Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Being in the present

By

I’ll never try to keep you
But I’ll try to be
The kind of place
That makes you 
Always want to stay.
~J. Warren Welch

Never expect
Never assume
Never demand.
Just let it be,
If it’s meant to be,
It will happen.
~Unknown

Never chase what doesn’t want to be caught.  People leave and we want them back but what we really need, is to love ourselves more than they every could.  You are worth more than a love that didn’t stay.
~Ventum

When we live with unprocessed complex trauma, we have a very low tolerance for the unknown, for liminal space, for chaos (and we view chaos as anything unknown or unforseen). We like to have plans.  We like to know what is coming.  We like to have the future all mapped out.  

We struggle with last minute changes.  We are challenged when letting things unfold in their own time.  

We have a need for our lives to go a certain way, for our plans to work out exactly as we planned them.  We have our futures fully mapped out and deviations from that cause us overwhelming stress and anxiety.  

We feel uncomfortable in the present, in the here and now.  We are constantly doing-doing-doing, looking for the next thing, planning the next event, the next project, the next stage of a relationship, next promotion, next, next, next.

This discomfort in the here and now can be overwhelming.  With our sympathetic nervous system activated and constantly on high alert our “normal” way of being in the world is looking for escape from the present. It has us looking to the future to try to avoid harm.  

We struggle with staying present in the now because our systems don’t feel safe.  They don’t feel safe in the now, they don’t feel safe in the future, because they weren’t actually safe in the past. 

Learning to teach our activated sympathetic nervous system that we are actually safe in the moment, this moment now, is the only way we can move away from always being in the future and come back to the here and now.

Self regulation and co-regulation are important parts of learning how to feel a sense of safeness in the present.  Helping our nervous systems slow down, to not always be on high alert is a skill that most of us weren’t taught or modeled in our childhood or adolescence.  These skills don’t come naturally for us, and so as we begin to learn them, they may feel strange, uncomfortable, even wrong.  

The reason they feel so strange is that we are doing something new and different.  We are beginning to grow new neural pathways, which can be a slow process.  Learning new ways of being can be awkward, and there will be times we just don’t want to do it.  Being present can simply feel too much, too overwhelming, the work too hard.  There will be those days.  

And.

Being able to be present, be in the now, can be an amazing experience.  To not have the pressure of needing something to turn out a certain way, to not have an endgame, to allow things to be as they are, to unfold as they will, can be freeing.  

Once we move through the discomfort of the new and different, once we have taken the time to grow the new neural pathways and practiced new ways of being, our sense of safeness in the present moment allows us to enjoy the now, as it is, without needing to escape into the future.  It allows us to let situations unfold, in their own time, without needing to micromanage them or try to dictate every moment or the final outcome.  

It allows us to feel good in our own skin.  In this now.  As it is.  To enjoy our life, and yes to feel the depths of the sad moments too – the difference being we are feeling it all in the moment, instead of stuffing things down to leak out at a later time.  

Being present, allowing the now to be Enough, is tricky business.  It asks us to face our demons, to process our trauma, to be accountable for our own actions, to do the work of learning to self-regulate in helpful ways, to connect to and re-integrate the lost or hidden parts of our Self.  This is intense work, it is hard work.

And it is work that I believe is so very worth it. 

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter on August 8, 2020. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

We will be exploring these ideas, and how to change the ways we are in our relationships with others and with ourselves in my new six month group Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Relationship.  You can learn more about it here. 

Safeness & settling into the in-between

By

The In-Between somehow makes you feel grimy, like all those sights and sounds and sensations and smells have stuck to you, like you’ve been rolling around in a preschool art class’s trash can. ~Michael Reaves, Mallory Reaves, The Silver Dream

The In-Between place, what I have often referred to as The Goo, can be a very messy, very uncomfortable place. It a place of unknowns.  A place that is familiar in some ways and yet filled with the unfamiliar.  

For those of us with unprocessed trauma living within us, unknowns can be uncomfortable to say the least and at times downright terrifying.  I know in the past I have been a planner.  Well, I still am a planner, but to much less of a degree.  In the past I would have plans A through ZZZ, thinking through all the possible scenarios and back up plans for each scenario or possible derailment to the previous plan.  It was exhausting, and yet it gave me a sense of (not real) safeness.  It gave me a sense of (not real) control.  It gave me space to breathe and not completely freak out if plan A, B, C, or DDD, didn’t work out.

I understand why I was the way I was.  The chaos of my childhood left me in desperate need of stability, consistency, and knowing what the hell was going to happen next in every moment.  I wasn’t one for “surprises” and when plans had to suddenly, unexpectedly change, it would send me into a fight/flight/freeze meltdown.  

