Category: intergenerational trauma

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Sitting in discomfort

Revolution and rebellion and disruption looks like many things. Sometimes its work out in the world and sometimes its that inner work of unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging.

Most Monday afternoons I go to see my therapist. She specializes in two particular modalities of trauma therapy, which is why I chose her. To process and dislodge both some relatively recent traumatic events with my kids, and to process my own various childhood traumas.

For the first year plus, every time I sat down on her couch she asked if I want to do one of the two modalities. I would invariably tell her, No. No I do not. Because this particular form of trauma work, while gentle in many many ways, is also intensely uncomfortable. I literally feel the trauma shifting in my body and it creates a type of dissonance under and on my skin that is… well, uncomfortable.

It isn’t icky feeling or unbearably painful. It is simply not a pleasant sensation. At all.

And so no, No I did not want to do that. Because really, who would intentionally sit there in this intentional physical, emotional and psychological discomfort for 20-40 minutes at a stretch.

Anyhow, I would say my no, we’d laugh, talk about the short game of avoidance and the long game of actually dislodging this shit from my body. We’d do some breath work, I would get present and then I say, okay, let’s do this work.

And we’d do the work and it’s uncomfortable and things would shift and sometimes I *felt* emotions and sometimes I cried and sometimes I’d get an intense pain in a particular part of my body and we;d get curious about it then sometimes I would feel even more emotions and so it goes until I would say it’s time to stop. And we check in with that No More and see if it’s short game saying “I’m uncomfortable and I DON’T WANNA” or if I really have reached my capacity of processing for the day. And so it goes.

In the last six months or so, this has shifted.  Now when I walk in I state straight away “I want to do the trauma work” or “I need a lot of time to talk today.”  We don’t need to have discussions about avoidance.  The work, while uncomfortable, is now something I am more than willing to tolerate because I have seen for myself some of the short and long term benefits of the work.

My point however is that being uncomfortable isn’t fun. Not for me, and really probably not for anyone. By definition, being uncomfortable is NOT enjoyable. And for most of us, in our short game of fear or shoving it down or not wanting to deal or feel, we avoid discomfort like the plague.

Here’s a thing though: we need to remember our Long Game. What our real intentions for being in the world are. What do we have to do to make it happen.

I’m doing my own trauma processing and dislodging for a variety of reasons, many of them about other people (like my kids). But the real, the core reason I’m dealing with my own shit is because I don’t want to ever be frozen in front of a TV screen unable to move as a sexual predator stalks about ever again. I don’t want to ever be frozen in inaction again. I want to be able to move and act and roar and fight.

And, well, I also need to walk my talk. Because I invite all of you to sit in your uncomfortable feelings, to push outside your own comfort zone, to learn that even if we *feel* our our emotions and their physiological sensations or make mistakes or feel uncomfortable because we are challenging our racist uncle at the family feast or defending a boundary with our mother while visiting, we *will* survive. And we may even learn a little bit about selves in the process.

In the all the work I do, facilitating groups and individual work, I invite the participants to push themselves outside their own comfort zones. To become curious as to why they don’t want to “go there.” To expand, contract, then expand a bit more. I always offer tools to help titrate or process or soothe, as needed. And then, when ready enough, we bravely push out into discomfort again, get curious again, ask the whys and start to unravel all the stories that have kept us stuck and small and frozen.

Because I deeply believe that we have remained frozen for far too long. And I deeply believe all of us are carrying trauma in our bodies, be it the trauma of our own lived experience or the trauma passed down to us through our ancestors and in our DNA.

Our trauma impacts us in many ways. It impacts our ability to set boundaries and know our consent. It impact how we relate to other people, and especially as women how we relate to other women.

This is why I do the work I do.

This is why I offer the TIE™ for Sexual Trauma group each year.

Why I work with the individuals I do.

Why I continue to do my own work of unraveling and dislodging and learning.

Because while there is the macro work out in the world of tearing this shit down, we will never build something new and different until we do our own inner work of dismantling and dislodging.

In rebellious solidarity, always.
xoox

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Trauma, retreat, cocooning, coming back into world

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. 

~Laurell K. Hamilton,  Mistral’s Kiss

About a year and a half ago I received some incredibly traumatic news.  I was incredibly blessed that my people gathered around me and held me together and up as I processed all that was being unearthed.  I was, and am, deeply grateful for those women.

A couple weeks later, I learned that one of my best friends from high school died.  And there was the funeral to attend across the state and the grief to feel and sit in and know.

