Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Putting down the armor

By

Sweetgrl, You have the power to break the cycles that have been passed down to you.  You have the power to dismantle them.  To question them.  To shift them.  To no longer accept them.  ~Anisah Amat

stay open darling, the world needs your kind of softness. ~s.c. lourie

stay soft.  it looks beautiful on you. ~nayyirah waheed

There’s a lyric in Beyonce’s song Daddy Lessons that goes:

Came into this world
Daddy’s little girl
And daddy made a soldier out of me
Oh, oh, oh
Daddy made me dance
And daddy held my hand
Oh, oh, oh
And daddy liked his whisky with his tea
And we rode motorcycles
Blackjack, classic vinyl
Tough girl is what I had to be

Many of us grew up needing to be a Tough Girl™, even though we were (and still are) highly sensitive and emotional people.  There was no room for tears or “weakness” growing up in our homes.  Stoicism was rewarded and a Tough Girl™ I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude was applauded.  Being soft, being sensitive, being emotional in any way was both ridiculed and punished.

Our Tough Girl™ persona has probably served us quite well through most of our lives.  As teenagers it may have been required for us to survive those challenging years of adolescence.  As we grew older our inner Tough Girl may have generally protected us from being hurt too much emotionally, mostly by not letting us actually get close to people or reveal too much of our actual inner workings (and emotions).

But our Tough Girl™ persona, is just that: a persona.  And honestly, it is more than likely that plenty of people saw through it while simultaneously going along with it.  

It is a form of our armor, for certain.  It allows us to rarely feel sadness or hurt and to stay in anger and or defensiveness.  And while this may have been a great survival tool growing up, it turns out it’s not  such a great way to be if you want to be in an emotionally intimate relationship.

Who knew?

Softness does not come easy for many of us.  It may be something we have been working at for years.  It may seem whenever we begin to feel softness, we can only sustain it for a short time before the armor goes up and Tough Girl™ takes charge again. It can be a challenging journey, and even with all our tools and resources we may struggle to allow our vulnerability, our softness, to come through very often.  

Softness, and vulnerability, is related to how we are able to trust.  For those of us with complex trauma trust is rarely an easy thing.  The entire time our brains were forming, we learned to not trust, or more to the point that there wasn’t anyone to trust and that people, particularly adults, were inherently untrustworthy.

And while this armor is incredibly protective in many ways, it is also lonely and even harmful.  The armor, the Tough Girl™ persona, prevents emotional intimacy, which means, in short, that it prevents us from being truly seen.  

If we can’t be truly seen, we are left feeling alone, and cannot meet our very human need to have a sense of belonging nor are we able to develop secure attachments.  

What does this mean?  Well it means that until we are able to be soft, to be vulnerable, appropriately, we will only ever be surviving and not able to to truly thrive.

Survival is important.  It is actually mandatory, from an evolutionary point of view.

Thriving is vital, even though we don’t need to thrive to survive.  

Many of us may not even know what thriving could look like, and we most certainly don’t know what it actually feels like (though perhaps we can imagine).

To me thriving looks like ease.  It looks like softness.  It feels gentle.  It feels loving.  I imagine there is much laughter in thriving.  And probably a lot of tears too.  And in the laughter and the tears there is a being held.  Both being held by ourselves and being held by trusted, and trustworthy, others.

Thriving definitely does not include defensiveness.  It does not include rigidity.  It does not include blaming (ourselves or others).  

It does definitely include compassion.  Empathy.  Love.  Boundaries.  Patience.  Joy as well as grief. 

Having the tools and resources to do this this work, this work of moving away from rigidity, from either/or thinking, into softness and the non-duality of both/and, is always one thing; utilizing them, practicing them, is something different entirely.  Practice is key.  Compassion is key.  Patience with ourselves and others is key.

To softness.  To emotional intimacy.  To thriving.

/../

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

From connection to relationship

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We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness. ~Albert Schweitzer

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous. ~Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

When I began my business/private practice almost eight years ago, my main value, intention, and driving force was connection.  I wanted to connect with others.  I wanted to connect with myself.  I wanted to guide others to connect with their own whole self – body, mind, spirit, and soul.  I wanted us to connect to our breath.  To connect to the present moment. I wanted to connect more with my own family, my community, the greater world.  I wanted the same for others.  Connection.  

Connection was my word for the last part of 2012, all of 2013, and then stayed with me from there on after as a base, a foundation of my work and being in the world.

