Category: Complex Trauma

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The space between stimulus & response

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. ~Rollo May, The Courage to Create

Creating that space between stimulus and response is not an easy feat.  It takes practice and intention.  Those of us who live with trauma and highly activated sympathetic nervous systems (fight/flight), have a very clear understanding of how challenging it can be to create that space.  To shift our ways of being from a wounded animal who simply lashes out at anyone or thing that comes near them to a more self aware and thoughtful response that is not fully based on our triggered emotional state. 

Creating this space isn’t about not feeling our emotions and sensations.  Instead it is about slowing down how we react to these emotions and sensations.  It is slowing down when we are in a state of overwhelm and considering what all is contributing to those feelings, what we actually have control of, and how we want to be in these moments.

Most of us living with complex trauma not only have activated nervous systems that are either on extra high or extra low alert (or alternate between the two at rapid pace), we also have a visceral sense of not being heard.  Those of us who experienced childhood trauma either were convinced to keep the “secret” by our abuser, or we told people and either they didn’t believe us, told us we were making it up, or told us to not complain and that it ‘wasn’t that bad’. 

So not only do we have activated systems that see almost everything as a threat, we don’t know how to express our feelings – emotions and sensations – in a way that can be received by another.  We either snap and yell or we totally shut down and “cut off” by not speaking or interacting with the person who we feel caused us harm.  These reactions are automatic in some ways and they can be slowed down, we can slow ourselves down, and shift from the automatic reaction to a more intentional response. 

It takes time and a willingness to practice self-regulation skills to come into your body.  It won’t happen over night.  We will all fall back on old habits from time to time.  And these shifts in being can happen.

The shifts in our ways of being in the world aren’t always neat or easy or even pleasant.  Sometimes the slowing down process can be incredibly uncomfortable.  

We need to be willing to sit a bit in the unknown of shifting and transforming.  To have the courage to move from the comfort of what we know into the possibilities of what is unknown to us outside of our imagination. 

We were all raised in environments that taught us how to interact with others, either by example of how the adults treated each other or by how the adults treated us as children.  These patterns and ways of being were likely passed down through generations.  These cycles are entrenched in our psyches as well as our cellular memories.  They run deep.

And.

We can break the patterns and cycles that have been passed down to us.  We can shift our ways of being.  We do not need to allow what has happened to us to define us or how we are in the world.

Yes, there are things we cannot change.  Yes, this is not easy work.  

And.

We can learn to calm and regulate our nervous system.  We can learn to create that space between stimulus and response.  We can learn to experience our feelings and to express them without causing harm to ourselves or to others.

It takes time, intention, and practice.  It requires a willingness to live in that unknown in-between space that is so uncomfortable.  We need to develop our self compassion.  

Because at the end of the day we all need each other.  So learning how to be in relationship with others, while maintaining boundaries, is an important part of our work.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly(ish) newsletter on July 8, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

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We need each other

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

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Breaking open

To live this life. To live it with wholeness and gratitude and trust. In the pain and the glory. In the mess and the grace. In the sacred and the desperation. This is the stuff of which real superheros are born. ~Jeanette LeBlanc

We are here to love hard and true. Here to give ourselves over to the rush and bliss of it all. Here to offer our patchwork hearts over and over again. Here to feel and fall and hurt and bleed. Here to say yes and to choose wholeness and to break anyway and to do it all again. ~Jeanette LeBlanc

Here you are.
Still standing. Fierce with the reality of love and loss. Wearing the truth of our hearts on your tattered sleeves. And yes, this one very nearly took you out. And yes, there were days when the darkness was heavy and the climb out of that rabbit hole required you to mine your depths for strength you didn’t even know you had.

But here you are.
Broken open by hope. Cracked wide by loss. Full of longing and grief and the burn of that phoenix fire. Warrior painted with ashes. Embers from the blaze still clinging to your newborn skin, leaving you forever marked with scars of rebirth.

And just look at you. Heart broken but still beating. Arms empty but still open. Face raised to the sky and giving thanks for the light, even when it hurts your eyes.

My god, you are beautiful. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

In preparing, I ran upon an old ACT UP handbook. It reminded me of the ways the “masters tools” are used break movements. Using power over to suppress us.