I lost my words.  All the pain of those two events, the sense of the world as I thought I knew it shattered.  I needed to go inside, to spend as much time and energy and space as I could process and being with those I love most.  I stepped back from the world and went in my safe cocoon.  I processed and felt and cried and screamed.  I listened to music I knew would encourage my tears.  I allowed all the tears to shake themselves out of my body as my chest hurt and throat felt raw.

I was reacting to and processing two traumas at once.

And because of the way our bodies work, I was also processing old traumas.  While the reason for my tears may have been about recent events, the toxins that were released via those tears have been in my body for a long time.

This is how processing trauma works. Our body doesn’t really know the difference between traumatic events, though our mind does.  Our body only knows something is not right, that it needs to be in a heightened reactive state. And so as we process any one specific trauma, our body also is able to process old and other traumas at the same time.

Part of my process of processing traumas, personally, is to cocoon.  This is different from isolating (which is something trauma encourages us to do).  Cocooning for me is like wrapping myself in a cozy, heavy, blanket. It is warm and safe and quiet.  The cocoon is made up of time with those I love, time with my therapist, time in solitude.  It is having quiet and having soothing voices.  It is being held and being not touched.  It is limiting sensory input and output and allowing myself to sit in and feel and be with and yes, process, the multitude of emotions that are swirling in me.

(Not all that) long ago I would not cocoon when I experienced a traumatic event. I would “power through.” I would isolate – telling all those around me I was “fine” as I felt like I was dying.  I didn’t reach out.  I didn’t feel safe.  I didn’t seek comfort.  All of this is a normal trauma response.  For reasons we don’t yet understand, when we experience trauma, and do not have sufficient reserves of resilience, our mind tells us to stuff it down, act like nothing’s wrong, and even worse, tells us we are all alone, no one would understand, don’t even bother seeking help.

With my own personal work, both trauma specific and not, I’ve been able to come to this place now of no longer isolating, and instead, cocooning.  It hasn’t been easy getting here.  And I am still in my own process and journey in this work.  This work takes time and patience and whole fuck ton of self-compassion.

Because of the self-compassion part I can look back at old patterns and ways of being and not feel shame.  Instead I remind myself I was doing the best I could with the tools I had and was able to receive at the time.

This is true for all of us.

I deeply believe each and every one us at any moment are doing the absolute best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

Even when we are at our absolute worst and lowest and darkest.

Take that in for a moment.

Even in our darkest and lowest and worst moments, we are doing the best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

(Note: sometimes we are not able to receive resources, for any number of reasons, even when they are offered to us.  We get to have compassion for this too.)

I have often heard people say (and even said myself a few times) “I wish I had started this work [of self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and or trauma processing] earlier/when I was younger/a long time ago.”

A truth is, that we couldn’t have started this work until we did.  For whatever reasons we didn’t have the right resources to move into this work.

We didn’t have enough of our basic needs being met.

Dr. Abraham Maslow developed a theory that is called the Hierarchy of Needs.  At the base is food, water, shelter, rest, the ability to breathe and eliminate waste.  If these basic needs aren’t met then we can’t focus on the second “level” which is safety – being in an environment where your body feels physically safe, you have a steady income, you have resources you can rely on including friends and family, you have a relatively healthy body.

The “middle level” in the hierarchy is love and belonging.  I feel this is important to note.  I’ve seen a meme several times over the years that says in essence “If you don’t love yourself, no one else can/will love you.”  According to Maslow, this is absolutely incorrect – we actually need to feel loved and cared for and have a sense of belonging somewhere before we can move on to “self-esteem” or self-love.  We need our people, our community.  We need to feel like we are a part of something.  Sometimes we are able to find this sense of belonging from our parents or siblings, and sometimes not.  Sometimes we find this at church or school, sometimes not.  Sometimes we find it in our social circles, and sometimes not.  It honestly doesn’t matter where we find it, only that we do. (Also, this is what attachment theory tells us – we need to feel and be loved in order to love ourselves.)

This is where that “deeper” work, trauma related, self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and our ability to “do the work” comes into play.  We actually can’t do that work UNLESS we have our other basic needs met – one of which is having a sense of belonging and being loved.

My truth is I would not have been able to start any of my personal work any earlier than I started it.  Particularly my own trauma work.  I needed to have my basic needs met, have consistent and reliable access to food and shelter, to have a sense of safe-enoughness, to feel loved and that I belong enough, and then also to love myself enough – to be able to come to the place of feeling that I do matter, that my life matters, and that I am worthy of happiness and to not continue to suffer all the physical and psychological and emotional impacts of my own trauma history.

