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On Deserving Joy and Peace

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close up image of rocks and shells jumbled together on the beach

After a string of happy, peaceful days, days where I met new people, was invited to join them for outings, I was beginning to imagine that my life could be more like this in the months and years to come. It took almost no time at all to slip back into a familiar old place. That place where I cringe ever so slightly as a matter of course. Where I devote some portion of my thoughts to preparing for losing my footing again. Where I feel in my bones that I will somehow pay for this.

The other day I wrote in my journal a reminder that I don’t have to earn joy or peace. (News flash: either do you. None of us does.) Cognitively, I know that life isn’t a balance sheet. That we don’t have to come to some reckoning or accounting of the number of hours we suffered lined up against the number of joys we felt. I don’t have to justify feeling good. There is no amount of suffering I am required to endure in order to be qualified to experience happiness. I don’t have to pay dues for ease or satisfaction. These things don’t come at a cost. They just are. I am allowed to just experience them without apologizing or explaining or waiting for the other shoe to drop.

These things that rise up from my body in one way or another, the thoughts that prompt me to be wary of the times when I am happy, they are deep and powerful, hooked in to me in ways that require careful, deliberate handling. The admonitions that I am not allowed to laugh out loud, smile at the sight of a hummingbird in my backyard, wake with a sense of hope and gratitude unless I also acknowledge all of the suffering others are enduring and prepare for my own to come roaring back – those are ancient. They are messages from my parents, their parents, our culture. The idea that everything has a cost is a difficult one to ignore.

When I knew I was going to start a new life in a new place, I spent a great deal of time exploring notions of what I truly wanted. The kind of work I want to do, the people I want to surround myself with, the way I want to spend my time. I also thought about how I want to feel and move through the world. I wrote those things down and I practiced believing that I deserve them. I’ll say that again. I wrote those things down and I practiced believing that I deserve them. Because deserving is a loaded sentiment, but it doesn’t have to be. I can just deserve love and joy and care simply because I exist. I don’t have to work for it.

While I have become more comfortable with this idea, I still have to remind myself often that creating the life I want and giving myself permission to inhabit it are two different things. The other day I found myself with nothing on the calendar. At 2:00 in the afternoon, I had a moment of mild panic (yes, that’s a thing – at least for me) that I had nothing pressing to do. For a millisecond, I entertained the idea of grabbing the novel I was reading and lying down on my bed to read. I indulged the fantasy quickly – the dogs stretched out next to me beneath the ceiling fan that was slowly pulling the ocean air through the windows, the curtains billowing slightly, me propped up on pillows, deep in a good book. And then came a visceral recoiling and the voices in my head:

You can’t do that. Surely you could mop the kitchen floor instead. Or go find some weeds to pull. Or at the very least, go outside. It’s sunny and beautiful. Get some fresh air. Or get on the elliptical machine and exercise. Certainly you could find something productive to do instead of lying down with a book at 2pm!

My gut tightened. How irresponsible could I be to think it would be ok just to lie down with a book in the middle of the afternoon?

But here’s how I know I’m making progress; from some deep corner of my heart came another voice that said simply,

this is the life you wanted to create for yourself – a life of ease and rest. Why wouldn’t you lie down and read for a while? 

And so I did. And I’m fairly certain I fell asleep for a bit, too. And when I woke up, the dogs were nestled against my legs and the kitchen floor was still unmopped and I hadn’t burned any calories, but I was a little bit closer to believing that I deserve joy and peace in my life, however it shows up. The work of animating the knowledge I have deep within me takes presence and intention, and the more I practice the better it gets. Here’s to believing that we all deserve joy and happiness and ease, no matter what.

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Stop Reinforcing My Trauma Response

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Glowing coals from a BBQ

Photo by Jens Buurgaard Nielsen

“You are very grown up, aren’t you?”

“You are a very mature young lady!”

“You are wise beyond your years.”

These are just a few of the phrases I heard as a kid that served to reinforce my trauma response and help me build an identity around it. And as I built that identity, I got praised for it more and more, for thinking on my feet, for dashing in to fix things, for never letting ‘em see me sweat.

“That’ll toughen you up, kid.”

“Show ‘em your battle scars! Be proud of them!”

I think that’s part of the reason I’m such a good leader at the food bank. Every week is a new challenge – food deliveries don’t come at the last minute or what we thought we were getting turns out to be something else altogether. The weather turns awful and I have to figure out how to keep five volunteers dry outside while packing boxes in sideways rain and hail with just tarps and pallets. Years and years of hypervigilance and doom-planning are paying off. All the time I spent as a kid imagining alternate scenarios and planning for them, wondering what I could do if X happened and how I could manage if things turned sideways and Y happened instead.

You might be thinking, ok, so what? Your trauma is serving you well as an adult.

