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Ending Cycles: Processing the Past & Changing the Future

March 15, 2018 By gwynn

No one is innocent in the tide of history. Everyone has kings and slaves in his past. Everyone has saints and sinners. We are not to blame for the actions of our ancestors. We can only try to be the best we can, no matter what our heritage, to strive for a better future for all.

~Diana Peterfreund, Across a Star-Swept Sea

When we look at cycles of trauma, it is important to remember that often there may not have been a choice to not pass the pain forward.  Talking about trauma at all is a relatively new development in our human (western) history, and in the early days of recognizing and trying to find ways to process trauma, we only looked at the trauma soldiers experienced and lived with.

It has only been in the last forty to fifty years that we began to acknowledge the trauma that comes with abuse and assault.  And it has only been about twenty to thirty years that we began to recognize the impacts things like poverty, being witness to abuse, or living in a family where one or more members had addictions issue has on us.

Add to this that the somatic (body-centered) trauma therapies are also a relatively new thing. It wasn’t until 1997 that Levine’s first book Waking the Tiger introduced the wider public to the ways that trauma lives inside our bodies and how we humans prevent ourselves from processing it.  That was only twenty years ago.

The amount of research and acknowledgment around trauma just within my own lifetime (46 years) is amazing.  We have come so far since the early 1970s, and I believe we likely still have a long way to go.  And I also believe we are getting there.

I share all that to remind us that we couldn’t know what we didn’t know.  I don’t  know how many times I have heard clients say “I wish I would have started this work earlier/years ago/when I was much younger.”  But the truth is that this work, body-centered trauma processing work, is a very new phenomena and likely you actually could not have started this work earlier, because it didn’t exist.

And yet.  While it is not our fault that information was not available before it was available, it is our responsibility now to do the work to create change, within ourselves, within our families, and in our greater communities and world.

Breaking cycles of abuse is something that has only been talked about for the last fifty or so years.  And then it was only spoken of quietly.  Greater social conversations didn’t begin to happen until the 1980s, in part thanks to Alice Miller and her body of work.  We didn’t even consider that beating children would or could have long term, life-long, impacts on them. And it wasn’t until the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACEs) which was initiated in 1995 but then not really talked about until twenty years later, that we knew those impacts were beyond psychological and spilled into our actual physical health.

And even so, I know my maternal grandfather talked about his abusive step-mother and how he swore he would never treat his child the way she treated him (now I have no idea if he actually kept this promise to himself, but evidence says he probably did).

So, even though the greater social conversation was not there, I do believe we have within us the “moral” (for lack of a better word) compass to know abuse, domination, authoritarianism, and othering are not right, okay, or humane (or for that matter actually human).

We are in the infancy of truly understanding how the traumatic experiences of our ancestors are passed down to future generations.  We are in the infancy of learning how to examine and process these traumas – especially the ones we don’t actually know about. There is still so much that is unknown, and frankly there is so much that cannot be known for several more decades as studies continue to watch families move through more and more generations.

And.

Even with this being true, I believe we all know deep within ourselves that the past impacts us.  Historical past, ancestral past, and our own lived experience past.  We may not have all the data and research to back this up (yet), and still we know.

And this is where our own responsibility comes in.  It is not our fault what was done to us or our ancestors.  It is absolutely our responsibility to make the change within ourselves so that change out in the world can occur, so we can end the cycles of abuse, oppression, and domination.

So we can all find our ways to freedom.

So we can all be a part of creating a world where all of us are free.

I believe part of that work is for us to look at our ancestral, historical, and personal pasts and to unearth what we have internalized; to examine it; to unlearn what we know is not right or just; and to create space for change and doing different for ourselves and for the world moving into our futures.

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

This essay is the fourth and final in a four part series I have written exploring ancestral, inter-generational, historical and cultural relational trauma and internalized misogyny.  I hope you found the series 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

Connecting the Dots

Connecting Individual and Collective Traumas 

Ending Cycles :: Processing the Past & Changing the Future (this essay)

The importance of processing Ancestral Trauma & Dislodging Internalized Misogyny

More About the Unleashing Ourselves Circle

You can find the FAQ for this circle here.

