Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Communication & Complex Trauma

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Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words. ~Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.  ~Fred Rogers

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”

But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”

My bones said, “Write the poems.”
~Andrea Gibson,The Madness Vase

One of the most important parts of any relationship is communication.  In order for there to be good communication, both people need to be able to express themselves verbally, in a relatively non-defensive and non-abusive or non-harmful manner.  Both parties need to be able to take the risk of being vulnerable, of expressing their wants and needs.  Both parties also need to be able to truly listen and hear what the other person is trying to communicate to us.

This of course makes sense.  I believe this is what most of us strive for.  

But it is so fucking hard in practice.

It’s challenging because we each have trauma coursing through our bodies, living in our nervous systems. We each received messaging, either overtly or subvertly, that our wants and needs don’t matter, that we should just be happy if someone loves us and not complain.

Many of us learned in one way or another that expressing our wants or needs is actually dangerous.  Perhaps we were physically abused for crying or “whining.”  Perhaps we witnessed siblings or one of our caregivers receiving violence for expressing themselves.  Perhaps our bids for affection were met with coldness or further isolation.  Perhaps we were ridiculed for being “sensitive” or “weak” or “soft.”

Regardless of the specific whys, we got the message loud and clear that expressing our wants and needs wasn’t okay, wasn’t acceptable, wasn’t safe.  

So, it makes sense that as adults we have a very challenging time expressing our wants and needs.  

It makes sense it is challenging.  

It doesn’t make sense that we may (unconsciously) expect others to be mind readers. 

How many times have you thought or said or heard “Well, if they loved me they’d know what’s wrong!”?  Or “I shouldn’t have to tell you why I’m upset, you should know!”  

This narrative is actually a cloak for our own hurt and fear that our own feelings don’t matter.  That we don’t matter to the other person (and look, there’s proof!  They can’t read our mind!).  That we aren’t actually lovable.

Learning to communicate in productive, connecting ways takes practice. Lots of practice. It requires us to look at and work through some of our own wounding.  It requires us to come into our bodies so we can have some felt sense around what is happening for us – if past wounds are being poked, if something new is growing, if it’s a combination of both (usually it’s a combination).  

It takes practice to become curious and ask questions instead of making assumptions about what another person is thinking or feeling.  

It takes practice to actually ask another person if they can meet a want or need of ours in that moments, instead of demanding it from them.

It takes practice communicating our desires and boundaries without expectations for how the other “should” respond.

This all takes practice.  It takes patience, from all parties.  It takes messing up and getting it all wrong.  It takes a willingness to be vulnerable, to take some risks in sharing something a bit more intimate about ourselves.

This is what it means to break patterns and cycles.  It requires us to actually do the very messy and challenging and uncomfortable work of disrupting these generations old ways of relating that cause harm, to the others, to our relationships, and ultimately to our Self.

It not glorious work.  It isn’t fun.  It can be painful.  As we disrupt these patterns, we will likely lose people.  There will be grief.  There will be days we just don’t want to do it anymore.  

And. 

There will be days when we realize we are in a situation where once we would have lost our shit and here we are, relatively calm, figuring it out.

There will be days we feel such intense joy and happiness that all we can do is cry.

There will be days where we know, deep in our bones, how cherished we are, how loved we are, how lovable we are.

Both and.

Yes it is intense work.  And in my personal experience, it is so intensely worth it. 

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter on May 10, 2020. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays and learn about my online offerings, you can subscribe here.

Love is a word

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It’s [love] a human emotion.
No, it’s a word.  What matters is the connection the word implies.
~Matrix Revolutions

Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
…
Maybe there’s a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and its a broken Hallelujah
~Rufus Wainwright, Hallelujah

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
~Elie Wiesel

Love is just another four letter word,
But that never stopped nobody.
~Hey Violet, Like Lovers Do

What does it mean to love?  To love another.  To love yourself.  Romantic love.  Platonic love.  Parental love.

How do we define the ideas of mature love and immature love?  

How do our attachment wounds and trauma come into play?

How do we not have expectations, demands and assumptions and still have our boundaries, wants, and needs met?

How do we know when we are in love?  How do we know it’s actually love and not simply a repeat of a well known (and ultimately harmful) pattern or cycle?

How do we know when our relationships are helpful and not harmful?  

What is passion?  Is it a repeat of harmful patterns?  Does it really boil down to chemical reactions (dopamine, serotonin, ocytocin)?

When we love a person, be that our Self or another, how do we treat them?  How do we want to treat them?  Are we willing to do the work of love to make the shift?

I deeply believe the work of breaking our inter-generational patterns and cycles is an act of love.