I don’t react quite so strongly anymore to changes.  I still have my feelings and depending on what the change is sometimes my complex trauma stuff comes up.  But I don’t need a million fall back plans anymore and I can actually sit in the in-between spaces of not really knowing what will be happening in the next days, months, or years with relative comfort.  Or when there’s not relative comfort I can tolerate the discomfort without freaking the eff out.

I didn’t get to this place by chance.  It has taken a lot of hard work, intention, and a ton of self-compassion. 

Being able to sit in a space of discomfort is no simple task.  It requires us to be able to be present – in our bodies, in the moment, in our environment, with the people around us.  When we have complex trauma coursing through us, all of these things are almost impossible.

Almost.

We can do it.  

And.

It takes practice, commitment, self-compassion, and time.  These shifts don’t happen over night.  It can take months for small shifts to happen.  It can take years for bigger shifts.

And it can happen.  We can do it.

Learning to regulate ourselves, to calm our nervous systems, takes time and energy.  Most of us didn’t learn life-long helpful ways to self-regulate.  When we were children we did what we needed to do to survive – both physically and psychologically.  That generally meant for most of us leaving our bodies, leaving the present, living in our heads.  As we grew older we may have found ourselves constantly stuck in the past or future or both, but rarely if ever in the here and now.  Being in our bodies, being present to our physical sensations was too overwhelming and activating.  

This is not our fault.  We each did the best we could with what we had.  

And this disconnection from our bodies, from the present moment, from our whole Self, can also leave us feeling empty, lonely, and disconnected.  Our relationships, with ourselves and others, don’t go overly deep.  We have our walls and armor that prevents others from getting too close.  

This works for us until it doesn’t.  And when it doesn’t work for us anymore we are left not knowing what to do or how to shift things or wondering if we even are capable of shifting things, of being in the world differently.

We can.  Again, it takes work, intention, compassion, and time.  It takes all of these in combination.  Not one part alone will allow things to shift.  All the time in the world won’t process our trauma or teach us to self regulate if we aren’t doing the work, if we don’t have the intention to do different, if we don’t cultivate some self-compassion.  Because we will mess up, we will fall back on old patterns and cycles; on old ways of being that served us so well for some many years (until they didn’t anymore).  

And.

With work, intention, compassion, and time we will fall back on those old ways of being less and less.  We will find our ways to self-regulation.  We will learn where we end and others begin (a.k.a. boundaries).  We will find our ways to center and ground.  We will begin to understand we are not alone (a.k.a. internal and external resources).  

All things come to an end.  All things shift and evolve.  Whether we want them to or not.  How we respond to the shifting and evolving is ultimately up to us.  We certainly have the choice to remain in our activated states, to remain hyper-alert, to resist and avoid to our heart’s content.  

We can also choose to the do the hard work.  To make the commitment to find some peace for ourselves.  To learn to self-regulate.  To come home into our bodies and the present.  To accept the shifts and changes and evolutions as they come and do our own work within and outside of them to continue our own shifting and evolving.

It’s not easy.  Often it’s not fun.  Often it is messy.  And as I have said many times before and will likely say many more times again, I believe it is deeply worth it.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on July 22, 2018. It has been edited and revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

On being an adult in relationship

By

Our work, then, is not to abolish our connection to the past but to take it into account without being at its mercy.  The question is how much the past interferes with our chances at healthy relating and living in accord with our deepest needs, values, and wishes. ~David Richo, How To Be An Adult In Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving

David Richo states in How To Be An Adult In Relationships, that in order to be an adult, we need to be self-aware and mindful in our actions. 

 In other words, self-awareness is vital on it’s own, but until it is coupled with mindful and intentional action (or inaction), we still aren’t fully acting in our frontal lobe, or “adult” brain.

Those of us who experienced chronic trauma in childhood have a lot to be angry about.  We have a lot to be sad about.  We have a lot to rage and scream and wail about.  I don’t believe anyone would deny that.  The atrocities that were done to too many of us as children are horrifying and all of it is held in our body and mind memory. 

The trauma doesn’t want to stay trapped within us however, it wants to get out.  This is great news if we are in therapy and doing a combination of talk and somatic therapies to help move that trauma on out of our systems and being.  It’s not so great news if we aren’t and so we try to stuff it down and eventually it bubbles up and out and we spew it all over an unsuspecting passer-by.

That passer-by could be our children, our intimate partner(s), our friends, other family members.  It could even be ourselves.

It is understandable that we have so much hurt and torment living within us.  I makes sense that it all needs to get out.  It is not okay for us to lash out at others.