But you would be wrong.

It’s not your fault – up until this morning, I would have agreed with you.

But we were both wrong.

My trauma is re-traumatizing me as an adult.

I built an identity and a way of moving through the world that means I never let my guard down, that means I always expect to be on my own when the shit hits the fan and that I assume responsibility for managing crises and cleaning up after them without even being asked.

It’s who I am.

But this morning, I took the time to imagine what it would have been like if my 8-year old self had been told, instead, that it wasn’t her job to be “wiser than your years.” What would it have been like if she had felt safe and held within a community or family group that didn’t place adult responsibility on her shoulders? How would she have learned to calm her nervous system and ask for help when she felt overwhelmed? How could she have grown up not feeling as though she was the only one who could fix things, and that if she didn’t do it, nobody would?

What if someone had told her, instead, “I’m so sorry you have those scars. I wish I’d been there to keep that from happening”?

I spent so many years of my life searching for the Right way to get through painful, scary times – knowing with absolute certainty that if things got worse, it was because I hadn’t been smart enough, prepared enough, savvy enough to plan for the right contingency. It made me even more determined to explore every avenue. And I got really good at it. If there was a way to put it on my resumé, I would have.

But in my body, it meant I was alone, always. It meant that even when I was married, I didn’t think to trust my husband to solve really big problems, really scary ones, because I had learned that people without trauma didn’t think like I did – they couldn’t always accurately assess the potential dangers that lie ahead and plan for them. Those people were naïve. Lovely, and loving, but naïve. I couldn’t rely on them in a crisis.

It also means that, in my body, there are embers that flare when someone close to me is suffering and the flares are often disproportionate to the situation. I suppose that’s really the basis of PTSD, but it’s surprising to me to realize how much of that is applauded and reinforced in our society. The idea that hypervigilance is a muscle we want to build is so backward to me, but my entire life, I’ve been praised for it, and it is causing harm. Those embers that flare when someone close to me is in crisis give me a momentary ability to get clear and start the process of contingency planning, but they also cut my head off from my body because the sensations I feel in my body are too painful and frightening to feel in those moments. That severance is really seductive – feeling competent and clear and able to swoop in and offer my support to a loved one is a powerful drug. Why would I want to check in with my body? Just to feel fear? To experience the little zaps of grief and overwhelm that rise up and make me remember all the times I’ve felt that way before? Not likely.

But I have learned that disconnecting my mind from my body has consequences. Namely, my brain experiences a power trip and it also starts spiraling into scary places, imagining all sorts of horrible scenarios just so I can build a strategy in case they come true. And as much as I try to divorce myself from my physical self, all I’ve really done is cut off communication from my body to my brain, not the other way around. My body is still absorbing energy, still taking in information (much of it from my spiraling thoughts that are generally wholly inaccurate), and lighting little fires everywhere. Eventually, I freeze in overwhelm and panic. I burst into tears, lie on the couch and stare, shake uncontrollably. So far, this generally only happens once the crisis is over and I know I’m safe (or my loved-one is safe), but those fires just keep getting bigger.

Today, I’m starting the work to put out the embers; to go back and find every spot in my body where younger me was put in situations she didn’t belong in and relieve her of those burdens. I’m asking her what it might feel like to imagine that she was held and safe and free to be eight or ten or 14, instead of collecting battle scars and proving herself more adult than her age. It is my deep hope that in doing so, I will be able to face the next really scary situation without a fire flaring inside me. I would like to stay connected to my body and show up for my loved ones as my whole self, un-triggered and loving, secure in the knowledge that we are in this together and I can ask for help if I need it. I want to have healed those parts of me that were taught it is a good thing to tackle big challenges by myself, no matter what it costs, because those scars are something to be proud of. I want to come clear-headed and with a calm body responding out of love and not fear. The idea that I can put my energy toward helping hold what is rather than exhausting myself imagining what might be will hopefully be more seductive than thinking I can single-handedly save the day.

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Rage and the Potential for Change

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Image Description: blue candle holder with lit candle sitting on a metal table top

I have been thinking a lot about rage lately. About how we hold it and offload it, about who ends up being the container for it and what it feels like and how much energy it possesses.

Rage is the product of anger and fear suppressed. It is borne of a feeling of powerlessness. In my own life, it has shown up as the result of childhood molestation, gaslighting, and a lack of agency or ability to change my circumstances. It multiplies in dark places, building on itself until it can no longer be contained, and it is this aspect of rage that I find the most compelling. It is also where I see the most possibility.

Men like Harvey Weinstein who have massive quantities of rage seek to dispel that energy at some point. No being can walk around and function while they hold that storm within them. And as women (or those with feminine qualities) are seen as the containers for emotion in our society, it follows that men like him would seek to literally insert their rage in to the women around them, the women they see as the perfect vessels to hold their rage. These kind of men tend to hold their rage as long as they can and then expel it outward in violent acts, often toward women.

