Working Moms, I See You; Let's Help Each Other Bring Ourselves Back to Life

Rage is the spark, not the fuel.

—Karen Walrond, Unlocking Us

What Working Mom Can’t Use Some Humor about Daddy Privilege?

Kaiser Permanente Rock Creek Medical Offices

On November 11, 2021, my almost six-year-old child received her first COVID-19 vaccination. Palpable relief immediately washed over me. When I went to the same clinic for my own booster shot the following day, I welled up with tears upon seeing the bulletin board pictured below. If only every time we turned to the outside world, we experienced this much love and care for each other.

Then news of the Omicron variant hit the airwaves, and my motivation to write this post died on the vine. Meanwhile , the Supreme Court weighed in on Texas’s draconian anti-abortion law, the Senate has not been able to move voting rights legislation forward, and ongoing obstructions are blocking the passage of the Build Back Better Plan. Thank you rage for prompting my return to the keyboard.

Given how hard it is to detect the water while we’re swimming in it, we likely won’t know just how impactful the last 21 months have been on our lives until several years from now. On November 11, however, I got a glimpse of the massive energy, time, and effort that have gone toward protecting and negotiating for the safety of my daughter since we first locked down in March 2020. Knowing I’m never alone in these moments of collective struggle and transformation, I feel inspired to give a shout out to my fellow moms and additional parents who may not be women but are largely, if not entirely, carrying the load of what remains heavily skewed as women’s work within patriarchal, gender-binary systems. That load includes but is not limited to the actual physical labor of caring for children as well as the mental and emotional weight of establishing and maintaining the systems that keep daily life afloat. Here are just a few examples of that systems maintenance: keeping track of what food is needed to fill hungry bellies and what bills need to be paid to keep those bellies dry and warm, enrolling in and coordinating children’s activities and appointments, transporting and/or organizing transportation for children to get to those activities and appointments on time, communicating with third parties like schools and doctor’s offices, and doing the due diligence necessary to determine which peers and community members are safe and hospitable for our little ones. During the pandemic, engaging in near constant cost-benefit analyses of how much we expand or shrink our children’s worlds to keep them safe has been yet another burden added to the already unbearable weight of being a mom. Parents with children under five remain saddled with this additional burden.

It recently came to my attention that my daughter thought she caused my exhaustion. Initially, I felt heartbroken. She’s not crazy for picking up on how limited my patience has been for the brilliant ways she delays bedtime. She accurately detects the irritability that emerges when I’m trying to get us somewhere on time and her freer timescape does not give a hoot about others’ rules, judgments, and rigidity. And she’s most certainly not making up the fatigue she detects in my eyes or the sadness she picks up in my voice on a regular basis these days. Of course she believes all of this is about her. That’s what kids do. So I at least have said and will continue to repeat to her that the depletion is not her fault or her responsibility. When I went through a list of reasons I grow weary that have nothing to do with her, I appreciated her solemn contribution, “Mama, playing hard makes us tired, too.” Amen to that.

As a bit of my worry about her has dissipated with her vaccination shots, that spark of rage has started to replace the heartbreak. I have been a psychotherapist throughout the pandemic, working with approximately 25 clients per week. This experience hasn’t exactly felt like a walk in the park. I look back at those first six months with incredulity, as I would see five clients for hour-long sessions from 7 a.m. to noon in the basement, come upstairs, and take over childcare for the afternoon. Now I understand that initial period as one of crisis, when my stress response system had enough reserves to tackle day after day with no time or space to nourish myself. And I was one of the lucky moms who didn’t lose my job or have to leave it because there was no one else to take care of the children. I also had a reliable co-parent and so was able to tag-team work and parenting.

Even with those resources, as 2022 fast approaches my reserves are gonzo. And a lot of people in this country—many of whom refuse to get vaccinated—deny there is even an issue. Re-enter the rage and our need for a different kind of fuel. Amanda Doyle poignantly captured the reality for too many of us when she said,

…in chemistry, fire burns when fuel meets heat and oxygen. You need heat and oxygen to turn fuel into fire. And I realized that I have that fuel in me. I do have fuel in me for fun and joy and desire and curiosity. And I think we all do. But I think because of the way our lives are structured, mostly for women, we don’t give those things heat and we don’t give those things air. And that is giving space and time for these things and allowing attention for them. And if you have no room or time in your life to live, you just won’t. And the truth is, is that the world is fine with women not living. And that means that we have to decide whether we want to live because not a damn person is going to require it of us, because that is how the world turns...And I think the key thing for me has been not viewing this as yet another duty that I’m failing to meet. Not just another way I’m jacked up, not just another way that I have a problem or my relationship has a problem, or I haven’t prioritized correctly, but it’s just that I have been doing the best that I can. And that best has been not making any fucking room to have these things in my life. And I’m just viewing them not as a something I’m failing to make happen in my life, but as a birthright that I want to reclaim. And so I’m taking back that room because I can either spend my time resenting the world for failing to ignite me, or I can make some time to give myself the heat and the air that I need.

So how do we reclaim this birthright of feeling ignited in life? I say we love the shit out of ourselves and each other. The isolation and self-reliance required by a toxically individualistic society are not badges of honor. They are our death knell. With the recent loss of Bell Hooks, it seems only fitting to return to her wisdom on the power of beloved community. As she said, “…people in oppressive institutions will not change from the logic and practices of domination without engagement with those who are striving for a better way.” Finding and loving those who want to address what is happening, rather than avoid it, as well as those who embrace the compassionate mess that is life, rather than judge it, will bring us back to life. With some vitality, we can mobilize collectively for transformation of those systems, which benefit so few and devastate so many.

In addition to engaging with trusted others when I can muster it (there’s been more cheesy holiday film watching this month than I would care to admit), I am paying closer and closer attention to the harsh voice that I’ve appropriated from various institutions and relationships across my life. That voice derisively says my first name before dismissing my struggles. Usually a negative evaluation follows as well as an order to be different. “Connie, why are you getting so upset over such a small thing? Pull it together.” This voice represents the colonization of my mind that would have me buy into systems designed to objectify me, exploit my labor, and violate my dignity. So I am committed to not giving that voice any more of my power, which I can do regardless of whether or not I have a beloved community to lean on just yet. And when I struggle to pull my attention away from that gaslighting voice, the following poem by Becky Helmsley reminds me of what is actually true:

She sat at the back and they said she was shy,

She led from the front and they hated her pride,

They asked her advice and then questioned her guidance,

They branded her loud, then were shocked by her silence,

When she shared no ambition they said it was sad,

So she told them her dreams and they said she was mad,

They told her they'd listen, then covered their ears,

And gave her a hug while they laughed at her fears,

And she listened to all of it thinking she should,

Be the girl they told her to be best as she could,

But one day she asked what was best for herself,

Instead of trying to please everyone else,

So she walked to the forest and stood with the trees,

She heard the wind whisper and dance with the leaves,

She spoke to the willow, the elm and the pine,

And she told them what she'd been told time after time,

She told them she felt she was never enough,

She was either too little or far far too much,

Too loud or too quiet, too fierce or too weak,

Too wise or too foolish, too bold or too meek,

Then she found a small clearing surrounded by firs,

And she stopped...and she heard what the trees said to her,

And she sat there for hours not wanting to leave,

For the forest said nothing, it just let her breathe.

Standing in the Truth Will Set You Free (And Hurt Like Hell)

…That’s what releasing all the trauma is about, is about being open enough, vulnerable enough to do the work to tell the truth about your own life. And I think when you can stand in the truth of your own life, you then get to rise to the highest, truest expression of yourself as a human being.

— Oprah Winfrey, Armchair Expert

The amazing podcast episodes released during the pandemic have saved my life. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe. I at least want to express my gratitude. On the days when I wasn’t sure how to keep going, I grabbed my shoes and the dog, headed for the creek near my house, and expanded my world. I still do.

In addition to inspiration, I find solace in the voices of those who so bravely have shared the truths of their lives, often with each other. Oprah Winfrey. Brene Brown. Resmaa Menakem. Glennon Doyle. Prentis Hemphill. Tim Ferriss. Rod Owens. Tara Brach. Gabor Mate. Kristen Neff. Richard Schwartz. Terri Cole. Sonya Renee Taylor. Terry Real. Brandi Carlile. Ashley C. Ford. Rachel Kaplan. And so many more. When we learn how to find them, the wises ones and helpers are abundant.

So I decided, why not stand in the truth of my own life? I am here to practice Glennon Doyle’s bold claim: it is my job to trust my vision, even in the midst of a midlife unraveling. There is both no time to fuck around and no time to rush. Bring on the paradox.

These days, clarity about my own truth has come from inquiring into the impacts of growing up in an authoritarian world. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey wrote,

We elicit from the world what we project into the world; but what you project is based upon what happened to you as a child.

While participating in an intensive training on developmental injuries, an image emerged of a five-year-old child, with her hands on her hips, facing a bulldozer. With deeper insight into how young children make maps of the world that are based on their intergenerational family patterns and immediate landscapes, I began to honor the lifelong fear I’ve carried in my body. I understood that little girl faced extreme physical and emotional harm if she did not obey the rules of the adults in power and perform the role of a good girl perfectly. Anxiety and de-selfing became my primary ways of sustaining relationships and salvaging some semblance of safety. They were ingenious adaptations rather than inherent defects. In some contexts, these strategies still work.

As I brought compassion to the fraught blueprints I inherited, my struggles with trusting the friendliness of the universe made more sense, as did the association between vulnerability and powerlessness. So I began to honor rather than shame the shakiness in my body that arises when I am feeling vulnerable in relationship. What began as an awareness of a force pressing down on my neck and shoulders—a force that resembled one of those wall-mounted can crushers—released into a trembling when I could stay with it. With adequate safety, that quaking could complete. And liberate.

I recently had a hard conversation with loved ones and, instead of engaging in the tried and true habit of suppressing the trembling, I quivered—from my jaw to my toes. And I said to my beloveds, with the confidence that comes only from having mindfully experienced these sensations many times before, “This is what fears looks like when it’s allowed to move through and leave your body.” That was a moment of agency, not weakness. I have been savoring the shit out of it. With each passing day that I practice staying connected to my body, fear has a little less stranglehold over my life.

With the help of a therapist, I also realized that my nervous system immediately settles when a trusted person places a firm hand on my neck while I feel afraid. It’s like magic. Pediatrician Claudia Gold wrote,

What makes stress toxic is the absence of a safe, secure relationship to protect the developing child from the effects of that stress. The relationship acts as a buffer...this safe, secure relationship is one in which the caregiver has the capacity to hold the child in mind, one in which there is a process of mutual regulation. Stress and adversity are ubiquitous. Adversity becomes ‘trauma’ when it is compounded by a sense that one’s mind is alone.

Eddie

So connection is beginning to replace the limited and limiting strategies of self-reliance and grit, which I have used to get through hard things by myself. That hand on my neck, hugs, words of affirmation from trusted loved ones—all of these gestures and additional ones, too—are allowing that missing experience of mutual regulation to happen. My cat’s adoring eyes and warm body on my lap also work, as does imagining an ideal parent.

And when I am adequately regulated and resourced, my adult self offers that love, compassion, and listening presence to younger parts of me. Every time I can do the latter, I actually feel self-trust grow in my core. It’s like the mercury in an old-school thermometer moving upward as the temperature rises.

When we stay with ourselves, we earn our own trust.

Glennon Doyle, I am here for it!

Despite years of therapy, I needed to arrive at midlife to understand the outsized role that shame continues to play in my life. The pervasiveness and sophistication of the “there is something wrong with me” narrative is downright astonishing. In a recent podcast episode, I heard Gershen Kaufman’s definition of shame for the first time: “the breaking of the interpersonal bridge.” My 45-year-old self was finally ready to allow shame to be seen as the relational injury that it is.

The other day, I went on a hike and was mired in self-blame about how imperfectly I stood up for myself. I managed to use the sacred pause. Understanding that his mean-spirited voice in my head was trying to protect me from re-injury, I asked her, “What would you have to face, feel, or experience if you stopped beating me down?” As I have learned to do, I waited for the response to come from within. From stillness and patience. There was nothing to figure out. Held by the natural beauty surrounding me, the bright, clear truth shone through before long: “If I let my true self be seen, I will be punished, rejected, or abandoned.” Grief immediately replaced the shame. With tears streaming down my cheeks, my Self replied, “I will do none of those things. I am here to love and protect you, and I promise I am not leaving. I am with you ‘til the end.”

Fierce self-compassion is gradually replacing that shame, and the Boundary Boss Bill of Rights is growing muscle on previously exposed and brittle bones. It’s a process. As I often joke with clients, healing is not like ripping off stripper pants. It is about paying closer and closer attention to how the things that happened to us impacted what happens inside us. Abundant creative resources now exist to support us on this journey. For example, Margaret Paul offers this pearl of wisdom that has changed my life:

…at any given moment, we have only two choices regarding our intention:

* The intention to learn about love — starting with learning to love yourself so that you can share your love with others.

* The intention to avoid pain through various forms of controlling behavior.

To hold the former intention, we first need to build safe-enough internal and external containers. Then the alchemy of healing can manifest. With a strong enough foundation, we can remember this:

Reclaiming the Selfie, as Sonya Renee Taylor Invited Me to Do

Who you are is so much more than what you do. The essence, shining through the heart, soul, and center, the bare and bold truth of you does not lie in your to-do list. You are not just at the surface of your skin, not just the impulse to arrange the muscles of your face into a smile or a frown, not jut boundless energy, or bone wearying fatigue. Delve deeper. You are divinity; the vast and open sky of spirit. It's the light of God, the ember at your core, the passion and the presence, the timeless, deathless essence of you that reaches out and touches me. Who you are transcends fear and turns suffering into liberation. Who you are is love. (Major bow to you for this poem, Danna Faulds.)

When "Tend-and-Befriend" Is A Trauma Response that Hurts More than It Helps

On an unseasonably warm November day, I took the dog for a walk. With COVID-19 raging, I suited up with a baseball cap, sunglasses, visible earphones, and a bright green cloth mask with white polka dots. I thought my presentation’s message was pretty clear: Not here to talk, just to walk.

Alas, while strolling along a relatively busy street listening to Brene Brown’s latest podcast episode with Dolly Parton, a man on a bicycle, who was wearing a mask better suited for Nightmare on Elm Street than COVID-19 protection, waved as he passed me on the other side of the road. I responded with a slight wave, trying to be friendly rather than antisocial in this time of so much isolation and loneliness. Apparently this was all the go-ahead he needed to turn around and ride up alongside me.

I abruptly stopped walking, and he rode past, which is what I had hoped would happen. I believe in science and the infection prevention that physical distancing provides, especially when I have no idea where people have been or what they’ve been doing. When he realized I was no longer beside him, he hit the brakes. I saw a large knife in a sheath on his hip. About 15 feet away now, he told me he wanted to talk to me. I replied, “I’m not talking to strangers during the pandemic.” I waited, feeling grateful to have the dog by my side and the presence of several people driving by that I could flag down if necessary, although I noticed I was feeling fairly frozen. After what felt like an eternity, he began to pedal again and turned around to go wherever he originally was heading. I returned the earbud to its rightful place and began to walk again, the words he was now yelling at me as he rode away garbled by Dolly’s soothing twang.

When I got home, I headed straight to the stump and axe in my backyard, set up explicitly to metabolize the anger that has been stuck in my body for years. To borrow from my daughter when she was a toddler, “I have a lot of yellings in my body.” The swinging movement of the axe helped to thaw the freeze in my torso. As the stuck energy was mobilized, my throat opened, too, and the words came—the things I wanted to say to that man, that would have been appropriate to say to that man, but that could have resulted in violence to me if I stated them directly to his face. Other words came, too. About accountability. About entitlement. About wanting to be a person who isn’t expected to caretake adults and their feelings.

During this hellish year, some amazing women have delivered poignant and welcome truths:

I have a voice.

Started out as a whisper, turned into a scream

Made a beautiful noise

Shoulder to shoulder marching in the street.

— Alicia Keys & Brandi Carlile, A Beautiful Noise

I will not stay, not ever again - in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.

— Glennon Doyle, Untamed

Do no harm, but take no shit.

—Elizabeth Lesser, Unlocking Us

These singers, writers, and activists are not the white women who turned out in droves to vote for Donald Trump on November 3. As a trauma therapist who wishes everyone old enough to vote was required to read Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, I think there’s a lot more going on here than we want to acknowledge, let alone address, in the cries for unity following Biden’s win.

The day before I encountered Entitled Biker Man, I happened upon Heather Plett’s poignant blog post, “On trauma, abuse, and the justification that helps us cope with cognitive dissonance,” written after her own encounter with “Mr. Big Man” and published three days after the 2020 presidential election. As she wrote,

When I found the research that identified a fourth trauma response (tend-and-befriend), I finally felt seen and could finally begin to name my reactivity as trauma-related and not just something that made me weak. (I could also learn to soothe myself, and to experience my heightened reactivity with more mindfulness and less self-judgment.) Tend-and-befriend is most often seen in women, according to the research. It’s the instinct that causes us to gather the vulnerable around us and to befriend those who will help us survive the threat. The ‘befriend’ part can be a really healthy community-support piece (i.e. gathering other family members to help us protect our children), but the dark side of it is that we also tend to befriend the perpetrator of the threat in order to mitigate the harm.

Nowadays, when I observe this tend-and-befriend adaptation not only in women but also in people with additional marginalized social identities, individuals who have partners or parents who fall on the “higher” end of the narcissism spectrum, and life histories filled with violence and negligence (and often all of these experiences reside in a single body), I interrupt minimizing language, such as “people pleasing” or “peacekeeping,” when it is used to describe this trauma response. Instead, I emphasize the unmet need for safety that drives it.