Even when they cause us harm.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Even when  a person causes us harm, it is not acceptable for us to lash out and cause them harm.

The whole “two wrongs doesn’t make a right” thing.

Here’s a thing, though.  For most of us, I don’t think our “eruptions” or “lashing out” are intentional.  I know for me it mostly certainly isn’t mindful.  It comes from a primal place within that only cares about our survival. And so when we are already wounded, like any animal, if we get poked or prodded we go into fight/flight/freeze because we see any hurt as an attack and we need to protect and defend ourselves.

Rollo May wrote: “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between 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.“

The work of self-awareness is to be able to grow that capacity to pause and allow space for us to mindfully choose the response we want to to actually have.

This is not to say there isn’t a part of us that wants our response to be screaming at the top of our lungs and stomping our feet.

It is to say however, that we need to take the moment to consider the longer term impacts of us screaming and stomping our feet.  And if the longer term impacts actually cause us and other (more) harm, then perhaps we could consider a different response.

Shifting from a space of automatic, mindless, response to one where there has been space created between being activated and actually responding, is no simple task.  We cannot undo the habit of a lifetime of automatic, mindless responding simply because we decide we want to do so.

It takes time.

AND.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, learning to regulate our systems: calm our sympathetic nervous system, activate our parasympathetic nervous system, move the stored up cortisol out of our system.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, connecting to our boundaries and coming into our bodies.  Learning to truly understand, on a very visceral level, where we end and another begins, physically, psychically, emotionally.

It takes practice, a LOT of practice, finding our ways to ground and our own center, being able to find our way to not only be in but stay in, the present moment, despite any and all the discomfort we may be feeling.

And after all of that, it takes practice, a LOT of practice, to break the patterns and cycles that we have become so accustomed to.  To actually not engage in an argument even though we may be being provoked, to walk away, to calm ourselves in the moment, to bite our tongues, to actually feel empathy for the person causing harm.

None of this comes easy.  Or at least, none of it has come easy to me.

Changing life long, if not generations old, patterns and cycles takes effort.  It requires compassion.  And we will all screw it up along the way, slipping back into old ways of being because that is what is known.  

And.

It can be done.  With practice.  

What is interesting about changing these patterns and cycles is that as we begin to do so on our end, the person(s) on the other side may try to up their game. When this happens it can be so tempting to engage.  Believe me, I know!  And, it is all the more important for us to continue practicing our own work, to continue growing that “pause”, to continue our own work of breaking harmful patterns and cycles.

Eventually those who try to engage us will change too.  Either they will simply go out of our lives because they aren’t getting the emotional charge from us anymore, or they too will begin to create space, to cultivate and grown that pause, to break their own patterns and cycles.

We can’t do any of that for them though.  We can only do our own work.  Even in those moments when, right then, we really just want to scream and stomp, and perhaps, especially in those moments.

In rebellious solidarity, always.

/../

This essay was originally written in May 2018 for my weekly newsletter and has been updated and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

*Post now on Substack.

On Anger

By

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. ~Joe Klaas, Twelve Steps to Happiness

Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness. ~Viktor Frankl

In the Unleashed Woman Book Club call a couple years ago we got to talking about the idea of “going with the flow”.  The conversation was inspired by a FB post by Toi Smith.  Toi wrote ::

“silence is beautiful.

not speaking up is sexy.
going with the flow makes you tolerable.
doing everything without complaint makes you loveable.
making yourself always available is the expectation.

-love letter to women from patriarchy”

We talked about all the ways we have been trained and conditioned to go with the flow.  To not speak up.  Eventually this led to a conversation about anger.

A couples therapist recommended a book to my now ex-husband and I about anger when we were trying to find ways to save our marriage.  It’s not really an anger management book per se, but it talks about all the ways anger is bad for us and how it “destroys our lives” (that’s a direct quote from the book).

I’m guessing you can imagine my response to this book. Wanting to throw it across the room was the most tame of my responses.

I did skim through it.  There were some interesting, and perhaps in the right context, valuable exercises.  But the premise that anger will ruin our lives had me rolling my eyes and wanting to burn the book.

In general my issues with the book, beyond this uninformed premise, are:

1. It does not come from a trauma-informed perspective
2. It does not come from a systems perspective
3. There is not discussion of the neuroscience or neurobiology of anger (it did talk about the physiological affects of anger)
4. Because it does not come from a systems perspective, it does not tie anger to social/political/institutional reasons for anger
5. There is zero discussion of epigenetics and how anger (or other unprocessed by our ancestors emotions) may be passed down
6. It did not offer any somatic-informed approaches (it only talked about the mind and thoughts)
7. It was written by three white middle aged men with PhDs who I am assuming are at least upper middle class in economic status and carry with them all the privilege that comes with this.

