More on consent

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

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November 30, 2016January 8, 2017

Consent, complicity & rebellion (the complexity of consent part 3)

The topic of consent has shown up over and over for me recently: in Isabel Abbott and Bronwyn Petry’s course The Body Contains Multitudes; observing All Souls Day; in my work with my own therapist; in my ancestral work unraveling what the women and men who lived before me passed down to me and what is me and mine; in my constant work of dislodging and dismantling my own patriarchal training and doing all I can to not pass this training on to my own daughter (and failing, and doing better than my own mother did… sometimes progress is terribly incremental).

Consent. The complexity of it. How there is so much in our lives that we don’t consent to. How so much lives in our own bodies that we never consented to–not only what we didn’t consent to in regard to our own lived experience, but also what our ancestors passed down to us, what lives in our cellular memory and our very DNA.

And while there is so much that lives within our bodies that we did not consent to, it is still ours to manage or heal or dislodge or unravel. We have a responsibility to it, to ourselves, to understand all these parts and where they live and what messages they may have for us that are helpful and what messages they give us that are harmful.

We have a responsibility to untangle the web of stories and training and wounding and strengths that we did not ask for and are within us all the same.

Our bodies store it all. The pain and pleasures of our own lived experiences. The memories that our mind doesn’t want us to remember. The longing for freedom and truth and justice and love that our spirit cries for. The trauma and oppression of our ancestors. Thousands of years of gaslighting from our culture.

All of it. Our bodies hold it all.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past all this. Sometimes the experiences and memories and longing are too much and we need to move out of our body, out of our being, out of our Self in order to escape the chaos and dissonance and get through our days.

That’s okay. We each need to do what we need to do to get by.

And.

Sometimes, we do need to connect to it all. To hear the stories. To know the truths. To sense the injustices of our own lived experiences and those of the people who came before us. To believe that we aren’t just making it all up, it isn’t all in our heads, it is, in fact and truth, very, very real.

This connection doesn’t have to look or feel or be big. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. We don’t need to dive in so deep that the weight of it all crushes us.

We can move into this work of connecting to our bodies, slowly, quietly, peacefully. We can get curious and quiet and give space for our bodies to tell us what they need to. We can listen.

This is the work of re-membering our body.

Of putting all our fragmented pieces back together.

Of coming home into our Self.

Of becoming our own Unleashed Woman.

This is the work of reclaiming our bodies. Or, perhaps really, claiming them for the first time. Taking ownership of them.

This is the work of being able to say wholly, fully, confidently: No or Yes or Maybe or No then Yes then No again.

This is the work of acknowledging all the ways we never gave consent. We never gave permission. We never consciously or in any informed way agreed to the disconnection, the dismembering, the disowning of our own Self – of our physical and corporeal and flesh and blood body.

And neither did our ancestors.

Lack of consent is part of how our patriarchal culture works. Those in power don’t need to ask, and those without power don’t get to say no.

This is as true today as it was 100, 1000, 2000 years ago.

We, you and I, never gave consent for trauma to live in our bodies the way it does. We never consented to the disease or disorders. We never consented to our DNA being altered by the trauma and oppression our ancestors experienced.

We did not consent to the anxiety. The depression.

We did not and do not consent to the constant messages of how we are not enough, how we are too much.

We did not consent to the shame that is instilled in our psyches and being from birth. From before birth.

We did not consent to having our boundaries disregarded, ignored, torn away from us, over and over and over again.

We did not consent to being told that we have no value, no worth.

We did not consent to the disconnection from our Self or our sisters or our community.

We did not consent to the gaslighting or torture or murder both we and our ancestors have experienced.

We did not consent to having all this patriarchal training living within us, burrowing so deeply into our blood and bones and being.

We did not consent to unconsciously and unintentionally passing on this training.

We did not consent to being complicit in this culture that hates women.

We did not consent because we were not informed.

We were not told we had a choice.

We were not told there was, there is, a choice.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we have to follow the rules. That we must play small. That we should strive to achieve that never ending To Do list.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that to rest is to be lazy, weak, proves our worthlessness.

We were told, taught, indoctrinated with the idea, that we deserve all the pain we endure. Because Eve. Because Pandora. Because all the “evils” of the world are our fault.

Psst… I wanna tell you something…

THEY FUCKING LIED.

xoxo

We do have a choice.

We have the choice to say No more.