Frankly, I didn’t get to that place, I didn’t have all those needs met, until relatively recently, in the last few years. And so, even if I had gone into trauma therapy prior to that, it likely would not have helped as much as it is now, and also frankly, I likely wouldn’t have stuck with it.

This “deeper work” isn’t necessary for our survival.  The first three tiers of the hierarchy are.   We honestly don’t need to love ourselves or be “self-actualized” in order to survive on this planet.

And.

For those of us who have the privilege of having those three basic needs met, what would our lives be like if we were able to get the fourth and fifth met?  If we did the work of processing our own lived experience trauma, our ancestral trauma that lives in our DNA, our cultural trauma that feeds  itself every day?  What would that even be like?  How would our lives be different?

For me, I know how my life is different.  I also see the shifts in the women who gather in my circles and who I work with individually.  I know, personally, how coming home to my own body changed every aspect of my life.  I know, personally, how doing body-focused trauma therapies have opened up aspects of my Self and my life I thought were closed away forever.

It hasn’t been easy.  It has certainly more often than not, been really fucking hard.

And yet, for me, and it seems for others who are able to do this work, it has been so fucking worth it.

…

Did you enjoy reading this?  It was originally written for my weekly newsletter in the summer of 2017; I edited it for publication here.  If you’d like to receive my weekly emails, which includes essays like one, you can fill out the form on this page. 

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Love is not a victory march

And love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
~Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

The last year plus has been traumatic for our world politically and culturally, and because of this, also for many of us personally. We have seen some of our worst fears of what would happen with Republican run Executive and Legislative branches here in the United States. We have seen so much put back forty or more years in time, so much more that has been attempted to be put back. With each hit it feels like we are sinking deeper and deeper in a dystopian novel.

And.

Last year saw #metoo. And this year #timesup.  We see more and more women coming forward and some of the men who perpetrated sex crimes actually having consequences for their actions. I have been witness to more and more people becoming aware of the social injustices in the world, acknowledging their own internalized biases, compliance, and complicity, and doing the work to make change both within themselves and out in the world.

This shifting in our culture and within ourselves has been about love.

Unearthing what love actually means.

That love is a verb.

That love is not always gentle.

That love can be fiery, fierce, loud.

That love can be both protective and can push us outside of our comfort zones.

That love and justice can and should go hand in hand. And in that mix there needs to also be compassion and boundaries.

I believe that on any given day in any given moment all of us are doing the best we can with the tools we have.

This best we can may not be good enough. This best we can may actually be harmful to ourselves or to others. Other’s don’t have to accept our “best we can”. And in order for me to have hope in humanity, I do still believe we are each trying our best to be the best humans we know how to be.

And.

It is also true that sometimes the “best” others can do is something we need to say a firm NO to. And this No can, and in my opinion should, come from a place of deep love. Love for ourselves as well as love for the other person. And perhaps love for all humanity.

The #metoo movement that has caught fire in the last couple of years is a statement of this kind of love. A love comprised of clearly stating this is where I end and you begin and you don’t get to cross this line without my permission. A love comprised of compassion for ourselves and the traumas we have experienced at the hands of (mostly) men. A love comprised of empathy for others with similar experiences and especially for those who are able to speak up and out.

It is a love that seeks more than justice. It is a love that seeks our humanity.

We are at the dawn of a new epoch of human history. We have perhaps been at this dawn for the last hundred or so years. We have seen cultural “norms” slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, shift. We have seen the emancipation of slaves, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, all in the last 150 years. This is after, literally, millennia of slavery, and the de-humanizing of women, persons of color, queer folks, the poor, and anyone who is not a white, heterosexual, middle class (or “better”), CIS, male.

One hundred fifty years is barely a drop in the bucket when you look back three to six thousand years.

The shifting of our culture feels slow. And it is taking multiple generations. And will likely take multiple more before we live in a world where racism, misogyny, ablism, and homophobia are quaint things of past.

And.

With each movement, more movements are born. With each small shift there is a ripple effect.

And those ripples are getting larger. And stronger.

And the more we do this work of shifting ourselves and our world, the more we see the importance of doing this work with love made of justice, compassion, empathy, and boundaries.

Love is not always gentle. In fact, I believe love can actually be rather rude. Love shows up when we set our own boundaries and love shows up when we respect and honor the boundaries another person has set for themselves, whether we like those boundaries or not.