If we are in homes and relationships that promote secure relating—that is we feel seen, heard, valued, and, especially when we are kids, protected in our close relationships—we do not tend to live in constant fear of physical and/or emotional harm. In contrast, in environments where we have repeatedly felt emotionally overwhelmed and alone in that overwhelm, whether as young children or later in our lives, a wise strategy is to keep the external environment as stable and harmonious as possible, regardless of the cost to ourselves. So we learn to soothe the volatile person who has power over us. To silence our truth so as not to not upset those around us. To give up our authenticity. To freeze.

Unfortunately, in a society founded on a caste system and filled with authoritarian religious communities, the tend-and-befriend trauma response abounds among those of us in one-down positions on the ladder. Healing this response first and foremost involves carving out safe-enough external and internal landscapes in which we can learn to tend and befriend our own experience.

It is hard to contact the wounded places in us if we’re feeling imperiled by threats of violence, humiliation, criticism, and contempt. We’re mammals after all, and our animal defenses (that is, fight, flight, freeze, and tend-and-befriend) will generally win out if our nervous systems perceive or experience enough threat. Boundary setting therefore is key to establishing those safe-enough spaces to tend and befriend ourselves first. Learning how to set boundaries that are firm, clear, and kind requires a lot of practice after a lifetime of shrinking the self to evade harm. When we have been terrorized as children, we may have an even harder time allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to stay kind when standing our ground, or keep a soft front to use Brene Brown’s language, since our brain so quickly associates vulnerability with violence.

I’ve found that the “take no shit” part of Lesser’s teaching can easily drown out the “do no harm” message in an interaction if I have not metabolized enough of my anger beforehand and/or I am interacting with someone who is scared of my anger and so tries to control or dismiss it, which is akin to throwing gas on a fire. Another boundary I therefore am learning to honor is to walk away from most people when I start to feel the upward and forward energy of rage in my body so that I can process that energy in a way that does not harm others or myself. For the record, containing our rage long enough to get to a safe refuge is much easier to do when we’re sober, have enough food in our bellies, feel supported by a community and got adequate sleep (the HALT acronym is a great tool for assessing how resourced we are at any given moment).

After decades of doing no harm and taking a lot of shit, we are undoubtedly going to make mistakes on the path to doing no harm while taking no shit. Ironically, the more we can practice tending and befriending ourselves, the more resilience we will have in the face of the shame that arises after unskillfully standing up for ourselves. Simply put, more self-compassion creates more capacity to effectively engage in the art of repair.

Ultimately, if we want adults to grow up and be responsible for their own words, feelings, and actions, we are, as Lama Rod Owens puts it, going to need to let people “have their agency to be in the dark.” The process of transforming the tend-and-befriend trauma response to a more fulfilling life is a winding one with a lot of cognitive dissonance. Shadow work is not for the faint of heart. And I cannot think of a more liberatory experience than consciously choosing to no longer betray myself. Having attended to my own wants and needs, I now understand I am not my trauma. Nobody is.

A Love Letter to Marginalized Community Members in Late October 2020

Feel the pain of it, not the disgrace of it.

—Sharon Salzberg, Shelter for the Heart and Mind

Me. Unicorn and butterfly face painting by 4 year old.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and I feel like a steel-toed boot just kicked me in the face.

Before that confirmation, I decided to speak with family members about Barrett. As both a cisgender woman and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I figured empathy would prevail. My family members would see, hear, and value me, my partner, and my almost five-year-old daughter enough to link Barrett’s confirmation with the loss of hard-fought protections and rights. In that moment, my yearning for deep connection blinded me to an intergenerational reality that is steeped in white supremacy, misogyny, heteronormativity, and unbridled self-interest. There’s a lot of addiction, anxiety, and perfectionism in my ancestry, too, which I would argue are the family-level version of the more macro-level forces I just named.

So what I got in return for bringing up Barrett was what Resmaa Menakem would call dirty pain—pain that uses denial, avoidance, and blame to block trauma from metabolizing and, therefore, healing. They denied that she will contribute to economic and cultural harm for many through a judicial position of power. They blamed the “liberal media” for painting her in such a negative light. And, perhaps most agonizingly, they avoided responding directly to the anguished question I posed, “How can you say you love me and support her nomination?”

Here’s the deal. Yes, we need to fight the oppressive conditions in this country that have existed from its inception. AND it is going to be much harder to engage in that struggle effectively and over the long haul if we don’t do so from a foundation of self-love. Assertiveness, confidence, and resilience do not emerge from the trance of unworthiness.

I am 45 years old. This past year I finally allowed myself to experience—not just think about but actually feel—being delighted in by another. Did you know that being delighted in is one of the primary conditions of secure attachment? Until recently, I did not. Yes, I “knew” we need to feel valued to experience a substantial sense of connection and belonging. I did not yet feel, in my body and with emotion, that the path to believing in your value is feeling delighted in by those around you. I have received plenty of accolades and pats on the back for my accomplishments; that is not the same thing. To truly be delighted in is to experience someone lighting up simply because they are in your presence. You do not have to say anything, do anything, or feel a certain way. You—your whole, glorious, messy self—is celebrated for being here, with me, in this moment. Over and over and over.

Developing the capacity to allow in someone else’s delight in us is no joke after a lifetime of oppositional messaging: “You need to obey to belong.” “You need to perform to be loved.” “You need to not be needy to keep me from leaving.” Getting these toxic beliefs out of our system is a process that requires time, patience, and heaps of self-compassion. In other words, we need a lot of support. The good news is that oodles of amazing people and resources exist to assist us if we learn how to let them (I’ve linked to some of my favorites below). In case my own long and winding journey can support yours, I want to offer this:

Before we can generously feel our own value, we need adequate safety—of the physical and emotional kind. It is nearly impossible to give ourselves undivided, loving attention if we simultaneously need to be vigilant about protecting ourselves from judgment, shaming, and humiliation. How we get to safety is going to depend on our circumstances (what resources are available to us) as well as our willingness to try something different. When we have a lot of experience with staying silent to remain safe, anticipate a lot of “Yeah…buts” coming up. “Yeah, I would love to be delighted in, but that’s childish.” “Yeah, I get what you’re saying about this radical self-love idea, but I need to spend all my time getting out the vote.” “Yeah, I see how this system that focuses only on my performance is exploitative and dehumanizing, but it’s all I know.” Unfortunately, those “buts” dismiss the insight in the first half of the sentence and keep us stuck. I invite you to engage in an experiment: see what happens if you can catch the “but” as it comes out of your mouth and replace it with “and.”

Clematis in the Garden

If we are not in a life-threatening situation and can stay with the truth that we need safety to take in love, so many possibilities emerge. As someone who has struggled with feeling like a burden to others if I ask for support, I’m grateful for the existence of practices that require only our imagination (linked resources on this below). For example, I recently imagined a dome of blooming clematis vines surrounding me and blocking out any voices that were critical, taunting, and demeaning. While sitting on a soft cushion that rested on soft grass within the safety of that living shelter (all of this imagined, by the way), my ideal parent appeared. For me, my ideal parent is a trainer I had, but they do not have to be someone with whom we have actually interacted. What matters is they know how to delight in us, exactly as we are. So my trainer showed up on a cushion, sitting across from me. She looked at me with her kind, twinkling eyes and reached out with her baby-blue-painted fingernails, inviting my hands into hers. And once we settled in to being with one other, she said to me, “You are lovable just as you are.”

Because I have allowed myself to enact these practices, I am more and more able to take in the nourishment from my trainer and savor it. And the more I take in this nurturance from an imagined ally, the more possible it feels to receive it from real, live sources available to me in my current life—the cat sleeping on my lap as I write this post, a 20-second hug from my partner, my child’s snuggles, the beauty of the fallen red maple leaves outside my front door, and the loving friends with whom I have built reciprocal, trusting relationships. And, yes, the more I experience being delighted in—not merely tolerated or even accepted—the more I step into a loving and fierce presence that has the capacity to use my voice to fight for collective liberation and justice. In my everyday interactions as well, I am growing better at clearing the FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt) and embracing a practice of love that is rooted in honesty and acceptance.

An important note: if the substantive nurturance I highlighted above has largely been missing from your life, please know that tidal waves of grief are going to accompany this process of learning how to love yourself. Hence the opening quote from Sharon Salzberg—feel the pain without adding the second arrows of judgment and shame to it. Seek out and receive the support you need to feel this grief all the way to its end. I promise you can:

Breathe in the pain

breathe out the love.

Come to see

right here

right now

you are a goddamn miracle.

Resources

• Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands

• Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology

• Love and Fear During Times of War: An Interview with Lama Rod Owens

• David Elliott Explaining the Ideal Parent Practice

• David Elliott Explaining the Power of Imagined Practices

• Sharon Salzberg's Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World

• Emily and Amelia Nagoski's Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle

• Dana Morningstar’s Out of the Fog: Moving from Confusion to Clarity After Narcissistic Abuse

Transforming Self-Reliance into Interdependence Right Here, Right Now

What comes to mind when you think about self-reliance? Until recently, my academic training steered me toward a critique of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her daily newsletter on March 18 (was that only 9 days ago!?), “After more than a generation of a culture that idealized individualism and said selfish greed was good, the coronavirus is forcing us to evaluate whether that is what we want to be as a government, and as a nation.”

That critique remains sound, to be sure. Now that I am a psychotherapist who is ever more interested in the significance of our attachments to each other, I also see self-reliance in a more intimate, devastating light.

During the past six months, I have been blessed to participate in an intensive sensorimotor psychotherapy (SP) training that focuses on healing developmental wounds. The sources of this pain are frequently our earliest relationships with caregivers and other individuals who were consistently in close proximity to us, such as siblings, peers, and teachers.

Attachment research shows us how infants orient toward what invites a caregiver’s attention. Infants also learn to mute or shut down the behaviors that result in their caregivers turning away. In light of how dependent we are on our caregivers for survival as a species, the strategies we develop to ensure that our caregivers attend to our basic needs are vital. According to SP, self-reliance is a particular adaptation that forms in response to our needs not being met during the developmental period when we experience separation anxiety. This phase begins as early as infancy and can last until we are about five years of age.

Part of the rub in convincing people that self-reliance is linked to early unmet needs is our society’s stubborn refusal to treat emotional needs as critical, not only to our survival but also to our flourishing. So many of us believe that if we had our material needs adequately met, in a country and world where many do not, we are fine. This is exactly the self-reliant mindset that is born from not having sufficient nurturance. The young child who is not adequately seen, heard, and valued wisely learns not to need these forms of connection. We learn to do things on our own—“I’ll figure it out”—and do not practice asking for help from others when we are struggling.

Moreover, we develop a wall of distrust (a nourishment barrier to use SP terms) since we have not been able to rely on those around us to consistently meet our relational, emotional, and additional needs. As children, we do not yet understand that this necessary self-reliance is specific to our earliest relationships. We therefore generalize the need for self-reliance to the world at large and, in so doing, inadvertently cut off connection from people who have much more capacity to be present with us, even in our most vulnerable, needy moments, than the individuals involved in those early-childhood relationships.

Here is the real kicker. Because we are not robots and have real physical, emotional, and mental limits, the ongoing insistence that we do not have needs means that eventually we collapse. Maybe we get sick or have a mental breakdown. Maybe we relapse into addiction of one kind or another. Maybe we even die.

I have been reflecting on how the most self-reliant among us are potentially more at risk of death in this era of the coronavirus. Surviving COVID-19, as well as preventing the contraction of it, often requires support from others rather than going it alone. One of the most self-reliant people I know recently had coronavirus symptoms and didn’t know what to do about the fact that they were running out of food and didn’t want to risk spreading the illness to others by going to the grocery store. The idea of asking someone to shop for them or, less vulnerably, using the delivery service that many stores offer had not occurred to them.

I personally suck at identifying and attending to my own needs. The weekend that I had the training about the self-reliant adaptation, I was repeatedly slapped in the face with the limitations of this strategy. I had just seen 30+ clients the previous week and also thrown a 50-person surprise party for my partner’s birthday (the planning of which I chose to do almost entirely on my own). I came to the weekend with a respiratory infection that greatly diminished my capacity to speak, let alone breathe. When our trainer asked if we all could withstand watching a video about a 17 month old who was significantly and negatively impacted when his parents left him for 9 days while his mother was birthing his sibling, something in me screamed no. Since I was on the verge of collapse, I couldn’t contain that refusal, and said, “No,” loudly enough for the people around me to hear it. Almost all my peers were up for watching the video so I hunkered down to endure it, knowing I’d likely be fighting back tears through the entire thing. At the time, I attributed the overwhelming emotion I felt to the fact that I had a four-year-old child at home who was the age of the boy in the film not so long ago.

I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder by one of the trainers who had heard my no. I quietly said to her, “You are going to tell me to leave for this part aren’t you?” She nodded her head. I left the room, feeling ashamed of my inability to toughen up and stay with the group. That same trainer soon came to find me and ask if I needed anything. I was in the stairwell of the training facility. “I’ll just walk up and down the stairs. I’ll be fine.” I was not fine. The remainder of the weekend hammered that home a million times over. I am grateful to my trainer for having the wisdom and presence to instruct me not to watch the video since I could not do that for myself.

I had the luck of going to my parents’ house soon after the training and finding photos of myself during the age when self-reliance takes root. Because my mother is a diligent photo-album keeper, I found pictures of my parents on a two-week vacation, without us kids, when I was 13 months old. It was a different era, and I’m not here to blame anyone. What I felt was vindication that I hadn’t been over-reacting when my intuition told me not to watch that video at the training. The documented evidence of my own separation from my parents at such a critical developmental stage strengthened the growing belief within me, “It’s not my fault.”

Little Me

Realizing just how self-reliant I am has been rough. Time and again, I have gone to almost any non-human resource I can think of to figure something out or get through a tough moment. SP would say I’ve learned to auto-regulate instead of interactively-regulate. Had a tough day? I’ll take a bath or do some deep breathing. Need to understand why I’m out of sorts? Solitary meditation or a Google search to the rescue! Feeling overwhelmed? Off to the pantry for some chocolate or maybe the refrigerator for a beer. Experiencing conflict with someone? I’ll journal about it or delve into a psychological thriller to distract me. Feeling anxious? I’ll run, walk, or hike, by myself, with my favorite podcast blasting through my earbuds.

I am learning to interactively regulate, however, and I invite you to do so, too. When I am feeling a lot of arousal in my body, which shows up as trembling, racing thoughts, and fast speech, a hug from my partner soothes my nervous system like nothing else can. The challenge has been to acknowledge the nourishment barrier between him and me, bow to it, and ask for the hug anyway.

Two days ago, I had an opportunity to interactively regulate in the coronavirus era. An accident occurred, while I was solo parenting my daughter, that resulted in a gash on my head and momentary shock about what had taken place. Touching my head and finding blood on my fingers scared the shit out of me, and I was not able to be the grounded, calm presence for my daughter that I do my best to be. I told her I needed physical space from her. Although I did need a moment to calm myself, I sure wasn’t kind or gentle in the way I demanded it, and she ran to her room and began crying. She was scared, too, since she saw the blood on my fingers and the emotional flood on my face. I immediately heard a critical voice in my head. She told me to get it the hell together so I could be there for my child.

On this particular day, I was able to say to that voice that it’s okay to ask for help from others. I turned to the Slack “workspace” that my partner set up for a group of us working parents in the immediate neighborhood who are trying to keep our shit together while we maintain physical distance from everyone outside our households. We help each other with grocery runs, childcare activity ideas, and additional needs. I went to the “general” channel and told my neighbors about the injury. The response was immediate and nurturing. Not only did I take a deep breath after receiving this support, but I also was quickly able to invite my daughter onto my lap, embrace her, and repair the relational rupture that occurred when my head injury happened.

I am finding the COVID-19 pandemic is the perfect opportunity to break what for so many of us is an intergenerational pattern of doing for ourselves regardless of the cost. And some days we are better at letting others support us than others. Self-compassion and forgiveness are key. After all, the young mapmaker in us is the one who wisely learned to turn only to ourselves when no one else was available or responsive.

We recently had another weekend training, this time online due to the risks of meeting in person. This experience taught me that deeply meaningful connection is possible across a distance and using video-based interactions. In one of the practice sessions, when I assumed the role of client, I realized that despite my years of therapy and practice with self-acceptance, I have kept that young mapmaker at arms length—I see her and offer her words of comfort, but the relationship is one of sympathy more than genuine empathy. With the support of the therapist, I found myself capable of offering her the intimate nurturance she craves. An image came up of holding my four-year-old daughter on one knee. My current adult, parent self invited that child part of me onto the other. I drew them both to my chest and kissed the top of their heads.

During an interview on NPR, Jennifer Michael Hecht, who authored Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, stated in no uncertain terms, “We belong to each other.” And we do. May we (re)learn to act from this belief and remember that in this wild, sometimes harsh, and beautiful world, we need each other more than we need to be self-reliant.   

Tolerating Shame to Heal Narcissism and Restore Justice

Recently I had a revelation. My three three year old has been chest deep in developmentally appropriate narcissism. That was not the revelation.

When I use the word narcissism, I’m mostly focusing on a sense of grandiosity that can quickly morph into passive-aggressive or outright aggressive victimhood and that is accompanied by little to no empathy. I’ll say more about this in a minute.

Credit to: The Mum’s Group

When my daughter is not demanding that she can have and do whatever she wants, she frequently is telling us, “I already know that!” If we would just get with her program, life would be sweet and peaceful. Until I did a u-turn and inquired into what was happening in my inner world around this parent-child relationship (and the book Parenting from the Inside Out has been my favorite guide for learning how to do this), her behavior was triggering me daily. I had to use all the restraint I could muster not to yell at her or run from the house screaming as each new ultimatum and dictatorial order shot out of her mouth.

Upon going inward, however, I recognized that when I was my child’s age I would have had my ass kicked, literally, if I puffed out my chest like she does. In the significantly more authoritarian and perfectionist household of my youth, I knew well before three that being a compliant, nice, and polite daughter was the way to stay physically and emotionally safe. Not disappointing my father and the other adult authority figures in my life was my number one priority. So my own inner toddler was utterly terrified by my spirited child’s behavior.