We have the choice to say, No, that isn’t correct.

We have the choice to use our voices. To access our power. To demonstrate our strength.

We have the choice to stop following the rules, to stop passing on the rules, to stop being complicit in a culture that wants us gone.

We have the choice to do and be different. For ourselves. For our daughters and nieces. For our sisters. For our mothers. For all our grandmothers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our cells and being.

And not only do we have a choice, we have a responsibility.

Now that we are aware of this training, now that we are unraveling all the ways we have been lied to, tied down, leashed, we have a responsibility to continue in this unraveling, in finding our truth, in taking off this leash that has choked and silenced us for generations.

We have a responsibility to do and be different. For our Self. For our daughters and sons and nieces and nephews. For our mothers and fathers. For all our grandmothers and grandfathers, long forgotten in our conscious memory yet still living within our blood and bones and being.

We have a responsibility to break the rules. To defy this sick normal. To tear it all down, burn it to the ground, and build new.

New. Different. Creating a time and place where all of us are free and equal. Where we no longer feel shame. Where we embrace our sisters. Where we find deep connection with our Whole Self, with our community, with our world.

This responsibility can feel heavy. It can sometimes feel like a burden. We may sometimes want to put it down and wish we were not aware of the oppression, the hatred, the inequality.

That’s okay.

Even Jesus had moments of doubt.

And.

We can do this. Together. In community. With each other.

Together. Always.

Now, let’s go smash this shit to bits.

xoxo

The text of this essay originally appeared my weekly love letter on November 5, 2016 and has been slightly edited and modified to appear here. If you enjoyed reading this, and would like to read more like it, you can sign up to receive my love letter right over here.

Isabel Abbott and I have locked arms and joined minds and are offering a six month circle unearthing, exploring, dislodging and embracing our consent and boundaries. If you’d like to learn more and possibly register, click right here.

November 23, 2016January 8, 2017

The complexity of consent Part 2

consent-part-2 Last week I wrote about how sometimes consent is a tricky thing, how sometimes our mind will give consent to something, like a surgery, but our body won’t (and really can’t). How sometimes our logic needs to override our body because our mind actually does know better (for example that a surgery could actually save our lives.

The point being that sometimes the giving or not giving of consent isn’t always a straight forward thing.

And, while that is true, it is also true that more often than not, the giving or not giving of consent is very straight forward.

Like the not giving consent for sexual abuse and assault or physical and psychological abuse and torture.

The not giving consent for mundane and yet traumatic things like car accidents or cancer or any disease or illness.

The not giving consent for other people to break our hearts, or betray our trust, or dishonor us in any of the big or small ways.

The not giving consent for our children becoming ill, our parents dying too young, our best friends suffering in any way.

There are million things in our lives that we do not give consent to. Some of them extraordinary and some mundane.

All these noes that we may or may not have given voice live within us. In our minds, yes, and also in our bodies.

Every time our consent is disregarded, our bodies know. They react. They store the data.

The data of emotions and pain and the color of the walls and slow motion detail right before impact.

This data lives in our shoulders and necks and jaws. In our chests and hips and underneath our scapula.

This data lives in our intestines and stomach and womb.

This data lives in our blood and bones and muscles and sinew.

The raw non-verbal emotions, the howls and screams and wails, all vibrate within our being. And not only does the disregard of our own consent, from our lived experience, live within our body and being, that of our ancestors does too.

This includes the gaslighting that women have experienced for thousands of years.

This includes the impact of rape and abuse. It includes not having control or sovereignty over our own bodies or lives.

Yes, there a million mundane ways in which our consent is disregarded. Yes, this all lives within us. And the trauma and impact of these mundane, ordinary things, like car accidents, can be quickly and easily dislodged from our bodies.

It is the millions of ways in which our consent is disregarded that are not mundane, though in our culture considered ordinary and almost unremarkable, like rape or abuse or gaslighting, that takes time and patience and focused intention to dislodge and dislodging is made even more complex by living in a culture that continually and constantly traumatizes us.

It may take a lifetime to dislodge some trauma, some violations of our consent. There are some things that we will only learn to live with, as we also continue to chisel away at the layers. The hope always being that the more we dislodge, the more we chisel away, the less the next generation will need to do.

In truth, the trauma of being women living in a patriarchal culture makes it almost impossible to completely heal our bodies and minds and spirits.

And.

