Category: sexual trauma

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The importance of grief work in our trauma processing

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.

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Learning and relearning to trust our Self

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.  ~Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.  ~Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Within you is a fountain of wisdom. And you sell yourself short every time you allow some authority to define your limitations and cage your potential. Even if that authority lives in your head.  ~Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

Sometimes there are things we know.  What our next steps are.  Decisions that need to be made.  Changes that need to happen.  We know, deep down in our bones and being.  

And yet.  We don’t listen.  Or we don’t want to listen.  

Because the change feels to big.  Because the process feels too painful.  Because there is a part of us that doesn’t want the change, wants things to go back to the way they were.  

Also because we were taught, from a very young age not to trust ourselves.  Not to trust our own inner knowing.  

So we look for ways out.

We look to signs from the Universe, the cards, the songs on the radio, the grocery store clerk.  We ask everyone under the sun what they would do.

We talk ourselves in circles trying to find any way we can to not do the thing we know we need to do.  

We do all this in an effort to avoid doing what we know we need to do. 
We don’t listen to our own inner truth.
We seek answers outside of us when they are screaming at us from within.

We do this to avoid pain, discomfort, the unknown.
We do this out of fear.

We do this to try and escape the grief that is welling up inside of us.
Or the hurt.
Or the anger.
Or the frustration.
Or all of the above.

Regardless of the whats or whys, we don’t listen to our Self.  We don’t listen to our Truth.  

We stop our own metamorphosis.
We keep ourselves stuck.
We hide.
We put on fronts and masks.
We try to pretend everything is fine as it is.

But everything is not fine.

And if there is one thing that is constant and inevitable in our lives it is change.
Sometimes that means trying harder, trying different.
Sometimes that means letting go, surrendering, allowing.
It always means going outside our own comfort zones.
It means doing what we know we need to do.
Even if we don’t know what is on the other side.
Even if we are terrified of the process.
Even if it breaks our hearts that things need to be the way they need to be.

Trusting ourselves, trusting our own knowing, is no easy task.  It is not something we learn to do, in fact it is something we were born with knowing and then it was taught out of us.  We were conditioned to trust others over our own Self.  We were told we don’t know what is best for us or our own lives.  We were trained to seek answers outside of us and to never look within.

But here’s a thing: we were born knowing how to trust our Self.  We were born with the knowledge of how to connect with our own innate wisdom.  We were born listening to our own needs, wants and truths, and never, ever questioning them.

We were born with a blind faith in ourselves.

I don’t know that we can, or should, get back to that blind faith.  I am a deep believer in curiosity, questioning, analyzing, and understanding.  I believe we should always check in with ourselves and see if there are shadow pieces, hidden motivations, unconscious agitators, to what we see as our truth, as our knowing.

And all of that requires deeper looking within.  Not outside.  Within.

And a willingness to actually trust ourselves.  And then to honor that trust and do what we know we need to do.

/../
This was originally written for my weekly newsletter in September 2018 and was edited and updated for publication here. To receive my most current essays you can subscribe here.

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The difference between being triggered and feeling our feelings

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget. ~Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

I’ve written about how I view healing compared to processing trauma.  It is an important differentiation to make, I believe, and the quote above pretty much sums it up for me.

The reality is that the traumatic events we have each experienced did happen.  And they did change us.  Molecularly, yes.  And more importantly, fundamentally those events in so many ways inform who we have been, who we are currently, and will continue to inform the people we continue to evolve into.

The events happened.  There is no changing that. The conscious memories we do have, we will not forget.  They are imprinted now in our explicit memory.

And.

The body remembers too. That remembering shows up as anxiety and or depression.  It shows up as a low tolerance for sudden and loud sounds.  It shows up, for me, in my own yelly-ness.  

However, the implicit memory of the body is something that can actually be reset.  While the mind will remember forever the things that it does (barring any dementia in the future), the body can release the memories of trauma that lives within it.

This is true for all of us.

This resetting is not done quickly. It usually involves a lot of discomfort and moving out of our own norms and ways of doing and being.  Often times things may feel like they are getting worse before they get better.  And sometimes we reach a point of wishing we’d never started down this journey of processing the trauma that lives in our bodies and being.

Life can be challenging, even hard.  Often there are discussions out in the greater world, as well as in our private lives, that are uncomfortable and even triggering.  Add to this the fact that sometimes our anxiety ramps itself up without any obvious cause and well, our daily lives can be challenging at best.  

There are times where we forget all we know about how to self-regulate and self-soothe. There are times that we need someone else to help us reset.  There are times of lots of tears and actually feeling some pretty intense feelings.  

