Gwynn Raimondi, MA

The stages & tasks of grief

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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.

Trust, needs, vulnerability, & Complex Trauma

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What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful. ~Brene Brown

What happens when people open their hearts?
They get better. ~Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

She was a wicked thing sometimes. All full of want. As if the shape of the world depended on her mood. As if she were important. ~Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

We’re never so vulnerable than when we trust someone – but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy. ~Frank Crane

I’ve been feeling a lot lately. Emotions and sensations swirling around in me, creating chaos, or perhaps expressing the chaos, within. They have been happy, joyful, pleasurable feelings on the one hand. And completely terrifying on the other.

Terrifying because they are new and different.
And.
Terrifying because I am actually feeling them. 

And terrifying because I am beginning to be emotionally vulnerable with another person. I am learning what that actually looks and feels like. I am doing it in small steps and most certainly keeping much still to myself, and also with each little step of expressing my emotions to them, I am finding new, not harmful ways, of caring for myself and the overwhelming feelings of all the experiences I am having.

I’m trying on adulting.
Clearly stating boundaries.
Telling the person how I feel around them.
Not running and hiding or putting all my armor on with extra reinforcements.

It has not been easy. I have probably misstepped. I know I have gotten caught up in conversations in my own head that didn’t go well and lead me to tears (hello INFJ).

And still. I am doing things differently. Which is new and different and feels strange and yes, is terrifying in moments.

As humans we have very real needs of attachment and belonging. We actually need to feel loved, adored. We need to be respected in having our autonomy and our autonomy needs to be not only respected and accepted but also rejoiced and celebrated. We need to be physically safe, and also we need to feel emotionally and psychologically safe. We need to feel connected, understood by another, and to feel they feel connected to and understood by us. 

Having these needs met, to even a minimal degree, allows us to survive as infants and children. They are absolutely necessary for survival. In some ways it doesn’t matter who meets these needs. Ideally it would be our primary caregivers, but it can be secondary, or even tertiary caregivers. And we only require these needs be met just enough for our actual survival.

That means as children we can be neglected, abused, disregarded most of the time, but as long as there are moments of feeling like a person, even our abusers, actually care for us, we will survive.

As adults, the needs are the same, but the requirement to have them met for our survival isn’t as dire. As adults having these needs met means the difference between simply surviving and beautifully thriving in our lives.

We all have these needs, and yet expressing them can be incredibly delicate and feel overwhelmingly vulnerable. 

And vulnerability in our culture is considered a weakness.

And when we have had childhoods where there was abuse and or neglect, expressing our vulnerability could have literally meant our deaths.

So. What are we to do, as adults, with our wounding, our pain, our fear, our trauma, to have our needs actually met?

First I want to note that it is important that others meet our attachment needs, yes. That is part of thriving in our lives and being in a loving relationship. However, it is equally important that we know how to meet these needs for ourselves too. That we are able to build our resilience when those we love inevitably hurt us in some way.

I say inevitably because we are all human. We all cause unintentional harm. We all have our own “stuff” that we need to work through. And so, part of being open to a loving relationship where another meets many of our attachment needs also means that we are open to them sometimes hurting us. It also means that we will inevitably hurt them also. What matters here is how we come back into relationship through repair.

When we are able to process the traumas we have experienced as children and are able to come back into our bodies, we learn what it actually means to fully experience our emotions and their correlating bodily sensations. We begin to learn how to titrate so we don’t go into overwhelm. We learn how to hear our bodies long before they are screaming at us. 

And.

We learn to trust ourselves. To have compassion for the people we’ve been and the person we are today. As we learn to trust ourselves, we can also begin to trust others. 

Learning to trust another is yet another piece of our trauma processing. So many of us were abused and or neglected by our primary and or secondary caregivers, starting at such early ages. These experiences train us to distrust those we love and those who express that they love and or care for us. Part of our trauma processing is also allowing these old distrusting neural pathways to atrophy while we build new paths that allow for us to trust, and know who to trust in the first place.