As we continue to do the work of unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging these traumas we also learn to resist and to prevent more trauma from impacting us as deeply.

We learn resilience.

We learn that no matter what, we will not only survive, in many ways we will also thrive.

We learn that our NOes matter. We learn to honor them and defend them and demand respect for them.

We learn that our boundaries matter. We learn how to notice them and feel them and know them. We learn how to honor and respect them. We learn how to demand others honor and respect them too.

This is not easy work. It is messy. It can be dark. It can at times feel like we are sinking into a deep abyss.

And, as we build our resilience, we learn that this messiness, this darkness, this sinking into the abyss will pass.

We learn hope. We learn to breathe. We learn to rest and nourish and replenish.

We learn to wield our consent. To state that we matter. Our Noes and Yeses and Maybes matter. Our boundaries matter. Our voice matters. Our essence and being and life matters.

We learn that as we chisel away at our own trauma, we are also chiseling away at a culture that insists on oppressing us. As we learn to wield our consent, to declare that we matter, we chisel away at the stories our culture has fed us since birth, since our mothers births, since our grandmothers births. As we learn resilience, we rip away at leash our misogynist, racist, patriarchal culture has put on us.

As we learn, we begin to do different. And in our doing different, we take back our bodies, our consent, our autonomy, our lives. And in this taking back, we begin to crumble the bricks of a culture that tries to tell us our bodies and lives are not our own.

And this is how we will tear it all down and how, in the end, we will win.

xoxo

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November 16, 2016January 8, 2017

The complexity of consent -part 1

consent-part-1 Five years ago, while still in graduate school, I had a day surgery give me a bigger understanding of trauma and the impacts it has on our body. That semester I fought to be in the Crisis & Trauma class, it was the last time it would be offered by one of my favorite professors and there was a screaming within me that I needed that particular class at that particular time in my life. I had to fight with my academic advisor and demand over and over to be let into the class. I didn’t understand the warrior within me who was battling so hard for this class, there was no logic at that time which said to take it now and that I couldn’t take it later. And yet I knew, my body knew, that taking the class later was not what I needed. I needed to take it now. I eventually convinced my advisor and he got me into the class.

Let’s go back a bit.

When I was 18 I was diagnosed with endometriosis. In the months leading up to this diagnosis, I had horrible and debilitating PMS and periods. Debilitating to the point that I missed many days of my senior year of high school because I was curled up in a ball on our bathroom floor, dripping cold sweats or tightly curled in my bed moaning and crying and screaming because of the pain in my abdomen, my uterus, my womb. This pain led to multiple ER visits and one of them finally led to me being fully admitted and having the surgery that discovered and removed, the endometrial tissue growing outside my uterus causing all the pain.

The whole of that hospital experience was awful. The surgeon, may he be burning in the depths of hell, completely disregarded me. He wanted me to sign a “consent” form that would allow him to remove my uterus and ovaries if he saw fit (I did not agree to this, but only because my adopted mom was there at my side advocating for me; I was so doped up on pain medication I would have signed anything). When I asked him if the surgery would leave scars he let out a smug laugh and said in a condescending voice “Of course it will leave scars!”. After the surgery, a week or two after, in the follow up appointment he told me I would never be able to have children due to the endometriosis, that I would never be able to get pregnant and if I did by some miracle I would never be able to carry a child to term. These words, his authoritative words, led to some rather risky and stupid behavior during my early 20s and honestly I am lucky that I survived that period of my life as relatively unscathed as I did.

Fast forward to five years ago. We had been struggling to bring our second child into the world for years. Four early miscarriages. Twice with hopes so high that we finally did it. Visit after visit to more doctors and being told the miscarriages were “normal” for my “advanced maternal age”. More smugness. More not being heard when I said, NO! This is not normal. Not for my body. Not for my family. There is something else at play. More being disregarded and dismissed.

Each month was a roller coaster of hopes and prayers and disappointment and tears. And then the symptoms came back. More cold sweats while curled in a ball on the bathroom floor. And now, projectile vomiting added to the mix. After three months of this, it was my husband who observed this was happening right before my period would start. And so back to my doctor. My doctor who had been with me over the last almost two decades. My doctor who had been with me through cancer scares. Who treated me. Who knew that I knew my body better than her. My doctor who I trusted.

