self regulation

When the media activates us

February 13, 2020 By gwynn

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. ~Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral’s Kiss

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. ~Elie Wiesel

Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion… Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being “just like” the past and “emergency” emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions. ~Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists

A couple weeks ago there was a tragic helicopter crash in which eleven people were killed. One of the deceased happened to be a celebrity. A celebrity that was accused of a very brutal sexual assault in 2003.

Images of him and him and his daughter (who was also killed) were all over social media for a couple of days as well as all over the more “traditional” media outlets. It seemed no matter where you looked, there was his face.

This was hard on many people, especially those who had experienced sexual trauma of their own. Seeing not only the image of a sexual perpetrator all over the media, but also seeing him exalted and all his good deeds repeated with no to very little comment on the rape accusations, was retraumatizing, painful, and activating of our fight/flight/freeze responses.

Many people had similar responses during the Brock Turner trial in 2016. Or during the presidential election of same year. Or any other number of instances when a sexual offender is praised and their image is all over the media. When regard to a sexual predators future or career is given more credence than the future and trauma of their victims.

Our autonomic responses, our fight/flight/freeze, are understandable given our histories. Our histories where we weren’t believed. Where we were blamed for what happened to us. Where the future of the perpetrator was more important than our present or future. Where we were the one in the wrong for breaking the family apart, causing problems by speaking up. All of that contributes to why when events like this occur we go into an activated state. We are reminded again and again why our stories don’t matter, why what happened to us was our fault, and why we aren’t important, weren’t important, aren’t relevant.

These responses are so completely understandable. And to a great degree out of our control.

So what do we do when the media is filled with images that are activating for us?

We do what we need to do to care for ourselves. That is going to look different for each of us. For some it is putting down our phones/going off social media. For others it is curating our social media so it is only our close friends/family or others who “get it”. It could look like requesting an extra session with our therapist. It could look like writing our own pieces from a survivor/victims point of view. It could look like going out in nature. Drinking lots of water. Eating comfort food. Asking our friends or intimate partner to hold us or conversely to not touch us. Telling our close people that we are activated and asking for some grace and support. It could look like hermiting and having our own space binging on Netflix (or whatever streaming service).

Most importantly, we need to have compassion for ourselves. We need to recognize and acknowledge that we are activated and remind ourselves that it makes sense why we are. We allow the space for the rage, the grief, the frustration. We let ourselves feel the emotions and sensations that are coursing through our minds, bodies, and being.

The event a couple weeks agao will not be the last time a sexual predator will be honored and exalted in the media. It won’t be the last that victims were brushed under the rug, disregarded, or disrespected. It will, unfortunately happen again.

It is true that tides are changing and we are starting to hold some perpetrators accountable. It is also true that it is a slow process to change rape culture and there are those who are fighting like hell to keep it alive and well.

So it is vital that we develop the resources and tools to care for ourselves in these times. To let those close to us know that these kinds of events can be activating for us and ask they check in on us or let them know how they can support us.

I wish the world were different. I wish we didn’t put the lives and futures of sexual perpetrators above that of their victims. I wish that we could accept the complexities of humans and not try to put all people in either “good” or “bad” categories. I wish that victims were believed, supported, and cared for by our culture as a whole.

And.

We are moving in that direction. I believe that with all my being. In the meantime though, we have to take care of ourselves.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weeklyish newsletter on February 3, 2020. To receive my most recent essays and more, you can subscribe right here.

Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors (TIE STS) begins on March 2. Part of the program is support during times like these when the outside world is activating our own trauma experiences. To learn more, click here.

Plans, resilience, & trauma

December 30, 2019 By gwynn

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans. ~Allen Saunders

Only when a child’s authenticity is threatened do they develop unhealthy behaviors, distorted reality perceptions, and emotional difficulties. When you force a child to do what they don’t want to do, feel what they don’t feel, and think what they don’t think, their authentic self becomes damaged. ~Darius Cikanavicius, Human Development and Trauma

Those of us who have trauma living within us, and especially childhood/development/relational trauma, like plans. We like to plan. To have a plan. To know what is going to happen when and where it is all happening.

We aren’t so good at surprises.

I used to fall apart if a plan needed to change. By fall apart I mean become non-functioning to the point of crying non-stop, not eating, and at the worst of times going on a suicidal ideation bender. I could not deal with plans changing. Even small ones. If a friend got sick and needed to cancel a date we had it was the end of the freaking world and I would literally spend hours to days flipping out and disparaging said friend to other friends (They are so unreliable. They are always so flaky. You can’t trust them at all.)

My late 20s and 30s were all about learning to adapt to plans needing to change. What this looked like was I had plans A, B, C, D, E all the way to ZZZ. This way if one plan failed I had another to fall back on and if that failed then there was still another.

I still always had a plan this way, and also it created some space for my friends to get sick without my entire universe imploding.