It is important to note we need to be connected to the feelings – emotions and sensations – of our body to move into deeply trusting relationships. Being embodied means we can actually hear the appropriate alarms, and trust that they are correct and act accordingly when it comes to relationships. It also means that we can trust another when those alarms don’t go off.

And once we can trust another, then we can begin to be vulnerable with them.

Being vulnerable with another person is terrifying. We are opening ourselves up to being hurt by them. We are also opening ourselves up to being loved by them and see what it feels like to be truly respected and adored. 

It’s not easy. We will have many missteps. We will dip our toes in and share something deeply vulnerable and then immediately pull our toes back out and maybe even take several steps back or run away and hide for a bit. With practice this sharing of ourselves, the more raw and vulnerable pieces, becomes easier, but perhaps never totally easy (I have no idea actually, I’m still in the dip my toes in and try not to run away and hide stage!). 

And before we can share our feelings, we actually need to be able to feel them. 

/…/

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To learn about my six month Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors go here. The next cohort begins April 15.

Trauma, retreat, cocooning, coming back into world

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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

About a year and a half ago I received some incredibly traumatic news.  I was incredibly blessed that my people gathered around me and held me together and up as I processed all that was being unearthed.  I was, and am, deeply grateful for those women.

A couple weeks later, I learned that one of my best friends from high school died.  And there was the funeral to attend across the state and the grief to feel and sit in and know.

I lost my words.  All the pain of those two events, the sense of the world as I thought I knew it shattered.  I needed to go inside, to spend as much time and energy and space as I could process and being with those I love most.  I stepped back from the world and went in my safe cocoon.  I processed and felt and cried and screamed.  I listened to music I knew would encourage my tears.  I allowed all the tears to shake themselves out of my body as my chest hurt and throat felt raw.

I was reacting to and processing two traumas at once.

And because of the way our bodies work, I was also processing old traumas.  While the reason for my tears may have been about recent events, the toxins that were released via those tears have been in my body for a long time.

This is how processing trauma works. Our body doesn’t really know the difference between traumatic events, though our mind does.  Our body only knows something is not right, that it needs to be in a heightened reactive state. And so as we process any one specific trauma, our body also is able to process old and other traumas at the same time.

Part of my process of processing traumas, personally, is to cocoon.  This is different from isolating (which is something trauma encourages us to do).  Cocooning for me is like wrapping myself in a cozy, heavy, blanket. It is warm and safe and quiet.  The cocoon is made up of time with those I love, time with my therapist, time in solitude.  It is having quiet and having soothing voices.  It is being held and being not touched.  It is limiting sensory input and output and allowing myself to sit in and feel and be with and yes, process, the multitude of emotions that are swirling in me.

(Not all that) long ago I would not cocoon when I experienced a traumatic event. I would “power through.” I would isolate – telling all those around me I was “fine” as I felt like I was dying.  I didn’t reach out.  I didn’t feel safe.  I didn’t seek comfort.  All of this is a normal trauma response.  For reasons we don’t yet understand, when we experience trauma, and do not have sufficient reserves of resilience, our mind tells us to stuff it down, act like nothing’s wrong, and even worse, tells us we are all alone, no one would understand, don’t even bother seeking help.

With my own personal work, both trauma specific and not, I’ve been able to come to this place now of no longer isolating, and instead, cocooning.  It hasn’t been easy getting here.  And I am still in my own process and journey in this work.  This work takes time and patience and whole fuck ton of self-compassion.

Because of the self-compassion part I can look back at old patterns and ways of being and not feel shame.  Instead I remind myself I was doing the best I could with the tools I had and was able to receive at the time.

This is true for all of us.

I deeply believe each and every one us at any moment are doing the absolute best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

Even when we are at our absolute worst and lowest and darkest.

Take that in for a moment.

Even in our darkest and lowest and worst moments, we are doing the best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

(Note: sometimes we are not able to receive resources, for any number of reasons, even when they are offered to us.  We get to have compassion for this too.)

I have often heard people say (and even said myself a few times) “I wish I had started this work [of self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and or trauma processing] earlier/when I was younger/a long time ago.”

A truth is, that we couldn’t have started this work until we did.  For whatever reasons we didn’t have the right resources to move into this work.