When I told her all the symptoms, and all the fertility struggles, and all the All Of It, she asked if I thought my endometriosis was back. I sat quietly for a moment and said Maybe? She sent me home and later that day called me with the contact information of the best gynecological surgeon in Seattle and she had a referral into her for me. I made and appointment the next day. And this surgeon, this woman surgeon, listened. And knew. And knew that I knew. And we came up with a plan, including a surgery, to help heal me.

Here’s where consent can get tricky. My mind consented to this surgery. Wholly and completely. But my body, my gorgeous amazing body never gave her permission. And so post-surgery the trauma symptoms, that I have lived with since I was a child, intensified.

Back to my Crisis & Trauma class. In this class, I was learning how trauma lives in the body. How we can help trauma move out of our bodies. What we can do as therapists to help others and ourselves heal from this deep wounding that isn’t only about the stories that run through our minds. It is also about all the ways our bodies scream out and relive the experiences over and over and over again and how we don’t listen to them.

So, thanks to this class, I was able to piece together that my body was traumatized by the surgery. That we can actually experience trauma even when we give consent to what is happening to us. That our body doesn’t always understand things in logical ways. That our body only knows it is frozen on a table and being sliced open and having metal shoved into it and pieces of itself being cut and torn and burned away.

Our bodies are wise and hold much. And also, they don’t understand the world or our experiences in the same ways our mind does. And so, in order to heal trauma, we need both mind and body to be connected and listening to each other. We need to not try to rationalize what our body is experiencing because the logic and rationale of the body is not the same as that of our mind.

We need to listen and heal.

That class on trauma saved me in many ways. It showed me how I need to listen, we all need to listen, to the messages of our bodies. And that our bodies will respond to having its consent disregarded, our consent disregarded in the ways it knows how.

Where this has all left me is in a place of questioning and wanting answers. I want to know the facts and figures and statistics for women who have been sexually abused or raped and the correlation to “women’s health issues” like endometriosis, ovarian/uterine/cervical cancers. I want there to be research on the real health impacts of abortion on women. I want these numbers and this research not to have further reason to take our choices away, but rather so we can have more fully informed consent.

Without all the information, how can any of us ever truly give our consent?

I understand, as well as anyone, that sometimes our mind must make decisions to override the consent of our bodies. If I hadn’t had that surgery five years ago, and the follow-up medical treatments, I would not have my son today. I also would still be losing a week every month to debilitating pain and agony. There are times when logic, when our mind, must prevail.

And in those times, after the consent of our body has been disregarded, we need to come back to her. Back to our body and reconciling with her. Back to our body and soothing and healing her. Back to our body and letting her know in all the ways that in this moment, she is safe. We need to let her know we hear her, we feel her, we respect her, we honor her.

Our minds and bodies and spirits are separate parts of our Self, and they are deeply connected to and intertwined with each other. This must be remembered. It must be remembered that we cannot heal our body through the power of our mind only. We must do other work, body work, to help her heal, to help her release, to help her feel safety and comfort.

By connecting to her, listening to her, hearing our body, then we can heal. We can heal our own pains and traumas, planned or otherwise. We can shift from spaces of anxiety and depression (because the health of our body affects the health of our mind) to spaces of calm and peace. We can feel the interconnectedness within our Self and within our greater world.

xoxo

PS – The first draft of this essay was written a week prior to the presidential election here in the US. I have debated posting in now, and instead focusing more on the outcome and fallout of the election. However, consent, consent in regards to our bodies as women, hangs in the balance again. Having claim to our bodies, having total authority over what happens to her is now in question, again. And so, I have decided to post this, as the first in a series I have written on consent and our bodies, as it does directly relate to all that is again hanging in the balance.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, and oh that warms my heart if you did, you can read more of my writing by subscribing to my weekly love letter right over here. xoxo

June 11, 2016November 21, 2016

The concept of “choice”

I’ve been feeling out the ideas of consent, of being leashed and unleashed, of deceptive marketing practices. How these ideas are all connected.

As I’m exploring them, in blog posts by others and in conversations, both online and in-person, the idea of “choice” always comes up.

And I really hate it.

The conversations usually go something like this:

Person 1: XYZ thing is bad and it stomps on other’s consent or feeds their insecurities or makes them powerless or manipulates or tricks and robs them in some way.

Person 2: True. Remember though those other people always have the choice not to buy into the thing, to not be so insecure, to not feel powerless, to not be robbed or tricked.

The reason this conversation bothers me so damn much, is because when we revert to the concept that they have a choice, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility in practicing or preventing unethical behaviors.