With time, age, and a lot of really great therapy, I can now say that while I still like to have a plan, it’s not always necessary. When a plan does fall apart, I don’t fall apart too. I’ve learned to adapt, really adapt. To allow for change and surprise and create space for my own problem solving outside of the box when it’s needed.

There are even times when I don’t have any plan at all, just go with the flow of whatever is happening.

It’s been a big shift for me in my ways of thinking and being over the last several years. My level of resilience has increased exponentially and I have gotten to the point where the small stuff (like a friend getting sick and needing to cancel our plans) is no big deal.

The big stuff still has its impacts, for certain, and even with that I do seem to be able to come back from a major upset relatively quickly.

A thing about growing resilience though, is that life seems to give you plenty of opportunities to continue to build that muscle.

Life has a way of doing its own thing, regardless of our plans or intentions or actions or even odds and statistics.

My family received a really big shock in the early spring of 2018. The kind of shock that would have lasting reverberations for us no matter what we did in the moment or how we chose to move forward.

The shock was one of those things that we never in a million years expected. In fact, all our previous experience as a family would tell us that it was impossible.

Yet, there we were.

We sat in the space of processing the news, and honestly in a bit of denial for a bit.

The denial was part of the process for certain, and also it’s not a place where we could have sat forever. Decisions needed to be made and plans needed to be figured out.

A thing is though, that sometimes, (and really even in this case), we can sit in that denial place. For a very long time. Life will still go on. Not making a decision is a decision in and of itself. Allowing “fate” to have its way is one thing that happens when we sit in that denial space. And sometimes “fate” can make things a whole lot worse.

A note: Denial isn’t always or only trying to claim that something that is fact is not fact. Denial is also when we simply don’t want to deal with reality or the facts. When the facts feel too big or overwhelming or terrifying. Or when the facts cause too much cognitive dissonance within us.

Sometimes we need to accept facts that don’t make sense. Or seem impossible. Or don’t fit with our own worldview. Because regardless of whether they make sense or seem possible or fit into the ways we see the world, they are still true, reality still is what it is.

When we live with unprocessed trauma, allowing what is to be what it is, is a pretty foreign concept. Most of us who had childhood trauma, have so much cognitive dissonance about the people who were (supposed to be) our caregivers, that we need absolutes. We need definites. We need Sure Things. We need things to fit into our worldview and to not break The Rules (whatever those rules may be at the time).

Childhood trauma creates its own form of gaslighting. We are often told to keep secrets, or not talk about, or worse if we dare talk about what has happened or is happening to us, we are told that couldn’t possibly be true. Our own sense of reality and what is true and what can be true gets skewed.

So when we make plans, and life throws us a curve-ball… well we tend to fall apart. Because our grip on the here and now can be pretty tenuous at times, and every little disturbance to our plans and worldview, can lead us to a very dark place.

And.

We don’t have to continue living like this.

There are many ways to process our trauma. There are multiple avenues to find help.

We don’t need to live in constant overwhelm or denial.

We can learn to adapt. We can learn resilience. We can learn that things don’t have to make sense; that the impossible can actually be possible; and that sometimes our personal worldview isn’t the be all end all truth.

(Yay neuro-plasticity!!)

It takes time. It requires learning self-compassion. It depends on having safe-enough relationships where we can explore and experiment and be wrong and shift and grow.

And.

It is necessary for us to move out of living in constant overwhelm, to start experiencing moments of calm, peace, and even joy.

Plans aren’t everything. Sometimes when they fall apart something more amazing happens. Not always. And sometimes. Learning to be open to that possibility has been such a personal shift for me over the last five years.

I wish this shift for you too.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly(ish) newsletter on March 18, 2018. It has been edited and revised for publication here. To receive my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

Safeness & settling into the in-between

December 23, 2019 By gwynn

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.

Feeling our feelings

December 16, 2019 By gwynn

We try so hard to hide everything we’re really feeling from those who probably need to know our true feelings the most. People try to bottle up their emotions, as if it’s somehow wrong to have natural reactions to life. ~Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday

To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a ‘hot mess’ or having ‘too many issues’ are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world. ~Anthon St. Maarten

For those of us living with trauma, we have spent a majority of our lives dissociated. Meaning, we didn’t really feel our feelings (until perhaps we had no choice and couldn’t ignore or stuff down anymore). We weren’t aware of our bodies. We lived in our heads and outside of ourselves.

And when we did feel our feelings, we never, ever, under any circumstances shared them or expressed them (except maybe anger). Those of us living with complex trauma learned early on not to express our emotions, or at least we never learned how to express them in any sort of constructive or helpful way.

So when we start to come to this work of coming into our bodies and processing the traumas that live within us, we all have so much to learn and unlearn.