To shame us
To make us invisible
To mute our voices and our message
To kill our trust

These tools of the master are used to break one’s spirit, to disempower, to confuse, to divide, to immobilize. These tactics are another assault on our humanity.

They will not work.
We must love our people more than they hate us.
Movement work is about healing, building engaging and transforming. ~Desiree Lynn Adaway

Love. Relating. Having hope, even in and after devastating heartbreak.

I’ve been writing a lot over on IG the last couple weeks. It has been in part processing some grief around a specific relationship. It has been in part confirming my truth in how we need to relate to each other, in all our relationships.

The other day I watched this IGTV by Jeanette LeBlanc. I sobbed. And sobbed. And sobbed some more.

When my marriage was crumbling, and even shortly after it ended, I didn’t believe I would ever love again. I didn’t believe I could ever open myself to that kind of heartbreak again. I didn’t even know if I was capable of loving again, not in the ways that I had loved my ex-husband.

I kept my walls up. My armor was on secure and tight. Once I decided I wanted to have sex with another person, I had partnered sex, but there was no intimacy. I wouldn’t allow it. There was no sleeping over. There was no sharing of my life and there was no listening to them talk about their’s.

I wasn’t ready for and frankly, I didn’t want to have, a Relationship (with a Capital R). I didn’t want to “catch feelings.” I didn’t want to be vulnerable. I didn’t want to risk having my heart shattered again.

And I didn’t meet anyone who changed my mind.

Until I did.

It is ironic to look back at the very beginning of this relationship. We texted for a week and I wasn’t overly interested, though in text we seemed like a good match. I almost canceled our first date. But then I wanted to get out and we had plans, so I went.

And I met him.

As soon as I laid my eyes on him I knew, I knew, that he would break my heart. I knew, from that first night, he would break me open in ways I didn’t want to be broken open, in ways I wasn’t ready to be broken open.

But are we ever really ready to be broken open? I don’t think so.

I knew he and I were probably not going to last forever. I had (and still have) lost all faith in happily ever after and ’til death do us part. I didn’t want a white picket fence anymore (ironically, he actually has a white picket fence at his house). I didn’t want to be tied down with expectations and promises, mine or anyone else’s. So I knew, at some point we would come to an end, because all things come to an end at some point, and when that day came, my heart would shatter.

I wrote this the other day on IG ::

Sometimes we meet people who have profound impacts on our lives and our Self. Just by being them they create space for us to unearth some lost pieces of who we are. They show us what it is to be loved and adored. They teach us what freedom is. We may want these people to be in our lives forever but that may not be how it works out. They may only be with us for a short while & yet their impact is massive & our hearts shatter when they leave.

Hearts are meant to shatter I believe. And then to be put back together. We are meant to love & lose that love. Nothing is forever.

And sometimes relationships come back & start again. There are those in my life who I can literally go a decade without talking to & when we see each other it is as if no time has passed.

There are people who light us up regardless of time or distance.

We can’t “keep” these people though. People are not for keeping. People are for loving, for caring for, for experiencing life with. In whatever time allows us to have with them.

“All we have to see, is I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me.” ~George Michael

I am in a time of grief. It is true. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I left the door open for the future, and who knows what will happen in a week, a month, a year, a decade. And also, in these moments now I need to accept the ending of what was.

This hurts like hell. My chest literally aches. I cry at the drop of a hat.

I’m not miserable though. I wouldn’t change any of this, because knowing him allowed me the space to get so much of myself back, including my knowing that I am meant to love, and to love deep and hard, without apologies or fear. I am more me for having known him, even if it was for the briefest moment of time.

I will eventually move through this grief. It is true. While time alone doesn’t heal all (or any) wounds, it does help to dull the pain, and in addition I am processing the hell out of this year and our time together and what it has all meant to and for me.

Here’s a thing though, our love, our wide open hearts, our vulnerability, our authenticity, aren’t only meant for romantic love. They are meant for friends. For (chosen) family. For colleagues. For comrades. For our grocery clerk. For total strangers.

We need to bring love, our whole broken open selves, into all our spaces. Most especially into those spaces that are about bringing systemic change, about tearing down the status quo, about ending oppression and authoritarianism and marginalization.

The world needs our wide open hearts. The world needs us to be willing to risk having our hearts shattered, over and over. By lovers, friends, family, and strangers. With every shattering, the world needs us to choose to put our hearts back together and then to enter the world with them wide open once again.