We have even, in many cases, normalized that response. The Australian ex-rugby player who killed his wife and children last week prompted an outpouring of grief and shock, but also comments from men like “he must have been pushed over the edge” or “she took his children away from him” as though it was somehow understandable that a man would discharge his feelings in a way that destroys the lives of people he purported to love.

If I think about the archetypal feminine and masculine (not gender, but the qualities we have ascribed to the Feminine and the Masculine), so much of how we address our rage is in line with those energies. Masculine energy is associated with linear thinking, decisive action, control and competition. Feminine energy is about nurturing, creativity, emotions and collaboration. Our culture has embraced those notions along gender lines and it is killing us.

The problem with rage (and energy, in general) is that you can’t let it go or give it over to someone else entirely. If you don’t transform it in some way, the seeds of it will continue to live within you and grow again. It is why men who assault others don’t often stop – the issue hasn’t resolved itself. It is why some men choose suicide – often after they’ve killed others. It is why most men choose methods of suicide that are loud and outrageous. These men have embraced the notion that transforming their rage by processing it, feeling it, talking about it, examining it is unacceptable, not masculine. And if you don’t know how to morph it in to something else, but you don’t want to feel it anymore, you have to try and get rid of it. And if our culture has told us that it is acceptable for men to be outwardly expressive and show their anger, and that women are the nurturers, the carers, the containers, it somehow feels ok for men to offload their rage on to women.

The human body is not designed to hold emotion or energy. If it were, we wouldn’t have to continue breathing or eating to sustain ourselves. We wouldn’t have to find a bathroom every few hours in order to eliminate the things that aren’t necessary. When we hold on to rage, trying to contain its energy within us is destructive. It continues to ping around in our bodies and brains, wreaking havoc. Even if we think we can wall it off, it sits inside us like a coiled cobra, muscles quivering, senses alert, ready to strike.

Rage makes us hyper-focus on control – the masculine energy seeks to control others, and the feminine energy seeks to control itself. Female rage often turns to depression, anxiety, dissociation. Male rage often turns to violence. And when that energy is offloaded, it multiplies like one candle lighting another. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. But it can be transformed, and until we begin recognizing the rage we carry and learn how to transform it, we will all continue to swim in it. It is and will continue to be the legacy of toxic masculinity, perpetuating physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, shame and isolation. Excavating rage, examining it, owning it, and alchemizing it in to something that can be used to build rather than destroy is freeing. When I have taken the time and done the hard work it takes, I feel free, light, strong. The space that rage used to inhabit becomes a place for hope and optimism, and the energy builds connections that end up serving the collective. It is on each of us to do our own work, but we can create a culture where the work is important and necessary and normalized for all of us if we begin to recognize the power of rage and just how much of it we are all carrying.

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Do You Expect Joy?

“In a culture of deep scarcity – of never feeling safe, certain, and sure enough – joy can feel like a setup.”  Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

I lived those words for most of my life.  Every time I found myself knee-deep in joy I fantasized about when someone would come pull the plug and it would all drain away.  When the girls were two and four, Bubba was traveling more often than not, struggling with an undiagnosed illness that left him hospitalized every few months, and I was scared.  I was wracked with stomach cramps and sinking deeper and deeper into depression with every passing day and I somehow felt right at home.  While I couldn’t accurately predict what any one day would bring, dealing with crisis after crisis kept me busy and feeling competent. I could put out fires all day long and, while I was exhausted at night, dealing with one fire meant that I didn’t have to worry when or where the next one would flare up.  If a day passed without anything falling apart, my nerves were stretched taut as I waited, hypervigilant, scanning the landscape for the slightest new flame.  I expected danger. I anticipated fear. I did what most of Brene’s research subjects talked about; I lived in fear so that when something awful happened, I was already in the trench and wouldn’t have to feel the pain of falling or climbing back down. It was easier to stay in the dark than to suffer the loss of light.

Or so I thought.

These days I expect joy.  Despite a very challenging summer and early fall, struggling with a major construction project that is two months behind schedule, one pet’s death and a cancer diagnosis for another, and a very close call with one of our daughters, I have somehow managed to stay positive.  Instead of waking up each morning in trepidation, worried about what this day may bring, I open my eyes and seek the light.

In Daring Greatly, Brown writes about gratitude being the antidote to fear of joy. She says that people who practice counting their blessings aren’t afraid to feel joy like so many others.  I believe that wholeheartedly and credit my own daily gratitude practice with helping change my perspective on life, but I think there is another step beyond gratitude that is even more powerful. If the spectrum starts on the left at fear of joy (or, as Brown says it, “foreboding joy” – that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop the second you realize you are happy beyond measure), gratitude is nearing the other end, but I say that the far right end of the spectrum is expecting joy.

