personal trauma

Our shame narratives

January 16, 2020 By gwynn

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare. ~Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

We all carry with us narratives from our families of origin, narratives from our communities, narratives from our greater culture. The stories of how we are too much this or not enough that. The stories about how we should feel shame for what we want, what we do, who we are, that we even exist in the first place.

These narratives didn’t come to us out of the blue. These are stories that have been cultivated for generations and generations, by a greater culture that sees humans as a commodity to be used, but not respected. These stories stem from capitalism, authoritarianism, patriarchy, misogyny. These stories stem from those in power wanting to stay in power and doing whatever they can to keep everyone else in line and doing their bidding.

That is where those stories come from on a meta level. That is how they seep into our communities. Into our families. Into our relationships. Into us.

It is true that our own experiences of abuse feed these stories. Complex trauma only makes those voices louder, only makes the stories seem more true.

And.

I would argue that the abuse of children – sexual, physical, neglect – all stem from this meta source.

Why else would children be beaten if not to be forced to fall in line with the status quo?

Why else would children be molested if not because the abusers were indoctrinated in the idea that children exist to serve others, in any and all capacities?

Why else would children be neglected if the adults weren’t so busy trying to stay alive within a culture that wants to kill them?

I am not dismissing the responsibility of the abusers for their own actions. Regardless of our own experiences of oppression and abuse we are always responsible for how we treat others in the world and whether or not we perpetuate harm.

What I am saying is that these narratives are fed to us from many, many different places. Hearing these narratives is inescapable. If it’s not our family, or our Self that’s telling us how we are too much or not enough and should feel shame, our greater culture definitely is.

These stories are fed to us, from birth. These stories seep into under skin, into our muscles, our sinew, our bones. These stories keep us small, quiet, complicit, compliant.

These stories keep us stuck in harmful (to us and others) patterns and cycles.

These stories impact the ways we relate to others. They have us judging. They have us expecting. They have us assuming. They have us demanding.

These stories keep us disconnected from our Self. Our true self. Our tend, broken open heart, Self. The self that knows, in its very being these narratives are total bullshit. The Self that asks over and over, why do you keep believing these lies?

Because a truth is, we are not too much.

A truth is, we are exactly enough.

A truth is, we get to take up space. And there is plenty of space for everyone.

A truth is, we get to state our wants, whatever they are, without shame.

A truth is, we get to have our boundaries respected.

A truth is, we are exactly enough just as we are.

A truth is, we can do the work of untangling all this cultural indoctrination and trauma.

Let’s do it. Let’s undo the generations of training we have living in our bodies and minds. Let’s begin to feel good in our own skin. Let’s find our ways to connection, real connection, without losing pieces of ourselves in the process.

We can do it. I know we can.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weeklyish newsletter on January 14, 2020. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

We will be exploring these narratives in my seven week writing course Embodied Writing :: Too much, not enough, & shame. We begin Monday, January 27, 2020. To learn more and register, click here.

Trauma & releasing shame

January 6, 2020 By gwynn

Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change. ~Brene Brown,I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame

Shame is a soul eating emotion. ~Carl Gustav Jung

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was—and am—innocent. ~Ellen Bass, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

One of the ironies of trauma, is that for those of us who have experienced it, particularly relational trauma, we feel shame. We, the victims, the survivors, the ones who were harmed, feel the shame of the experience. We carry the burden of being “tainted” or “damaged” or “broken.”

This shame often leads us to silencing ourselves, even if the perpetrator didn’t specifically tell us not to talk about what happened. We don’t tell when the abuse is happening or immediately after the assault occurred. We don’t tell the story because we are afraid of what people will think, what they will say, how they will respond.

We don’t tell because we somehow think what happened was our fault. That we somehow encouraged the other person to harm us, that if only we’d done x or hadn’t done y.

When we are living in shame, and unable to share our stories, we are also unable to deeply connect with others. We don’t allow ourselves to be truly
seen and so intimacy, deep emotional intimacy, isn’t possible.

Sometimes though, it’s not only others that we can’t share our stories with. Sometimes we can’t admit our own stories to ourselves. Or we can admit parts of them, but not others. Or we can acknowledge the stories but are unable to examine them, explore them, become curious about the ways these events from our lives are still impacting us today.

The events from our past do impact us in our present, and will continue to, until we are able to dig into our own unconscious and automatic reactions, including the stories we have about being too much and not enough.