But what does that mean?

Love is caring. 
Love is boundaries.  
Love is connection.
Love is being seen and heard, exactly as we are. 
Love is seeing and hearing another, exactly as they are.
Love is being accountable.  To ourselves.  To others.  
Love is holding others accountable.  
Love is encouraging growth, expansion. 
Love is beginnings and endings.  Love is allowing the beginnings and endings.
Love is not forced, however, love is work.
Love is a verb.  An action.
Love is freedom, liberation.
Love is change.  
Love is release.  Letting go.  

Love is not flowery words or poetry.
Love is not forever and ever if the cost is stagnation.
Love is not promises we can never keep simply because we are human and we cannot foresee what the future holds.  However, love is commitment. 
Love is not ownership.
Love is not confinement.
Love is not punishment or retribution
Love is not lies or dishonesty to “save someone’s feelings”.  With our Self or with others.
Love is not safe, in that love is a risk, love is vulnerable and vulnerability.
Love is not comfortable.  In fact, love encourages discomfort.  Because discomfort is a sign of growth and change.
Love is not pain.  (There is a distinct difference between pain and discomfort).
Love is not isolation.  
Love is not about winning or getting rewards. 

These are some of the ways I’m finding myself defining love at the moment as I look at my relationships, with others and with myself.  As I consider my own wants and needs.  As I consider my own attachment wounds and tender spots.  As I open and acknowledge some of the places I could focus some processing and healing.  As I open and acknowledge many of the patterns and cycles I have broken and disrupted.  

Love is an emotion, sure.  Love is a feeling, absolutely.  And in so many ways, love is non-verbal and indescribable.

And.

Love is not an excuse for breaking boundaries.  Love is not an excuse for harm (i.e. I’m doing this because I love you or for your own good).  Love is not hierarchies or striving or needing to prove our worth.  

Love is a willingness, and the ability, to do the challenging, uncomfortable, work of breaking the patterns and cycles that have been passed down to us and of healing our own wounds and processing our own traumatic experiences.  

Love is not easy, but the choice to love can be.

/../

This essay was originally shared in my weekly newsletter on April 19, 2020. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

The importance of connecting during isolation

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A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection to a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.  ~Albert Einstein

When people go within and connect with themselves, they realize they are connected to the universe and they are connected to all living things.  ~Armand Dimele

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.  ~Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

As most of us across the globe are in physical isolation to help flatten the curve of the COVID-19 global pandemic, we are all adjusting to new and different ways of connecting with those we care about.  Zoom has seen a massive uptick in usage, as well as phone apps like WhatsApp and MarcoPolo.  We are learning the importance of these connections as the option to see folks in person is not advisable or safe.

We humans are social beings.  We are meant to live in community and to connect to each other regularly.  Our very survival once depended on it and our brains and epigenetic memory haven’t forgotten this.

For some of us, we normally live in relative isolation.  We only go out once or twice a week, if that often or we rarely socialize outside of work.  This means that having this already limited time of interaction with others removed as a possibility for an unknown period of time can have our feelings of isolation and anxiety skyrocket.

I know this has been true for me.  

I like to be “alone with people.”  This looks like me going to my favorite pub, sitting in a booth alone and working (and eating and drinking too), while others around me talk and laugh and socialize.  It gives my introverted self a sense of connection and community and protects my INFJ self from needing to partake in small talk.  I also go to the beach and usually see a couple people, we wave at each other or say hello and go about our business. It is very limited interaction, and yet I find it an important part of my own connection to humanity and it helps with my own sense of belonging and community.

(This is not to say I don’t go out with friends, I do, and not all that frequently because introvert and life is just full).

Having this very limited amount of community removed as an option for me has been intense.  

What this has meant is me pushing myself outside my own comfort zone.  I have joined two different online groups; groups with people I have never met.  And I am actually making myself participate.  I’m joining the calls.  I’m connecting the FB groups and on the group Marco Polo.  I’m putting myself out into the world in a way I don’t normally.

It is uncomfortable as hell.

And it is absolutely totally necessary for my own mental health.

Connecting to others, in whatever ways we can, is important.  We can still maintain our boundaries, we can still honor our introverted parts (for those of us who have them). 

And presently we need to be finding new and different ways of connecting.  What the looks like will be different for each of us.  What is important is that we are connecting.  That we are having our needs for a sense of belonging met.  That we are finding ways to sooth our anxiety and co-regulate.  That we are connecting with faces and voices outside our own four walls (whether we live with others or not).

