Category: trauma

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On Self Care :: Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries!

Boundaries define us.  They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and where someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership.  Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom.

~Henry Cloud

Boundaries.

We talk about them a lot.  On my most recent Open Office Hours call we talked about them, in fact.

We talked about what a boundary is.  What they mean to us.  What some of our “obstacles” may be in honoring or defending our own boundaries.  What some of our stories are when others honor their own boundaries. How boundaries run both ways.  How they are fluid.  How they are complex.

There are many things I believe about our boundaries.  One is that they are fluid and living and breathing; they change from day to day and person to person.  In a phrase, what our boundaries actually are depends on All The Things.

In my experience there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to boundaries.  What may be a firm boundary with person A today may not be a boundary at all tomorrow with person B.  Many of our personal boundaries change with time, and some never change at all.  This is part of life – we all change and grow and it makes sense that our boundaries would do so too.

I also deeply believe our boundaries, physical, psychological, and emotional, are directly tied to our bodies.  What I mean by this is that I believe we can sense when a boundary is being violated long before we are fully consciously aware of what it happening.  Our body reacts, in one way or another, to this intrusion.  It could show up as a knot in our stomach or literal pain in our neck.  It could show up as suddenly feeling agitated or anxious, without any “real” or “logical” explanation.  It could show up in any number of ways.  The point being, our body is giving us information, long before our brain can comprehend what is going on.

Our boundaries are also tied to our histories.  If we have trauma in our past, how our caretakers modeled boundaries when we were children, both inform what our boundaries are as well as how we react when our boundaries have been violated.

Our culture also informs our boundaries, and more importantly, how or if we defend them.  We all have messages about “being nice” and “not hurting people’s feelings” in our psyches and bodies to unravel.

We have all been told in one way or another that our Noes don’t matter, aren’t valid, and should never be voiced.

Most of us learned at a young age that when we say no to someone or something we are giving them a message that we don’t love them.  And of course, while we internalized this direct message, we also internalized the reverse :: that if someone says no to us it means they don’t love us.

Again, boundaries go both ways.  There are our own boundaries for us to connect to and consciously and intentionally decide to defend (or not!) and there are the boundaries of others that may stir up some of our own stories of worth and value and instigate an unconscious response from us.

There is so much for each of us to unravel around our boundaries, including becoming consciously aware of where they come from and when and if we want to honor  and defend them (and I’ll tell you now, the answer isn’t always yes, there can be many different reasons why we don’t defend our boundaries and none of them have to do with us being “weak” or having “poor judgement.”)

I talk more about this in the 13 minute video below ::

This essay is the second in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for Challenging Times :: Holiday Edition.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.

Other essays & videos in this series ::

Holidays, Trauma, & Our Nervous Systems

Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

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On Self Care :: Holidays, trauma & our nervous systems

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

~Audre Lorde

We are entering into that time of year again.  That time here in the northern hemisphere where the light recedes and we enter into more and more darkness as each day passes.  It is also the time of year of the winter holiday celebrations, which can for some of us, bring their own darkness with them.

I have always declared that the winter holiday season begins with my birthday in mid-October.  Then quickly is Halloween and the All Souls and All Saints Days.  Next is Thanksgiving.  And then we move into December when most religions have a festival of lights celebration of one kind or another.  With all these holidays often comes gatherings with family – ones that we either attend or avoid.  With these gatherings come all the stresses of connecting with our families, be that in person or in spirit.

There is also the truth that for many of us this time of year is a painful reminder of the people we have lost in our lives, either through death or severing of ties.  It can be a reminder of those we loved who aren’t here to celebrate with us, and the grief that comes forward has its own way of showing up at a time of year we are told over and over we need to be joyous.

There are a million plus different reasons why the this time of year can be challenging in many ways and why we all need to remember self-care, real self-care, during this coming seaon.

One of my frustrations with our current culture is how the term self care is defined. For many this term has a very white, privileged look to it.  It looks like spa days or mani-pedis, or days at the salon, or weeks at some tropical local.  It’s looks like, according to many, something only the wealthy can afford.

I have a very different definition of self care.

For me, self care is first and foremost about calming and soothing our nervous systems.  It is self-regulation and being able to bring ourselves back from a “triggered” or highly emotional state.  This can look like many different things, including drinking water, getting sleep, any of the numerous Nervous System Soothing tips I share with you in the weekly love letter and on Facebook, drinking tea, locking ourselves in the bathroom for five minutes of solitude… all of those things are self care. These are the small, non-glamorous things that keep us going and keep us feeling calm and sane.