This doesn’t mean walking through the world without boundaries (we all desperately need those). It doesn’t mean being a martyr or allowing people to cause us harm in the name of Love. It doesn’t mean we are passive.

We can be warriors with open hearts. I would argue the only way to be a warrior is with an open heart. With the strength and bravery and willingness to move through the fear and let people in and to hold space for others to let us in too.

In order to be in the world with our hearts open, and able to hold space for others with open hearts, we have to do our own work. Our own internal work. Of healing old wounds. Of processing old traumas. Of becoming self aware, self reflective. Of creating the pause before we react to situations out of anger or frustration or hurt. Of getting to the roots of the ways we have internalized oppressive and authoritarian behaviors and attitudes. Of getting to the roots of our own black holes of abandonment, neglect, not feeling worthy or deserving or wanted.

We need to do this work so we are not only able to allow ourselves to be broken open, but also so we can be in the spaces with others who are breaking open themselves. We need to do this so we don’t continue to carry and utilize the master’s tools. We need to do this so we can break harmful inter-generational patterns and cycles. We need to do this so we can create a world where love, not fear, is abundant and the motivation for all our actions.

We need to do this work for the sake of our most intimate relationships, for the sake of our least intimate relationships, for the sake of our Self, our humanity, our real purpose in life.

Which is to love. Each other. Our Self. Our world.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on November 17, 2019. It has been edited and revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays along with stream of conscious writing prompts, self-regulation exercises, and more, you can subscribe right here.

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The importance of grief work in our trauma processing

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you. ~John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief.  How grief can be present at the same time as excitement and anticipation.  How in our culture we don’t have ways of grieving that are helpful.  How we try to put a time limit on our grief. How we, in my profession, often don’t include grief work in our trauma work with clients.

Here’s some things.  There are no time limits on our grief.  Ever.  And grief work is a vital part of our trauma work.

A vital part.  An essential part.  A necessary part.  A required part.

Those of us living with trauma in our bodies have had horrible things happen to us, done to us.  For those of us who experienced trauma in our childhood, those events literally shaped our brains and the ways we are able to see and be in the world.  These childhood experiences also impacted our physical health, specifically our nervous systems and autoimmune systems.  Those events have life long impacts.

It is hard for me to imagine who I would be if all the trauma I experienced as a child hadn’t occurred. If I have been raised in a household where the ACEs score was under 4.  If I had never been touched inappropriately.  I would be a totally different person, of that I am sure.  

It is heartbreaking to know all the damage that was done, and to know that we have survived (and some of us are learning to thrive) DESPITE all those experiences.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply be thriving?  If we didn’t have to learn how to do that.  

Yes. Yes it would.

What happened to us as children is not our fault.  Those events took so much away from us.  Some of which will never be recovered, and some of which may be.  Because of those childhood events, we have, as part of the trauma, experienced great loss.  Loss of innocence.  Loss of trust.  Loss of resilience.  Loss of “normal” neuropathways. Loss of an ability to relate and connect to others in a healthy way.  Loss of feeling comfortable in our own skin.   Loss of a sense of safeness. Sometimes even loss of hope.

We have experienced a lot of loss.

When we experience loss, grieving is a natural process.  Yet we don’t talk about the losses we experienced because of the trauma events in our lives.  We don’t acknowledge all those losses, let alone grieve them.  And this I believe is a disservice to ourselves, and our greater culture. 

How do we grieve these things we (perhaps) never had?  How do we grieve these losses that feel totally theoretical?

We slow down.  We acknowledge the losses.  The things we never had.  The things we wanted so desperately.  The things that will never be.  

We acknowledge the struggles.  The difficulties being in intimate relationships.  The challenges being present in our bodies.  The extra work we’ve had to do to try to break (generations old) cycles and patterns.

We allow the tears.  The anger.  The deep sadness.  

We allow ourselves to acknowledge and feel the unfairness and injustice of it all. 

We grieve.  In community. In ritual. In our own hearts and bodies.

I believe when grief is not a part of our trauma work, that we are missing a huge piece of the work.  Grieving what we have lost, what never was, and perhaps what never will be, is vital to our ability to move the trauma out of our bodies and systems and to learn to shift from simply surviving into a place of actually thriving.  