Filed Under: ancestors, ancestral trauma, Circles, collective trauma, Community, Cultural Relational Trauma, embodied wisdom, Fuck the patrirachy, inter-generational trauma, intergenerational trauma, Internalized Misogyny, mother wound, patriarchal wounding, Personal growth, personal trauma, processing trauma, Programs offered, Self-Care, Smash the patriarchy, trauma, trauma healing

Unleashing Our Self :: Mothers, daughters, and generations of trauma

March 9, 2017 By gwynn

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

~Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

The other day I googled “mother daughter relationships” just to see what would pop up.  Unsurprisingly there were pages and pages of How to Fix Your Mother Daughter Relationship types articles with some Signs Of A Toxic Mother Daughter Relationship pieces mixed in.  The truth that mother-daughter relationships tend to be challenging is relatively well known, at least to any women who have mothers, which is, well, all of us.

My own relationship with my mother was traumatizing at its worst and complicated at it’s best.  She was both physically and psychologically abusive during my childhood.  There was abuse yes and there was also neglect, and these formative years have had their impact on me, for sure.

When I was fifteen my mother got involved in the then popular “Tough Love” movement and by the time I turned 17 she stopped talking to me.  Her silence lasted for six years, and I know it only ended because of the pressure my grandmother (her mother) put on her to make amends.

We spent the next decade plus trying to find our way together.  My mother did apologize for the abuse she inflicted on me and to her credit she truly did work hard to repair our relationship.  In truth it was only after the birth of my own daughter that I began to truly forgive my mom and understand the challenges and hardships of what it means to be a parent.  For the fourteen months immediately after the birth of my daughter our relationship did deepen in ways I would have never thought possible.

And then she went out of remission, the cancer she had fought mostly on her own five years prior came back and all too soon she died.

There is more to the story of course than what I have written here.  There always is.

I grew up never knowing if my mother loved me or even wanted me.  And then when my own daughter was born I knew that she did, she always had, and she simply didn’t have the tools or support to be the mother I needed let alone the mother she actually wanted to be.

This is not to make excuses or to minimize my own pain and trauma.  Rather it is a statement of facts.  Facts that took a very long time for me to see or understand.

My relationship with my mother of course informs my relationship with my daughter today.  From the beginning of my daughter’s life I knew exactly what I never wanted to do but didn’t always know what I did want to do or rather, how to do it.  Throughout her almost ten years the young woman born from my womb has given me lessons and pushed me and expanded me and healed me in ways I never knew possible.  And, thankfully, so deeply gratefully, I am in a place where I can receive those lessons, where I can learn and stumble and make mistakes and make amends and do everything I can to do different the next time.

I think if my mother would have had a husband who was actually supportive or had the support instead of the ridicule of her own mother she would have done the same – she would have fought for us and our relationship from the beginning.  But that was not our reality, it was not to be our experience as mother and daughter.

And so I have taken those painful lessons and apply them as best I can today.

This work of unraveling the pain and trauma of my own relationship with my own mother and trying to create a different paradigm with my daughter, has lead to a deeper understanding of how our culture does not support women, and perhaps especially mothers.  I have learned about intergenerational trauma and the wounding that is passed down generation after generation, both in our DNA and through the ways we relate with our mothers and they with us (and in turn the way we relate with our own daughters).

What I have come to realize is that the strife and frustration and trauma of the mother daughter relationship is both an act of survival and an act of oppression.  In understanding how our own mothers, and their mothers, and theirs, and theirs, and so back several thousand years, were disregarded and dehumanized and in understanding what they, our feminine ancestors, had to do to not only insure their own survival but also the survival of their daughters, it is clear that this wounding that is passed down – from physical abuse to psychological abuse to all in between and beyond – was a way of trying to keep the daughters in-line so they would survive.  This is something that scholars call the “Patriarchal Bargain” – what we give up for a sense of safety; what our mothers gave up and what they taught us to give up.

And while our mothers are responsible for their actions and inaction, they were also pawns and victims in how our misogynist culture seeks to isolate and dis-empower us as women.

We live in a culture that is terrified of women.  This terror shows up as hatred.  It shows up in the fact that we are paid a lessor wage.  It shows up in the ways we are told over and over that we don’t know or understand our own bodies.  It shows up in the ways it tells us over and over that women are untrustworthy, are manipulative, are sinful, are evil.