We didn’t have enough of our basic needs being met.

Dr. Abraham Maslow developed a theory that is called the Hierarchy of Needs.  At the base is food, water, shelter, rest, the ability to breathe and eliminate waste.  If these basic needs aren’t met then we can’t focus on the second “level” which is safety – being in an environment where your body feels physically safe, you have a steady income, you have resources you can rely on including friends and family, you have a relatively healthy body.

The “middle level” in the hierarchy is love and belonging.  I feel this is important to note.  I’ve seen a meme several times over the years that says in essence “If you don’t love yourself, no one else can/will love you.”  According to Maslow, this is absolutely incorrect – we actually need to feel loved and cared for and have a sense of belonging somewhere before we can move on to “self-esteem” or self-love.  We need our people, our community.  We need to feel like we are a part of something.  Sometimes we are able to find this sense of belonging from our parents or siblings, and sometimes not.  Sometimes we find this at church or school, sometimes not.  Sometimes we find it in our social circles, and sometimes not.  It honestly doesn’t matter where we find it, only that we do. (Also, this is what attachment theory tells us – we need to feel and be loved in order to love ourselves.)

This is where that “deeper” work, trauma related, self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and our ability to “do the work” comes into play.  We actually can’t do that work UNLESS we have our other basic needs met – one of which is having a sense of belonging and being loved.

My truth is I would not have been able to start any of my personal work any earlier than I started it.  Particularly my own trauma work.  I needed to have my basic needs met, have consistent and reliable access to food and shelter, to have a sense of safe-enoughness, to feel loved and that I belong enough, and then also to love myself enough – to be able to come to the place of feeling that I do matter, that my life matters, and that I am worthy of happiness and to not continue to suffer all the physical and psychological and emotional impacts of my own trauma history.

Frankly, I didn’t get to that place, I didn’t have all those needs met, until relatively recently, in the last few years. And so, even if I had gone into trauma therapy prior to that, it likely would not have helped as much as it is now, and also frankly, I likely wouldn’t have stuck with it.

This “deeper work” isn’t necessary for our survival.  The first three tiers of the hierarchy are.   We honestly don’t need to love ourselves or be “self-actualized” in order to survive on this planet.

And.

For those of us who have the privilege of having those three basic needs met, what would our lives be like if we were able to get the fourth and fifth met?  If we did the work of processing our own lived experience trauma, our ancestral trauma that lives in our DNA, our cultural trauma that feeds  itself every day?  What would that even be like?  How would our lives be different?

For me, I know how my life is different.  I also see the shifts in the women who gather in my circles and who I work with individually.  I know, personally, how coming home to my own body changed every aspect of my life.  I know, personally, how doing body-focused trauma therapies have opened up aspects of my Self and my life I thought were closed away forever.

It hasn’t been easy.  It has certainly more often than not, been really fucking hard.

And yet, for me, and it seems for others who are able to do this work, it has been so fucking worth it.

…

Did you enjoy reading this?  It was originally written for my weekly newsletter in the summer of 2017; I edited it for publication here.  If you’d like to receive my weekly emails, which includes essays like one, you can fill out the form on this page. 

More on Rape Culture

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… in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women’s experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

~Judith Lewis Herman

I believe it is important for us to understand the different aspects of our oppressive and harmful culture.  This essay was originally published in my newletter in May of 2017 and has been edited for publication here.

What does rape culture look like?

It’s a million different things.  I believe that the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why depicts rape culture perfectly.  Also you can watch Audrie & Daisy; A Girl Like Her; and/or The Hunting Ground as other films (two of them documentaries) of rape culture.

Rape culture looks like the sexualization of young girls.  Also see beauty pageants and the likes of Toddlers & Tiaras.

It looks like rapists receiving lenient sentences.  See: Brock Turner.  Or rapists and sexual predators being awarded positions of power and prestige.  See: Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh.

It looks like being re-traumatized when we do report a rape.  See: being in the wrong place at the wrong time; what was she wearing; she should have known better; she shouldn’t have been drinking; etc.