Love is willing to be uncomfortable. To sit in the discomfort of unraveling our own familial and cultural training. To sit in the discomfort of unraveling the trauma that lives within us and sorting what is ours, what is our ancestors, and what has absolutely nothing to do with us or our lineage. To sit in the discomfort of sometimes being wrong and causing harm and doing the work to make amends. To sit in the discomfort of acceptance that we are not always in control, and that sometimes honoring the boundaries of another person can be personally and emotionally painful (not harmful, painful) for us.

Love is fierce. And can be filled with rage. Love can be loud and bold and demanding.

Love is sometimes gentle too. And can be quiet. Love is supportive, always. Love is in the giving and receiving. To ourselves and to others. Always and in all ways.

Love is not a bully. It is not used as a weapon to cause harm or manipulate and impose unrealistic expectations.

Love is a comrade. It is a tool we can use to deconstruct our oppressive culture. It is a tool we can use to create a new world where there is justice and safeness and the embracing of differences.

Love is speaking and listening and hearing. Love is respecting and honoring.

The Christian bible states in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 ::

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

I can agree with most of this. And, I do believe that love is not blind, that while it doesn’t keep score and it does trust, it is always smart and aware and knows who and when to trust and when not. Love is not gullible.

Love has been a tool for change within myself for most of my life and in particular I have leaned on love this year. Love for my Self. The love of friends and family. Love as a verb. Love as a lesson. Love as a breathing, shifting, thing that both has torn me apart and put me back together.

May we all use love as a tool for destruction of our own old harmful patterns and ways and for creation of new ways of being which invite ourselves and others to live in compassion, empathy, justice, and truth.

/../

This essay originally written in December 2017 for the subscribers of my newsletter.  I edited it a bit for publication here.  If you’d like to subscribe to my weekly love letters you can fill out the form on this page.

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Secular Blessing for Becoming Unleashed 2018

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

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

May we…

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

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

Dismantle the shame we carry in our bones and being

Embrace our beauty, our power, our voice

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

…

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

In case you missed the essays exploring the topics and ideas we’ll be examining in this circle, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring 

Why the Becoming Unleashed circle?

The essence of Becoming Unleashed

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 

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Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

 

Without the ‘dark’ I would never understand how light the ‘light’ really is. And while I don’t care for the dark, I do appreciate what it does for the light. ~Craig D. Lounsbrough

Change is supremely inconvenient, uncomfortable and naturally scary. Yet we only move through life through the process of change, reinvention and renewal, and so bravery is our quintessential rebel for pushing us past our own limiting beliefs and behaviours. Bravery is feeling the fear, immersing yourself into it and through it so you can come out the other side. ~Christine Evangelou, Rocks Into Roses: Life Lessons and Inspiration for Personal Growth

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. ~Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Within each of us is strength, power, and daring.  Our own.  That of our ancestors.  Within each of us is resilience, love, hope.  Within each of us is a knowing, a trusting, a believing.  It is there.  We may not feel it.  We may not be able to admit it is there, we may not be able to see it, but it is there all the same.

The work of reclamation is to unearth and reclaim these parts of our Self that we have buried, pushed down, ignored, or truly did not believe existed.  It requires us to reclaim our bodies as ours, our strengths and skills and talents, our inner power and knowing, our courage, bravery, and daring to break patterns and cycles, to become the people we want to be.

Reclaiming those parts of our Self we thought lost, or worse that they never existed, is work that can only be done after the work of releasing and creating space, and allowing for the time of renewal to integrate the openness into our being.  Once that space exists and is truly a part of us, we can begin to see those parts of us we couldn’t before.  Those parts of us that we were told were vile, were ugly, or simply weren’t there in the first place.

Reclamation is the time of deeply and viscerally realizing that what we were told is “too much” about us is actually our strength, our power.  Of realizing all the ways we were told we are “not enough” is actually where our courage, our bravery, our daring lives.  Of realizing all the shame we carry isn’t ours, that we were never meant to have it living within our being.

Then, once we have all these realizations and can feel them in our bodies and at the core of our being, the work of reclamation becomes relatively easy.

I’ve described all these stages of this work in a linear fashion, first one then the next then the next.  And while it is true that in many ways one stage does need to proceed the next it is also true that we are constantly doing all these stages of this work simultaneously.

I envision the path of this work to be like a three dimensional spiral.  We travel along it, around and around, up and then down, revisiting the same narratives, the same wounds, but at different layers and from different perspectives each time.  The work is perhaps never actually “complete” and yet with each layer we find our ways closer to the person we truly want to be, the person we truly are, and finding more and more freedom from the leash of our own trauma and the trauma of living in our current western culture.

I talk more about these ideas in the 6-minute video here.

This essay is the fourth and final of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you have found it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

In case you missed the previous essays, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring (this essay)