Connection pushed me out of my comfort zone.  It had me reaching out to people I never would have before.  Connection expanded me in so many good and glorious ways.  The friendships that grew from my own drive for connection are some of the most important in my, and my family’s, life.  

Connection also brought me closer to me.  Connecting with my body, connecting with my mind, connecting with my spirit.  Unearthing and understanding some of the connections within me.  The connections of my traumatic past and the my ways of being in the present.  

And of course the intellectual connections: personal and political, social and self, individual and collective.  The connections between trauma, grief, and embodiment.  The deeper still understanding of systems and our inter-connected-ness as humans on this planet.

So much connection.

And even with all this connection happening, within and outside of me, to my body, to my intellect, to my Self, to my world, I still felt lonely.

Sometimes deeply lonely.

And not only lonely, but also alone.

A thing about trauma, is that it has us self-isolate.  It also impacts our attachment styles and relationships.  If we experienced trauma young enough, and the trauma was inflicted by primary or even secondary care-givers, our ability to trust others is deeply impacted.

In other words, it affects our willingness and ability to form deep, vulnerable, emotionally intimate relationships.

Which then, leaves us feeling lonely and alone, even if we are connected in some or many ways to other people.  Because, if we haven’t processed our trauma, we are still in an activated state; we are weary of allowing others in; we “know better” than to allow ourselves to be vulnerable by stating our wants and needs. And deep, intimate, relationships cannot form. Because we are still in survival mode.

Until we can feel a sense of safeness in our body, a sense of physical safeness, we can’t move on into the work of emotional safeness and vulnerability.  Our brain stems and nervous and lymbic systems need to be soothed and calmed and feel like we are physically okay before we can move into the next level work of emotions, compassion, and empathy, which includes vulnerability and the ability to state our wants and needs and then (more than not) have them met.

Our brains literally will not allow us to do the emotional work until it is convinced we are physically safe.  If we have trauma living within us that we have not processed, our brain does not believe we are physically safe (because trauma, and our fight/flight/freeze response in our amygdala is concerned about actual physical safety and literal physical survival) – even if our frontal lobe, the logic part of our brain, knows that actually we are physically safe. 

When we are in an activated state, we are not connected to our frontal lobe, we are living back in the survival response state of our amygdala.  

Living in that survival state has varying degrees.  Sometimes it shows up as full on panic attacks, other times it appears as a relatively low-grade anxiety or depression.  And even if we are in a relatively low grade state of anxiety or depression, even if we can partially connect to logic in our frontal lobe, our brain stem and amygdala are running the show and will over-ride our frontal lobe and logic brain.

What all that can look like in our personal lives is that we have many important connections.  We have friendships and relationships that mean the world to us.  There are people in our life who have literally saved us and who we love dearly and deeply.

Even so, moving to a deeper level of intimacy with other humans is really hard.  It is something that terrifies us in a way that is non- and pre-verbal.  In a way that we know stems from trauma and has no logic in relation to the present moment and or person.

Part of our own personal trauma work is in calming our brain stem and limbic and nervous systems enough for them to understand that we are actually physically safe in this present moment, so that we can move into the next level territory of exploring what exactly emotional safeness is and how even in times we put our trust in a person we perhaps shouldn’t, we will survive it.  Now is the work of moving beyond connection into relationship.  Intentional, deep, vulnerable, intimate relationship that takes work and bravery on our end.

Relationship, attachment, belonging – these are also basic human needs.  But they come after our physiological needs of food, water, shelter and the ability to use the bathroom; they also come after our need for physical safeness and safety.  Until we have been able to (correctly) convince our activated systems that we are indeed physically safe, moving into relationship and emotional safe-enough-ness is nearly impossible.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter in January 2018. It has been updated and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

We will be exploring our relationships, how complex trauma impacts them, and how we can begin to shift that, in the six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Relationship that begins September 1. You can learn more here.

Curiosity and honoring our own wants and needs

By

Darling girl,
follow that white rabbit
and fuck what they say.
~Ann Marie Eleazer

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit. ~audre Lorde

say yes
to new
adventures.
~unknown

There will be people in our lives who when we meet them, we know that we are going down a rabbit hole and when we come back up, we will be forever changed.  People who we know will break us further open, who will gently guide us back to our Self, who will inspire so much feeling within us that at times we feel we might burst.