Again, admittedly I only skimmed the book, however the general sense I got was that anger is bad.  And there was no science to back up their claim.

(That said, again, the exercises in the book, which are mindfulness based, could be helpful for people in processing some anger and in helping to control their (potentially harmful) actions that stem from anger.  We can’t always throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if the baby is mostly made up of elitist and privileged bullshit).

I have become very weary of anyone who claims that anger is always a “bad” thing.  Or that is it always destructive (and in these cases destruction = bad.  My view is that often destruction = good, growth, change.  But that may be another conversation for another day). That we should move past anger as quickly as possible.  That anger will “destroy our relationships and our lives”.

Anger, as I have shared before, is an active emotion.  It needs movement.  It requires physical, emotional, and cognitive movement.

What this means, is that when we are in the height of anger, we do need to physically do something to help release it.  This could be going for a walk or run, screaming into a pillow, punching a pillow/punching bag/mattress/cushion, doing jumping jacks/pushups, running up and down stairs, etc.  Once enough adrenaline and cortisol (two chemicals that are produced by our bodies when we are stressed, which includes when we are angry) is burned off, we can then move into calming practices, like the nervous system soothing exercises I share with you each week.  But those chemicals have to be burned off and begin to flush out of our systems first otherwise our nervous system will stay activated and we won’t be able to fully connect to our frontal lobe (where logic and empathy live).

It also means that when we are angry, not in a rage, more that we are simmering, that we can use this anger as a motivator for action and change.
It means it can be an encouragement to have those difficult conversations with our partner about how they have hurt us, or those difficult conversations with our boss about how we aren’t compensated fairly, or to make difficult decisions that will change the trajectory of our lives.

Sometimes there are other emotions beneath our anger.  Sometimes there is sadness, grief, frustration, hurt, betrayal, or any other number of emotions. And it is important to be self-aware and to recognize when our anger is protecting us from some of those even more challenging emotions, particularly those of hurt, betrayal, and grief.

And it also is true that sometimes we are simply angry.

Angry because of any number of injustices that take place daily in the world and possibly even in our lives.

Our rage is valid.

Historically speaking and present day speaking.

When we take the opinion that anger is a “bad” or “negative” emotion or that it will “destroy our lives” then our tendency is to shut our anger down (or at least to try).  To stuff it.  To ignore it.  To pretend we aren’t really angry at all.

Let me tell you something, that doesn’t work out so well in the end.

Remember how I said anger is an active emotion?  It will come out, even if you (try to) stuff or shut it down.  It will show up as:
• stomach/gastrointestinal and/or digestive issues
• depression
• anxiety
• chronic pain
• chronic illness
• mood swings
• irritability

It will manifest itself, in one way or another.  And you can choose to try to ignore it, or you can meet it, shake its hand, and find ways to release, process, and be (positively) motivated by the anger.

Anger in and of itself is not bad.

Sometimes how we act when angry can be harmful to both ourselves and others.  And finding ways to release, process and be motivated to healthy action is important.  I am in no way condoning physical, emotional or psychological violence to ourselves or others using the excuse that we were angry.

We can all learn to find that space between “stimulus and response,” to expand it and find our ways to responding to and with our anger in appropriate ways.

And, because sometimes some people act inappropriately, or even in harmful ways, when angry, does not mean that anger itself is “bad” or will “destroy our lives.”

Anger can be our way of protesting the status quo.  It can be our way of saying we will no longer go with the flow.  We will no longer be compliant and complicit.  We will use our voice and our intelligence and our resources to promote justice, to demand justice.

So, remember::
Our rage is valid.  It is the culmination of generations of rage that has been suppressed and passed down.  What we choose to do with this rage, well, that is up to each of us, individually and collectively.

/../
This essay was originally written for my newsletter in September 2017 and has been edited for publication here.

If you would like to receive my weekly newsletter you can sign up here.

Slowing into the pause & breaking harmful patterns

By

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

she learned to walk away
from everything
that didn’t inspire her
toward greater things
~Mark Anthony

a successful life is created
with two words: yes and no
have the courage to say yes
only when it feels right
and no to the old patterns
that do not serve you
~yung pueblo

One way that complex trauma impacts us in our adult lives is in our relationships, be they with friends, family, or intimate partners. Many of us with complex trauma are not good at tolerating painful emotions, like sadness, frustration, or disappointment. 

In fact, most of us don’t have a lot of tolerance for the more “positive” emotions like happiness, joy, and pleasure either.