And, self-care isn’t 100% regulating our nervous systems.  The other big piece of self care, for me, is boundaries.

You know, that whole being able to say No thing.  (I’ll talk more about boundaries as self-care in the next essay in this series.)

However, I do believe that before we can really connect to, and then honor and enforce, our boundaries, we need to be able to connect to our bodies and calm our nervous systems.

What do I mean by “calm our nervous system,” “triggered state,” or “activated nervous system”?

I deeply believe that all of us have trauma living within our bodies.  It could be a trauma (or multiple traumas) of our personal lived experience.  This could look like abuse, neglect, rape, or car accidents, surgeries, living through natural disasters.  Any and all of those events that we may personally experience our bodies experience as traumatic events.

In addition, we have intergenerational, or ancestral, trauma living in our DNA. Epigenetics has shown us how these “trauma markers” are passed down through the generations and how they are “mutable” or “reversable”.  This means that the unresolved, unprocessed traumas of our parents, grandparents, and back to the beginnings of time, live in our bodies today.

Finally, there is what I call Cultural Relational Trauma.  This is the trauma we experience living in a white supremacist, capitalistic, misogynist, patriarchal culture.  This is the trauma of isolation, of being told we are less than, not enough, too much, that we should feel shame for who we are and for existing at all.  This is the trauma that tears us from our communities and teaches us that one “group”is somehow superior to another.  It is the trauma we hold in our bodies that is put in us every day.

Because we all carry trauma in us, our nervous systems are generally all out of sorts.  What this looks like day to day is that we are easily irritated, or anxious, or depressed, or have rapid and far ranging mood swings, or feel like we want to crawl out of our skin on a regular basis – but with all of these things happening we can’t always pinpoint the why or what actually caused the dysregulation or what is also called an “activated” nervous system or a triggered state.

Calming or soothing our nervous system brings us out of this activated state.  It allows us to feel good in our bodies, to be in our frontal lobes (where empathy and logic live), and eventually to respond to stimulus (or triggers) in a way that isn’t harmful to ourselves or others (and by harmful I mean not only physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and physiologically).

I talk more about this in the 11-minute video below ::

This essay is the first in a three part series I have put together to introduce some of the topics we’ll be exploring in my winter self-care circle, Self Care for Challenging Times :: Holiday Edition.  If you’d like to learn more and possibly join us, you can click right here.

Other essays in this series :: (active links coming soon)

Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries!

Stress, Grief, & Embodiment

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Unleashing Our Self :: The loss of sisterhood

We’re connected, as women. It’s like a spiderweb. If one part of that web vibrates, if there’s trouble, we all know it, but most of the time we’re just too scared, or selfish, or insecure to help. But if we don’t help each other, who will?

~Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper

I hear over and over, and also know from my own lived experience, that there is a longing within us as women to find Our People, our community.  I know that at various points in my life I had that inner circle of women who I knew had my back and I had theirs, and then at other points in my life I longed for that inner circle, feeling the empty space within me that it would fill.

Now, I need to point out, there are  inner circles and there are Inner Circles, and one is a true community of love and support and is a quiet (or not quiet) form of rebellion and the other is a Mean Girl dynamic that buys into and promotes our culture.

I would love to tell you that in my younger years I had this amazing community of love and support.  And, in truth, with certain women, I did. And also in truth, I was very much a part of Mean Girl culture and tearing other (young) women down.

In my mid-20s life it was all about competition.  Who was cuter, who was smarter, who had the better boyfriend, car, cat, clothes.  And there was definitely a stepping on top of and shoving down that happened.

I am not proud of this part of my past, this part of me. And yet, this is part of me, of who I was and a part of what makes me who I am today.

Here’s a thing though, we are conditioned in our culture to be Mean Girls and if we aren’t part of the actual Mean Girl Inner Circle, boy howdy, we’d best do all we can to be.

This is patriarchy.  This is misogyny.  This is also ablism and racism and homophobia and xenophobia and and and and… because if you are different, in any way, from the leader of the Mean Girl Pack, you are a target.