If we are lucky we get to meet multiple people like this in our lifetimes.  People who push us lovingly outside our comfort zones, people who, when we are around them, we want  to push ourselves outside our comfort zones.  People who, simply knowing them is truly an adventure.  People who we feel alive with, free with, connected with, at peace with.

Sometimes these people will be in our lives for a very long time, decades, maybe even most of our lives.  Sometimes these people will be in our lives for a very short time: a few hours, a day, a couple months.  Sometimes it seems like these people show up exactly when we need them to, to get us through a very specific phase in our lives.

Sometimes these people are our Forever People and sometimes they aren’t.

Just because a person isn’t a Forever Person doesn’t make them a “bad” person.  Sometimes relationships end not because harm has been done, rather because it is simply time for it to end.  Because one person has grown into needing something different than what the other in the relationship can give and to stay would be to keep both people stuck and stagnant.

Letting go of these people who touch us so deeply, so intensely, who forever change us, is not an easy task.  It is understandable that we want these people to stay forever.  It makes sense that we try to cling to them, that we lose our minds a bit in the trying to somehow backtrack and change course “soon enough” for the inevitable to be avoided just a bit more.

It makes sense because our attachment wounds and complex trauma run deep.  Because learning new ways of being, which includes new ways of grieving, can feel so uncomfortable and even at times overwhelming.  Because we want the stability and relative safeness of things staying the same.  Because while change is unavoidable, we humans sure do try to keep it at bay as long as possible.

All relationships have their ebbs and flows.  Their expansions and contractions.  Their beginnings and endings. Being able to move with these shifts is an act of courage and love.  It is brave and loving to do differently, to break patterns and cycles that inevitably cause harm, to allow for the autonomy of the people in the relationship and that of the relationship itself.  

What is most important, always, in all ways, is that we are able to stay true to who we are, to stay in our own integrity, to do our best to not cause harm and when we do to be accountable and do the work of repair.

Sometimes that looks like walking away or staying still while the other person walks away.  

And whoa can that hurt like hell.

A thing is, when we try to force a relationship, any relationship, to be something it can’t be, we begin to lose our Self.  We become so focused on the relationship and the other person that we lose sight of us.  We allow fear of being alone, of having to meet new people, of change, to be in charge instead of sitting in the discomfort of grief and change and allowing space and time to consider how we, ourselves want to move forward.

Staying in relationships, or trying to keep a relationship, where both people aren’t fulfilled, aren’t having their wants and needs for the relationship met and respected, ultimately causes harm to ourselves and to the other person.  It may not be intentional, and any time we to twist ourselves into someone we aren’t, anytime we comprise what is most important to us, anytime we expect the same of another person, we are causing harm.  We are not allowing for growth, expansion. We are acting from fear and not from love.

And.

When we are in the place of not having our needs or wants met in a relationship, I invite us to be curious.  Have we asked for what we want or need?  Have we communicated in a way the other person understands how important these things are for us?  Have we checked in with the other person to see if their wants and needs are also being met?  Have we heard the other person when they expressed their own wants and needs?

Have we stepped into our own vulnerability, sharing parts of our Self that feel scary to share?  Have we allowed space for the other person to do so, without our judgement or comment?

Have we made assumptions without actually confirming with the other person?  Have we set expectations that are unreachable?  Have we made demands, trying to “force” the other person to our own will?  Have they done similar?

It is true relationships ebb and flow, expand and contract, begin and end.  

And endings don’t have to mean something is over completely.  Endings can mean a new beginning, a shift, an opportunity for honest, open communication.  More intimacy, more vulnerability.  

And also, sometimes, endings do mean a thing is completely over. 

The important thing, I believe, is that we remain curious.  We remain honest, with ourselves and with the other person(s).  We ask questions and we state our needs and wants and ask if the other person can meet them.  We need to honor ourselves, recognize our wants and needs are valid, and not try to shrink ourselves in the name of not being alone.

And we need to allow space for those we are in relationship with to do the same.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weeklyish newsletter on August 2, 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. 

Emotional intimacy & complex trauma

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

I want love,
  passion, honesty,
and companionship…
  sex that drives me crazy
and conversation that
drives me sane.
~steve maraboli

love fearlessly,
for Your heart
beats brave.
~Matthew Spenser

When we live with complex trauma, entering into new relationships, be they platonic or romantic, can be activating.  We can want to dive into the depths too fast, reveal our past too quickly.  We may be impatient to allow things to unfold as they will.  We could want guarantees, promises, to know exactly what is happening.  We want a sense of control, not to be controlling, rather to calm the chaos that is living within us.  