It looks like being gas lit when we describe our experiences.  See: Oh, he didn’t really mean that; You misunderstood; You’re too uptight; Stop taking everything so seriously; and my personal favorite – They were only joking.

It looks like random men trying to friend you on social media.

It looks like random men sending you pictures of their penis through social media.  It also looks like the social media platform doing essentially nothing and blaming the victim when it is reported (see example below).

It looks like men in power making ludicrous public statements about women and rape (see other example below).

It looks like being afraid to say no.

It looks like not knowing how to say no.

It looks like not understanding boundaries, ours or others.

It looks like being told you don’t know your own body.

It looks like being told to obey authority.

It looks like being told to unquestioningly trust authority.

It looks like not feeling safe walking down the street in broad daylight.

It looks like not feeling safe walking down the street at night.

It looks like not feeling safe in our own homes.

It looks like mansplaining.

It looks like manspreading.

It looks like having a self-admitted sexual predator as the President of the United States.

It looks like…

It looks like…

It looks like…

I could go on listing things for pages and pages.  But I hope you get the point.

Sometimes the insidiousness and pervasiveness of rape culture can feel overwhelming.  It can feel like too much and that it will never change and that nothing we attempt to do about it will ever matter.

I get it.  I so deeply get it.

I have my own personal experiences of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment.

I grew up in a family that pretended the incest wasn’t happening.

I grew up in a culture that told me it was my fault.  I should feel deep shame.

I was told I wasn’t really raped.

I’ve been asked what I did to “encourage” my sexual assaults and harassment.

I was told I was asking for it.

I’ve been called a bitch for calling rape culture and rapists out.

I’ve been threatened with physical violence when I have called rape culture and rapists out.

To date my daughter’s physical safety has not yet been threatened due to me using my voice, and I’m sure that day will come too. (See: any number of vocal feminists on social media.)

I share all this to say Me too.  And You are not alone.  And I get why sometimes some of us do NOT speak up and out. And I believe survivors.

And also.

I know that remaining silent, looking the other way, pretending things aren’t that bad, is all an act of compliance.

I know that not talking about rape culture, not calling it out, not talking about consent and boundaries, not talking about all the ways our culture conditions us to to obey, all of this is complicity.

I know that it can be terrifying to speak up and out (that is intentional and by design, by the way).

I know I have been so scared speaking up that my whole body shook.

I also know it is much safer for me to speak up and out than it is for others. (This is my privilege and I intend to use it to the full advantage of all of us.)

I know that if I don’t speak up and out change won’t happen.

I know that when I speak up and out I am creating ripples and shifts in our culture.

I know when I speak up and out, others hear my voice and know they are not alone. 

Countless FB and IG friends, along with myself, have received a private messages from a not-known-to-us men over the last couple years.  In these messages there is almost always an image of, supposedly, the sender’s penis.  Total strangers.  Unsolicited in any way.

One particular friend ended up in FB jail for 24 hours because she took a screen shot and then publicly posted the picture to a couple of his friends/family pages so they would see what he was up to. (If you have a stronger reaction to her retaliation than you do to the fact that a total stranger felt it was okay to send her a picture of his dick via private message, then… well that is a perfect example of rape culture in action.)

She reported it to Facebook as sexual harassment and essentially they did nothing.  Oh, they gave him a warning.  If it happens again (as in he does it again AND the woman he does it to reports is properly) he may be put in FB jail.  Then she was told not to talk to strangers on messenger.

*eye roll*

Isabel Abbott posted the following quotes by US politicians last year.  All of the men quoted here are Republicans, and let me be perfectly clear that Democrats uphold and are complicit in rape culture too.  They are, perhaps, simply more secret about it.  (You can see Isabel’s original post here. Also, in the comments she provides the original context for each quote below)

(note: offensive and distressing words about sexual violence below)

“Rape is kind of like the weather; if it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”
-Clayton Williams

“If a woman has (a right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman. At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”
– Lawrence Lockman

“Rape victims should make the best of a bad situation.”
-Rick Santorum

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that thing down.”
Todd Akin

“In the emergency room they have what’s called a rape kit, where a woman can get cleaned out.”
– Jodi Laubenberg

“Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen.”
– Richard Mourdock

These are men in power.  These are men who are making the laws of our country.  These are men who have wives and some of them daughters and all of them have mothers.  These are men who see absolutely nothing wrong with the words they have said.