One of the most powerful messages our culture gives us are the ones about how women are untrustworthy.  These messages show up in our media, through the encouragement of “mean girl” behavior, through the very facts that our own mothers in many ways betrayed us to a culture that hates us (as did their mothers, and their mothers, etc), in the ways we encourage competition and have a cultural scarcity complex (there isn’t enough for everyone so you’d best step on everyone else to make sure you get yours).

This message isolates us.  It isolates us from our mothers and our daughters.  It isolates us from our sisters and our aunties.

And in this isolation we lose not only relationships with other women, we lose our relationship with our Self.

Our mothers and grandmothers treated their daughters the way they did because of a deep trauma and thousands year old fear of what will happen when their girl-child goes out into the world.  The knowledge and fear of how women are raped and beaten and murdered by the men who claim to love them.  The knowledge and fear that we are not only not safe out on the streets or at a bar or at a party alone, we aren’t safe in our own homes.  The knowledge and fear that statistically speaking the pains and secrets of their own lived experiences will also be pains experienced by their daughters.

I talk even more about the complexity and intricacy of mother-daughter relationships in this 20-minute video below.  I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the first in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves.  We begin April  1.  If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

If you’d like to read the second essay and watch the second video in the series, you can click right over here and you can read and view the third one right here.

Filed Under: Becoming Unleashed, Circles, Cultural Relational Trauma, mother wound, patriarchal wounding, trauma

More on consent

January 5, 2017 By gwynn

Here’s a thing… Like most (all) people I wear many hats and have many roles and many ways of being in this life of mine.  And at the base of it all, I am a woman living in a patriarchal culture.

What that means, is like all other women, I have experienced sexual and physical assault, rape, been stalked, cat-called, and gaslighted.  It means that I too have internalized the stories of how women don’t matter, aren’t good enough at anything, always take up too much space, and are worthless.  How we know nothing, and especially know nothing about our own bodies (and therefore shouldn’t have rights to them).

I didn’t ask for any of these things.

Not when I went to that party.

Not when I wore that short skirt. 

Not when I flirted with that person at the bar. 

Not when I drank so much I almost passed out.

Not when I had the audacity to enter into a male-dominated career and profession.

Not when I walked down that street to class. 

Not when I laid there as still and silent as possible and left my body. 

Not when I screamed and fought.

Not when I made a scene. 

Not when I melted into the background.

Not when I took that class or chose that major. 

Not when I sat in that seat on the bus.

Not when I wore those boots. 

Not when I danced that way. 

Not when I initially said yes and changed my mind.

Not when I met with that professor.

Not when I invited him into my home.

Not when I was born with female genitalia. 

Not when I was pregnant.

Not when I was struggling to become pregnant again.

Not when I was writhing on the floor in pain.  

Not when I asked for help.

Not ever.

Not once.

I never gave consent to any of these experiences.  I never gave consent to the messages and stories of my worth and value to burrow into my skin and muscle and core.  I never gave consent when I was in preschool or elementary school or junior high or high school or college or graduate school.  I never gave consent because to give consent we have to be informed, we have to know we have a choice, we have the option say no or yes or maybe and to change our minds as many times as we fucking feel like it.

Like all women I learned at a very early age that my body is not my own.  My mind is not my own.  My spirit is something that can be trampled and disregarded.  Like all women I learned what I had to to survive.  Like many women, I am still unraveling it all and finding my own ways to peace and rage and using my voice.  Like most women I am a work in progress in connecting to and trusting my body, my instincts, my intuition.

Because we live in a world where we are told not to trust our own bodies and knowing.  That our “spidey sense” is illogical and should be ignored.

Because we live in a world that tells us we can’t take up space. Our bodies are to be small.  Our voices small.  Our impact in the world, small.

Because we live in a world that pits women against each other as competition.

And.

Because I am fucking done with this bullshit.

Because I will fight with every breath I have to dislodge these stories from my own body and to help you dislodge them from yours.

Because I will use every breath I have to prevent these stories from burrowing into my daughter’s skin.

Because the Truth is I have a birthright to my body.  I have a right to saying no or yes.

And you do too.

xoxo

 

Did you enjoy reading this?  If so then I invite you to subscribe to my weekly love letter right over here.

Filed Under: Becoming Unleashed, Circles, Consent, Fuck the patrirachy, Here's a thing, Leashed Woman, patriarchal wounding, Unleashed Woman

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