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Love is a word

May 7, 2020 By gwynn

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.

Filed Under: Attachment, body love, boundaries, breaking cycles, breaking patterns, Collective Relational Trauma, Community, Connection, Consent, discomfort, Expansion, love, Relating with trauma, Relationships, Release, self-love

Breaking open

January 27, 2020 By gwynn

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 few months.  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.  It has been in part me showing up as me, for me, and for you.

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.  I started “dating” eventually, because frankly, I wanted sex.

I wasn’t ready for and honestly, 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.  

I didn’t meet anyone who changed my mind on this for a while, several months.

And then 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.

There are so many details I’m going to leave out.  And 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 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, 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.  And also, in these moments 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 great 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 blackholes 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 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 published in my weekly(ish) newsletter on November 18, 2019. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

Filed Under: Collective Relational Trauma, Complex Trauma, grief, grief and loss, love, processing grief, Relating with trauma, relational trauma, Relationships, self compassion

Breaking open

November 21, 2019 By gwynn

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.

Filed Under: breaking patterns, Collective Relational Trauma, Complex Trauma, cPTSD, grief, grief and loss, love, processing grief, Relating with trauma, relational trauma, Relationships

Love is not a victory march

November 1, 2018 By gwynn

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.

Filed Under: Complex Trauma, Connection, cPTSD, Cultural Relational Trauma, discomfort, Fuck the patrirachy, inter-generational trauma, intergenerational trauma, love, patriarchal wounding, Personal growth, resilience, revolution, Self Actualization, Self Awareness, social justice, social justice informed care, trauma, trauma healing, trauma informed care, Truth

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