It is a painstakingly slow process that generally involves many almost imperceptible baby steps mixed with a lot of falling back into old patterns and cycles and finding our ways back out again.

I can say that it does get… less challenging… in time. With practice, with patience, with self compassion.

Learning to sit in our uncomfortable feelings (and really for those of us who dissociate, all our emotions are uncomfortable, all body sensations can feel like too much) is not easy or fun. And once we have learned how to tolerate our own feelings, well, now we get to actually feel those feelings and let me tell you I wouldn’t exactly call that fun either.

So if this embodiment stuff isn’t easy and isn’t fun and has us sitting in our uncomfortable stuff, what the heck is the point to it??

I actually used to ask myself this question at least once a week. I’m not even kidding.

I have many answers for myself (and for you!). Ultimately, for me, it is all about relationships, and having real, deep, meaningful ones; with myself, with those I’m intimate with, both sexually and not, with my children, with my friends and family.

If we not attuned to our feelings (emotions and bodily sensations), then it is very unlikely we are present in the moment, in our environment, or with the person we are interacting with. If we are unable to be present with another person, then we are unable to connect with them on a more than a superficial level. If we are only connecting with folks on a superficial level we feel lonely and isolated and we are also unable to tune into what is happening with the other person on a deeper level.

If we can’t tolerate to feel our own feelings then how can we tolerate to feel another’s? And isn’t part of being in deep and meaningful relationship being able to hold space and be supportive of and to those who matter most to us?

That’s part one of my answer.

Part two of my answer has to do with our reactions and actions, which also impact our relationships. If we aren’t noticing our little “tells” that we are at the very early states of feeling overwhelmed, flooded, or triggered, then we are unable to do anything to soothe ourselves in those early moments. If we are unable to soothe ourselves in those early moments, then those feelings build and build. They may build over weeks, but still with every interaction that activates our sympathetic nervous system that we are unable to reset our system from, then the next trigger feels more intense. This build up continues until we explode in one way or another.

That explosion can look like yelling and screaming and “losing our shit.” Generally speaking when this happens we aren’t our best selves and have a tendency to lash out and cause harm to the other person (be that actual physical harm, or emotional or psychological harm may depend on any number of factors).

That explosion can also look like illness. Chronic infections, chronic pain, autoimmune issues, chronic colds or flus.

That explosion can look like self harm, which includes over spending for “retail therapy,” over eating foods that ultimately don’t make us feel good, using drugs or alcohol to numb, and of course what we usually think of as self harm: cutting, binging and purging, suicide attempts, etc.

That explosion can also look like self isolation coupled with extreme amounts of shame and shoulding on ourselves (which can then lead to self harm or illness or “losing our shit”).

That explosion can look like any combination of the above.

None of these explosions are ultimately helpful for us or for our relationships.

As a species, we humans need each other. We were never meant to live in isolation or do this thing called Life alone, without any support or help. We are meant to live in community and in relationship. We are meant to have deep and meaningful relationships where we are accepted by each other (even our uncomfortable feelings), supported by each other, held by each other, and lovingly pushed by each other.

Trauma, and specifically being dissociated, prevents us from being in community and in relationships.

And so.

Becoming embodied helps us relearn what to experience being fully human.

Being fully human has some very messy and uncomfortable parts to it, as well as some amazing and joyous parts, and everything in-between.

So, my short answer to my question above of why I do this whole embodiment thing, and why I support others in their own journeys to embodiment, is so I can be in deep and meaningful relationships with others and with myself and so I can experience all that living as a human has to offer.

It is a conscious choice. It is made multiple times a day. It is not a one and done.

I am so much more embodied and present in my environment, relationships, and Self than I have been at any other point in my life. Even so, I still fall into those old no longer needed survival skills of dissociation and isolation. Even so sometimes my feelings sneak up on me when I’m not paying attention. Even so I cause harm in my relationships, even though that is the last thing I ever want to do.

And. I am also able to express my emotions to others, often without exploding. My relationships have grown deeper and more meaningful. Those closest to me see more of me than they have before. I am able to get past defensive anger and get to some of the deeper emotions that are bringing up my armor relatively quickly. I am able to laugh more freely and also cry more freely. I understand myself so much more.

I am able to receive love. To be seen. To see that others accept and adore me as I am.

And I have developed a deep compassion for myself and others that wasn’t there five years ago.

This work is not easy. It is not generally speaking fun.

And even so, I believe it is so deeply worth it.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weeklyish newsletter on April 15, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To read my most recent essays you can subscribe here.

We need each other

November 25, 2019 By gwynn

The world of intimate bonds is the world of emotions—a field of reactions and hidden desires for safety and acceptance that we all long for. All of us. ~Joseph Schaub, Divorce (or not): A guide

One of the things that trauma does is encourage us to isolate. It encourages us to be away from our family, friends, intimate partners, and communities. How this looks for each of us is different. It may look like us actually appearing to be a hermit and not interacting with people or it may look like we are incredibly social, with many friends and connections, yet all of those relationships are only surface level and we never reveal (much of) who we truly are, our fears, our wants, our needs.