It is vital in this time of physical isolation to remember and be reminded that we are part of a greater world. That our global community needs us active in it.  Human interaction is important to help us with processing our own attachment wounds and complex trauma – and not just therapists, but in finding our people who we can come together with and have our needs for connection met.

We need to be in relationship in order to find ways of healing our relational wounding and exploring new ways of relating.  We can’t heal our attachment wounds in isolation.  We can’t process our complex trauma alone.  We can’t experiment with new ways of being in relationship if we aren’t relating with others.

May we all find our ways to social connections during this time of physical isolation that are nourishing, fulfilling, and meaningful.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weeklyish newsletter on March 30, 2020. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most current essays, you can subscribe here.

Moving into softness

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If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.  ~Sharon Salzberg,Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

Attachment is a unifying principle that reaches from the biological depths of our being to its furthest spiritual reaches.  ~Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory

Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?  ~Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

As we adjust to our “new normal” and social distancing, many of us staying “safe at home”, our anxiety may be running rampant.  As we are either in close quarters with those we normally live with or are alone because that is our normal, we may find ourselves feeling frustrated and our attachment wounds being activated.

This can have us turning to all kinds of unhelpful or even harmful behaviors.  Behaviors that we developed at a young age that were meant to either keep us alive, or are meant to try and get our attachment needs met (in perhaps a very backwards sort of way).

We may find ourselves picking fights.

Pushing people away.

Feeling “clingy” and demanding.

Allowing (untrue, harmful, and hurtful) narratives about others or about ourselves to run rampant in our heads.  

Falling back into ultimately harmful relationships (and remember, a relationship doesn’t need to be outright abusive for it to be harmful, any relationship that keeps us stuck in repeating hurtful patterns and cycle and doesn’t encourage our healing and growth, is harmful).

Our anxiety may be over the top.

Our fear of abandonment may be going wild.

So much is happening in our minds and bodies right now as we move through this unprecedented and totally unknown space.  

We can find ourselves becoming rigid.

Hard.

Immovable.

Ultimately stuck, stagnant, repeating patterns and cycles that hurt us and others. 

Now is the time for us to slow down.

To find ways to calm our systems, take a half step (or more) back, and to consider situations from a more rational place.

A time to examine if the reaction we are having is based in an old trauma, the present situation, or some combination of the two.

A time to consider how our past pain and hurts are impacting us in the present.

A time to find new, helpful ways, of soothing our systems.  Of managing our overwhelm.

A time to shift into softness.

To connect to compassion, for ourselves and others.

To find ways to be more vulnerable, with people who are safe enough.

To explore our own wants, our needs, our desires, for our relationships, for our world, for our Self.

To nurture our own bodies and minds, those we care about and for, our planet.

To consider what fulfills us, what ignites our passions, what gives us a sense of abundance.

To expand, to transform, to evolve.  

To move into softness is counter-intuitive when our fear response is activated.  It is challenging to do even in the best of times.  We live in a culture that encourages us to disconnect, to judge, to be harsh and hard.

Moving into softness can be challenging.  It requires self-awareness and a willingness to shift, to grow, to transform.  It asks us to come home into our bodies, to learn to sit in the discomfort of our emotions and their bodily sensations, to expand our windows of tolerance so we can respond to situations with love for ourselves, others, and our relationships.

We are in challenging and complex times.  Finding ways to calm our systems, to rest, to allow the space for our own evolution is vital.  We are at a precipice in the collective, a time for us to decide if we want to continue on in the harmful ways, destroying our relationships and planet, or if we want to shift into a nurturance culture, one of caring, of compassion, of coming together and lovingly encouraging each other to expand outside our comfort zones, to break generations old patterns and cycles, to revolt against all that keeps us apart and to evolve into the people, and the society, we have always dreamed of.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weeklyish newsletter and has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

Last weekend Sarah Martland (Founder of Trauma & Co) met to figure out ways we can support our community right now.  We have changed the pricing the the Trauma & Co Community to make it more accessible to more people, and we’ve also made some changes to what all will be offered in it.  We have also brought an offering planned for later this year forward, as well as added an extra pricing level.  You can learn more about Resourcing for Complex Times: Supporting Ourselves Through Challenging Experiences here.

We need each other

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The world of intimate bonds is the world of emotions—a field of reactions and hidden desires for safety and acceptance that we all long for.  All of us. ~Joseph Schaub, Divorce (or not): A guide

One of the things that trauma does is encourage us to isolate.  It encourages us to be away from our family, friends, intimate partners, and communities.  How this looks for each of us is different.  It may look like us actually appearing to be a hermit and not interacting with people or it may look like we are incredibly social, with many friends and connections, yet all of those relationships are only surface level and we never reveal (much of) who we truly are, our fears, our wants, our needs.