Our systems may not have the ability to tolerate the unknown and liminal space that is required for new relationships to unfold in a ways that are beneficial for all, not rushed or pressured, slow and steady.  The slow and steady growth of a relationship may activate our anxiety, as things aren’t moving “fast enough” or we don’t actually know where they are heading.  

This makes sense given our histories.  Unknowns almost always led to harm in some way.  We learned from a very early age how to recognize patterns so we could navigate abusive and neglectful situations.  When we are early  in a relationship, patterns are being established and not yet known – this activates our stress and trauma responses.

We also may want to jump in and have our selves be “seen” and “known,” which may lead us to revealing parts of our selves or our history too early in a relationship before real trust has been established.  (This is what we call trauma bonding.)  We want to feel connected so desperately that we do whatever we know to try and “make” that happen.

One of the issues with this is we actually can’t “make” connections happen.  We cannot force intimacy.  True intimacy, emotional intimacy, is something that needs to be cultivated and nourished; it is something that grows and deepens over time with trust.

In order for emotional intimacy to grow we actually need to have good boundaries.  We need to know and defend our limits.  We need to be able to speak up when we are hurting, not in a blaming or accusatory way, rather in a way that is vulnerable.  We need to be able to be comfortable enough with the idea of rejection and endings.

This is all counter intuitive when unprocessed complex trauma is running rampant in our systems and being.  Our boundaries tend to be either overly soft or overly rigid (and sometimes depending on circumstances both).  We are afraid of communicating to another when we are hurting, and then when we do we place blame and accusations instead of showing the tender, soft, hurting side.  We are so terrified of abandonment that we do whatever we need to smooth things over and not have confrontation… which builds up over time until we finally explode or implode.

Emotional intimacy is challenging for most of us.  It means being vulnerable.  It means not having an agenda or endgame.  It means releasing expectations and assumptions.  It means putting a stop a to making demands.  It means allowing space and time for things to unfold naturally and not forcing things in the directions we think we want.  All of this goes against what the trauma living in us wants us to do.  

This goes against what our neural pathways, our brains, know and understand.

Which means, in order to get to this place of emotional intimacy, we literally need to grow new neural pathways.  We can do this in a number of ways.  Embodiment or body-centered mindfulness can be part of the path.  Taking baby steps in learning and doing different, practicing over and over.  Learning to regulate our nervous system.  Reclaiming our body as our own.  Finding ways to expand the pause between being activated and reacting to a situation.  Practicing all these things over and over and over again.

And even with all this foundation, we still need to actually communicate our wants and needs.  To share parts of ourselves, in the right time and space, that feel tender, vulnerable.  To take a breath when we are activated and to look at it and decide if old wounds are being poked at or if new ones are actually being created (or perhaps a bit of both). 

All the embodiment practices in the world won’t replace actually speaking and sharing our wants, needs, boundaries, desires, or hurts.  

The more we are able to speak, to communicate without trying to manipulate, limiting our expectations of responses, letting go of our assumptions about what the other person will or won’t do or say, the more we bolster those new neural pathways.  The more we do this, the easier it becomes.

Though I’m not sure it every becomes easy. 

Unlearning our old ways of being in relationship, and learning new ones, takes time, practice, and compassion.  There is no quick fix or easy way to do this.  It asks us to be self-aware, accountable, and vulnerable.  It asks us to let go of harmful stories of what relationship “should” look like.  It asks us to come home into our bodies, into the present moment.  It asks us to process our childhood trauma.  

It asks us to do things that were likely never modeled for us, to do things we’ve never done before and that feel foreign, strange, even wrong (even though in our logic brain knows it is right).  It asks us to go against what is known and comfortable and move into the unknown and discomfort. It asks us to be accountable for our words and actions, without shame.  

Through this process we need to remember we will mess up.  We will get it wrong at times. We will fall back on our old harmful patterns and cycles.  This is where our self-compassion can come in, where we need it to come in.

Learning to relate in new and different ways takes effort.  It takes bravery.  It takes a willingness to be wrong.  

It takes love.  Real love.  Without expectations or assumptions or demands.  Without promises or contracts.  Without cages or prisons or obligations.  

Love for others. Love for our world.  Love for our life. Love for our Self.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter on July 26, 2020. It has been revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays and learn about ways to work with me, 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. 