Both scenarios (and a million in-between) are isolation. When we do not allow ourselves to deeply connect with others, that is one way our trauma shows up. Our not allowing this deep connection is a signal for our desperate need for a sense of safeness and acceptance, our need for love and a sense of belonging.

When we have unprocessed trauma living within us, it means our ability to have a sense of safeness — with others or with ourselves — is stilted. For many of us living with trauma, the traumatic events we experienced were perpetrated by people we trusted, people we possibly literally depended on for our actual literal survival. These types of betrayals, especially when perpetrated over and over throughout our childhoods teach us that we can’t rely on another, that the world isn’t safe, that those who claim to love you will only cause harm.

We internalize these lessons and they form the development of our neural pathways that then inform us as adults, once we are far from the harm, how to be in relationship with others.

David Richo, in his book How To Be An Adult in Relationships, talks about the “5 A’s” that make up our emotional needs as humans. These are: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

We all need someone to pay attention to us in a way that builds us up.

We all need to feel accepted, just as we are, in all our messy and complicated human glory.

We all need to feel appreciated for our contributions to our families, our friendships, our communities, our world.

We all need affection, be that loving words or begin physically held.

We all need allowing, to be allowed to shift and change and grow, allowed to be complex, complicated, and even contradictory.

All humans have these needs. For those us who did not have most or any of these needs met as children, we have that much more of a desperation to have these needs met as an adult.

But even though we have this requirement to have these basic human needs met, we don’t trust that anyone will ever meet them.

Trauma is a complex and contradictory thing in and of itself. As a survival mechanism we isolate and yet isolation can literally kill us. Without the love and support of our community (be that chosen family, blood relatives, competent trauma informed professionals or hopefully a bit of all of the above), we slowly or sometimes quickly will bring about physical disease, intense loneliness and hopelessness, and sometimes a depression so deep there feels like there is no way out.

But our early life experiences have formed the ideas that we cannot trust other humans to have our basic human emotional needs met. And it takes a great act of courage and strength to reach out and ask for help. And frankly, some days we don’t have that courage or strength.

So how do we shift this? How do we find the resources to move through and past the fears of betrayal? How do we develop our own sense of safeness and trust?

It takes work. Patience. Time. Intention. Mostly, it takes work.

I deeply believe that we need to do the work of calming our nervous systems, connecting deeply to our boundaries and reclaiming our bodies as our own, finding our ways to our own center and ground. And then we need to continue this work through deep embodiment and trauma processing work.

Then slowly that sense of safeness, and our ability to trust others and ourselves, will grow.

We are not meant to do this processing and healing work in isolation. In fact, we actually cannot successfully do it in isolation. We need others, we need to do this work in relationship. This is the point of therapy, to help a person heal in a safe relationship so they then can take what they learn (and the ways they have shifted) out into the world and apply it to their other relationships.

Of course, therapy is not for everyone and frankly not all therapists (sadly) are competent.

However, that does not change the reality that we need to do this work of healing, of developing our sense of safeness, of cultivating trust, within relationships.

It does not make us weak to need other people, it makes us human. It does not mean we have a character flaw when we yearn for deep connections with others, it makes us human. It does not make us “less than” or “too much” to ask another for support, it makes us human.

Where this is tricky perhaps, is that we can’t rely on any singular person to fill all our emotional (or any other kind of) needs. No one person will ever be able to do that. We need a community of people and we need to be able to rely on ourselves in way that is helpful for us and not harmful.

Stephanie Bennett-Henry wrote :
No one is going to love you exactly like you imagine. No on is ever going to read your mind and take every star from the sky at the perfect time and hand it to you. No one is going to show up at your door on a horse, with a shoe you lost. Do you understand?
That’s why you have to love yourself enough, so that any other love just adds more candles to the cake you’ve already iced.

Our work in processing our trauma is loving ourselves, it is the cake and the icing of our making. But we don’t need to, and I would argue can’t, do this work alone. We build ourselves up as we build our relationships, our relationships grow as we do, we learn to trust others as we learn to trust ourselves.

It’s a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum, honestly. The point being however, we need both. Both our own willingness to do the work, and people to support us and or guide us in this work.

It is true that no one person is ever going to meet all our emotional needs. Knowing this is part of our own maturation process. However, we can have a community of people, even a relatively small community of a handful of folks, who together can help us get our needs met.

That’s how we are supposed to be. In community. Serving each other and ourselves.

/../

This essay was originally published in my weekly newsletter on June 10, 2018. It has been revised and edited for publication here. To receive my most recent essays, you can subscribe to my weekly(ish) newsletter here.

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