this circle, 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

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring 

Why the Becoming Unleashed circle?

The essence of Becoming Unleashed

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 

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The Psychological & Emotional Impacts of Trauma

In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one’s past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition. 

~Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment

It is true that our minds and bodies are connected.  What our body experiences impacts our emotional and psychological states.  Consider how when you have a cold or the flu you also feel crabby or irritable.  Or how when you physically feel good generally your mood is also good.

The unprocessed traumas that live within our bodies also impact our moods and ways of being and connecting with our world, including the people in it.  Some of the ways trauma appears via our emotions and mental state are:

• Unexplained or “illogical” fear

• Anxiety, including “panic attacks”

• Depression

• Hyper-vigilance (also related to fear and anxiety)

• Extreme (for you) irritability

• Emotional dysregulation (mood swings; cannot soothe self easily; once triggered into anger or sadness or fear cannot easily come out of it)

• Disassociated from the present (stuck in past and or future thinking)

• Inability to concentrate and stay focused on one thing for an extended period of time

• Self-isolation (withdrawing from or not connecting to others)

• Feelings of shame and self-blame and claiming responsibility for things that are out of your control

• Addiction

• Inability to trust others, even those you are in intimate relationships with

• Struggle expressing your feelings in a calm or non-agitated way; often “lash out” at others when feeling hurt

• Anger tends to be the “go to” response to emotional pain including sadness and grief

• Hyper emotional defensiveness

Our pasts impact our present and future, this is true. Our experiences impact the ways we interact with our world.  And while it is true that our traumatic experiences were out of our control, it is also true that we have a choice as to how much we allow those experiences to determine our path.

Often when we have experienced a trauma our sense of choice is altered.  Because the experience was out of out control, and not our choice, our brain shifts into thinking-both un/subconsciously and consciously-that we have no control over the impact of the traumatic events.  The event actually impacts our neuropaths and our ways of thinking and the more we think we are stuck and don’t have choice, the deeper those paths become and the more ingrained those thoughts are.

I often think of entering into trauma processing or “healing” in relation to the Physical Law of Inertia :: A body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

In addiction circles this “outside force” is called “hitting rock bottom” – something so awful happens to us that it is a wake up call to seek help and change.

I believe trauma works in the same way.  We will be willing to live with the impact of trauma, physical, emotional, psychological, until something happens that “forces” us to move towards processing and shifting.  This could be something huge or small, some action we take or path we start down that is so very much not who we are that we are left looking at ourselves and making a decision to change.

Unfortunately, many people do not understand that it is unprocessed trauma that is driving them through their unconscious.  Perhaps a person’s mind has blocked the memory of a traumatic event so they don’t even know it happened, or perhaps a person doesn’t understand the wide impact trauma has on the mind and body.  Because of this many people are left scrambling for help – going to medical professionals seeking relief from physical impacts and or to mental health professionals seeking relief for their depression or anxiety and not seeing the connection between the two.

Again, this is why it is vital we seek professionals who are trauma informed.  It is also why we ourselves need to better understand the far reaching impacts of trauma.

The more we are willing and able to learn about our Self, the more we are willing to bring our unconscious into consciousness, the more we are willing to face our fears of the discomfort and change that comes from processing our trauma, the more we will be able to reconnect to our Self and our world, in meaningful, loving, and compassionate ways.

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

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

Additionally 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.

If you missed the other essays and videos in this series their links are below ::

The Traumas Living Within Us

The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

The Psychological & Emotional Impacts (this essay)

Processing or Healing Trauma