What is interesting for me to look back on and dissect a bit, is that I was only a Mean Girl during a very specific period in my 20s.  Prior to that, I was relatively oblivious to Mean Girl culture.  Many people talk about their horrible experiences in middle school, but I had great experiences.  I wasn’t one of the “popular kids” but I had my good friends and we had fun and I never felt any need to be a part of any other group.  This was also true of my experience in high school and even early college.

But something clicked in my brain as I approached my early-mid 20s that I needed to be at the top of the heap.  I can’t tell you what it was or if there was a specific event that triggered this, but it did happen.  And it lasted a couple years and then mostly stopped until my daughter was born.

I’ve written before about how the birth of my daughter was a huge turning point in my life.  This is true in so, so, SO many positive ways.  But it is also true that it brought about the Mommy War Syndrome in me and I was constantly comparing myself to other moms and comparing them to me and each other.  I had a constant running dialogue in my head of how this mom wasn’t doing enough here and that mom was failing there and this other mom should never have been allowed to have children and so on and on and on.

From the other side of this, I could tell you this had everything to do with my own insecurity as a new mother, my own feelings of failing, and my need to feel like I was at least doing better than HER (whoever that “her” was on any given day).

And sure, that was probably part of it.

But here’s another thing: I was feeling insecure and like I was failing at motherhood because we live in a culture that sets mothers up to fucking fail.

Yes, I have a husband who has always been very involved with the upbringing of both our kids and who never once expected me to Do It All nor has he ever said “oh, this is your job because you’re the mom.” But he is one person, one voice (and yes one important voice, but only one voice nonetheless) against a cacophony of voices about how mothers should be, how working mothers should be, how working mothers are failing their children, how mothers who stay home are failing society and their children, how if I only had my shit together I could actually Do It All and don’t I dare “expect” my husband to do anything.

So.  Lack of support of mothers in our culture definitely played its role.  Which includes lack of affordable childcare, lack of decent healthcare, and a lack of true communities.

The culture we live in wants us in-fighting.  It wants us to be looking at other women and judging the ever-loving hell out of them.  It wants to be pointing out all the ways they all do it wrong, all they ways they are all failures.  It wants us climbing on top of each other to be the cutest, the smartest, the best mama, the best worker, the best wife, the best housekeeper, the best crafter, the best, the best, the best.

And if we aren’t the best, well, clearly we just aren’t trying hard enough.

Here’s yet another thing, though: If all we are doing is looking at other women as some sort of measuring stick of our own value and worth, we will never come together in community.

This is intentional.  This is by design.

There is a reason many of us are longing or have longed to find Our People.

Because our culture isolates us.  It tells us resources (men, food, money, prestige) are limited.  It tells us there is not at all enough to go around and if she gets some, then you certainly won’t.

To which I call bullshit.

Resources are not actually limited. There really is enough love, enough success, even enough food and shelter, to go around.

It is not true that if Jane succeeds then Sue can’t.  It is not true that one person’s version of success has to even look like another’s.  It is not true that we have to constantly be clawing at each other so we can each “get ours.”

Our culture wants us separate.  Those in power know that we as women come together  in true sisterhood, as true comrades in arms, that shit is going to burn the fuck down.

And because of this, our culture encourages us to compete with other women, to distrust them, to consider them less than so we can be “enough.”

Here’s some good news though: we actually don’t have to follow the conditioning and training of our culture.  We can say No thank you and No more and Not on my watch. We can dig into the stories we have about women, others and ourselves, dislodge them, and come together in community.  In true community, where we are all comrades, locking arms, supporting each other, lovingly pushing each other outside of our comfort zones, and doing the work to create a better world for the generations to come.

I talk even more about the complexity and intricacy of mother-daughter relationships in this 20-minute video below.  I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the second in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves.  We begin April  1.  If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

If you’d like to read the first essay and watch the first video in the series, you can click right over here and to read and watch the third you can click right here.

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Unleashing Our Self :: Mothers, daughters, and generations of trauma

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

~Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

The other day I googled “mother daughter relationships” just to see what would pop up.  Unsurprisingly there were pages and pages of How to Fix Your Mother Daughter Relationship types articles with some Signs Of A Toxic Mother Daughter Relationship pieces mixed in.  The truth that mother-daughter relationships tend to be challenging is relatively well known, at least to any women who have mothers, which is, well, all of us.