Wanting to be loved, afraid to be loved

By

She believes that she isn’t pretty enough to be loved, so she pretends to be not the kind who falls in love.  In reality she is just afraid to trust her heart to those who could easily tear it apart. Therefore she begins building a wall.  To create a world, where no broken hearts exist and not even the pretty girls get kissed.  ~Lina C.

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them.  ~bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

When we put our running shoes on and fight tooth and nail to hide from someone, it’s because that’s the person who really matters. That’s the one person you fear will see what’s inside you and cringe. You’d rather live with the not-knowing than to give it a chance.  ~Rebel Farris, Pivot Line

All of us want to be loved.  We want to be accepted.  We want to be seen, held, adored.  We want to have someone else look at us in that way, with those eyes, that say they see us, all of us, and they want us, all of us.

We want to be loved not despite our “flaws,” but because of them.

We want to feel at home, to be able to rest, in another’s arms.  To set down our masks, to let down our walls.  

We want emotional intimacy, to be understood, to deeply connect in ways that are beyond words, beyond sex, beyond the now, reaching out into the infinite.

We want all of this.

And because of our complex trauma, because of our attachment wounds, because of fear, we, consciously and unconsciously, prevent any of this from happening.

We close ourselves off.

We bottle up our hurts.

We keep our masks on and our armor up.

We don’t express our needs.  Our wants.  Our desires.

We don’t share who we are, what we like, what we enjoy.

We bend, and bend, and bend, until we break.

We push people away when they offer help, when it feels like they are getting too close, when it appears they are starting to actually see us.

This is a survival response.  

We relate to others in this way because that is how our brains were wired to respond to people who love us.  Because when we were young, the people who loved us caused harm.  They hurt us – physically, sexually, psychologically, emotionally.  They abandoned us, either physically or emotionally.  When we would try to express ourselves, our wants or needs, we were silenced.  We were told we were too much, too needy, too demanding.  We were told we weren’t enough, not smart enough, not good enough.

Because of all this, our internal survival systems did everything they had to do to make sure we would survive, to makes sure our caregivers actually took care of us, to make sure they kept loving us so we wouldn’t die.

Neural pathways grew during critical times that taught us how to hide, how to protect ourselves, how to detach, how to expect disappointment, pain, heartache.  Over and over and over.  

These neural pathways are still active.  They probably will be active for our entire lives. 

And.

We can grow new neural pathways.  We can encourage these old ones to atrophy.  They may never disappear, but they can have less influence, we can learn how to manage them better and move more and more quickly into new, more connected ways of being.

These old neural pathways are based in fear.  Literally based in the fear of death.  It’s not conscious.  It is instinct.  These neural pathways kept us alive as children, because in different ways our lives were at risk.

And.

We aren’t those little ones anymore.  We are adults now.  We aren’t living in those chaotic or neglectful homes anymore.  We live in the homes of our creation.  We aren’t reliant on caregivers who abuse or neglect us anymore.  We are reliant on ourselves.

But our systems don’t understand this.  Our neural pathways, what informs the ways we are in the world, the ways we are in relationship with ourselves and others, they want to keep us safe because they don’t fully understand that we aren’t in those situations anymore, that we aren’t dependent on those caregivers anymore.

So we close off.  We lash out.  We push and pull.  

All the while longing to connect.  Longing for love.  Longing for intimacy.

Growing new neural pathways, learning to do different, calming our fear response… this is intense work. Embodiment is one of the keys.

And we can be fully embodied and still emotionally closed off.  

So we need to practice vulnerability.  We need to practice sharing what we want, what we need, with the people we care about.

We need to practice sharing parts of ourselves we have hidden.

We need to practice receiving love, compliments, adoration.

We need to practice setting boundaries and respecting boundaries without creating stories about what it means or doesn’t mean about our own worth, about how lovable we are, about how much or little the other person loves us.

We need to practice curiosity.  Asking questions.  Of ourselves.  Of others.  

We need to practice having uncomfortable and even terrifying conversations.

Practice. Practice.  Practice.

And while we do this, we need to remember to love ourselves.  To have compassion for ourselves.  To know we aren’t going to always get it right.  That it will come out wrong.  That sometimes those old neural pathways will keep us in fear.  

And to keep practicing.

Because that connection we long for, that intimacy we crave, those kinds of relationships we desperately want – won’t happen if we don’t do the work of allowing it in.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly-ish newsletter on July 12, 2020. It has been revised 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.