Which is to say, that while we may have processed a lot of the trauma that lives within us, there is (always?) still more work to do.  And also, life happens to all of us and sometimes we just have bad days or weeks or months.

And.

While it is true there are times that we can’t access all the things we know about self-soothing and self-regulating, with practice there will be more times that we are able to access at least some of what we know and utilize the tools we have worked so hard to ingrain in our mind and body.

Here’s an important thing to note however: there is a difference between calming our nervous systems and not feeling our feelings.

Stuffing our feelings, not allowing them to be expressed in some way, is not the same as calming, soothing, or resetting our systems.

While it is true that we may be able to calm our anxiety and bring ourselves back from our amygdala, it is also true that we are also able to cry and feel sadness.

We can both feel sad and have our nervous system regulated at the same time, is what I’m trying to say.

Sometimes I think we are sold a bill of goods on what it means to process our trauma, or to heal our brain stems, or to reset our nervous systems.  Doing these things does not mean we will not feel intense sadness.  It does not mean we will only ever be happy shiny people.

Having a healthy nervous system does not stop us from feeling grief.  Or fear.  

What it does is allow us to feel those emotions, and the sensations that go with those emotions, and still remain present in our bodies and in the present moment.

In fact, I would argue, that having a healthy nervous system, one that is not in a constant activated state of fight/flight/freeze, may mean we actually feel those emotions more intensely.  Because we stay with them in the now.  Because we literally are able to feel them in our bodies.  Because we are no longer stuffing them down or disassociating from what is happening within us.

I believe this is an important thing to note:

At times, having a healthy nervous system may actually mean we feel worse.

BUT.

That feeling worse, is momentary.  It isn’t a constant state.  It will pass. 

AND.

That sense of feeling “worse” is actually part of the resetting.  It is part of learning to actually feel the emotions and sensations that we have been ignoring for so long.  It is part of learning that we can feel our feelings and not be flooded or overwhelmed by them, even if they feel overwhelming in the moment.

When we first start to do the work of trauma processing and coming home to our bodies, everything is new. Even the slightest sensations or emotions can feel intense.  Not overwhelming, but intense.  It is the newness of it all that can feel a bit “too much” even though in actuality our systems are not being activated or flooded in a trauma sense.

We can feel intense emotions and sensations and not be overwhelmed back into an activated state.

Feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body is not the same as being triggered into a trauma state.

Over the last few years there have been more and more times where I have felt all those emotions and sensations.  It is not fun.  I have cried a lot of tears.  AND I was not in a fight/flight/freeze state.  It is true at some points I was not verbal, and often being in our emotions is a non-verbal state and so we find other ways to express ourselves (crying, art, cleaning, movement, etc). It is true that when our nervous systems are activated that we can become more flooded when we feel our emotions and sensations. 

It is true that being non-verbal is also part of having activated nervous systems and being in a fight/flight/freeze state.  It is true that a sense of overwhelm is part of having the trauma living within us triggered and activated.

And.

It is also true that with time and processing, we learn the difference between feeling our feelings and becoming or being flooded or overwhelmed or triggered.

We learn to tolerate uncomfortable sensations and emotions without going into a fight/flight/freeze state.  We learn that feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body isn’t dangerous or life threatening.We learn to hold ourselves and allow ourselves to be held.

It takes work and time.  In many ways it has taken me years and in others mere months to be where I am now.  To be able to feel intense sadness without becoming lost in a forever downward spiral.  To be able to feel both the intensely uncomfortable and intensely pleasurable sensations of my body without going into a trauma triggered state.

I now have a sense of freedom and safeness within myself that I had not had for most of my life. And it is amazing, even when feeling some of these emotions and sensations isn’t always pleasant.

This sense of freedom is something I want for everyone. The journey to this place is not easy; it is filled with challenges and discomfort. It is also filled with rewards and peace. And I believe it is all worth it.

/../

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

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Desire, pleasure, & trauma

The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect. ~Peter A. Levine 

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive. ~Eleonora Duse

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love. ~Washington Irving

Earlier this week was Mother’s Day here in the United States.  It’s a day that is mixed with many emotions for me personally, and there are few Mother’s Days I can look back on as 100% good or precious memories.  Mother’s Day, for me, is a day of grief, a day of frustration, as well as a day of love.

I know for many this day can be a mixed a bag.  Perhaps our mothers weren’t the mothers we needed them to be.  Perhaps they have died.  Perhaps we longed to be a mother and aren’t.  Perhaps we never wanted to be a mother and are.  Perhaps we desperately wanted to be mothers, are now, but are filled with frustration or regret.  Perhaps this day brings other emotions up for us.