My own relationship with my mother was traumatizing at its worst and complicated at it’s best.  She was both physically and psychologically abusive during my childhood.  There was abuse yes and there was also neglect, and these formative years have had their impact on me, for sure.

When I was fifteen my mother got involved in the then popular “Tough Love” movement and by the time I turned 17 she stopped talking to me.  Her silence lasted for six years, and I know it only ended because of the pressure my grandmother (her mother) put on her to make amends.

We spent the next decade plus trying to find our way together.  My mother did apologize for the abuse she inflicted on me and to her credit she truly did work hard to repair our relationship.  In truth it was only after the birth of my own daughter that I began to truly forgive my mom and understand the challenges and hardships of what it means to be a parent.  For the fourteen months immediately after the birth of my daughter our relationship did deepen in ways I would have never thought possible.

And then she went out of remission, the cancer she had fought mostly on her own five years prior came back and all too soon she died.

There is more to the story of course than what I have written here.  There always is.

I grew up never knowing if my mother loved me or even wanted me.  And then when my own daughter was born I knew that she did, she always had, and she simply didn’t have the tools or support to be the mother I needed let alone the mother she actually wanted to be.

This is not to make excuses or to minimize my own pain and trauma.  Rather it is a statement of facts.  Facts that took a very long time for me to see or understand.

My relationship with my mother of course informs my relationship with my daughter today.  From the beginning of my daughter’s life I knew exactly what I never wanted to do but didn’t always know what I did want to do or rather, how to do it.  Throughout her almost ten years the young woman born from my womb has given me lessons and pushed me and expanded me and healed me in ways I never knew possible.  And, thankfully, so deeply gratefully, I am in a place where I can receive those lessons, where I can learn and stumble and make mistakes and make amends and do everything I can to do different the next time.

I think if my mother would have had a husband who was actually supportive or had the support instead of the ridicule of her own mother she would have done the same – she would have fought for us and our relationship from the beginning.  But that was not our reality, it was not to be our experience as mother and daughter.

And so I have taken those painful lessons and apply them as best I can today.

This work of unraveling the pain and trauma of my own relationship with my own mother and trying to create a different paradigm with my daughter, has lead to a deeper understanding of how our culture does not support women, and perhaps especially mothers.  I have learned about intergenerational trauma and the wounding that is passed down generation after generation, both in our DNA and through the ways we relate with our mothers and they with us (and in turn the way we relate with our own daughters).

What I have come to realize is that the strife and frustration and trauma of the mother daughter relationship is both an act of survival and an act of oppression.  In understanding how our own mothers, and their mothers, and theirs, and theirs, and so back several thousand years, were disregarded and dehumanized and in understanding what they, our feminine ancestors, had to do to not only insure their own survival but also the survival of their daughters, it is clear that this wounding that is passed down – from physical abuse to psychological abuse to all in between and beyond – was a way of trying to keep the daughters in-line so they would survive.  This is something that scholars call the “Patriarchal Bargain” – what we give up for a sense of safety; what our mothers gave up and what they taught us to give up.

And while our mothers are responsible for their actions and inaction, they were also pawns and victims in how our misogynist culture seeks to isolate and dis-empower us as women.

We live in a culture that is terrified of women.  This terror shows up as hatred.  It shows up in the fact that we are paid a lessor wage.  It shows up in the ways we are told over and over that we don’t know or understand our own bodies.  It shows up in the ways it tells us over and over that women are untrustworthy, are manipulative, are sinful, are evil.

One of the most powerful messages our culture gives us are the ones about how women are untrustworthy.  These messages show up in our media, through the encouragement of “mean girl” behavior, through the very facts that our own mothers in many ways betrayed us to a culture that hates us (as did their mothers, and their mothers, etc), in the ways we encourage competition and have a cultural scarcity complex (there isn’t enough for everyone so you’d best step on everyone else to make sure you get yours).

This message isolates us.  It isolates us from our mothers and our daughters.  It isolates us from our sisters and our aunties.

And in this isolation we lose not only relationships with other women, we lose our relationship with our Self.

Our mothers and grandmothers treated their daughters the way they did because of a deep trauma and thousands year old fear of what will happen when their girl-child goes out into the world.  The knowledge and fear of how women are raped and beaten and murdered by the men who claim to love them.  The knowledge and fear that we are not only not safe out on the streets or at a bar or at a party alone, we aren’t safe in our own homes.  The knowledge and fear that statistically speaking the pains and secrets of their own lived experiences will also be pains experienced by their daughters.