This is rape culture.

And.

These men didn’t become powerful without women :: they all have wives who supported them in various ways, and more importantly women voted for them.  Without the women’s vote, they would not be in office.  

Let’s sit with that for a second.

Let’s also sit with the fact that 45% of white women who voted in the presidential election in 2016 voted for Trump, a self-admitted sexual predator.

We have a lot of work to do to unearth and unravel and dismantle and dislodge from our being, the culture we are currently living in.

All of us. 

It could be easy to blame our current culture on men.  In fact it would be really super easy to do that.

And yes, men are responsible for their actions and words.  Absolutely.

And yes, we need more men to stand up and speak out against rape culture.  To call their friends and brothers and dads and uncles out on it.  To teach their sons to respect boundaries.  To dismantle their own internalized toxic masculinity.

Yes.

And.

The rest of us need to do the work too.

As in us women.

Mothers. Aunties. Voters.

We need to unearth and explore and dismantle and dislodge all that we have internalized and been conditioned to believe.

So we can know our own boundaries.  So we can understand consent.  So we can learn to say no and yes.  So we can respect the noes and yeses of others.

So we can stop supporting sexual predators, rapists, those who physically threaten and assault us and others.

So we can burn down rape culture and create a world of consent culture.

Our first steps in burning it down, are being able to see it.  To name it.  To know what rape culture is and what it looks like in daily practice.

Our first steps are also finding our voice and learning ways to speak up and out.

Even knowing we may not be safe in doing so. Even knowing this is going to make us and those around us very uncomfortable.

There is great risk involved in tearing down our current culture.  Great risk to the status quo.  Great risk to our own perceived comfort and safety.

Here’s a thing though :: we aren’t safe in the culture we currently live in.  Our sense of “safety” is a lie.  A lie meant to keep us complicit and compliant.

I am willing to risk being disliked.  I am willing to risk being hated. I’m even willing to risk my own physical safety to a certain degree to create a world I want for my children and for you and yours.

These are not actually risks per se for me.  They aren’t risks because in many ways they are things I don’t actually care about (other than my physical safety).

There is far greater risk in allowing the world to keep chugging along as it is and sending my children out into it.  Knowing the statistics.  Knowing the statistics are only for what is reported.  Knowing the reality that I am sending my daughter into.

I want something different for her. And for my son.  And for you.  And for me too.  

I want those statistics to be a dark spot on our human history and no longer our human reality.

And so.

I will continue to speak up and out. I will continue to write about the ways our culture oppresses and dehumanizes us. . I will continue my work in anti-authoritarian activism and will continue to promote consent culture. I will continue to call out my profession and the ways it is complicit and compliant. I will continue to raise my kids to understand and respect noes and yeses – their own and others. I will continue to help others unearth, dismantle and dislodge the ways rape culture has gotten into their own bodies and minds and beings. I will do everything I can to BURN IT DOWN and help create a world where this atrocity no longer exists.

I am not alone in this work.  And neither are you.

Together we will do this.  I deeply and wholly believe that.

/../

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Love is not a victory march

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And love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
~Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

The last year plus has been traumatic for our world politically and culturally, and because of this, also for many of us personally. We have seen some of our worst fears of what would happen with Republican run Executive and Legislative branches here in the United States. We have seen so much put back forty or more years in time, so much more that has been attempted to be put back. With each hit it feels like we are sinking deeper and deeper in a dystopian novel.

And.

Last year saw #metoo. And this year #timesup.  We see more and more women coming forward and some of the men who perpetrated sex crimes actually having consequences for their actions. I have been witness to more and more people becoming aware of the social injustices in the world, acknowledging their own internalized biases, compliance, and complicity, and doing the work to make change both within themselves and out in the world.

This shifting in our culture and within ourselves has been about love.