I know without a doubt, that Mother’s Day has never been about pleasure for me.  It has historically not been a day just for or about me, as a mother.  It has never been a day of rest or doing what I wanted.  Last year was a particularly hard Mother’s Day filled with grief, heartbreak, anger, and frustration.

It is funny sometimes how much our lives, how much we, can change in a year. Twelve short months and we look back and wonder at the person we were, are in awe of the changes and shifts we’ve made, are surprised to see where we are now.

A truth is that I didn’t do a very good job of receiving on this day.  Another truth is, I rarely spoke up and stated what exactly I wanted.  I didn’t do a very good job of advocating for my own pleasure, for my own joy, for my own enjoyment.

I know why this is, of course.  There was my own ingrained messages of how asking for what I want isn’t acceptable, that pleasure is bad, and then all the stories about whether or not I “deserved” or was “worth of” doing what pleased me.

The why I didn’t advocate for my own pleasure is a tangled web of complex trauma, fear, and shame.  There is also a heavy dose of the narratives about wanting, about desire, about pleasure, saying they are all bad and only “bad people” want or desire any thing beyond what they have.  Or more specifically that a woman should want, should desire, should seek pleasure in any form.  

Desire, in an of itself, is a complex notion. We are all taught on so many levels to be thankful for what we have and that wanting more or different is not a good or healthy thing. I’ve written in the past about how the whole gratitude movement makes me want to scream, because at its roots can be shame around wanting more than what we have, in wanting different.

We can both appreciate all that we have and want something more, something different. It is possible to hold both, for both to be 1000% true.

Learning to explore our wants, our desires, has so many levels to it.  Unraveling the indoctrination by our culture is one level.  Looking at the ways our families approached desire and wanting is another.  Examining the shame we carry from our childhood traumas is yet another layer.  

We have learned from so many places that wanting is bad.  That desire is bad.  That we aren’t deserving or worthy of pleasure, of peace, of feeling full, nourished, complete.

We learn to strive, yes.  To keep reaching for that carrot.  But we aren’t taught to examine if that is the carrot we even want.  We are sold an idea of what success looks like and if we don’t meet that standard then we are failures and that is even more proof of how unworthy and undeserving we are.  

Slowing down and taking the time to unravel, explore, examine, and experiment with what we actually want,  what we truly desire, what brings us undeniable pleasure is no easy feat in and of itself.  Learning to allow ourselves to experience pleasure, joy, fun – takes practice, time, intention.  And yes, coming home into our bodies.

Learning to be at home in our own skin, to tolerate both discomfort and pleasure, is an important part of the work.  And it is not the whole of it all.  We also need to consciously examine the stories we hold in our minds (and yes bodies), and practicing new ways of thinking, to do the work of growing new neuropaths and allow the old ones, where all these old stories live, to atrophy.

It is not easy work.  And, as I have said many times before, I do believe it is deeply worth it.  

/../

Embodied Writing :: Pleasure Edition is a seven week program where we will explore different aspects of pleasure, our internalized narratives about pleasure, and learning to reclaim pleasure as a part of our lives through stream of conscious writing and embodiment practices.  To learn more click here. 

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My response to “not all men”

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
~Leonardo da Vinci

Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman’s hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes.
~CrimethInc.,Contradictionary

I’m a member of several different online groups related to trauma.  In general I basically quietly observe because at this point in my life I don’t have a lot of time to have hours and days long discussions online about anything, not even one of my most favorite topics ever (trauma). Even so, I am observing and reading, and sometimes learning, and sometimes nodding along, and sometimes shaking my head and needing to walk away.

One thing that has me shaking my head vehemently and wanting to shake people is this particular reaction that certain “leaders” in the trauma processing (or “healing”) world have about sexual trauma and what is and isn’t okay to say in reference to these topics.

Specifically what I have seen happen is a women or femme makes a post about her own experience of sexual abuse or harassment or trauma.  Other women jump in to support.  Eventually someone says something along the lines of “Men are pigs”. And then the “leader”/facilitator of the group will jump in, always also a women, and tell folks to “tone it down” and “not all men” and “all people, regardless of gender, have trauma and deserve to heal it”and “remember there are men in this group and we don’t want to offend them,” and perhaps my all-time favorite, “my husband and the men I work with are all Good Guys™ so we can’t talk about men like that.”

As you can guess, I have a bit of an issue with this.