Yes, we do have choices in this world.

Except when we don’t.

Like when we hit a brick wall of systemic racism and/or sexism and/or misogyny and/or bigotry.

Like when we live in poverty.

Like when the “choice” is between living or being killed. (No, actually I’m not being dramatic.)

Like when the other “option” simply is out of our reach due to finances or time or life or the laws of physics.

So, sure, we have choices. Except when we don’t.

When people say, often flippantly or condescendingly, “You have a choice,” what is being implied is that if you just tried harder, things would be different; that you aren’t doing a good enough job; that clearly there is something wrong with you because all you have to do is choose differently.

It also alleviates people of their own responsibilities in contributing to factors that make it so others don’t actually have a choice. It erases their responsibility to be empathic to another’s experience. It allows people to stay stuck in the their privilege and not become aware that life and the world is very, very different for other people.

The idea of choice is often thrown at victims as an explanation for why they found themselves in a traumatic situation. Well, you chose to go to that party and wear that dress. Well you chose to live in a hurricane/tornado/earthquake zone. Well, you chose to take that job or go to that school or marry that person or have those children.

It’s all your own fault you ended up where you did.

This is what our culture would have us believe.

I’m calling bullshit.

This is not to say there aren’t times that we do have choice. Most of us can decide what to have for dinner, who we spend our time with and often how we spend our time, be it at home or at work, all within a specific set of options. Because the sky is not the limit for most of us. Most of us don’t have the option of “choosing” steak and caviar every night (or maybe even any night) for dinner; who we spend our time with is generally limited by location and the people who are actually available; how we spend our time is also limited by time, place, space, responsibilities, deadlines, resources, and often the laws of physics.

Another piece of this puzzle is how the idea of choice is thrown around about how we feel about our life. As in, we have the choice to be happy or sad, grateful or miserable, angry or accepting. And sure, in many ways, we do choose how we respond and feel about any given situation or experience.

However.

When someone starts to tell us that all we have to do is choose to be happy, the implied messages are 1. it’s easy to simply choose happiness over being miserable and 2. any emotion other than happiness is unacceptable.

Again, I am calling bullshit.

Most people are fully conscious of the fact that being happy is much more complex than simply choosing happiness. I’m going to leave that at that, because I believe anyone reading this understands that work is involved in having a mostly happy and fulfilling life and that it doesn’t happen with simply making a choice (though that is part of it perhaps, for some).

The dangerous message is this: any emotion other than happiness is unacceptable.

This message tells us to stuff any feeling that isn’t “happy.” It tells us we are wrong for feeling any other emotion. That our feelings of rage, sadness, frustration, resentment, disappointment, fear, irritation, and loneliness are invalid.

And since they are wrong and invalid, we need to dismiss them, stuff them down, ignore them, pretend they don’t exist.

This stuffing down can work for a while. We can pretend we only ever feel happiness and bliss for a certain period of time. Eventually though, these other emotions will bubble back up, and this time bring with them feelings of shame and the stories of how we are too much (too emotional) or not enough (because we can’t just choose to be happy). And then comes more stuffing (because it’s a choice we feel like shit, right?) and so the cycle continues and the snowball gets bigger and bigger.

(This doesn’t even begin to take into account the realities of brain chemistry, physical health, the effects of trauma, or life stress factors that contribute to our mental and emotional health. These are all realities too and something to be considered and acknowledged for ourselves and others.)

These messages, these stories, of choice that are fed to us by our culture don’t hold up when we start to look at them. They are, in fact, lies that are meant to hold us down, keep us small, and make sure we are obedient to the rules patriarchal society deems appropriate. They are meant to keep us leashed and disconnected from our body, our mind, our spirit, our Self.

So.

Let’s stop throwing around this idea that we all have a “choice” when it comes to what life doles out to us and how we experience our life. Because while, certainly, yes, we each have choices we can and do make, there are any number of factors that influence those choices and/or give us limited options.

Let’s start to give each other and ourselves the benefit of the doubt, that given our personal options, we are doing the best we can.

Let’s stop shirking our responsibility and roles in spreading these stories that contribute to our collective shame and ideas of being too much and not enough.

Let’s start showing and feeling compassion for each other and our selves.

Let’s say fuck you to a culture that continues to try to keep us tied down.

Let’s rebel against these stories.

Let’s take off the leash.

xoxo

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