Unearthing what love actually means.

That love is a verb.

That love is not always gentle.

That love can be fiery, fierce, loud.

That love can be both protective and can push us outside of our comfort zones.

That love and justice can and should go hand in hand. And in that mix there needs to also be compassion and boundaries.

I believe that on any given day in any given moment all of us are doing the best we can with the tools we have.

This best we can may not be good enough. This best we can may actually be harmful to ourselves or to others. Other’s don’t have to accept our “best we can”. And in order for me to have hope in humanity, I do still believe we are each trying our best to be the best humans we know how to be.

And.

It is also true that sometimes the “best” others can do is something we need to say a firm NO to. And this No can, and in my opinion should, come from a place of deep love. Love for ourselves as well as love for the other person. And perhaps love for all humanity.

The #metoo movement that has caught fire in the last couple of years is a statement of this kind of love. A love comprised of clearly stating this is where I end and you begin and you don’t get to cross this line without my permission. A love comprised of compassion for ourselves and the traumas we have experienced at the hands of (mostly) men. A love comprised of empathy for others with similar experiences and especially for those who are able to speak up and out.

It is a love that seeks more than justice. It is a love that seeks our humanity.

We are at the dawn of a new epoch of human history. We have perhaps been at this dawn for the last hundred or so years. We have seen cultural “norms” slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, shift. We have seen the emancipation of slaves, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, all in the last 150 years. This is after, literally, millennia of slavery, and the de-humanizing of women, persons of color, queer folks, the poor, and anyone who is not a white, heterosexual, middle class (or “better”), CIS, male.

One hundred fifty years is barely a drop in the bucket when you look back three to six thousand years.

The shifting of our culture feels slow. And it is taking multiple generations. And will likely take multiple more before we live in a world where racism, misogyny, ablism, and homophobia are quaint things of past.

And.

With each movement, more movements are born. With each small shift there is a ripple effect.

And those ripples are getting larger. And stronger.

And the more we do this work of shifting ourselves and our world, the more we see the importance of doing this work with love made of justice, compassion, empathy, and boundaries.

Love is not always gentle. In fact, I believe love can actually be rather rude. Love shows up when we set our own boundaries and love shows up when we respect and honor the boundaries another person has set for themselves, whether we like those boundaries or not.

Love is willing to be uncomfortable. To sit in the discomfort of unraveling our own familial and cultural training. To sit in the discomfort of unraveling the trauma that lives within us and sorting what is ours, what is our ancestors, and what has absolutely nothing to do with us or our lineage. To sit in the discomfort of sometimes being wrong and causing harm and doing the work to make amends. To sit in the discomfort of acceptance that we are not always in control, and that sometimes honoring the boundaries of another person can be personally and emotionally painful (not harmful, painful) for us.

Love is fierce. And can be filled with rage. Love can be loud and bold and demanding.

Love is sometimes gentle too. And can be quiet. Love is supportive, always. Love is in the giving and receiving. To ourselves and to others. Always and in all ways.

Love is not a bully. It is not used as a weapon to cause harm or manipulate and impose unrealistic expectations.

Love is a comrade. It is a tool we can use to deconstruct our oppressive culture. It is a tool we can use to create a new world where there is justice and safeness and the embracing of differences.

Love is speaking and listening and hearing. Love is respecting and honoring.

The Christian bible states in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 ::

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

I can agree with most of this. And, I do believe that love is not blind, that while it doesn’t keep score and it does trust, it is always smart and aware and knows who and when to trust and when not. Love is not gullible.

Love has been a tool for change within myself for most of my life and in particular I have leaned on love this year. Love for my Self. The love of friends and family. Love as a verb. Love as a lesson. Love as a breathing, shifting, thing that both has torn me apart and put me back together.

May we all use love as a tool for destruction of our own old harmful patterns and ways and for creation of new ways of being which invite ourselves and others to live in compassion, empathy, justice, and truth.

/../

This essay originally written in December 2017 for the subscribers of my newsletter.  I edited it a bit for publication here.  If you’d like to subscribe to my weekly love letters you can fill out the form on this page.