First, it’s silencing and shaming at best and exacerbates trauma at worst. Not allowing women and femmes to express their outrage, frustration, fear, anxiety, or sadness about the state of the world, that women are unsafe in this world, is gaslighting.  These types of statements are saying that an individual woman’s experience is invalid because “not all men” are bad.  (More on this “not all men” crap in a few). It is saying that our anxiety of being unsafe in the world is “all in our heads.”

A truth is, the world IS unsafe for women and femmes.  A truth is that actually, yes all men.  No, not all men rape, not all men assault.  But I’d be hard pressed to say that “not all men” harass women (though they might not call it harassment).  And absolutely all men benefit from the privilege bestowed upon them simply because they were born with a penis (and that privilege includes women being fearful for their lives around men and therefore being compliant and docile and “supportive” of “their” men in an attempt to survive).

Do I believe there are good men in the world? Yes, absolutely.  AND my definition of a good man is one who acknowledges his privilege and utilizes it to bring about change for women.  A good man calls out other men.  A good man notes when he screws up, apologizes, and then does the inner work he needs to in order to do different the next time. A good man doesn’t silence women or say “not me” or “not all men”.  A good man listens and creates spaces for women’s voices to be heard and respected.

A good man doesn’t need a woman to silence other women on his behalf.

Which brings me to the second part of my issue: women defending “innocent” men at the expense of other women.

A truth is, men don’t need us defending their “honor.”  Their actions in the world defend their honor.  The ways they speak up and out against rape culture defends their honor.  Every time they call out another man on some misogynist “joke” or comment they defend their honor.  Every time they listen to a woman and don’t interrupt or “mansplain” they defend their honor.

They do not need us defending them.  Or making statements like “not all men” or “my partner/colleague/friend” is a Good Guy™.

They, as the cultural oppressor and ones with the upper hands, can defend themselves just fine.

What women need to be doing instead of making statements like “not all men” is standing in solidarity with other women.  We need to not be silencing women who are sharing their story and pain and trauma.  We need to not gaslight each other. We need to to not throw each other under the bus so we can maintain our own status as “good” (and by “good” I mean obedient, complicit, and compliant) women in the eyes of men.

We need to stand in solidarity with each other.
We need to support each other.
We need to believe each other.
We need to encourage each other to speak up and out (when we are ready).

Looking at the Senate race in Alabama in December 2017, I was frustrated at see again how much work we have to do.  That 63% of white women voted for Roy Moore is disgusting to me.  That 63% of white women threw the safety of their own daughters out the window to maintain the patriarchal status quo (and their own place in the hierarchy in doing so) is nauseating to me. (There have been multiple similar examples since then, including most recently Jill Biden jumping to the defense of her husband Joe around the Anita Hill hearings.)

Our daughters deserve better.

Our daughters deserve to live in a world where men in power don’t have the right to sexually, physically, emotionally, or psychologically abuse or assault them.  A world where there are real and dire consequences to harming women.

Our daughters deserve us to stand up and protect them.
Our sisters deserve the same.
Our women and femme friends deserve the same.
Women and femmes we have never met deserve the same.
WE deserve the same.

When we, as women, make statements like “not all men” or try to defend men from the atrocities they as a collective have and continue to commit, we are only being complicit and compliant players in our oppressive, misogynist, patriarchal culture.

Because a truth is, yes all men.

Even your husband.  Even my (ex)husband. Even your son.  Even my son.  All men have their own work to do.  And us loving them isn’t going to change the reality that they were raised and conditioned and trained in a misogynist culture and that, through no fault of their own, they internalized these messages.

There is not a totally innocent man out there.  And unless they are actively and intentionally doing their own inner and outer work to tear this shit down and atone for their own wrong doing and the that of other men, they are that much more of the problem.

Men don’t need us making excuses for them.  They don’t need us defending them.  They don’t need us say “Well, not MY man.”

Men need to do their own work.

And we, as women, need to do our own too.

Which includes taking a deep look inside to explore why we may feel a compulsion to defend the “innocent” men of the world.  Why we feel a compulsion to make statements like “not all men.”  Why we feel a compulsion to disregard and discredit the experiences of other women in favor of the “reputation” of a man.

Yes, we are all in this together. Yes, we cannot change rape culture into consent/nuturance culture without men.  Yes, men are also harmed by our oppressive, misogynist, patriarchal culture.

And we need to stop coddling them and instead begin pushing them to prove to us that they are indeed one of the Good Guys ™ through their actions, not just their in-actions.

Not being a rapist doesn’t automatically make one a good man.  It takes a lot of intentional internal and external work to get that title.

We all need to remember that.

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

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