This epiphany meant I could reassure the younger parts of me, including the protectors that developed to avoid further wounding (such as my inner critic), that my daughter is being raised very differently than I was. For one thing, my partner and I are doing our best to give her structured nurturance—the structure being boundaries and limits that seek to honor her own and others’ dignity. This form of nurturance is rooted in empathy and compassion, rather than fear, and focuses on unconditional love for who my daughter is, which does not always mean accepting what she does.

The tension in my relationship with her has significantly diminished now that I’ve made explicit the implicit, fear-filled memories of my youth. That growing awareness has allowed me to repeatedly convince those younger parts of me that it is safe to go on letting my daughter be who she is. I seek to connect with her experience first and subsequently redirect her behavior when necessary. If I inadvertently shame her in a given moment for behavior I don’t like, I repair that relational rupture as soon as possible. I am once again feeling confident that this developmental period will morph into something more reasonable and empathic if my daughter’s emotional, physical, and cognitive needs continue to be met.

What does all this have to do with shame, narcissism, and justice? A whole lot I am coming to see. At present, my caseload is teeming with people who have faced severe narcissism within their inner circles. Accordingly, I’ve spent a lot of time studying narcissism and how to heal from it. What I have come to understand from my work with clients as well as resources like Therapist Uncensored, The Covert Passive-Aggressive Narcissist, and Out of the Fog is that adults who are significantly narcissistic have virtually no tolerance for shame. Their immense defenses against feeling shame usually developed in response to early childhood wounds that are related to their relationships with primary caregivers and that often involve trauma of one sort of another. Here, I’m particularly thinking of Juliane Taylor Shore’s definition of trauma: feeling overwhelmed and being alone while experiencing that overwhelm.

As a recovering perfectionist, it’s been a painful and terrifying experience to take in how closely related perfectionism and narcissism are. I’ve come to see that my aversion to narcissism rests on an incisive truth: when we cannot be with shame, we cannot face the harm we have done to others and ourselves. Without an acknowledgment of that harm, we are not able to repair those ruptures, which is necessary to restore trust and justice as well as strengthen connection, both with ourselves and others. Steve Finn beautifully articulates how we learn toxic shame (i.e. “I am a mistake”) while young. I’ll say here that caregivers leaving relational ruptures with children unacknowledged and unrepaired is central to the origins of toxic shame.

Finn says the path to moving from toxic shame to healthy shame (i.e. “I made a reparable mistake”) as adults requires revealing to trusted others that of which we are the most ashamed. As Brene Brown said, “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.” Importantly, if a narcissist is willing to do the gut-wrenching work of acknowledging and feeling their own shame (after all, they usually have a lot of behavior of which to feel ashamed), the audience who can hold their shame with empathy will likely need to be people other than the ones they have harmed, such as a therapist or support group. The harmed ones need reparations that center their experience, not more witnessing of the narcissist’s pain.

Now a benefit that perfectionists can have that extreme narcissists do not is empathy. Empathy is what allows me to contact those younger parts I mentioned above and meet them with understanding and forgiveness. That internal healing process means those younger parts of me, such as my temper-tantruming toddler and adolescent inner critic, do not need to take over as I navigate the external world. My true self—my adult self—who has a greater capacity for compassion, flexibility, calmness, and clarity, can run the show.

Empathy also allows me to step into others’ shoes, such as my daughter’s, and imagine what they’re experiencing. So when I have hurt someone, I have gotten more and more practiced at listening closely to the impact of my actions—without defending my good intentions—and both formally apologizing for that negative impact and then offering a plan of action so that I do not enact that same harm again. I’m certainly not perfect at this process, but perfection is not the goal, effective repair is. I also still struggle not to over apologize, a behavior that indicates the ongoing presence of my own toxic shame (there’s plenty to say about the role of gender in this over-apologizing, too). Growing my tolerance for shame will be a lifelong process, as I certainly did not learn healthy shame as a child.

So what do we do with the narcissists in our lives who are so defended against shame that they disconnect from their adult selves and others to the point of feeling no remorse when they wreak extensive havoc on others’ lives? For one thing, I think we need to shift the focus back to assessing and growing our own tolerance for shame rather than trying to change them. I have sincere compassion for those individuals who are so wounded that they cannot see, hear, or feel how their actions impact others. I also view them as responsible for their own healing. To borrow from Juliane Taylor Shore again, it is respectful and benevolent to ask fellow adults to process their own emotions, including shame.

Too often, I see family systems and additional institutions focus on protecting the narcissist rather than setting firm boundaries that disallow further mistreatment and holding them accountable for their harmful behavior. The narcissist’s abusive bullying and victim stance are much more likely to go unfed when people refuse to be within their self-centered reach and/or do not allow their gaslighting to go uninterrupted (if they have enough power to do so). When people cannot create a lot of distance from a narcissist because, for example, they have to co-parent with one, the gray rock method has been a strategy that several of my clients have successfully used to stay sane and safe while within their proximity. Sadly, children of narcissists by and large learn this method, which essentially involves being as boring as a gray rock, to survive. No one has to teach it to them.

Clearly the interpersonal dynamics I’m describing cannot heal the institutions and nations that are founded on having little to no tolerance for shame (academia and the United States come to mind!). I do, however, believe that if more and more people learn to accept our own imperfections, we will be able to repair mistakes when we make them and so create more humane families and work places. We also will develop a greater and greater capacity to deal with systemic, historic injustices that thus far remain largely unaddressed. In Kiese Laymon’s poignant words, “America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.”

"Who Taught You to Live on Crumbs?" Reclaiming Nurturance as a Core Value

That Esther Perel. She knows how to ask questions that get right to the heart of the matter. In a podcast of a couples therapy session, for example, she inquired of one of the partners, “Who taught you to live on crumbs?”

As more and more clients have brought into our therapy sessions horror stories of sexual and additional forms of abuse, and I’ve braced myself for the next hateful, violent act to appear in my newsfeed (such as the Pittsburgh mass shooting of Jewish congregants), I keep returning to Perel’s simple and searing question. Lately, I’ve been asking myself, at least when thinking about the emotional and relational realms of life, Who hasn’t been taught to live on crumbs in the U.S.?

I’m not planning to take you down some sugar-coated road of sentimental nonsense. I am going to suggest that nurturance—or more precisely, our frequent deprivation of it in this society—is a subject with significant political, sociocultural, and economic implications. In the poignant words of attachment scientist Louis Cozolino, "We are not the survival of the fittest; we are the survival of the nurtured."

What I witness day in and day out in my therapeutic work is the impact of relational trauma. I intensely desire to dispel the myth that trauma only includes time on a battlefield, near-fatal accidents, or violent abuse. I appreciate Ruth King’s description of trauma as

an experience of severe emotional shock that causes substantial and lasting damage to our psychological well-being. Trauma is experienced as being intensely overwhelmed by a perceived threat or actual harm. Trauma can be a single incident of devastating loss, violation, or injury, or a chronic atmosphere of fear and neglect.

One of the things we as a society continue to minimize or flat out ignore is the pervasiveness of neglect in our culture and the trauma it begets. Because we are mammals whose survival depends on reliable and available caretakers when we are young, many of us experienced some level of neglect and, so, of relational trauma. In other words, the emotional attunement of a caretaker to our young is critical to those children’s well-being and often is disregarded in a society that prioritizes competition and self-reliance over connection and belonging. What do I mean by attunement? My favorite definition comes from the University of New Mexico’s Center for Development and Disability: “Attunement is being aware of, and responsive to, another.” Sounds so simple doesn’t it?

Clients often express disbelief when I relate the symptoms associated with a significant relationship injury or loss (e.g., racing thoughts, rapid pulse, sweaty palms, numbing, and memory loss to name a few) to the PTSD symptoms commonly associated with veterans of war. To return to King’s point, if we experienced a relationship breach as a threat to our being, our body is going to react in kind, usually with some form of a fight, flight, or freeze response. We did not have to be hit to know trauma; it is enough to be unseen, unheard, and devalued by people that matter to us.

The relational trauma experienced by so many relates to Perel’s beautiful question, as most of the people I meet in and outside of my office have been taught to live on crumbs. Oftentimes, the helpers in this society have learned to give nurturance but not to receive it. Their stories frequently rest upon a trance of unworthiness and a sense that their value is only as significant as the external recognition they receive for their do-gooding. The heavily armored individuals I meet usually view nurturance as weak, “feminine,”* and of little to no worth. Underneath all that shielding, which often developed to protect them from harm, lies unacknowledged terror (of the vulnerability required to engage in holding others and being held) and grief (about not having received adequate nurturance or even knowing what nurturance feels like). In both of these cases, social conditioning—that is, lessons learned in relationships with others and the world—are the culprit. As such, and in the words of Bessel van der Kolk, “our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being.”

I therefore am arguing that in addition to the “doing” of voting and engaging in social activism, we also need the healing of nurturing relationships to generate positive social change. A most challenging aspect of this process is the painful reckoning required when we cannot go to the source of the harm for the healing.

For example, many of us yearn for unconditional acceptance—“I love you no matter what”—from a primary caregiver and do not receive it because our caregiver does not have the capacity to give such nurturance. If they could have attuned to us and met our emotional needs by now (when we’re in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond), they would have. To face such a truth is excruciating.

Cheryl Strayed offered one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve read about this reckoning in her Dear Sugar letter “The Empty Bowl.” As Strayed responded to the letter writer “Could Be Worse” about her abusive narcissistic father,

[Your dad] will be the empty bowl that you’ll have to fill again and again. What will you put inside? Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time. There is absolutely no way around them. By cutting off ties with your father, you incited a revolution in your life…We want to believe healing is purer and more perfect, like a baby on its birthday. Like we’re holding it in our hands. Like we’ll be better people than we’d been before. Like we have to be.

It is on that feeling that I have survived. And it will be your salvation too, my dear. When you reach the place that you recognize entirely that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them. That you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them. That you have the two empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them.

Our capacity to heal one another in adulthood often involves the seeking out of people who are capable of being aware of and responsive to us. We also have the capacity to heal ourselves through the kind of spiritual reparenting that Strayed so eloquently captured in her letter. Returning to a sense of wholeness by giving ourselves what we did not get in our prior relationships may precede the ability to seek connections with people who are able to attune to us. Transforming the narrative that we only deserve crumbs into one that authentically declares, “I matter,” shifts the field of whom we attract and whom we pursue.

Sylvia Boorstein has wonderful, concrete advice for cultivating self-nurturance. In this current moment, when far too many people face immediate danger, I feel compelled to underscore that the following advice is for when we are not under direct threat. We do not need to slow down and reflect when our lives are at risk—we need to survive, which involves actively fighting or fleeing the sources of the threat.

On the other hand, if our limbic systems are reacting as if there is a saber tooth tiger breathing down our necks but there actually isn’t, and if we are aware of how over-sized our fear is (both of these are big “ifs” that may require additional legwork), Boorstein’s wisdom can come to our aid:

Sweetheart, you are in pain.

Relax.

Take a breath.

Let’s pay attention to what is happening, then we’ll figure out what to do.

In these four simple sentences she articulates how we can nurture ourselves and, in turn, others. We first acknowledge that we are suffering. There is no minimizing, neglecting, negating, or gas lighting our own experience. We name our pain. Period. This validation is a radical act in and of itself, especially for those from marginalized communities who have repeatedly received the message that our experiences do not matter.

Then we attune to the fear body and remind ourselves we are, in this moment, safe. Here, we can experience the relief and spaciousness that arises with letting down our guard—the connection associated with vulnerability. Only after validating our experience and making some space for it do we begin the inquiry process.

Crucially, we do not jump into fixing anything. We first observe—we pay attention—to what is happening right now. Having gathered information about our current situation within a welcoming, relaxed environment, we finally are ready to figure out what to do.

How radical to end her advice with what for so many of us is a habitual starting place—problem-solving. Boorstein encourages us to take the time to identify and explore what we are going through before doing anything about it. These are not selfish or unproductive practices. They are nurturing ones. If we are to become skillful at self-nurturance, it requires repeated, disciplined practice.

Can you imagine a world in which we took to heart that feverishly figuring out an action plan only makes sense when we are facing imminent danger? How much untapped creativity, empathy, and love might be expressed?

Credit: Calliope Learning

I will forever be grateful to my own therapist for looking me straight in the eye and declaring, “Connie, life is not a problem to be solved.” And it isn’t. Neither are relationships. Nor emotions. They are experiences to be lived and, of course, nurtured.

*Feminine is in quotes because evaluating as weak the qualities associated with femininity is straight out of the misogyny playbook.

Naming the Pervasiveness of Gendered and Additional Forms of Violence

My not-yet three year old recently came home from preschool and told me a boy called a girl stupid and stinky. I’m very conscious that this was a single statement at a particular moment in time. Unfortunately, it occurred amidst Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed and multiple clients revealing past and present emotional, physical, and sexual abuse by cisgender men. I also have been hearing my young female clients recount their male peers calling them, among other nasty things, a horse. Fat. Moustached. My toddler’s story reminded me how early the conditioning begins to discount and diminish anything associated with femininity in our culture, including entire human beings. As Jess Zimmerman so poignantly asserted,

The problem with misogyny in this country goes beyond the oppression of women—although that alone should be a reason to shatter the patriarchy where it stands. It’s also the oppression of anything seen as feminine: those who show ‘weakness,’ which is defined in our patriarchal system as anything outside the two acceptable masculine modes of brutish violence and cold indifference. Even cisgender men suffer when they are not able to convincingly perform this twisted vision of manliness. One of the automatic black marks on your masculinity performance grade is caring too much about anyone outside the male/straight/white/able ideal (i.e., the people allowed into our toxic masculine vision of strength). The practical upshot of this is that the entire left wing—yes, even the socialist irony bros—is, on a metaphorical level, a bevy of maidens. Our culture is dominated by men, yes, but more than that, it’s dominated by masculinity. No matter how much male privilege you have and regularly wield, going up against cardinal masculine virtues like violence, wealth, and the unchecked use of power taints you with a feminine stain, and in our society, femininity is disdained.

We have nothing short of the decolonization of our minds before us us if we want to tear down what scholar Francisco Valdes calls Euroheteropatriarchy. His words from 1996 are worth quoting, as he lays out the four foundational components of “the ideology of compulsory heteropatriarchy” in a country colonized by Europeans:

the bifurcation of personhood into ‘male’ and ‘female’ components under the active/passive paradigm; the polarization of these male/female sex/gender ideals into mutually exclusive, or even opposing, identity composites; the penalization of gender atypicality or transitivity; and the devaluation of persons who are feminized…through the hierarchical and coercive operation of these tenets, Euro-American sex/gender ideology inhibits sex/gender cultural diversity, harmony, and equality, and also subverts individual sex/gender autonomy and dignity.

In less academic terms, we have learned to accept extremely narrow, opposing gendered versions of others and ourselves and use those limited stories to dominate and coerce the majority of the population: women, gender non-conforming and expansive folks, and anyone else who dares suggest that being “active” is not only the domain of men who, it turns out, have the human capacity to be receptive, expressive, and gentle as well.

My work as a psychotherapist is inherently political, as I consistently challenge this ideology and its harmful impacts on my clients. I regularly highlight signs of appropriated beliefs and identities, understanding that none of us came out of the womb with such rigid, dichotomous, and destructive views of the world. They were actively taught to us by multiple institutions, including our most intimate one—the family, however it is configured and including the different kinds of relationships within it (e.g., romantic, parental, sibling). When clients experience the liberation that comes from unlearning this doctrine and embracing more fluid, open constructions of self, I take heart in knowing they will take these lessons out into the world and their interactions with others.

Rachel Wilson

I am particularly buoyed when I see someone who has been coerced and dominated sit more upright, roll their shoulders back, and, instead of jumping straight into the “It’s my fault” narrative, begin to report the factors beyond themself that led to abuse. They also begin contacting the anger that is entirely appropriate when we have been exploited, silenced, and demeaned. If rage, which I have come to think about as anger plus trauma, emerges, we work on releasing the trauma stuck in their bodies so that the anger returns to a less overwhelming size. Although rage can be paralyzing because we fear it will ravage those around us if we give it the light of day, anger can be a galvanizing force, used to inspire a collective power that has justice, not more violence and domination, as its aim.

I recently had the honor of working with a pre-teen client whose male peers and family members repeatedly and ruthlessly bullied her. During one session, I asked her to push with all her might against my hands. The relief she felt after doing so was palpable, as was a renewed sense of hope and possibility. Before my eyes, she transformed from a reed, pushed to the ground by the toxic wind surrounding her, to a tree—aware of and influenced by these brutal social forces while simultaneously refusing to let them dictate her story. This is the power of making accessible to the “feminine” among us the collective, relational, and internal resources that lift us up rather than keep us down. As psychotherapist Esther Perel said, “There is no greater vengeance against sexual abuse than to reclaim one’s full sexuality and celebrate it.” I would extend this argument beyond sexuality, to the reclamation of our whole selves. Of course, we need safe-enough relationships and social spaces to engage in such redemption, and I do not take for granted that such emotional and physical safety is a privilege in our current reality.

The capacity to move beyond the destructive ideology of Euroheteropatriarchy requires a certain maturity in thought and emotion that many of us have not yet attained, often because our development was stopped in its tracks by the misogyny described above. Talking about what he calls “the crisis in masculinity,” psychotherapist Terry Real describes how most boys know better than to express their feelings by the time they are three to five years old. “Before they know how to read,” he argues, “they know how to read the code of masculinity.” What stood out to me most about Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was how childish his tone, demeanor, and words were. Shining through all the bluster of our president, Kavanaugh, and Lindsey Graham is the truth that several boys with heaps of unmet emotional needs are currently leading our institutions and country.