I talk even more about the complexity and intricacy of mother-daughter relationships in this 20-minute video below.  I hope you enjoy it.

This essay and video are the first in my three-part series Unleashing Our Self as an introduction to the topics we’ll be unearthing, examining, dislodging and embracing in the six month circle Unleashing Our Mothers, Unleashing Our Selves.  We begin April  1.  If you are interested, you can learn more and request an application here. xoxo

If you’d like to read the second essay and watch the second video in the series, you can click right over here and you can read and view the third one right here.

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Mothers and daughters

Love her but leave her wild. ~Atticus

Most of us were tamed as children.

We weren’t allowed to run wild. Or if we were, only in certain circumstances.

I remember longing to be a tomboy in some ways, although I was very much a girlie-girl. The tomboys always looked like they were having so much fun climbing trees and getting muddy and having snarled up hair. I watched them, intently, with my brushed neat hair and pressed dresses, sitting as lady-like as possible on the porch steps or the sidewalk.

I think my mom longed to be a tomboy too. She wore jeans and it seemed like such an act of defiance. Her jeans and t-shirts were her own special fuck-you to my grandmother I think.

I know she, my mom, was raised to be lady-like too, to be girlie, to wear dresses and always have her hair neat, to speak properly and only when spoken to. And so, as an adult, she wore jeans and tied her hair back in messy pony-tails and swore like a sailor.

But not around my grandmother, her mother. Never then.

And of course, we were never allowed to be anything but proper around our grandmother too.

And so the lessons were learned early on to hide parts of myself. To hustle for love and acceptance. To bend and mold myself to another’s liking, no matter what.

This all came to a somewhat abrupt stop when I was pregnant with my own daughter. And the vows I made so many years before that all the abuse and shame and neglect would end with me came crashing forward and I claimed those vows again.

I wanted different for my own daughter. Hell, I wanted different for me.

I saw the pain in both my mother’s and grandmother’s eyes when they tried to connect, to interact with each other. My mother always on guard for the next criticism, my grandmother having the best intentions but always picking and pointing out all my mother’s “faults”.

I saw the pain in my own mother’s eyes when she tried to connect with me and I knew my own reluctance and resistance to letting her in for all the reasons I had.

I knew their heartache and I knew my own.

I didn’t want that for me and my girl. I still don’t.

Some days are better than others and some days my grandmother’s harsh voice comes out of my throat and some days my daughter watches me with weary eyes and some days we connect in ways that I never knew possible for a mother and daughter and my heart swells and I know that cycles are breaking.

These cycles that go back beyond my own grandmother. Back generations and generations. Back to the times when patriarchy took root and women began to be disregarded and de-humanized. Back to a time when women first learned the lessons of what they must do to survive, what they must do for their girl-children to survive.

The cycles, the trauma; the looks, the tones; the violence, the neglect; the complicity, the compliance. Passed on and down, over and over.

All leading to isolation and loneliness; anxiety and depression; disconnection from the women who came before and the women who came after. Passed on and down, over and over.

I was very young when I made the vow that it all stopped with me. Maybe five or six. And for a time I thought that meant never having children, as it was the only way I knew to guarantee none of it would be passed on and down again.

And then biology and wanting and the meeting the right man and well, here I am today.

Ten years ago I renewed my vows that it all stops with me. And every day since I renew them again and again.

Part of the renewal is continually finding ways to connect to the women who came before, to continually re-examine my own relationships with my mother and grandmothers and their relationships with each other. To step outside myself and see what is still being passed on and down and doing as much of my own course correction as I can.

This is one of the ways we burn it down. This is one of the ways we change our culture and world for future generations. By doing our own work of unearthing and unraveling and dismantling and dislodging and embracing and being.

On April 1, an intimate group of women will begin to gather for my next six month online women’s circle. (CIS, Transgender, and AFAB non-binary all welcome). We will explore our relationships with other women, with our mothers and grandmothers, their relationships with each other and connect to our female ancestors to heal wounds and trauma and embrace their strength and power. If this sounds like part of your own journey of self actualization, of social liberation, of becoming unleashed, then I invite you to learn more and request an application here: http://gwynnraimondi.com/unleashingourself