Any feeling – sensation and emotion – can feel too much and can trigger our fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The feelings can be overwhelming and so we need a way to release them, to get them out of us, because actually feeling them is intolerable.

So, we start fights. Or turn away and cut people out of our lives. In the moment we may freeze and feel stuck or placate and people please and then later move into the space of either wanting to fight or flee. Depending on the situation we do one or the other of these or we do some in rapid succession. 

Our reaction is generally immediate and coming directly from our back (or reptile) brain. There is no thought that is going into it. We don’t slow down to engage our front brain and are fully in our survival instinct. Because feeling our feelings feels like our actual lives are in danger. It feels like they might consume us. It feels like we won’t survive the sensations and emotions that are swirling within us.

I know for me a go to reaction was always to flee. And by flee I mean turn my back and cut people out of my life. One disappointment, one time of feeling rejected or abandoned, and it was “proof” that the person wasn’t trustworthy and therefore I needed to shut them out of my life. My armor would go up and if need be I would start fights if they wouldn’t “let” me leave. 

It has taken a lot of time, therapy, practice, patience, and self compassion to find my way to pause between the action of an emotion being activated and responding.

Because for most of my life I reacted, immediately, and without thought. What I want for my life, for my relationships, is for me to be able to thoughtfully respond, to slow down and evaluate the facts of the situation and previous situations so that I can respond intentionally and mindfully.

This has meant coming into my body. This has meant learning to tolerate all those intolerable sensations and emotions. This has meant practicing keeping my front brain (where logic, reasoning, creativity, problem solving, and compassion live) online while also experiencing the sensations and emotions that live in my back brain.

It hasn’t meant stuffing my feelings down. 

It has meant allowing myself to experience them and learning to know they won’t actually kill me. They will be uncomfortable, I may not like it, but I certainly won’t die.

When we are able to engage our front brain while also experiencing our feelings, we can begin to look at situations more objectively. We can look for patterns, for habits, for cycles. We slow down not to make excuses for the other person, but to see if our own pain is actually stemming fully from something they did or said or if it also stems from a long ago wound that never healed. 

And then we can decide how we want to respond to the person. We can intentionally decide if this is an opportunity for our own personal growth and processing. We can decide if it is an opportunity for us to communicate our needs, to repair in relationship and to stay. Or to communicate our needs, set a boundary, and possibly leave.

It is true that when another person triggers our feelings of disappointment, frustration, abandonment, and or betrayal that it was indeed their action or words that did this. It is true that our hurt is in part due to the what the other person did or said.

And.

They don’t deserve the full force of our fury or rage or pain, most of which comes from past hurts from others we trusted.

Sometimes when another person triggers our painful feelings it isn’t intentional, or may be a matter of circumstance or what they did or said is actually a perfectly reasonable or normal thing, but it sets off our alarms anyhow. Sometimes these triggers are not an indication of who they are as a person.

And honestly, sometimes it is.

Which is why we need the pause. So we can slow ourselves down and determine what we actually know about the other person. What we actually know about ourselves. What patterns we have seen. What other actions and words we have witnessed or not. 

We need the pause so we can engage our frontal lobe and respond in a way that lets us stand in our own integrity and authenticity. Without needing to cause another pain. Without lashing out. Without cutting people out because in that moment we are hurting and find it unbearable.

The pause requires us to be in our bodies, to be able to tolerate uncomfortable even painful emotions and sensations. It also allows us to enjoy the fun and pleasurable emotions and sensations that can also a part of living as a human.

Learning to live embodied, to tolerate, experience, and sometimes even enjoy the sensations and emotions of our fully human lives is a life long process. There are not five easy steps and then you are done. It is not a one time thing we can check off. It is a constant practice that will have its own ebbs and flows.

The pause will not come to us quickly. It will take time. At first you will notice while you are reacting that you are indeed having an immediate response. With time you will be able to “bring yourself down” more smoothly and quickly. Then, you will begin to notice that you are about to lash out and eventually stop it. In more time, with more practice, you will be able to catch yourself at the very beginning of being triggered. You will be able to feel the sensations and emotions and also be able to explore them, analyze them and the situation logically. And then intentionally decide how we want to respond.

Having patience and compassion for ourselves during this process, while learning to come into our body and to tolerate all the different, varied, and nuanced sensations and feelings and learning how to find that breath, that pause, when some or all our old wounds are triggered is vital and part of the process.

It is true that what was done to us by others is not our fault, we are not to blame for their actions. And we are responsible to learn to respond to new hurts in ways that hold us in our own integrity, in a way that does not continue to pass on harmful patterns, in ways that allow us to break painful cycles for ourselves and the generations to come.

/…/

To read more of my essays, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.