I had the honor of taking a graduate course from Anne McClintock, wonderfully titled “Paranoid Empires: Masculinities and War Zones.” While watching Kavanaugh, I remembered Professor McClintock describing the experience of studying the interactions between a dominatrix and her clients, many of whom were wealthy, powerful business men. Instead of engaging in forbidden sexual acts, they paid significant sums of money to wear a diaper and be fed baby food or scrub the bathroom floor with a toothbrush. Clearly it is time to reclaim the parts of humanity that patriarchy has deemed unmanly so that more grown men can join us in the struggle. To borrow from Esther Perel again, “You know the word ‘emasculating’ does not exist in the feminine? That’s a plague for men.” 

A false sense of safety frequently accompanies dominating, controlling behavior, and it takes some significant chutzpah for the more “masculine” among us to work with the threat of vulnerability long enough to be able to look under the covers and stay there—to make actual contact with the harm inflicted by a binary gender system that rests on a power-over dynamic. On this point, I want to be clear that the easy route is to stay in the binary and attribute all sorts of stereotypical characteristics to “men” and “women” upon first meeting them: “He is aggressive.” “She is emotionally needy.” “He is insensitive.” “She’s overly dramatic.” Working within the unique four walls of therapeutic settings, I’ve been lucky to have greater access to the complex human beings underneath our limited and limiting sociocultural conditioning. I’m particularly grateful that I’ve been able to work with several cisgender men who have consistently shown me that our conditioning is not our destiny. I also have learned from my clients that one’s social identities do not necessarily predict or prevent abusive behavior—all of us can and do appropriate the ubiquitous forms of oppression in our environment.

Although many of my male clients were taught to carry the torch of misogyny and scald others with it, some have been able to contact a larger awareness that allows them to set that torch down and stop the devastation. It turns out that the impulse to exploit patriarchal systems is not immutably encoded in their DNA. Euroheteropatriachy is a cultural script that we all have the power to rewrite. Somewhere along the way, these men also learned empathy and do not wish to keep harming others in the service of maintaining their domination. They understand the difference between intention and impact and show restraint when the impulse arises to defend their intention. Accordingly, they have the capacity to actively listen and come to understand the impact of their behaviors on others. Our most evolved human moments involve a felt understanding that we are interdependent. These men demonstrate with their bodies and emotions, not just their intellects, that when I violate you, I diminish myself. If a reckoning is due, they take responsibility for repairing the ruptures their harmful behavior has wrought.

Humility also plays a major role here. I have great appreciation for Paul Gorski who asserts a profeminist rather than a feminist stance so as not to diminish the self-determination of the very people fighting for liberation in the first place. In his words:

One of the ways I witness patriarchy, even among men who identify with the feminist movement, is in our willingness to battle sex and gender oppression so long as we control the process for doing so. So, as a pro-feminist, I act in support of feminism and work to eliminate the injustices women experience. But I also acknowledge that, despite these efforts, I benefit from patriarchy, at least in the economic sense. I acknowledge, as well, that it is one thing to fight oppression, but it is something else altogether to fight oppression while I am experiencing the oppression I’m attempting to fight. Failure on my part to make this distinction is, in essence, a symptom of patriarchy, an example of male privilege. So by identifying as profeminist, I remind myself that among the most fundamental human rights is the right for oppressed people to decide for themselves how to win their liberation. It is my role, then, to serve rather than lead toward these ends.

Unfortunately, I’ve also encountered the unacknowledged shadow side of some male clients and additionally identified clients—including women—who have appropriated the beliefs and tools of Euroheteropatriarchy. When someone is consistently the recipient of blame-shifting and gaslighting, enormous self-doubt and a sense of being crazy are usually the result. Lacy Johnson’s recent essay eloquently captures the ways that abuse wears one down over time until there’s no longer a recognizable self in the relationship:

I was supposed to be flattered that my Spanish professor liked me enough to invite me to his apartment while I was still his student, to his bed, that he invited me to live with him. He was the one who taught me that it actually didn’t matter how likable I was, there was always the threat of violence or punishment for saying or doing something he didn’t like. We could be at the market choosing fish and fresh tomatoes for dinner and his hand would be resting on the small of my back and the next moment it would be raised to strike me. I tried diminishing myself in such a way that I wouldn’t provoke him, wouldn’t anger him, tried to bend myself according to his pleasure so that he would like everything I did and said and thought. It didn’t matter, because no matter what I did, it was never enough. I kept at it anyway, until there was almost nothing left of me, of the person I had been. And that person I became, who was barely a person of her own, is the version of me he liked best.

These clients rarely have the insight to understand the harm they have inflicted. So if they show up in my office, they often have been pressured to do so by people who have the power to negatively influence their life in one way or another. Sometimes they come in as a couple with the conscious or unconscious goal of forcing their partner to better meet their needs. My task in the first situation is to assess readiness for change. To quote one of my mentors, “No one gave the Buddha enlightenment.” I also am not interested in using the therapeutic setting to engage in coercive, manipulative tactics that reinforce the very systems I would like to dismantle.

If I am working with partners in the same room, the work is different, as I stop couples therapy in its tracks if I learn that abuse is occurring in the relationship. I agree with Phyllis Frank and Gail Golden that instead of continuing couples therapy when one partner is intimidating, controlling, and/or dominating another,

Strong, confrontive, counseling with individual men [and additionally identified abusive partners], that defines the spectrum of abuse, and locates the responsibility for his abusiveness solely with him is a good beginning. It is also vital to provide the abuser with all of the information necessary to make personal transformation a reality. This information must include an understanding of patriarchy in the United States and its impact on individuals, couples and families. Such intervention is the best protection for a woman from the therapeutic abuse perpetrated by assuming that she has a part in provoking her partner’s behavior.

Although I have compassion for abusive individuals since they often are repeating intergenerational patterns taught to them from the moment of conception, have themselves been abused, and have been emotionally stunted by the Euroheteropatriarchy described above, I have a responsibility to safeguard the dignity of my clients and myself. I also want to send a strong message to my clients that we need not tolerate abusive behavior, even if the external messages bombarding us send the exact opposite message. To my fellow therapists out there, these words from Kathy Steele are especially for you:

We are taught that maintaining the relationship and not being aggressive ourselves are important. They are, but not at the expense of the therapist’s well being. The therapist should not have to be abused in order to help an abused patient. Allowing a patient to be aggressive and disrespectful toward you only reinforces that this behavior is acceptable in relationships. Often these patients are coming to us precisely because they are losing relationships due to their difficult behaviors, so we have an obligation not to collude with them to continue a destructive course of behavior.

As a therapist, I have been struck by how many women and nonbinary clients feel intense grief when I walk them through an exercise that involves finding a real or imagined place they associate with safety, calm, or peace. They report that this practice has exposed how rarely they feel safe or at ease in their daily lives. Again, I do not want to suggest that only women are deprived of this essential element of our dignity. I want us to consider how much life, wisdom, and creativity have been lost due to this pervasive sense of threat.

Image Credit: AP/Damian Dovarganes

At this point in time, we have the joint task of challenging the brutality of Euroheteropatriarchy and refusing to martyr ourselves for the cause. There is no redeeming value in self-harm. Present-day events are holding up a repulsive mirror. Misogyny is not new; it is harder to ignore. May we build up our communities and ourselves to a point that we can look fearlessly into this mirror and create more humane and grown-up spaces in which to relate to one another and govern an authentic democracy (with a little “d”).

Continuing to Queer Partners (f.k.a. Couples) Therapy

I keep waiting to find an explicitly queer model of partners therapy (I prefer "partners" to "couples" therapy, which I will address in a minute) that is akin to that of the Gottman Institute or the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT) Institute, and I am growing impatient. I am grateful for the local organizations that have sprung up to provide therapeutic services for LGBTQ+ individuals, partners and families (e.g. Queer Asterisk in my county) and am craving the existence of a model for queer partners therapy that is robust in its theoretical underpinnings and the evidence supporting it. I also want to give a shout out to Esther Perel who is a master at calling out harmful dominant narratives and helping partners to re-story and re-experience their relationships and lives (and I highly recommend listening to her podcast of couples therapy sessions, which include several LGBTQ+ couples).

What continues to frustrate me about dominant couples therapy models that say, "Sure, this applies to queer folks!" is the use of inclusive language without a deeper look at how queering relational therapy would require a direct challenge to heteronormativity and a binary gender system that rests on heaps of misogyny and contracted forms of masculinity. A queer model also would confront additional, intersecting forms of oppression and domination—racism and poverty to name two—that impact people’s daily relationships with one another. To quote Addison and Coolhart’s 2015 article, “Expanding the Therapy Paradigm with Queer Couples: A Relational Intersectional Lens,”

Existing literature provides clinicians a basic understanding of queer couple and the dynamics that make them unique from nonqueer couples. However, much of this knowledge has been normed on White middle-class couples and has rarely included couples with transgender or bisexual members.

Ironically, I wrote about this very topic in 2014 and, re-reading my post today, feel like I could write the same post without much if any modification. The main difference between then and now is that I have four more years of experience as a psychotherapist and, amidst a Trump presidency as well as an upswell of the #Metoo movement, feel that time is way past due for robust, queer, justice-oriented relational models. I also am now the parent of a toddler, a role that has slapped me in the face with how life-sucking binary notions of gender identity and expression can be.

I want to own that I’m a white, cisgender, queer woman, recovering academic (which means I’ve had a whole lot of formal education, for better and worse), and licensed marriage and family therapist who by no means has a well-crafted approach to queer partners therapy tucked away in my back pocket. I do have some ideas and practices, however, that are rooted in my study and attempted enactment of justice-oriented principles. So this post aspires to move the dialogue about queer partners therapy in a deeper, more honest direction that is simultaneously appreciative of the many lessons learned from institutes like the ones named above and skeptical about the normative foundations of dominant models, which often inadvertently reinforce marginalization and reproduce a two-sex, heterosexist model. In other words, I honor the intentions of and have learned valuable practices from my mentors and colleagues. I want to focus here on mitigating the harmful impacts of normative models and generating practices that foster the flourishing not only of those with many social privileges but also of those who have been penalized for particular social identities and/or the material circumstances of their lives.

First off: partners versus couples therapy. To shift this one word acknowledges that more kinds of meaningful, intimate relationships exist than those between two people in a committed, monogamous relationship. For those individuals who have multiple romantic attachments to fellow adults, much of couples therapy literature and offerings are immediately exclusionary. With their focus on a single “primary” attachment, these models assume we as human beings in modern-day society need to rely on a nuclear family arrangement—children are optional (sometimes), but two adults need to be at the helm—to survive and thrive. Queer folks have much to teach therapists on this score, as so many are experts on the necessity of cultivating “chosen” family, having had immediate families who could not love them no matter what. My vision for queering partners therapy therefore begins with openness and curiosity about what relational ties bind people and how well they are working. The main question I have for folks is not, Who is your person? Rather, I want to know, What relationships matter to you? I also want to know if these relationships foster affirmation (of self and others, not of harmful behavior), safety (both emotional and physical), and dignity, by which I mean people’s inherent value and worth.

These more general relational questions do not mean we neglect specificities in a more comprehensive queer partners therapy model. Here are a few of the many particular necessities that may come up for a therapist working with queer partners:

• An understanding of and openness to learning more about dynamic terms, ways of identifying, and relational configurations. I especially believe that therapists need to find the resources to educate ourselves about LGBTQ+ definitions and theories rather than ask our clients to educate us. Many free, high-quality resources exist, like the Safe Zone Project’s glossary of terms. Educating ourselves does not mean we do not ask clients to tell us more about how they characterize themselves and their relationships (e.g., “What has being aromantic looked and felt like in this relationship?”). It does mean we acknowledge when we do not know something and explicitly commit to and follow through on learning more about the things that matter to our clients.

• A need to know the difference between an informed consent and gatekeeper model of therapy and clarity around where you stand on this issue, especially if you are working with someone who is contemplating a medical transition. Additionally, if one partner is actively transitioning, the non-transitioning partner(s)’ needs and desires, which often are complex and dynamic, need to be considered, too. This may seem obvious, but non-transitioning partners may stay silent about their struggles out of a desire to be supportive and/or because they have received the message that attention to their needs and desires is selfish. Knowing how and when to refer partners to individual resources (e.g. an online support forum for partners of trans individuals) versus ones focused on the relationship (e.g., Wikihow’s easy-to-use guide on nonviolent communication, which includes how it can be abused) is an ongoing art and science for any therapist meeting with partners.

• An understanding of and openness to learning about the myriad layers of becoming a queer parent if you are working with partners interested in conceiving, adopting, and/or otherwise parenting a child. For example, states still vary in how accepting they are of LGBTQ+ parents adopting or fostering children. Additionally, for partners wanting to pursue donor conception, significant issues arise for consideration, such as the impact on children of being donor conceived and the decreased likelihood of maintaining donor anonymity in light of technological advances, like the growing availability of genetic information through companies like Ancestry.com. Any time queer people have to engage with social institutions, like a fertility clinic or adoption agency, they may face subtle and overt forms of discrimination and marginalization. Becoming familiar with some of the roadblocks on the path to becoming a queer parent as well as the resources available to overcome those barriers can go a long way toward helping queer clients feel validated and supported.

Returning to my appeal for an affirming, justice-oriented approach to queer partners therapy, I would be remiss not to elaborate on how the numerous “isms” in our society impact every intimate relationship, not just the queer ones. I am grateful for resources like the Dear Sugars podcast, which acknowledged how the inequitable distribution of emotional labor tends to negatively affect queer partnerships, too. Patriarchy’s numerous, unwieldy tentacles do not stop at the household and bedroom doors of queer relationships. If we really do aspire to transform relationships into equitable, mutually beneficial adult partnerships, we have our work cut out for us, as we are bombarded with messages about some people’s superiority and some people’s inferiority from the time we are conceived until the moment we die. Moreover, institutionalized power imbalances act as titanium reinforcers of these pervasive messages.

In some ways, the pressure can feel more intense on queer partners to break dominant rules since a common assumption is that LGBTQ+ people have deviated from what’s “normal.” For example, outsiders may presume a lesbian couple has equality in their relationship when, in reality, the two partners are living out patterns from their childhoods that are very much rooted in the patriarchal idea of a dominant, controlling father and submissive, nurturing mother. None of us swims around in this fishbowl of unequal power relations without getting wet. With regard to the rampant sexism in this society, in particular, Julia Serano has some brilliant insights for all of us:

The greatest barrier preventing us from fully challenging sexism is the pervasive antifeminine sentiment that runs wild in both the straight and queer communities, targeting people of all genders and sexualities. The only realistic way to address this issue is to work toward empowering femininity itself. We must rightly recognize that feminine expression is strong, daring, and brave - that it is powerful - and not in an enchanting, enticing, or supernatural sort of way, but in a tangible, practical way that facilitates openness, creativity, and honest expression. We must move beyond seeing femininity as helpless and dependent, or merely as masculinity's sidekick, and instead acknowledge that feminine expression exists of its own accord and brings its own rewards to those who naturally gravitate toward it. By embracing femininity, feminism will finally be able to reach out to the vast majority of feminine women who have felt alienated by the movement in the past.

A queer partners therapy model that gets to the heart of issues is going to address our conditioning in this culture and what we need to unlearn as well as embrace if we are going to forge relationships that are more humanizing, creative, and just than those of previous generations.

As for addressing intersecting oppressions and identities, Jeff Baker, a queer therapist of color, has poignantly tackled the requirements of a therapist if they are going to work effectively with minoritized communities. Baker argues that in addition to recognizing our blind spots and implicit biases, therapists with a genuine commitment to realizing social change will invest in learning about theoretical orientations that affirm their clients, such as intersectional feminist and critical race theories. Instead of burdening the client with “unpacking the historical context around myriad forms of internalized oppression, as well as nuanced intracommunity issues,” such a therapist will demonstrate an understanding of how structural oppression impacts clients, including on an emotional level. As Baker so eloquently wrote to the women of color and LGBTQ+ people of color who are seeking a therapist,

…a therapist who cannot separate their work from your work, especially your anger, is not mature or skilled enough to engage with you about oppression in healthy and affirming ways. Holding space for you should always be a therapist’s first priority, even if leaning into the discomfort of their privilege means leaning into your rage.

In summary, a deep, meaningful approach to queer partners therapy will not shy away from tackling the most micro-level internal bodily sensations to the most macro-level external forces. A tall order, to be sure, and a worthwhile endeavor that promises wholeness, not perfection. Many people think of psychotherapy as a form of individual and/or interpersonal therapy. I think of it more as a stone dropped in the pond. If we are able to break old, violent, harmful relational patterns that we have inherited through our families and societies and replace them with dynamic practices that strengthen our capacity for peace, joy, and love, that energy ripples outwards. Although we cannot know how that outward map will look, we can draw on J. Krishnamurti’s words to trust that “[a]ction has meaning only in relationship; without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.” 

On that note, may this post contribute to the creation of queer partner therapy models that have the power to transform individual lives, relationships, and the institutions in which we live, play, and work. Having written it, I feel inspired to pursue the creation of a queer partners workshop in my local community. We shall see…

Don't Know Mind: Lessons from a Toddler

For those of you out there who have not experienced the film Tangled, please allow me to give you enough information about it for the below story to make sense. Rapunzel (aka the lost princess) has spent 18 years trapped in a tower with the manipulative and highly sadistic Gothel. Gothel kidnapped Rapunzel from her royal parents' castle when she was a baby because of her magical hair, which Gothel uses to keep herself young. During the course of the movie, Rapunzel steals thief Flynn Rider's heart. So naturally he comes to the tower to save her. Unfortunately, he meets Gothel's knife upon entry. Pure Disney.

I had ample social criticism for such a movie before my toddler came into the world (can we talk about the misogyny involved in creating these personality disordered female villains, for example?). I did not intend to watch the violent Tangled or Disney movies in general with her. Alas, here we are. Pure parenting!