Shame runs rampant in those stories. I think most of us can make a long list of all the ways we aren’t enough (not smart enough, not pretty enough, not vocal enough, not articulate enough, not successful enough…) as well as all the ways we are too much (too loud, too sexual, too smart, too large, too picky…). We are never “right;” there is always something “wrong” with us, something that needs to be “fixed.”

Trauma does this to us. Our culture does this to us. And often times, intentionally or now, our families of origin do this to us. Unearthing, unraveling, examining these stories is no easy feat. And doing it while remaining present in our bodies can be even more complex.

Shame comes with trauma. Releasing the shame takes intention, time, practice and requires us to come into our bodies, examining our histories and our stories and seeing how they impacted us, and how that isn’t our fault.

Because what was done to us, what happened to us was not, and is not, our fault.

And.

Changing patterns, cycles, and harmful behaviors we have because of these experiences is our responsibility so we do not continue to pass trauma on to future generations.

/../

This essay was originally published to my weekly(ish) newsletter on January 14, 2019. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

We will be exploring our stories of being too much, not enough, and the shame that comes with all that in the seven week program Embodied Writing :: Too Much, Not Enough, & Shame. We begin on Monday, January 27, 2020. There is a sliding scale fee. Learn more and register here.

The importance of grief work in our trauma processing

November 18, 2019 By gwynn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. Yes it would.

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

We have experienced a lot of loss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/../

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

The stages & tasks of grief

September 11, 2019 By gwynn

Every broken heart has screamed at one time or another: Why can’t you see who I truly am? ~Shannon L. Alder

When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief … Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance … What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day. ~Ranata Suzuki

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me. ~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Most of us have heard of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). It is a standard way of looking at grief and how we as humans process it. Sometimes folks think it is a linear progression, that once we finish one stage we’re done with it and move onto the next. And grief doesn’t actually work that way. We may feel each of the stages at different times or we may feel them all at once or we may have both experiences at different times.

During my clinical internship we utilized Worden’s Tasks of Grief, which are a bit less known, and I feel more powerful and representative of how we actually process grief, whereas I see the stages of grief as the emotions we cycle through when grieving.

The tasks of grief are:
Task 1 :: To accept the reality of the loss
Task 2 :: To work through the pain of grief
Task 3 :: To adjust to an environment in which the deceased are missing
Task 4 :: To find an enduring connection to the deceased while embarking on a new life

As I’ve said before, we don’t only grieve the deceased though. We grieve relationships that have come to an end. We grieve our children growing up and leaving home (which we also simultaneously celebrate their achievement). We grieve paths not taken and choices not made.

We have the opportunity to grieve what was taken from us when we were young, either through abuse or neglect.

And we can utilize the information of the stages and tasks of grief to do this work.

When I look at my own abuse, I think about the little girl who existed before it and then who essentially died because of what was done to her. That may sound dramatic to some. And it is true that the abuse any of experienced changed the course of our lives, irrevocably. The young, innocent, trusting person who existed prior to the chronic abuse and or neglect ceased to exist and grew into the people we are today.

We will never know what our lives would have been without the abuse and neglect we experienced. We will never know who those innocent children would have grown up to be.

When we are able to begin to consider all that was lost, we can then start to feel the emotions that come with that loss. The denial (which can also show up as it wasn’t that bad). The anger (or rage of what was done to us). The bargaining. The depression. The acceptance (which isn’t about it being okay, but about understanding these things happened and they deeply impact us).

We will cycle through all these emotions, often having more than one at the same time. This is part of grieving what was lost, yes. It is also part of processing the trauma itself. Of allowing ourselves to come into our bodies and actually feel the sadness of what was done.

And while feeling the emotions and sensations is vital, we also need to find ways to process them, to allow them to flow and move out of our bodies, minds, beings. We need to feel yes, and also to not get stuck in the feelings.

Emotions want to flow. They want to move. They want to come and go.

And since many of us have lived our lives at least partially dissociated and suppressing our feelings (emotions and the physiological sensations that go with them) we need to learn how to process them.

Worden’s tasks give us a way to do that. They give us a framework. One where we can acknowledge and accept the losses we experienced because of our trauma. Once we have acknowledged them we can then work through those emotions and sensations, feeling them, allowing them, and knowing they are valid and real. To accept the impacts of the abuse and how it has influenced our choices and lives and to create the space to ask all the what if questions we want. And to find ways to connect to those younger parts of us, to let them know they are safe now, and that you will keep them safe.