Both scenarios (and a million in-between) are isolation.  When we do not allow ourselves to deeply connect with others, that is one way our trauma shows up.  Our not allowing this deep connection is a signal for our desperate need for a sense of safeness and acceptance, our need for love and a sense of belonging.

When we have unprocessed trauma living within us, it means our ability to have a sense of safeness — with others or with ourselves — is stilted.  For many of us living with trauma, the traumatic events we experienced were perpetrated by people we trusted, people we possibly literally depended on for our actual literal survival.  These types of betrayals, especially when perpetrated over and over throughout our childhoods teach us that we can’t rely on another, that the world isn’t safe, that those who claim to love you will only cause harm. 

We internalize these lessons and they form the development of our neural pathways that then inform us as adults, once we are far from the harm, how to be in relationship with others.

David Richo, in his book How To Be An Adult in Relationships, talks about the “5 A’s” that make up our emotional needs as humans.  These are: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

We all need someone to pay attention to us in a way that builds us up.

We all need to feel accepted, just as we are, in all our messy and complicated human glory.

We all need to feel appreciated for our contributions to our families, our friendships, our communities, our world.

We all need affection, be that loving words or begin physically held.

We all need allowing, to be allowed to shift and change and grow, allowed to be complex, complicated, and even contradictory.

All humans have these needs.  For those us who did not have most or any of these needs met as children, we have that much more of a desperation to have these needs met as an adult.

But even though we have this requirement to have these basic human needs met, we don’t trust that anyone will ever meet them.  

Trauma is a complex and contradictory thing in and of itself.  As a survival mechanism we isolate and yet isolation can literally kill us.  Without the love and support of our community (be that chosen family, blood relatives, competent trauma informed professionals or hopefully a bit of all of the above), we slowly or sometimes quickly will bring about physical disease, intense loneliness and hopelessness,  and sometimes a depression so deep there feels like there is no way out.

But our early life experiences have formed the ideas that we cannot trust other humans to have our basic human emotional needs met. And it takes a great act of courage and strength to reach out and ask for help.  And frankly, some days we don’t have that courage or strength.

So how do we shift this?  How do we find the resources to move through and past the fears of betrayal?  How do we develop our own sense of safeness and trust?

It takes work.  Patience.  Time. Intention.  Mostly, it takes work.

I deeply believe that we need to do the work of calming our nervous systems, connecting deeply to our boundaries and reclaiming our bodies as our own, finding our ways to our own center and ground.  And then we need to continue this work through deep embodiment and trauma processing work.

Then slowly that sense of safeness, and our ability to trust others and ourselves, will grow.

We are not meant to do this processing and healing work in isolation.  In fact, we actually cannot successfully do it in isolation.  We need others, we need to do this work in relationship.  This is the point of therapy, to help a person heal in a safe relationship so they then can take what they learn (and the ways they have shifted) out into the world and apply it to their other relationships.

Of course, therapy is not for everyone and frankly not all therapists (sadly) are competent.  

However, that does not change the reality that we need to do this work of healing, of developing our sense of safeness, of cultivating trust, within relationships.

It does not make us weak to need other people, it makes us human.  It does not mean we have a character flaw when we yearn for deep connections with others, it makes us human.  It does not make us “less than” or “too much” to ask another for support, it makes us human.

Where this is tricky perhaps, is that we can’t rely on any singular person to fill all our emotional (or any other kind of) needs.  No one person will ever be able to do that. We need a community of people and we need to be able to rely on ourselves in way that is helpful for us and not harmful.

Stephanie Bennett-Henry wrote :
No one is going to love you exactly like you imagine.  No on is ever going to read your mind and take every star from the sky at the perfect time and hand it to you.  No one is going to show up at your door on a horse, with a shoe you lost.  Do you understand?
That’s why you have to love yourself enough, so that any other love just adds more candles to the cake you’ve already iced.

Our work in processing our trauma is loving ourselves, it is the cake and the icing of our making.  But we don’t need to, and I would argue can’t, do this work alone.  We build ourselves up as we build our relationships, our relationships grow as we do, we learn to trust others as we learn to trust ourselves.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum, honestly.  The point being however, we need both.  Both our own willingness to do the work, and people to support us and or guide us in this work.  

It is true that no one person is ever going to meet all our emotional needs.  Knowing this is part of our own maturation process.  However, we can have a community of people, even a relatively small community of a handful of folks, who together can help us get our needs met.

That’s how we are supposed to be.  In community.  Serving each other and ourselves.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly newsletter on June 10, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.

*Now posted on substack