As my kiddo has developed enough language to ask about how the world and its inhabitants work, she has a trillion questions about everything, including Tangled. Ironically, as a psychotherapist I regularly steer clients away from "why" questions since simple causal relationships (i.e. this leads to that) rarely explain complex phenomena in a satisfactory way, especially when humans, and our many contradictions, are involved. Our answers to "Why?" frequently leave us frustrated and wanting more. In the realm of grief and loss, they also can keep us very stuck. Parenting a curious child, however, has shown me how my answers to her unending questions can help us both to practice don't know mind.

Mindfulness teacher Jack Kornfield eloquently describes the practice of don't know mind as follows:

Think of the earth spinning through space with hundreds of thousands of people being born and dying every day. Where does each life come from? How did it start? There are so many things we don’t know. Feel the truth of don’t know mind, relax and become comfortable with it.

Now, bring to mind a conflict, inner or outer. Be aware of all the thoughts and opinions you have about how it should be, about how they should be. Now recognize that you don’t really know. Maybe the wrong thing will lead to something better. You don’t know.

Consider how would it be to approach yourself, the situation, the other people with don’t know mind. Feel it. Don’t know. Not sure. No fixed opinion. Allow yourself to want to understand anew. Approach it with don’t know mind. With openness. How does don’t know mind affect the situation? Does it improve it, make it wiser, easier? More relaxed?

Practice don’t know mind until you are comfortable resting in uncertainty, until you can do your best and laugh and say “Don’t know.”

Becoming comfortable with uncertainty is no small task, so I'm grateful my child gives me ample opportunities to practice it. Every damn day. Now, back to the Tangled story. While driving my child home from daycare, we had the following conversation:

"Mama, can we talk about Tangled?"

"Sure." [Audible sigh I tried to conceal but probably didn't.] "What part do you want to talk about?"

"I wanna talk about when Gothel stabs Flynn Rider."

[Pained expression about my parenting choices.] "Okay."

"Why did she do that?"

"I'm not sure. People do mean things for a lot of reasons. Maybe something happened to Gothel when she was younger." [Internal dialogue and eye roll: Geez, Connie, what do you think this toddler is taking away from your vague description of childhood trauma!?]

"But why did she do that, Mama?" [Clearly unimpressed with the previous answer.]

"You know, we'd have to ask Gothel that."

"But why, Mama?" [Frustration mounting, and we're out of snacks.]

"Only Gothel can really know why she stabbed Flynn Rider. I cannot get inside her head."

"But why can you not get inside her head?"

"She would need to tell me what is inside her head for me to know what she is thinking."

[Long pause.] "Okay, let's ask her."

Every day, this child's inquisitions give me an opportunity to practice don't know mind. If I pause before answering her, I often find that I truly do not know the answer to her astute questions. I can acknowledge, with humility, that we need to seek out additional resources to respond more fully to her inquiries. Instead of reinforcing Gothel's line, "Mother knows best," I try to answer her honestly and not claim to know more than I do.

As Kornfield points out, ease and levity arise when we're not trying so hard to know everything. These days, amusement has largely replaced exasperation as I share with her the various knowledge sources we would need to visit to answer her questions in more than a rudimentary way. While I have pointed her to meteorologists, engineers, and physicists, she seems to be more accepting of "I don't know" as a legitimate answer.

Now the challenge is to prevent her from internalizing the sexist message that she cannot have deep knowledge as a girl. I'm also hoping to drive home that she has more than two options--the sweet, beautiful, compliant princess or the nasty, conniving, ruthless wretch--as the female protagonist of her own story.

What I Learned from Giving a TEDx Talk

I could see the audition room from the nook I had found in an effort to pull myself together. Located in a university library, the room looked like a small study space. Given my long history with such rooms, my mind said the familiarity should bring some comfort. My nervous system vehemently disagreed. I tried several tricks of the trade to calm my internal anarchy: deeply and slowly breathing with a loooooong exhale, holding a river rock in my hand to ground and center my body, huffing lavender essential oil, asking my fear brain to chill out (with lovingkindness, of course). None of these things worked. My body decided this place was engulfed in flames. The only way to help me survive was by furiously signaling that I needed to get the hell out of there. My mind, of course, refused to listen. Too many hours spent crafting, editing, and memorizing five minutes of speech meant the most stubborn part of me dug in her heels. I was staying unless or until something catastrophic happened.

The five interviewers arrived, and I walked into the audition shaky and about to pass out. In that moment, the past performances and travails I successfully navigated in this lifetime disappeared from the map. So what that I had given a commencement address in the not-so-distant past in a large stadium. Never mind that even more recently I made it through the trauma of lying naked on an operating table for a dreaded c-section. Somehow, the task of auditioning without notes disabled the parts of my brain that knew how to do something besides freak out.

Sure enough, while delivering my five-minute talk, I flipped my lid, to borrow from Dan Siegel. The words disappeared, completely. Erased from the white board of my mind. If I had not had some PowerPoint slides to cue me, I could not have retrieved the speech to save my life. I walked out of that library convinced that my anxiety would forever squander my dream of giving a TED talk. I simply was not cut out for this kind of performance.

Herein lies my first lesson: do not believe what your inner critic tells you.

As a recovering perfectionist and academic, I know my critical manager intimately. When she senses danger, she takes over like a boss. Despite knowing about her tendency to dominate unsafe spaces, I heeded only her voice after leaving that audition room. I believed hook, line, and sinker that I had been an unmitigated disaster. I would hear nothing from the TEDxCU committee except that my idea was not worth spreading.

I therefore felt incredulous when I received an invitation to speak at the 2018 event. After accepting the invitation, I shared the intensity of my audition nervousness with one of the interviewers. She said it was not evident to her; rather, I clearly had invested a lot of time and energy on rehearsing my speech, and that showed. Once again, my mean-spirited protector had cast only shadows. I usually imagine this critic as a bright red lobster. By forcefully pointing out the flaws she deemed in need of correction, she thought she was helping. But this old, brow-beating strategy, taught and learned at a much earlier time in life, when I encountered criticism at nearly every turn, no longer serves. The work of unlearning the harsh tales this critic effortlessly weaves is worthwhile, even if it takes a lifetime.

After recovering from the shock of appearing on the TEDxCU speaker roster, I encountered my next lesson: persistence highly correlates with triumph.

This TEDx gig reminded me of an interview with author Kate DiCamillo. DiCamillo collected nearly 400 rejection letters on her way to becoming a Newbery medalist. About persistence, she wrote,

I've been in so many writing workshops, writing classes, and to the right of me and to the left of me, there's always somebody much more talented than I am. And what I figured out is they're not willing to go through the rejection, which is enormous, and then the compromise that comes with editing your work. I decided a long time ago that I didn't have to be talented. I just had to be persistent, and that that was something that I could control — the persistence.

When I learned I would be climbing onto the TEDxCU stage, my immediate thought was, I cannot give this talk without notes. I knew in my bones that having my written speech in hand constituted the one and only way for me to me to speak to a public audience, with cameras rolling, for longer than 10 minutes.

One of the most useful practices I have as a psychotherapist is knowing how to distinguish survival resources from creative resources. As it turns out, helping others to discern one from the other tends to be easier than doing it for ourselves. Survival tools helped us to get through something. The issue with them is that we keep using these resources past the time they benefit us. We know they have become a survival resource when they make our world smaller. Creative resources, on the other hand, open up our world. They motivate us to get out of bed in the morning and wholeheartedly jump into life. Sometimes creative resources morph into survival ones, and vice versa, as life circumstances change. In my past, notes had helped me to publicly defend a dissertation, give numerous academic and professional presentations, and teach college classes. I now sensed I needed them, and my utter dependence on notes transformed them into a survival resource.

So when I approached one of the people who was guiding us through this TEDx process about using notes on the day of the event, he told me in no uncertain terms, "If you go on stage with notes, you will be the only one who does so." Although I did not particularly appreciate this feedback, it helped me to identify that my attachment to notes had moved me into the land of survival resources. Absorbing the reality that TEDxCU speakers were expected to give a memorized talk set me on a path of figuring out what creative resources could allow me to give this talk without my beloved notes.

For example, I read Tim Urban's post on doing a TED talk and learned that memorizing the talk to the point of being able to recite it like "Happy Birthday" allowed speakers to focus on other things than the speech's content--like being present and engaged. As he wrote, "[T]he human brain is able to engrave things to that level if you just rehearse enough and sleep on it enough times." Now I had a concrete goal toward which I could work, which assuaged some of my anxiety. I also had a lot of work to do to realize that aspiration, which is where persistence comes in. Any time I could manage to practice the talk, I did--in the shower, during my commute to work, while cooking a meal. After my toddler went to sleep at night, I not only practiced the talk but also videotaped myself giving it as I got closer and closer to having it memorized cold. That damn talk involuntarily played in my head for days after the event it was so ingrained in my brain.

I also developed a plan B. Since my talk was all about suspending judgment, I figured that I would keep notes in my back pocket. If I went totally blank on stage, as I did in the audition, I could pull out my notes and talk about how this moment was not a failure but a growth opportunity. Embracing this alternative as a viable option caused the anxiety to drop precipitously.

Beta-blockers were another significant creative resource I sought out to persist with this goal of giving a TED talk. I am grateful to my psychopharmacology teacher from therapy school for de-stigmatizing what turned out to be an amazing aid for me. She casually mentioned that she took beta-blockers when giving a big presentation, and I tucked away this nugget of wisdom for future use. When I work with clients who are debating whether or not to take psychotropic medication, I frequently send them to mindfulness teacher Tara Brach's blog post on this topic. She brings compassion and wisdom to bear in acknowledging

...for some people, no matter how hard they try something else is needed to engender safety and bring anxiety to a manageable level...There are no absolute recipes for working with this issue of taking medications. In making choices on our path, it’s important to ask ourselves whether or not they will serve awakening and freedom. Our best answers are found by honestly looking into our intentions.

My deeper intention than completing this TED talk was to face and work through my fear of failure. The beta-blockers helped me to do that. Nevertheless, I persisted.

The final major lesson for me came after I gave the TEDxCU talk and began sharing it with the world: Do not take anything--and I mean anything--personally.

Intellectually, I knew this adage forward and backward. I frequently share with clients a favorite quote from a favorite chapter on not taking things personally:

Prior to giving the talk, I also explored with a therapist how to work with my fear of criticism from people in marginalized communities. I knew this talk was challenging the tendency in social justice circles to take a morally righteous stance. From testing out my ideas in various audiences, I surmised the probability was high that I might trigger a negative reaction from those I most wanted to support and least wanted to upset. When I checked in with myself, however, I felt clear about the importance of moving beyond right/wrong and good/bad dualities while challenging systemic harm. I would not diminish my truth out of fear.

Instead, I reflected long and hard on my words and invited feedback from various sources to ensure, to the degree I could, that my intentions lined up with the impact of my statements. But one cannot control another's response, which is, to again borrow from Ruiz, "a projection of their own reality." My next step was to work on accepting that others' reactions to my talk were beyond my control.

Additionally, I used a trauma therapy technique of imagining my protectors, nurturers, and wise guides were in the room with me as I gave my talk. The owls and hawks I frequently see with my child during evening walks in Colorado were flying amongst the audience, creating a safeguard between harsh critics and me. On the stage, the many courageous activists, teachers, and spiritual guides I have been lucky enough to encounter in this lifetime stood alongside me, reminding me that I was not alone. They also wisely reinforced that these ideas were not mine; they were shared ones borne of our interdependence.

Even with all this preparation, a mean-spirited online comment about my talk from a stranger on a queer parent Facebook page cut me to the quick. I could not get it out of my head. Yes, this was a virtual community of virtually unknown people, but I still had a sense that it was my community, and someone within it slammed me. What most helped me to come out of the turtle shell into which I was fast retreating was David Wong's article, "Why You're Being Kept In a Constant State of Impotent Rage." In it, he acknowledges the new frontier onto which we have entered:

...this system has a magical way of making even a hugely successful person feel helpless, because they're being attacked by nobodies who lash out because they also feel helpless. This helplessness comes from being raised to expect things from the world that it can't actually give you....if you are a public person in 2018, you will at some point be used as a punching bag by a bunch of strangers. That's the purpose you'll serve in their life, a thing they can hate without risk, and then forget about. It's part of the tradeoff of being a public person, and oh by the way, in the social media era, everyone is a public person.

In addition to placing the Facebook comment into a larger sociocultural framework and, so, depersonalizing it, this article brought me back to a central intention of doing this TEDxCU talk in the first place: to interrupt the helplessness that so many of us feel and that often spurs more violence and abuse. Ironically, the talk's central theme played out in a social media thread about the talk itself. At least the talk had some relevance, I suppose!

For those of you out there who absolutely believe you cannot realize an important dream, I hope you will dig beneath the self-doubt, turn away from the internal and external naysayers, and look around to see if untapped resources within and around you can bring that vision to life. Since I love an inspiring quote, here is one from Maya Angelou, "My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still."

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0_6b-AJdWU&t=603s[/embed]

The Radical Act of Connecting with Our Own Experience

My view is that a woman who goes through life without taking any notice of society's perception of her becomes the most feared individual on the planet.

--Mohadesa Najumi

The resurgence of the #metoo campaign still has me all fired up. You have to imagine where you want to go to get there, and oh, the places we can go! I see so many cracks in the fortress of misogyny and want to make those fissures gaping holes--rifts large enough to cause the whole rotten foundation to collapse. In its place, I imagine a gigantic greenhouse emerging. It will overflow with the generative talent and wisdom of multiple generations heretofore silenced. Diminished. Voided.

I have felt emboldened in my work with clients in this historical moment and want to speak directly to those of us assigned "girl" before or at birth, those who have lived as girls or women for any period of time, and those who have a non-conforming gender expression. All of us are subtly and overtly bombarded with the incessant messaging about our less-than value in the world. As a psychotherapist, I have become especially curious about the potential of that moment between when we first feel, sense, or think something and our reaction to that feeling, sensation, or thought. As someone so poignantly wrote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

What I have learned in my almost 43 years of being read and treated as a "girl" in this society is the lightning-fast speed with which my conditioning sets in to silence, judge, minimize, or otherwise turn away from my immediate experience, especially when it is difficult. Part of this conditioning is more general to be sure--who doesn't have the impulse to balk at pain at least some of the time? But many of us have learned a gendered form of self-rejection that contributes to an active shrinking of the space we take up in the world. This learned self-minimization shows up in the frequent use of speech like "I'm sorry" and "I don't know. " Clear statements morph into self-doubting questions as they leave our lips.

To be sure, learning how to turn toward our internal experience and validate it will not transform all the rotten layers of the patriarchal onion. I am convinced, however, that our external world would shift radically if we refused to negate our internal one. After all, we do not consciously choose our initial thoughts, emotions, and sensations. What we do with these moments is indeed within our wheelhouse. Make no mistake, we are accountable for our responses to our internal workings. Yet when, for example, anger arises, I can allow it to be there and investigate it without taking that anger out on others or myself. The key here is having enough space, within ourselves and the environments in which we live, to adequately explore the anger with curiosity. Otherwise, we never arrive at an understanding of the unmet need driving the anger. As it turns out, anger often emerges when we feel devalued. Meeting this need becomes exponentially more likely when we spend time becoming aware of the devaluation instead of squashing the indicator (anger, in this case) with judgment.

Importantly, if we want to share this acknowledgment of our internal worlds outwardly, we do well to assess our external environments, including the people within them. If we determine that the external sphere cannot hold our experience, we can at least prepare ourselves for the gas lighting. Here I speak of the fragility referenced in so many social justice offerings these days: While fragility. Male fragility. Straight fragility. These are just a few kinds of the limited tolerance for difference and pain that prevent marginalized folks from being seen, heard, and valued in our interactions with dominant cultures and ideologies. The reality is that we cannot make other people be more accepting, open-minded, or justice-oriented. So we do well to become aware of the potential backlash we may face if we choose to allow others into our internal fields. We then can consciously decide if we want to put ourselves out there. Safeguarding our dignity until we encounter a safe-enough audience can serve as a highly effective form of self-care, especially when our resources are depleted.

Hannah Gadsby's Nanette holds many rich lessons on the radical possibilities of self-acknowledgment. She clearly names how diminishing herself serves to caretake the audience members who recoil from the pain she experienced while growing up "a little bit lesbian" and "gender not-normal" in Tasmania. Ultimately, she refuses to continue silencing herself to make others comfortable. As she so eloquently says,

Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak, and I simply will not do that anymore.

Gadsby's story matters. It deserves to be heard as it is, without a sugar coating designed for those of us too defended and afraid to hear her truth. What is more, she relinquishes ownership of the abuse inflicted on her by others and the misogynstic air surrounding her. Those are not her burdens to carry. She finally can exhale and return those albatrosses to the individuals, institutions, and cultures that birthed and developed them. Maybe that release will help to catalyze those of us who hold institutional and sociocultural power to be accountable to Gadsby--to support transforming the trauma, oppression, and domination experienced by those at the margins into human flourishing.

Returning to the nuts and bolts of how we acknowledge our internal experience after participating in the depreciation of ourselves for years on end, I turn to a parenting book. As it were, I largely am calling for a form of spiritual reparenting. The authors of No Drama Discipline argue that we need to connect with our children's experience before we redirect their behavior. I am extending that argument to our relationship with ourselves. Before we try to control and manage the rage, despair, or anxiety, can we learn to let those difficult emotions be there? Not do a damn thing except breathe with and notice them? "Hello, overwhelm. You're here again. Okay. I consent."

Importantly, trauma can make our immediate experience too overwhelming to bear without additional internal and external supports in place. So there are times when we need to heed the "No!" we hear when we turn inward and find we are at the edge of our own cliff. Nevertheless, we frequently underestimate our tolerance for difficult internal experiences. We are unaccustomed to letting them have light and air. Thus we need to practice: "You again, sadness. Yes, this too." Once we have allowed an experience to have some space around it, we can engage more actively with it and inquire, "What are you hear to teach me? What do you need or want?"