We need to acknowledge these losses and create space for our own grief process along with our trauma work.  This is part of building our own self-compassion.  This is truly part of our life long healing work.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly(ish) newsletter on June 4, 2018. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

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Relating with Complex Trauma & Resisting Group Think

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. ~Bell Hooks

I get so god damn lonely and sad and filled with regrets some days, but I’m learning to breathe deep through it and keep walking. I’m learning to make things nice for myself. Slowly building myself a home with things I like. Colors that calm me down, a plan to follow when things get dark, a few people I try to treat right. I don’t sometimes, but it’s my intent to do so. I’m learning.I’m learning to make things nice for myself. I’m learning to save myself.
I’m trying, as I always will. ~Charlotte Eriksson

Wildflower; pick up your pretty little head,
It will get easier, your dreams are not dead. ~Nikki Rowe

This year, and honestly for the past several years, I’ve been looking at the ways we all relate with each other. The ways I relate in my relationships. In my intimate, sexual relationships. In my intimate, non-sexual relationships. My relationships with my children. Family. The grocery store clerk. And of course with my Self.

I’ve been looking at the ways We relate to each other online too. The ways oppression and authoritarian behavior seeps out in social justice spaces. The ways we bully. the ways we disregard the humanity of the people on the other side of our screens. As well as the ways we support each other, the ways we come together in solidarity, the ways we show love and appreciation for others, their work in the world, and their general Being in the world.

I am fascinated, horrified, and inspired by the ways we all interact and relate with each other. There are moments of beauty and there are moments of pure ugliness. There are times when it seems we all rise above our own wounding and find ways to connect. There are times when our wounding and trauma gets the best of us and we cause more harm.

We are all human. We all cause harm to each other, intentionally and unintentionally. We all feel harmed at times, whether harm was actually inflicted or not.

This is what it is to relate with other people. It is messy and complex and painful and gorgeous and amazing.

For those of us who have complex trauma coursing through our being (and let me be clear, I really believe that is the majority of us humans), it can be even more tricky and complicated. We have all these personal wounds that are exacerbated by our culture. We don’t have role models for how to relate with people in loving and harmless ways.

And even the most self-aware of us have our moments of unawareness. We all have places where our wounding seeps out, especially if we don’t process it, if we don’t have a place of support to do that extra work we need to do to unravel the harm caused us, so that we don’t continue to perpetuate harm. If we don’t have people who don’t have their own agenda and Opinions about what our lives should look like.

It can be all too easy to succumb to Group Think.

I do believe that we have a collective Consciousness as well as a collective Unconscious that we all draw upon. A deep collective knowing and memory. That is not what I’m talking about when I say Group Think.

Group Think can go against our own individual deeper knowing. It often stems from each individual’s own wounding and the tools we each developed to protect ourselves from that wounding. This can show up when a group of friends gives us advice that goes against what we know to be true for ourselves. Or when a group of people online, who don’t have all the information, decide to make judgments and attacks on an individual.

Group Think is relatively mindless, generally each person feels a sense of righteousness, and causes harm.

Resisting Group Think can sometimes be incredibly challenging. When everyone around you is telling you that your own perspective, your own experience, your own inner knowing, is all wrong we can start to doubt ourselves. We can start to question ourselves.

This isn’t wholly bad. Part of being self-aware and conscious is to question ourselves, to look deep and see if the comments, critiques, or advice of others do resonate with us, if there is some (or a lot of) truth in what they are saying. It is good to be reflective, to sit in the pause, to be curious.

And.

It is not good when others influence us in a way that causes us to go against what we know to be true of and for ourselves. It is not good when we start to think that what we experienced didn’t happen or didn’t matter, that our perspective is invalid, or that what we actually want isn’t what we (should) want.

We all lose our way in Group Think sometimes. We all are influenced by others in ways that cause us to forget who we are and want to be for a moment. This is part of being human and having a basic need for a sense of belonging.

And.

We can all do the work we need to break these cycles and patterns of losing our Self on the one side and of projecting our own wounding onto others on the other.

It is a practice to break these cycles. We’ll each fuck up. Hopefully when we do, we can make amends and repair. Which is a whole other practice in and of itself.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly(ish) newsletter on November 10, 2019. It has been edited and revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.