It is intense work. It is non-linear. Each individual comes at this work in the ways that are right for them. Often we move back and forth between tasks or are working through more than one task at a time. There is no one right way to process our trauma or our grief associated with it. We each come to this work in our time and work through it at our own pace.

And it is important work, I believe. Vital. So that we don’t perpetuate harm. So we don’t continue cycles and patterns that hurt us and can hurt others. So we can begin to live our lives on our own terms, becoming more and more self-aware and learning to shift and change the ways we respond to others and ourselves.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on September 8, 2019. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays (and more) you can subscribe here.

We will be utilizing both the stages and tasks of grief in the seven week writing program Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief. To learn more and register you can go here. We begin on September 16, 2019.

Seasonal Grief

September 5, 2019 By gwynn

So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love. ~E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone. ~Fred Rogers

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. ~Anne Lamott

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike the month of August. Historically it is month filled with death anniversaries (of long-time important pets, people, and a couple long term relationships). I feel extra anxious throughout the month as my body re-experiences the losses of years past and my mind going through another round of processing. August has a heaviness to it for me. It feels oppressive and generally speaking all my “stuff” is really up, front and center, leaving me exhausted at the least and feeling like my life is spinning out of control at the worst.

This past month was no exception to any of this. And to say I am thrilled to be in September is the understatement of the century.

It is also true that this August has also been filled with new found appreciation of this season. Of the heat. The sun. Of those little in-between spaces where I can breathe. Those joyful moments of watching my kids enjoy the sun and water and sand and driftwood; as well as those happy moments of retreating to the shade, eating popsicles or painting on our deck, and cuddling on the couch watching shows together.

This August, the first August in my memory, was filled with both ands.

Truth is all my Augusts were likely filled with lots of both ands. Lots of dark and lots of light. And because of where I was in my life I couldn’t see it all. This is what it is. And it is true several Augusts I was deep in the raw and traumatic grief of recent losses, and so seeing any light in those dark times simply wasn’t possible.

Both experiences, past and most recently last August(s), are true. Both are valid.

It is also true that now we are in September I feel like I breathe better. Like a weight has been lifted. Like all my stuff that has been stirred and swirled up for the past 31 days is settling down and I can get back to being the person I want to be in the world instead in a constant struggle with my own automatic trauma responses and focusing on little else than slowing them down so I don’t damage fragile relationships or even the more stable ones.

I believe we all have times of the year that do this to us, that are filled with anniversaries and or stir up all our “stuff”, our deep woundings, our painful losses. For many this time of year is the holiday season. For some it is summer. For others we have a specific month that just feels like Hell Month. Some experience multiple times during the year that are like this.

In all this stirring, there is grief. Old grief. New layers of old grief. New grief.

Grief is a part of life. Learning to feel, to process, to be in, and to allow it flow… this is our work.

Acknowledging how that grief shows up for us – in our bodies, in my minds, in our moods, in our emotions, the ways we interact with others. Learning to slow down and recognize what is happening, how grief is affecting us and our lives, that is not a simple or easy process. And it can be done.

This is the work of our own unraveling and rebuilding. The work of falling apart and putting ourselves back together. The work of dismantling and creating something new. The work of deep love, and the heartache that we open ourselves up to because of it.

We all have much to grieve. Death, any type of death, is a transition. This is true as much for the person or thing that has died as it is for those of us still left standing. We each experience death within our own lives, within our Self, differently, and still we all experience it. Change, even good change, means the end of something. Every beginning is preceded by an ending.

And.

There is a beauty in grief. It means we loved. We loved deeply.

As we begin our grief work of what could have been, that What If grief I’ve written about before, we find the deep love we have for our Self, our past selves, our current Self, and the Self we are becoming. There can be no grief without love. And that is what makes grief work beautiful, all the love that is a necessary part of the work is revealed.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly(ish) newsletter on September 1, 2019. It has been edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays (and more) you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

In Embodied Writing :: Unspoken Grief, we will spent some time unearthing and embracing all the love we have for our younger Selves, our present self, and our future Selves. If you would like to learn more you can go here. Partial scholarships (of 50%) are available for those who are called to this work but cannot afford it.

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