Some of my most poignant moments as a therapist occurred when a client realized they could offer to themselves the acceptance they sought from someone or something in the external world that, time and again, did not provide it. All at once, they shift from a reed, blown every which way by the shifting winds, to a tree--affected by the weather around it, to be sure, but also containing deep roots to hold it steady as the storm passes. A force to be reckoned with. To again borrow from Gadsby, "There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”

I say self-acknowledgment is at least worthy of experimentation and look forward to witnessing the findings of your own exploration.

Bring on the Reckoning

I am tired of calculation. If we're having a reckoning, let's have a full reckoning.

--Lindy West 

Like so many, I have been deeply touched and horrified by the personal stories of gender-based violence and abuse shared in the public sphere, across social institutions, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein debacle. My hope is that these narratives contribute to structural and cultural transformation. Hope, however, remains a dangerous tool in light of its close relationship to fear and fear's intimate connection to impotence (pun very much intended). As Derrick Jensen wrote,

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there's a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they--those in power--cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself...You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died...And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power. In case you're wondering, that's a very good thing.

I therefore want to advocate for drawing on these individuals' powerful stories to envision, rather than hope for, different relationships in our homes, workplaces, and additional institutions with which we regularly engage. After all, we have to imagine where we want to go to get there, to paraphrase trauma therapist Bessel van der Kolk.

Since I have spent the bulk of my professional life in higher education as a graduate student, staff member, junior faculty member, and mental health therapist, I am going to focus my imagination on this particular institution. K.A. Amienne's recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education directly addresses a root contributor to gendered abuse in higher education. As such, she provides powerful fodder for the visioning process:

Anytime you have a highly competitive system in which a single person has the power to make or break someone else’s career — whether it’s the crowded, greasy pole of Hollywood or a flooded Ph.D. pipeline — you will have abuse. Not only rape and overt sexual aggression, but also the many complicated and twisted forms of abuse that can sink a woman’s chances of succeeding in an already biased business.

To return to the above argument, to hope people will not exploit each other in such a competitive, hierarchical, biased system is delusional at best. Too often, I have witnessed interventions aimed at shifting the oppressive dynamics in universities completely ignore structural power imbalances in the name of honoring everyone's contribution to the project. Do I believe we as human beings are all equal? In the spiritual realm, absolutely. In the realm of institutions rooted in European, capitalist, patriarchal, and heteronormative ideologies--which fits higher education to a T and names only a few of its many additional oppressive ideological roots--I call bullshit.

I have eternal gratitude for the therapist who helped me to realize that my consistent minimization of the public humiliation I experienced at the hands of cisgender, male, tenured professors as a junior faculty member was not helping anyone, especially not me. But here's the rub. Our default in this hyper-individualistic culture is to point fingers at perpetrators, not systems. When we do that, we risk missing all the ways that people, policies, procedures, and daily practices collude in maintaining dehumanizing institutions. In my case, for example, the senior female professors and dean from whom I sought help to address these male academics' abusive behavior did not do a damn thing except encourage me to suck it up, inferring that they got as far as they did by suffering in silence and then remaining silent even when they had a lot less at stake professionally than I did. The current disaster at the University of Rochester also puts into stark relief the university leaders and processes that enabled not only inaction but also active retaliation against the community members who spoke out against Professor Florian Jaeger's downright disgusting behavior. It's so much easier to make ousting "bad apples" the focus of our attention than shifting a culture that allows the individuals exhibiting such rotten behavior to rise to the highest rungs of its hierarchy in the first place.

So blaming individual men in power is not going to get us very far in the visioning process. We of course need to focus some attention on individuals since they do the work of maintaining the status quo of these virulent systems. However, I would like to focus less on demonizing individuals and more on fleshing out conceptions of accountability and dignity that can serve as guideposts for meaningful action. The palpable urgency that so many of us are feeling at this moment risks spurring horror- and rage-driven reactions if we do not find our center before acting. Horror and rage are an important part of the equation, to be sure, AND they are trauma responses that often reproduce the very harm we're trying to mitigate when they are in the driver's seat. Since I am interested in diminishing the harm that these complex systems cause everyone, I want to make sure all parts of our brains are on deck as we seek to find our path forward, not just the parts designed to fight and flee from threat.

From my center, then, a full reckoning begins with holding people accountable for their harmful behaviors. The simplicity of the statement belies the significant individual and systemic transformation required to realize such accountability. For one, we are masters of excuse-making when it comes to the abusive behavior permeating our country and world. I recently had a powerful experience at a trauma training in which I realized just how deep in my own psyche the conditioning is both to normalize the personal harm inflicted by external forces and to minimize the lack of safety, both emotional and physical, that permeates my daily life. The mining of our individual stories--and I mean everyone's stories, not just those directly victimized by these systems--is part of the inside-out reckoning necessary to stop excusing the shitty behavior that is intimately connected not only to systemic misogyny but also to additional forms of institutionalized oppression and domination. I do not see an alternative here for the ongoing, necessary decolonizing of all our minds.

I have found Donna Hicks's dignity model to be a particularly powerful tool for delineating the behavior that violates our dignity, which she defines as our inherent value and worth. In some ways, her description of the essential elements making up dignity are even more profound than the violations if we integrate them into our daily lives and institutions. Imagine, for example, what life would be like on university campuses if their various actors, units, and policies actually insisted on her definition of safety as a birthright, not an entitlement: "Put people at ease at two levels: physically, so they feel safe from bodily harm, and psychologically, so they feel safe from being humiliated. Help them to feel free to speak without fear of retribution."

Such a mind-blowing imaginative activity because it is so fucking far from what any member of a marginalized community experiences on most if not all university campuses! And this essential element requires boatloads of courageous action, especially by university leaders, if it is to be anything but words on paper. After all, legitimate fear of legal, financial, reputational, and additional forms of reprisal by those in power is what silences so many of us in the first place.

Since I am writing a blog post on a topic worthy of a book series, I will close by reiterating that the work of imagining liberatory systems cannot be reduced to excising rotten actors, who it turns out have their own dignity buried underneath all those layers of intergenerational, toxic conditioning. The really great news is that so many of the people excluded from positions of power in these noxious systems have fabulous ideas about how to bring about change that grows justice, peace, and everyone's dignity. Their wisdom is rooted in empathy, compassion, and the intimate study of their own experience, not narcissism or the will to power.

It also feels important to note that a full reckoning is going to involve a whole lot of grieving for the vast talent, beauty, and creativity that never saw the light of day within these harmful systems. As Rebecca Solnit so poignantly wrote,

We live in a world where uncountable numbers of women have had their creative and professional capacity undermined by trauma and threat, by devaluation and exclusion. A world in which women were equally free and encouraged to contribute, in which we lived without this pervasive fear, might be unimaginably different. In the same way, a United States in which people of color did not have their votes increasingly suppressed, in which they did not also face violence and exclusion and denigration, might not just have different outcomes in its recent elections but different candidates and issues. The whole fabric of society would be something else. It should be. Because that is what justice would look like, and peace, or at least the foundation on which they could be built.

So let's quit relying on hope and work through the individual and collective trauma standing in the way of imagining what for far too long has been unimaginable.

Giving a *$%^!@ about How We Treat Each Other and Ourselves

"Don't mourn, organize!" I've seen this slogan often and tend to agree with it, with the caveat that we may need to process (not get stuck in) our grief before and while we jump into action. What I've been chewing on since November 9 is how we organize. In particular, I have hemmed and hawed over whether or not to put into written word what I believe matters a lot: how we treat other in our daily lives and also on public platforms. I've been fearing criticism of this stance by some of my most respected friends and colleagues given my social positioning and identities, which tilt me far to the side of privilege on this very imbalanced field of power and wealth called the United States. More specifically, I have been reading publication after publication about the ways in which white people take over, dilute and diminish justice struggles, and more generally often harm more than they help movements explicitly aimed at challenging white supremacy, such as Black Lives Matter. So I have been weighing whether or not to keep my views to myself.

Then I revisited Manson's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck." This article gave me the courage to speak my "t" truth because one of the few fucks I won't give up is that how we relate to one another matters, whether we're engaged in a regular daily interaction or resisting the violation of human rights and environmental degradation on a larger scale. Indeed, this fuck is why I keep The No Asshole Rule front and center on my bookshelf. May my intention to promote wise speech and action come through loud and clear in this post and strengthen our collective actions rather than undermine them. Lord knows, we need as large a critical mass as we can muster to resist the shit show unfurling on the U.S. political stage as I write this post.

*************

In 2011, I walked away from a tenure-track assistant professorship in education to become a psychotherapist. Many people thought I was nuts. How could you leave such a coveted position in academia? You spent all those years progressing along this career path and now you're quitting? I thought you were an agent for social change! How are you going to generate social transformation while working individually with people in a confidential space?

Leaving academia turned out to be the best thing I could do for my sanity and health. At the risk of irritating my much beloved activist friends and colleagues, I have come to see that much of the social justice work I undertook from a university perch resembled the aggression, divisiveness, and verbal warfare I'm currently witnessing on the heels of the 2016 presidential election. I still carry the commitments I had then, but I use different tools to enact them. More specifically, I frequently turn to models of dignity and nonviolent communication to do the work I used to do, as I believe they enable me to approach social change work with my integrity intact and ensure that peace, about which I also give a fuck, has a prominent place on the social justice map.

Rewinding the story a little bit, I identify Tara Brach and her sangha, of which I was a member during my three years as an assistant professor, as significant shapers of my decision to exit academia and shift my approach to justice work. Her teachings repeatedly drilled home to me that separation generates suffering, whether that separation manifests from a sense of superiority or inferiority to others. Additionally, she rocked my world when she named aversive judgment--that is, when we judge someone or something as bad or wrong--as synonymous with aggression. Both of these lessons revealed how much of the social justice language and behaviors in which I engaged generated harm, separation, and suffering.

More specifically, self-righteousness abounded in our treatises on justice and dotted the pathway with "shoulds." Someone who is anti-racist, pro-feminist, and promoting a redistribution of wealth, for instance, should do x, y, and z or they are not true activists and allies. Ironically, many of us replicated the hierarchical ranking of "good" and "bad" actors that the Euroheteropatriarchy against which we raged set up for us in the first place. In other words, our rants overflowed with aversive judgment as we looked down on those who did not subscribe to our particular ideology or approach.

A favorite past-time during that era was to take the white supremacy literature I pored over and use it like the sharpest razor blade against my own skin. Although extremely anxious and depressed while marching through the world bearing so much judgment for myself and others (and drinking way too much to cope with that anxiety and depression), I believed my privilege meant I did not--I could not--know suffering. And as I learned more and more about the pain suffered by marginalized communities of which I was not a member, I absolutely would not permit emotions that got in the way of the work I was supposed to be doing, particularly guilt and shame. They, like my whiteness, were the enemy.

Now please allow me to clarify my stance a bit. Concepts like "white fragility," "false empathy," and the "white savior industrial complex" have been and continue to be very helpful for those of us trying to become skillful contributors to positive social change, especially white people. How we use those concepts (and practices like nonviolent communication) is what I am emphasizing here, as everything is dangerous, to borrow from the late Michel Foucault. What I came to realize is that going to war with ourselves generates significant casualties--suicide in worst-case scenarios--and saps energy at a time when we need it most stay in long-term struggles for social justice.

To say a bit more about this self-aggression, we know that berating and belittling others does not foster good will or solidarity yet we frequently bully ourselves until, curled into a tight ball to fend off the barrage of harsh judgments, we inadvertently become extremely self-centered. Thinking that I caused systemic harm prevents me from becoming curious about the factors outside of myself that have contributed to any given moment or circumstance--an understanding that is essential to seeing clearly what is and, from that place of clarity, developing a potent action plan. Self-blame also is masterful at demotivating us so that we stay collapsed in a ball on the ground rather than get up and engage with the world.

With regard to guilt and shame, specifically, I now view them as simply emotions that we, initially at least, do not choose to feel. They actually can provide us with useful information, if we listen to them with curiosity rather than judgment, and process them to their end since all emotions have a beginning, middle, and end if we allow them to move through us. (It turns out emotions do not have a long shelf life when we let them run their course rather than feed them with our thoughts.) They certainly become problematic when we try to bury them--and so make them stronger--or grab onto them for dear life and so become mired in deep, paralyzing muck. They also can be very annoying when they take up all the space in a room. But they, and the people experiencing them, are not the enemy. White supremacy, economic inequality, heteronormativity, misogyny, transphobia, and additional forms of systemic oppression and domination, on the other hand, are worthy of attack.

*************

Although the dignity and nonviolent communication practices on which I currently draw are works in progress rather than panaceas, they generally allow me to sustain self-respect while speaking up and out. Here are a few reasons why:

The reality that we are interconnected means that when I violate your dignity, I diminish my own. If we pause long enough to notice what happens within us when we blame and shame others and/or step into the role of victim, I am confident we will not like what we find. It feels shitty to act out of our base instincts rooted in a rigid us/them mentality, especially when we have done our homework and so know that larger systems are at work when injustice occurs. And being the victim (versus resisting acts of perpetration) spirals us into a realm of powerlessness that feels real but often is not true. In other words, we give up whatever power we do have in the land of victimhood. Although easier to target individuals than to see the systemic conditioning that has influenced our beliefs and behavior (e.g. if we're swimming in white supremacist waters, we're going to get wet), we have a much better shot at re-humanizing those very systems when we can refrain from attacking its actors. Super importantly, choosing not to vilify someone is not synonymous with letting accountability slide. With our big prefrontal cortex, we have the capacity to hold people accountable for their actions without stripping them of their humanity in the process. Restraint is also not the same thing as rolling over and taking a beating. It does mean that as we defend ourselves and what we hold dear through the actions available to us, we refrain from engaging in the aggression that is aversive judgment.

Enter nonviolent communication (NVC). What NVC can do well is challenge the domination structures embedded in the language we use. And just to reiterate, this tool, like any tool, can be used to reinforce oppression and domination. The Center for Nonviolent Communication's founder, Marshall Rosenberg, articulated the radical potential of NVC when he explained how static, judgmental language combined with a retributive form of justice spur and grow planetary violence. More specifically, he highlighted how an emphasis on being rather than behavior (e.g., "You are a racist idiot" rather than "That was a racist action") generates unresolvable conflict and division. In the realm of retributive justice, which Oxford Dictionary defines as "A system of criminal justice based on the punishment of offenders rather than on rehabilitation," Rosenberg also revealed how reliance on authorities that use a dichotomous scale (e.g., good/bad, right/wrong, normal/abnormal) to determine who deserves punishment disconnects people from their own power and limits our understanding of what is actually happening in any given moment.

At the heart of NVC is a focus on unmet needs since they are what drive our sense of dis-ease in any given moment. In other words, if we can drill down to what needs are unrealized, whether they are basic physical needs like food, shelter, and clean water or more subtle human emotional needs like a sense of belonging and connection, we can put our energy toward fulfilling those needs rather than judging and punishing those deemed abnormal, mentally ill, or wrong. This framework has significant implications for how we address those marginalized by our current systems, since we direct our attention toward helping those more vulnerable folks to fulfill their unmet needs--needs that these folks identify themselves!--rather than to developing policies and processes that determine a person's worthiness (or unworthiness as is often the case) in the first place. Back to the dignity model, inherent value and worth is a birthright that is not up for grabs.

Now achieving clarity about what our needs are (and I'm not talking about desires dressed up as needs here) as well as expressing our observations about what is happening without resorting to aversive judgment (e.g., He is a narcissistic, stupid monster!) is no small feat. For most of us, it requires a paradigm shift, not only in the language we use but also in how we approach behaviors, emotions, and requests of ourselves and others that better meet our needs. I maintain it's a worthwhile challenge to undertake. I want to provide an example from my own life of how attention to dignity, in combination with nonviolent communication, have helped me to see how harmful words and actions often mask unmet needs and emerge from past dignity violations to the person wreaking the harm. And again, the capacity to understand unmet needs does not mean we tolerate harmful words and actions. It does mean our response has a better shot at diminishing rather than growing division and violence:

I interacted with a man who spewed virulent homophobic slurs soon after I met him. As a queer-identified person, I struggled not to react to his hate speech with my own speech about how bad and wrong he was. Deciding not to make a two-dimensional caricature out of him, I listened a little longer to his story and asked a few more questions. In the process, I learned that he had been sexually assaulted by a gay man as a young adult and had never processed the trauma. What I know about trauma--and I do believe everyone would benefit from a trauma 101 training in light of how much individual and collective trauma there is in our world--is that it diminishes our capacity to stay present, centered, and grounded, all of which are necessary to keep fear from hijacking our thinking. I sensed that terror, rather than hate, were at the root of his gross and negative generalizations about LGBTQ+ people. So I connected with his fear and validated the horror of the violation he experienced before I spoke of how the individual that harmed him was in no way representative of an entire, and very diverse group of people and asked him to acknowledge that cisgender, straight men perpetrate the bulk of sexually predatory acts. And our relationship continued, giving me more of an opportunity to challenge his distorted, fear-based beliefs about gay people.

I hear the critics in my ear as I close out this post. The individual of which I just spoke is not in a seat of power like our current president-elect and his cabinet members, most of whom have orchestrated and supported great harm to marginalized communities of multiple kinds as well as our environment. My point is not that we need to have dialogues with those intent on harming us. Ears to hear are necessary for dialogue to be of mutual benefit, and I am gearing up for a hell of a struggle.

Rather, I want to ask this: at the end of the day, when we face ourselves, who do we want to encounter? I can only speak from my own experience, which has taught me that resilience in the face of struggle expands when curiosity replaces aversive judgment. Perhaps more importantly, I now intimately know what Donna Hicks so eloquently noted: "When we honor other people's dignity, we strengthen our own."

Remembering Resilience

Several months ago I posted an article on my Facebook wall critiquing the current use of "resilience." As the author argued,

Resilience is fleet, adaptive, pragmatic — and it has become an obsession among middle-­class parents who want to prepare their children to withstand a world that won’t always go their way...But where ‘‘resilience’’ can suggest new avenues for civic infrastructure — admitting that disaster can’t always be diverted and shifting the focus to survival strategies — it is indistinguishable from classic American bootstrap logic when it is applied to individuals, placing all the burden of success and failure on a person’s character.

I appreciate the attention in this article to the ways in which our hyper-individualistic culture can co-opt an otherwise useful concept, thereby making it an empty and even harmful tool. However, fours months into parenthood and as a therapist who frequently works with people who have suffered significant trauma in their lives, I would like to take a stab at reclaiming resilience.

To start with the personal, I recently received the hospital records from the cesarean birth of my child. As I leafed through the document and read how much my daughter struggled during her first few minutes in this world, fear overtook me. I immediately lost sight of the smiling, calm baby before me and convinced myself that she was doomed to some sort of long-term suffering from her traumatic birth. Instead of focusing on the healing work we had done with a craniosacral therapist in the weeks following her birth and, perhaps more importantly, the fact that her inconsolable crying spells had abated, I momentarily convinced myself that my child had been irreparably harmed.  Thankfully, my partner and I know a skillful healer who has long specialized in trauma, and we reached out to him. He stopped my lizard brain in its tracks by asking some important questions--namely, what evidence do you have, in the here and now, that she is struggling with birth trauma?

I did not have evidence; I had fear stories. Coming back into the present and my body, I realized I could attune to my child and respond to signs of trouble, should they appear, in the present or down the road. But I did not need to create a problem for my child out of my own traumatic memory and experience. Instead, I could and did remember a very poignant line from Carl Jung-- “The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.” I've been attending to my own healing from the birth ever since.

Fast forward a few months to my return to work, and clients neglect of their own resilience smacked me in the face. One client in particular reminded me just how limited and limiting our worlds become when we focus only on the negative experiences we have had and ignore the parts of ourselves that allowed us to persevere through them. Before me sat an incredibly insightful, funny, kind human being who wanted me to focus on all the diagnoses they had been given through their many years of meeting with various psychotherapists and psychiatrists. Yes, they had suffered repeated and terrible trauma. And yes that trauma had significantly and adversely impacted their life. But they were so caught up in the tagline of being multiple disorders that they could not see their strengths or the many survival resources they had drawn upon to make it into my office, let alone middle age. Only once we had cut through the story of deficiency and defectiveness could they re-member (literally come back into their body as a whole self) their vitality. They could then reconnect with their desire not only to survive but also to flourish and have that aspiration guide their actions.

I do not want to minimize the harms that we as human beings wreak on each other, the Earth, and ourselves. But I also do not want to forget that, to borrow from Taoist Chuang Tzu, 10,000 joys accompany the 10,000 sorrows of life. The miracle and beauty of human beings is that we have the capacity to hold all of life, including its less savory parts. What is more, with appropriate and adequate support--not "American bootstrap logic"--we can use the tough stuff as fodder for wisdom, compassion, and love for the life that is here.

Research also shows that how we frame difficult experiences can matter a lot. As Maria Konnikova recently wrote,

Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

May we all learn to grow from the difficult experiences of our lives so that they ultimately enrich rather than diminish us.

Another Lesson in Radical Acceptance: A Loooooong Birth Story!

Warning of sorts: This tale includes a lot of details, many of which may strike the reader as boring and unnecessary. I intentionally left them for a few reasons. If my story resonates with that of others and so helps to increase a sense of connection and empathy while decreasing isolation, the extra detail is worth it. At least in my experience, throughout the pregnancy and birth journey too often people neither invite birthing parents* to share their experiences nor demonstrate a willingness to simply listen and witness those stories with compassionate understanding--to hold space for whatever a parent wants to express. Instead of being asked what is happening, too often we are told what we should be doing and how we should be doing it. Assumptions, generalizations, and rapidly drawn conclusions also abound, none of which helps us to feel supported and validated through what is, for many, a challenging process. Moreover, once the baby is born, many people are quick to say, "That was rough, but now you have this beautiful baby! Be grateful! What's wrong with you for not feeling only joy!?" If nothing else, I hope this post can reinforce what I know to be true: suppressing part of our experience so that others can feel comfortable or so we can avoid the difficult chapters of the story does not helps us to heal and learn from suffering. And suffering can be an amazing teacher when we allow it to serve that role. Human beings have the capacity to feel a panoply of emotions all at once and, as poet Danna Faulds instructs, "The only safety lies in letting it all in–the wild and the weak; fear, fantasies, failures and success." I'm not sure where to start this story but acknowledging how much effort it took to bring our child into the world, well before her birth, seems too important to leave out. By no stretch of the imagination was she accidental. We needed some extra help to conceive this kiddo. L'il miss emerged from our sixth and final intrauterine insemination (IUI) at a fertility clinic, and two of those IUIs ended in miscarriages. When I found out I was pregnant for a third time, I waited with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. But the weeks kept passing, and the milestones kept piling up--hearing the baby's heartbeat for the first time, completing the first trimester, seeing those tiny legs kick at the 20-week ultrasound. I soon could not deny that this new life just might make it into the world. I'm not sure I took a full breath, however, until we arrived at the third trimester, and I knew our child would likely survive a premature birth.

Around that time, we moved across the country, and I transferred care from an OB/GYN to that of a registered midwife. I dreamed of birthing the baby in the low-stress environment of my own home, surrounded by my loving partner and supportive midwives who view childbirth as a rite of passage, not a medical event, and the birthing parent as a wise collaborator, not a patient who needs to be compliant to be "good." We began to prepare our house for the big day, and I planned for a natural birth the best I could by doing things like participating in a Birthing from Within class and yoga birth workshop. The birthing class, particularly, helped me to identify and confront my fears about the birth process as well as move toward acceptance that our best laid plans rarely turn out as expected. One particularly poignant memory I have from the class is the facilitator splashing black paint on the art projects we were in the process of creating. Our response to this action highlighted how attached we were to a particular outcome and presented an opportunity to be more flexible in our thinking and actions--to accept and surrender to situations beyond our control. She also introduced us to the useful metaphor of the labyrinth. As the Birthing from Within founder explains it,

The labyrinth is an ancient symbol representing our journey through life, ordeals, and transitions. Its single, convoluted pathway begins at the opening, leads directly to the center, and then returns along the same path to the outside again. Walking or finger-tracing a labyrinth invokes a sensation of turning inward, then outward...you could be blindfolded and still reach the center by feeling your way through the path. You don't need to study the path before you enter it. You don't need a birth plan or a cell phone to call for help! There is no time-line and no mistakes. Any and every birth fits within the labyrinth--whether long or short, medical or natural, cesarean or vaginal--or anywhere in between!...In the Labyrinth of Birth, the journey (with its twists and turns) reflects the emotional, spiritual, and social experience of giving birth.

Time seemed to simultaneously slow down and accelerate as my due date, November 11, came and went. Knowing that most first-time parents go over their "estimated due date," I tried to relax and enjoy the time off, as I had just begun maternity leave. I also began following the various counsel I sought out and received about triggering labor, such as going for a strenuous hike.

As 41 weeks approached, I went in for an ultrasound to make sure everything was still functioning well. Turns out my placenta and umbilical cord were still rocking and rolling, and the baby was not in distress. So we marched past the 41st week mark. I went to an acupuncturist for an induction session and my midwife for a membrane sweep (fun, fun!). I had received lots of signals from my body that things were moving in the childbirthing direction, but this visit to the midwife dashed my hopes. The unsuccessful membrane sweep revealed that I looked more like I was 39 weeks pregnant, not 41 weeks and a day.

I began to face the reality that a hospital induction may be necessary, as the medical community and my midwife did not support me going beyond 42 weeks given the potential harm to the baby in that scenario. Of course I did not want to put the baby at risk either and was not exactly feeling stellar--physically or emotionally--by that point (and I won't go into detail about hemorrhoids, but they were definitely and acutely on board as 42 weeks approached). Still, a hospital induction meant throwing out my birth plan and possibly facing the thing I feared most--a pitocin induction that significantly increased the likelihood of needing an epidural and, ultimately, a cesarean section. Starting to feel some desperation, I went to a chiropractor on week 41 day 2 and got adjusted, hoping a more relaxed and aligned pelvis would do the trick.

Within 36 hours of those three interventions, I began to have more consistent, intense contractions throughout the night that arrived every 5 to 8 minutes. I called my parents the morning of 41 weeks and 3 days and asked them to pick up our 11-month-old dog whose presence at the birth would have been a bit too much for everyone, including her.

That evening, I went to my midwife's partner (my midwife had left town for Thanksgiving--another twist in the labyrinth) for a craniosacral session, hoping it would relax my body enough to bring on active labor. But the contractions had already begun to slow down. I was able to get a good night's sleep and relished the rest but once again felt the disappointment of getting my hopes up about an eminent birth. I discovered the term prodromal labor on the Internet and hoped all this preparatory work would mean a faster delivery once I transitioned into active labor. I was in the thick of the labyrinth, feeling the jolt that comes from moving inward toward the center (i.e. childbirth) and then suddenly finding myself at the outward edge again.

At 41 weeks and 5 days, after another night of rough contractions and very little sleep, I went to town on induction strategies, which helped to lift my spirits as only frenetic activity can sometimes do. I returned to the chiropractor and acupuncturist. I also got a non-stress test and was happy to find out the baby was still chilling in my womb. My new midwife gave me another membrane sweep, this time successfully, and reported I was about 2 cm dilated and 50% effaced, which was a bit hard to hear given how exhausted I felt but at least showed some progress. That night, the contractions grew even more intense, to the point that I was on all fours through each one, praying that this not go on another day. But they remained inconsistent, refusing to show the patterned frequency that marks active labor.

At 41 weeks and 6 days, I went back to the acupuncturist for the third and final induction session. I also procured Chinese induction herbs and a homeopathic remedy. I crossed my fingers that these efforts would finally bring about active labor and, more importantly, my daughter. The midwife came over to our house that night to give me a pep talk when the thought of facing another night of frequent, painful contractions seemed overwhelming, particularly since my body had started shaking like a leaf that afternoon. Another craniosacral session calmed me down enough to face the night but active labor did not come.

However, the morning of 42 weeks and 0 days, I felt a surge of energy, recognizing this day was my final chance to have the baby at home. I used a breast pump to try to stimulate active labor and kept drinking my Chinese brew, plugging my nose to get the strong-smelling liquid down the hatch. My partner and I also went to a sports field where I carried my very pregnant belly up and down the bleachers, hoping the stairs would jostle that baby closer to the womb's exit. I had been resisting castor oil as the final non-medical induction strategy because I have a very sensitive system but decided at 11 a.m. that the possibility of avoiding a medical birth still outweighed the potential costs of taking this powerful laxative. I only consumed a tablespoon of that disgusting substance and, 30 minutes later, threw up everything in my system. Utterly deflated, I called the midwife, and she planned to come over for one final prenatal exam before we headed to the hospital. No sooner had I gotten off the phone, I had to run to the bathroom and, lo and behold, active labor commenced! I felt a wave of excitement, believing this was finally the transition I needed to stay at home and finish what I had set out to do. But after an hour, the contractions slowed down and became shorter, once again revealing a false start.

We headed to a hospital that uses nurse midwives that evening. They welcomed me with open arms, and I will forever be indebted to the wonderful staff at Denver Health Medical Center. After checking in, I learned that I could take morphine, which would not harm the baby but would block out the contractions enough for me to get a good night's rest after five days of on and off again labor. Then, the next morning, which happened to be Thanksgiving, I could take cytotek, a much friendlier induction medicine than pitocin. I felt confident I could face active labor after some solid hours of shut eye. As my partner and I joked, I had trained for a marathon, not the Ironman, but I definitely felt like I was in the middle of the latter.

I fell into a deep, dreamy sleep for approximately two hours before the intense contractions started up again. Unfortunately, I had three of them within ten minutes, which took cytotek off the table, as the nurse midwife could not control what happened in my body once I ingested it and did not want to put the baby in danger. Although I had moments that looked like active labor, the contractions were still too variable, and my cervix was opening at a snail's pace. Pitocin was fast becoming the only option to induce active labor, and despair began to sink its teeth into my worn out skin.

Early the morning of week 42 day 1, the nurse midwife messed with my cervix, opening it up a little more and creating a bit of a scare as I dripped blood while walking to the bathroom. The nurse/midwife team put me in the tub to try to help me relax, as my body was shaking nonstop and my energy to move through more contractions was rapidly declining. A new set of nurses and nurse midwives started their shifts, and I reluctantly left the tub to see what my body would do next. I had dilated to 4 cm and was 80% effaced, which was progress to be sure but the road ahead still seemed awfully long. All hands were on deck to help me through each contraction, which continued to be inconsistently spaced apart. I went back into the tub and had some moments of zenned out bliss before we proceeded to the last non-pharmaceutical possibility--inducing active labor via the breast pump. As I watched my body create a bunch of colostrum (something that was actually going right!), my intuition screamed to me that this intervention was not going to do the trick and that I was fast reaching my system's limit to cope with more contractions.

Through tears, I asked if I could get an epidural before pitocin, and the nurse midwife said I could. They warned me that I would have to sit still through contractions for 20 minutes while they set up the epidural, but I found the procedure to be a piece of cake compared to the last 6 days. The relief from the nerve block was immediate, and I finally started to breathe deeply and stop shaking. They waited a little while to see if I would go into active labor. Surprise, surprise, I did not. The long dreaded moment had arrived, and they very slowly and gradually introduced pitocin into my body. All was going well until the pitocin hit 8 ml (22 is the maximum amount they use to induce labor). My water broke, and the poor little baby was hit with both the synthetic oxytocin of the pitocin and the natural oxytocin created by my body. Her heart rate plummeted for several minutes, so they stopped the pitocin and calmly repositioned me until her heart rate became normal again. The nurse midwife proposed starting pitocin again at 4 ml, and I agreed, not realizing how significant the baby's distress had been.

Immediately after they began the 4 ml drip, the baby's heart rate dipped again as my uterus began contracting like crazy. They injected me with something to calm my uterus, stopped the pitocin, and positioned my nearly immobilized lower body in a kneeling position to shove a censor through my cervix and onto the baby's head. Her heart rate sounded like a door knock through this device, and I took solace in the steady, patterned sound. The contractions were starting to break through the epidural, so the anesthesiologist reappeared to administer a bolus of what by then had become known to me as "the good stuff." The nurse midwife wanted to try one last option before turning me over to the surgery team: start the pitocin at 1 ml and see if we could get my cervix to dilate fully. I had been at 6 cm for a few hours at that point but also had been in active labor.

In the meantime, she wanted me to meet with the chief OB and ask her any questions I had about a cesarean birth in the event I needed to go that route. The surgeon was a lovely human being and with every passing minute I surrendered to the outcome I had once dreaded. I clarified to my midwife/nurse team that I was not resisting letting go of my birth plan. Hell, I'd thrown that out the window long ago. I mostly feared the baby would experience trauma on account of the surgery and miss out on what I have come to believe is an important event in a person's life whenever it's possible--pushing their way into the world. My lovely midwife told me we could repair the traumatic effects of a c-section soon after her birth, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then the resident who would be assisting the c-section entered the room. She wanted me to know who was behind the mask once I was in the OR. The anesthesiologist also returned once more to explain to me how he would numb my body for the procedure while I remained conscious. I did my best to utter my sincere gratitude to all of the people who were doing their best to make this experience bearable for me. I also made some requests, including to hold the baby right after the procedure if I could, as the pitocin drip began once again.

We made it to 2 ml of pitocin before the baby's heart rate decelerated yet again. The nurse-midwife said we could try to go up to 3 ml, and I said enough. A new shift of nurse midwives and nurses came on board (round 3!), and everyone began prepping for the surgery. I had been dilated at 6 cm for 6 hours when my parents came in from the waiting room for the grand send-off. My midwife was not allowed to accompany me into surgery, but my partner was. They transferred me to a gurney and told me my partner would join me after they had anesthetized me.

They transferred me once again from a gurney to the operating table, this time removing the sheet from my naked body under some very bright lights. All that covered me were the various tubes and needles protruding from my skin. As the numbing medicine rolled down my back like a waterfall, the staff around me spoke of everyday things like their work schedules. I have never felt so exposed and vulnerable and hope I never have to again. The nurse midwife noticed tears running down my cheeks and grabbed my hand. Soon after my partner arrived and whispered to me how sorry he was as he stroked and kissed my forehead. That moment of grace still brings tears to my eyes.

Being awake while someone opens you up is a strange sensation, to say the least. The surgical staff spoke to me about what they were doing and within just a few minutes, they had pulled the baby from my body. They told my partner he could look over the sheet if he wouldn't pass out but absolutely would not let me see what was going on. They were surprised how in shock the baby was, given how long I had been in labor, and immediately needed to give her oxygen. They took her to the far end of the room, and my partner was allowed to go over and be with her. Though only a few minutes passed in real time, an agonizing eternity took over my landscape. When I heard her cry, I finally took a deep breath and the tears began to flow again, this time streaming a mixture of joy and relief. The surgeon told me she wanted to take the baby to the NICU to give her more oxygen and monitor her for a short time, but I was able to look at this miracle, welcome her to the world, and touch and kiss her cheek before she and my partner left the room again.

After suturing me up--it's also an odd thing to hear someone say, "Now we're putting the uterus back in your body"--the surgical team released me to a recovery room, where I was reunited with my partner and the newly coined Reese Mae. By then, her respiratory system was fully on line, and she has been thriving ever since. Reese was born at 10:26 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day 2015, weighing 7 lbs 10 oz and measuring 21 inches. Words cannot capture the experience of finally getting to meet her, but poetry comes closest as I do the work of moving from the center of the labyrinth back out again. So I leave you with Mary Oliver's "Messenger":

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird— equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.

* I intentionally use "birthing parents" rather than "mothers" to honor that individuals with diverse gender identities and expressions birth children and may not identify as a woman or mother. See this blog post for a more in-depth inquiry into this topic.

The Necessity of Connection and Acceptance

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

--Maya Angelou

As of late, suicide is on my mind. I nearly lost someone to a suicide attempt this fall, am approaching the anniversary of a client's suicide, and reeling from the suicide of yet another trans teenager, Skylar Lee, in Madison, Wisconsin. Given that I am about to bring a child into this world, these tragedies, all of which are in some way tied to LGBTQ+ identities, have spurred me to reflect on the human need for connection and acceptance. Skylar's mom's courageous and heartbreaking news interview highlights this point. As she said, “The night before [he died], he hugged me and kissed me,” Joanne said. “I could feel it. He forgave me that I didn't accept him, and that was his final goodbye to me. I owe him to continue his fight.”

Ironically enough, I have found some of the most poignant lessons about connection and acceptance in the book No Drama Discipline by Dan Siegel and Tina Bryson. Because the book's title conceals more than it reveals about the author's definition of discipline, I want to start by sharing that definition, as it's about connection rather than punishment, which feels particularly relevant on the heels of the school resource officer's violent actions at Spring Valley High. As the authors wrote,

whenever we discipline our kids, our overall goal is not to punish or to give a consequence but to teach. The root of 'discipline' is the word disciple, which means 'student,' 'pupil,' and 'learner.' A disciple, the one receiving discipline is not a prisoner or recipient of punishment, but one who is learning through instruction. Punishment might shut down a behavior in the short term, but teaching offers skills that last a lifetime...we want caregivers to think of discipline as one of the most loving and nurturing things we can do for our kids.

I love this focus on teaching, which actually requires adults to use something besides our fear and conditioning to relate to a child. Siegel and Bryson reiterate again and again that we must connect with our children before we try to redirect their behavior. How that connection looks and sounds is going to differ, based on factors like circumstance and personality, but the result is the same: the child feels understood, valued, and accepted for who they are, not who they should or could be according to somebody else's norms and expectations. The authors do a brilliant job responding to the counter-argument that to connect with children is to spoil them, specifically noting,

Spoiling is not about how much love and time and attention you give your kids. You can't spoil your children by giving them too much of yourself...Nurturing your relationship with your child and giving her the consistent experiences that form the basis of her accurate belief that she's entitled to your love and affection is exactly what we should be doing. In other words, we want to let our kids know that they can count on getting their needs met.

Not all suicides are linked to a lack of connection and acceptance, but many of them are. So much of my work with clients centers on important relationships--oftentimes with parents and partners--in which they do not think they can express who they are and still be loved. Given that acceptance is a core human emotional need, the inability to be our authentic selves and still feel a sense of belonging and connection is devastating. I cannot overstate this point.

But I want to end this post on a positive note. I just had the opportunity to attend a Boulder Valley Safe Schools Coalition meeting and learned of parents, educators, and administrators working together to make this district's schools safe and equitable learning environments for all students. To see the district's language about honoring student identities and affirming gender fluidity and diversity was heartening. Even more so was the presence of parents who shared testimonials about their love of and support for their gender variant children at a district board meeting. These parents strike me as some of the biggest changers of hearts and minds about connecting with our children's concerns, feelings, and experience and accepting them as they are. May we learn from the tragic losses we have already endured so that human flourishing, not just survival, becomes a realistic aspiration for our society.

Learning to Honor Self-Doubt and Move through It

Self-doubt can be such a nasty monster. Although I aspire to look at our most ineffective habits as survival resources that, at some point in our lives (often when we're young), helped us to keep going, self-doubt is one of those bugaboos that seems to bring nothing we want and everything we don't, including paralysis, self-loathing, and a whole lot of angst.

I observe client after client live out a sliver of their lives on account of self-doubt. When I reflect on the role self-doubt has played in my own life, I see many moments of living in a painful story that prevented me both from engaging in the present moment and realizing possible dreams. But here is the thing: self-doubt in and of itself is not bad. Initially, at least, self-doubt serves as an indicator of sorts. Perhaps we are about to dive headlong into a new endeavor that warrants more caution and humility. Self-doubt might be the force that causes us to pause and move forward more wisely and skillfully. It also can spur us to consider perspectives other than our own and so engage in action with a wider, more informed lens. As Michelle McQuaid instructs, "nature has wired your brain with these uncomfortable feelings for the practical purpose of guiding your behavior."

Self-doubt becomes an issue when we identify with it--when we view it as a fixed aspect of our identity and say things like, "I can't handle this unfamiliar challenge so I might as well not even try." At that point, our attention goes largely toward feeding the self-doubt with negative beliefs, and we lose sight of other options, such as taking one small step toward a difficult challenge or unrealized dream.

A model I have found helpful for defanging self-doubt comes from a Birthing from Within class I have been taking in preparation for the birth of my child. The course's philosophy is rooted in four pillars: self-doubt, determination, faith, and love. Self-doubt is an integral part of the birthing process as it helps us to unearth the fears we have been carrying around about childbirth, often unconsciously. Having unearthed our deepest fears, we can work with them and use the other three pillars to see us through labor, delivery, and beyond. Thus we honor self-doubt as part of the birth experience and life more generally.

One of the art projects we did in the course brought these abstract ideas to life for me. Our facilitator asked us to identify one of our greatest fears and create a picture of it. Mine involved self-doubt taking over during labor. I envisioned collapsing into myself and not being able to access internal or external resources from this tight, closed space. With self-doubt at its peak, I would be forced to quit my home birth plan and submit to medical interventions not of my own choosing. The false core beliefs I learned long ago would come flooding in, particularly "You're a failure."

But picturing the fear was just the first part of the project. The facilitator then asked us to envision working with this fear and transforming it. I immediately thought of the body-based trauma training I completed and re-membered (pun intended) that I could shift my body even if my mind was screaming messages of self-doubt at me. More specifically, I could reengage my core and align my body in such a way that I was upright, with my shoulders back, and thus better able to breathe, push, and see and hear the support of the midwife and my partner. My body could serve as a guide and through its wisdom calm my thoughts and emotions. I returned to the space of saying to myself, and actually believing, "You can do this."

Later in that class session, we learned a pain coping strategy that struck me as another useful way to pull out of self-doubt's quicksand. Called ovarian breathing, this strategy comes from the Chinese ancient practice of Microcosmic Orbit. Essentially, you imagine pulling your inward breath up from the base of your spine to the top of your head and then imagine your exhaled breath moving from the top of your head down the front of your body. While exhaling, you send life-giving energy to yourself (and your baby if you're pregnant). The third step of ovarian breathing is the one that most helps us to move through self-doubt and access the other pillars: imagine a special bowl or container right above the pubic bone that captures the life-giving energy from your out-breath. Then use this collected energy to begin the next inhalation process and continue this cycle of breath. The take-away message for me in this practice is that we already have everything we need within us to keep going. I encourage you to try this practice, which is especially helpful when we feel exhausted and discouraged and does not require ovaries!

My baby's birth story is not yet written, but I can tell you that shifting my approach to self-doubt and experimenting with practices that remind me it is only a slice of my experience have allowed me to respect self-doubt and rest in determination, faith, and love. As Pema Chodron wrote, difficult emotions

are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we're holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we'd rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we're stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are.

Why no, I'm not infertile. Just queer.

This pregnancy business has given me a lot of time to reflect on just how heteronormative and ciscentric baby-making and baby-having processes are as well as how many unhelpful assumptions we human beings tend to make about all sorts of things. A concrete example illuminates what I mean: Imagine a couple composed of a cisgender woman and a trans man. They decide they want to become parents via the cisgender woman's eggs and a donor's sperm. They go to a fertility clinic because that is where procedures like intrauterine insemination and in-vitro fertilization happen. Because they are read by the staff as a straight, cisgender couple, they get two intake forms: one for the female and one for the male. Both forms were created with the following assumptions in mind: the woman has two x chromosomes, a vulva, a uterus, fallopian tube(s), and ovary/ies; the man has a x and y chromosome, a penis, and testicle(s); at least one member of the couple has fertility issues. Now it may be true that the man is sterile if he had his reproductive organ(s) surgically removed. But that infertility is not due to a "malfunctioning" penis, sperm, or testicles. In fact, if we are looking for trans men's reproductive stories, a more likely scenario is revealed in Alexis Light's study of 41 trans men--the majority of whom had undergone hormone treatment (i.e taken testosterone)--who became pregnant or gave birth. But I digress from the illustration.

Now if the fertility clinic is sensitive and knowledgeable about LGBTQ+ people, which remains a big if in 2015, the couple can let the clinic staff know that the male intake form is largely of no use and carry on with the process of trying to conceive a child in a welcoming environment. Ideally, the fertility clinic will revise its intake process, perhaps by simply beginning it with an open-ended question about what brings the patients to the clinic, without assuming there is a "problem" with one or both members of the couple or asking a bunch of questions about their presumed genetic make-up and body parts that are irrelevant to the situation at hand.

Avoiding a deficit-oriented approach can seem tricky since many queer folks are indeed missing an ingredient needed for conception. But what a difference medical providers can make for patients, especially when they are already feeling vulnerable from the parenthood journey, if they emphasize what the patients will be adding to the mix--in the above case sperm--rather than that the patients needs to make up for what is lacking (and I would assert that this argument applies to folks struggling with infertility, too). Adding a sperm donor to the picture certainly makes things more complicated for the couple in this case study. Legal and financial considerations abound and, perhaps more importantly, ethical questions about whether children have a right to know who their biological parents are as well as psychological considerations about how knowing or not knowing who contributed to half their genetic make-up may impact children down the road. Moreover, the individual not contributing genetic material to the conception process may need to make peace with this reality if they have not already. Nevertheless, promoting a sense of wholeness for these wannabe-parents, and definitely treating both patients as the "real" parents of the hoped-for child, sure could make an already daunting process significantly more inviting.

Now I will broaden the case study to LGBTQ+ people more generally, as the assumptions really go haywire once conception has happened. Unfortunately I know far too many individuals who, because they did not look the part of dear old mom and dad, faced significant micro and more macro aggressions throughout pregnancy and after their babies were born. For example, in Light's study, which I mentioned earlier, the pregnant male participants "recalled numerous insensitive comments and exchanges, both in public and in doctor's offices...This included receiving uncomfortable stares, suspicion, hostility, being misgendered, being turned away from prenatal care, and even being reported to Child Protective Services."

We can do better than participate in such mistreatment, of that I am confident. But we have to be willing to look at our assumptions about reproduction, pregnancy, and parenting--particularly who gets to engage in these activities--to do so. One perspective I find instructive is Pavel Somov's suggestion that we use "emotionally pragmatic assumptions" rather than "entitled presumptions." As he wrote,

Both an assumption and a presumption are ways of dealing with the unknown. To assume is to suppose that something is, was, or will be the case without evidence or proof. To presume is to take for granted that something is, was, or will be the case. Thus, an assumption is a tentative hypothesis and a presumption is an inflexible expectation...When faced with some crucial unknown, allow yourself to formulate an emotionally pragmatic assumption [or belief that helps you survive uncertainty with the minimum of distress] without letting it become an inflexible expectation. Recognize that just because you have a preference for a certain version of the future, that doesn't mean reality will comply. Reality owes us nothing.

To try to eradicate assumptions is unrealistic, as human beings rely on them to get through each day. Pavel points out that we assume such mundane things as that our alarm will work and we will wake up the next morning. I'm most interested in what we do when we realize our assumptions are in conflict with reality. Do we cling more tightly to our beliefs and insist that the knowledge challenging them is a lie? If we go this route, are we willing to investigate what is driving such fierce determination to hold onto what should be rather than what is? In my experience, fear is the instigator of such steadfastness much of the time. Acknowledging and working with that fear, which is ultimately the anticipation of loss, helps to defuse it so that there is more space for new knowledge to be integrated into, rather than rejected from, our current understanding of the world and the people in it.

A challenge to myself and anyone reading this, then, is to remind ourselves continuously how much we do not know about the people we encounter in our daily lives. People's appearances, in particular, provide great fodder for inquiry on what we actually know about the individuals before us and an opportunity to open to the multitude of possibilities made possible by the complexity of human beings. Once we recognize what we do not know, we have more options for proceeding in ways that increase understanding more than promulgate misconceptions. Although not everyone wants to share their story, most people appreciate being asked who they are rather than being told who they must be or who they are not. To borrow from Andrew Solomon, “Remember...that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know...If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.”

Old Stories Die Hard

I recently binge-watched Catastrophe, a hilarious sitcom about a 40-year-old woman living in London who becomes pregnant after a brief fling and decides to keep the baby. The show's depiction of the protagonist's interactions with the medical system particularly grabbed me. As I enter week 28 of pregnancy at the age of 39, I've had to draw on every resource I can think of not to resort to the worn-out but still living stories about my inadequacies and defects. Western medicine tends to serve as liquid fuel for these already smoldering narratives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfccan1k2_4

At 39, I qualify for the lucky title of "elderly primigravida" in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases. My "disease" is being over the age of 35 during my first pregnancy, which places me in the "high-risk" category. This experience has helped me to understand just how damaging pathologizing language can be and how many creative resources we need in our lives to prevent, or at least mitigate, that harm. In my case, Western medicine is the primary purveyor of toxic messages, but schools, religious institutions, and many other contexts play their part when it comes to infecting people with the idea that they are defective and/or a danger to our society.

This pregnancy has also strengthened my resolve as a therapist to help people externalize these pejorative voices and replace them with ones that speak of wholeness and insist that our dignity is not up for grabs. That work, as I've learned through the journey toward parenthood, requires a great deal of humility. Despite years of learning, growing, and therapy, a few minutes with an obstetrician brought me straight back to the insecurities of my 16-year-old self.

At that tender time, my family doctor said to me as I stepped off a scale during a routine check up, "Your weight is in the normal range for your height. Don't think you're overweight." Harmless enough if one lives in a vacuum. But I lived in a world where my worth was closely associated with the shape of my body. That scale had a simple metric: thinner = more valuable. Unfortunately, I had little access to resources--internal, human, and otherwise--that directly challenged this narrative during my adolescence. So I began my pursuit of making sure no one ever said to me again, "Don't think you're overweight."

I realized just how vibrant that thin-striving part remains in the second trimester of my "geriatric" pregnancy. The doctor made me go weigh myself a second time, this time under her supervision, to make sure the scale wasn't lying. From her perspective, I had gained too much weight in the previous two months. Despite my "advanced maternal age," I momentarily lost sight of the fact that this was one point of view. Yes, it was the voice of an expert. But a human expert, not an infallible one. I could not see that possibility because a younger part of myself had taken front and center stage, and she was hell-bent on not being called fat.

I went home and, for the first time in my pregnancy, consciously ignored what my body told me, which was to feed it. Even when I awoke in the middle of the night with clear hunger pains, I convinced myself that a little water would do the trick and refused to put more calories in my body. When the alarm went off the next morning, I felt terrible. I've had nausea throughout my pregnancy, but that day the nausea was more intense and accompanied by shakiness and dizziness. I promptly cooked and ate two eggs and headed to my office for my first appointment. Thankfully I arrived a few minutes early, as I immediately ran to the bathroom to violently eject this food from my body. I somehow made it through that work day but was exhausted for several days thereafter. A popped blood vessel in my eye from the intense vomiting marked my shame in resorting to starvation tactics while being tasked with growing a human being within this body.

The therapist with whom I worked would call the interaction with the obstetrician in the weighing room an "uh-oh moment." I came into contact with an authority figure who said and did something that triggered alarm bells. Of course I wish I had paused in that moment and recognized I did not need to go down the well-trodden path of self-loathing, judgment and control. I had other options. Then again, puking my guts out offered a teaching I could not easily ignore.

Since that unfortunate encounter, I moved to Colorado and began seeing a midwife. Such a partnership is not for everyone, and I am not here to evaluate one form of pre-natal care over another. What I can say is that I've been paying a lot of attention to my own signals (thoughts, emotions, and sensations) when I meet with her, and they are ones of ease and contentment rather than anxiety, self-doubt, and self-criticism. We have more of a collaborative relationship that is flexible in nature and very attuned to what is going on in my particular experience and body. Although I regularly face fear-based messages from strangers and loved ones about choosing to birth this baby outside of a medical environment, I'm more committed than ever to listening to my own voice--not the 16-year-old part who desperately wants approval and to achieve some unattainable form of external beauty, but the wise one that knows better than anyone else what is going on within.

For me to hear her, I have to listen inwardly, often and carefully, and inhabit the places that allow me to do so. After all, echoing dens of "uh oh" hamper such listening. So I'm actively seeking out contexts and people that support the presence of a big "s" Self, which Richard Schwartz would characterize as calm, curious, clear, compassionate, confident, creative, courageous, and connected. Living in Colorado, I am lucky to have gorgeous natural spaces at my fingertips and seek them out as often as I can. I also have taken solace in the midwife's perspective on my body's own wisdom: to breastfeed this baby for more than a short time, I am going to need some extra pounds and so my body is doing what it needs to do to prepare itself. I am especially grateful to have a partner who regularly says things like, "You need to feed yourself and that baby," and, "You look beautiful." I am asking the inner critics to step back so I can actually hear that voice and let it in.

Additionally, I have sought out resources like a lovely prenatal yoga class and Kimber Simkins' Full, a memoir that honestly and authentically captures her struggle with disordered eating and self-hate as well as her movement toward self-compassion and love. I particularly liked the rules she decided to make up for herself, which have bolstered my intention to spend more time following my own internal compass:

• First rule: My body is just fine the way it is.
• Second rule: I am allowed to love my body if I choose.
• Third rule: Stop listening to anyone who tells me otherwise. Even if the voice is in my own head.

At the end of the day, I'm doing my best to make peace with my old stories by reminding myself that they originally came into being to help me. I know from observation and experience that resisting them or wishing they would simply go away does not work. In Tara Brach's terms, we need to "tend and befriend" our experience, with openness and curiosity. That is the path to wholeness. Moving through its curves and rough spots continues to be challenging, to say the least. But my Self knows this is the road to radically accepting not only myself but also the baby I'm about to bring into the world.