I wake up every day expecting joy. Knowing that no matter what challenge or sadness I may face today, there will also be joy. Something will happen today that will bring me pure happiness.  This is probably the single biggest thing ever to happen to me.

“Do we deserve our joy, given our inadequacies and imperfections? What about the starving children and the war-ravaged world? Who are we to be joyful?” Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

Indeed. Who am I? Why do I deserve to be joyful? I used to ask myself this question, and then, at one point, a friend pointed out to me that I certainly deserved it, given the struggles I have had in my life – from a difficult childhood to my husband’s prolonged illness and beyond.  I calculated up the traumas I have faced and had to agree with her that I probably did ‘deserve’ joy on some level.  But this entire notion of deserving joy is something I am patently uncomfortable with.  For one thing, as a mother, I don’t want my children to have to EARN their joy by enduring hardship, or worry that if they do live joyful lives, they will one day have to pay for it with trauma and unhappiness.

The fact is, there isn’t some High Priestess of Joy doling out happiness according to a balance sheet she’s been given about who deserves what.  Joy is out there in the world. We simply have to train ourselves to recognize it, acknowledge it, expect it.  Joy coexists with sadness, it doesn’t cancel it out. When I look at my sweet puppy boy lying on his bed, feet twitching as he dreams, I feel a tenderness and an outpouring of love for him and the relationship we have and that love sits side-by-side with the knowledge that he has malignant melanoma and will die sooner than I want him to. The joy and gratitude I feel at having been so lucky to have him in my life are deepened and enhanced by the knowledge that one day soon he will not be here anymore.

We humans like things to even out. We love balance, but we also like to be ready for disaster.  The irony is, as we use our energy to prepare for calamity, we rarely prepare for joy.  We walk around searching for potholes to avoid, ready to duck if something comes flying, but very few of us spend any time practicing opening ourselves to receive or recognize opportunities for joy.  We are creating our own imbalance.  I have decided to turn that on its head and, instead, wake up every morning expecting joy, believing that, if nothing else, today I will discover at least one thing that will stop me in my tracks with wonder and awe.

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Post-Traumatic Processing

One of my favorite words is “friable.” It is a word I learned when I was working as a surgical assistant and it made an enormous impression on me for two reasons. First, it was accompanied by a visual cue. Second, it sounded to me like what it meant.

friable – adj. easily crumbled or reduced to powder; crumbly

Tumors or masses that were easy to remove from the surrounding tissue were either fluid-filled cysts or other dense collections of cells. But occasionally we would encounter a mass that, when you grabbed it with the forceps to hold it away from the surrounding tissue – to cut it away – little pieces would break off in the tips over and over again. It wasn’t that it was tightly adhered to its location in the body, but that it was fragile and easily broken and it was often challenging to be sure that we removed all of the mass because you couldn’t get it out all in one piece.

Today I feel friable. Not fragile, like glass that will shatter if dropped, but friable, as though if I am pulled on, small fragments will begin to fall off. It is the aftermath of how I felt yesterday which I am not sure there is a word for.

Yesterday afternoon for a few hours I felt very clear. If I were a fiction writer, a novelist who writes about space travel or psychological thrillers, I could use how I felt to form a compelling scene. It is that feeling you don’t get often that immediately follows the diversion of a major catastrophe. Similar to the adrenaline rush you get after narrowly missing another car on the road or barely righting your bicycle when you skid on a patch of wet gravel, but more profound. It is the calm after the initial heart palpitations in which you have a sort of tunnel vision, a clear, calm certainty that you have just done something very important, something that very definitively prevented a horrible set of events from being put into motion. A floating sort of feeling in which the parts of your life that are trivial literally fall away and you are left with a clarity that brings into focus every scent in the air, the dappled color of the leaves on every tree in your path, and each inhale and exhale that fills your cells with oxygen.

Yesterday as the dog and I walked through the neighborhood, I reveled in that feeling. In fact, I bathed in it. I had no other feelings. I harbored no anger toward the person whose heinous actions I prevented. I retained none of the abject fear I had possessed mere hours before, sobbing ugly, ugly tears at what we might have lost. I felt only clarity. I was yet hours from feeling gratitude for the way things worked out, and even farther from today when I simply feel friable.

As I have busied myself in the hours after the girls left for school, making phone calls and paying bills and baking blueberry muffins for the week’s breakfasts, I have felt competent and calm with an underlying sense of this crumbling, a sort of detached knowledge that if I am put under any kind of pressure, I may fall to bits.

*I know this is cryptic, but because of the particulars of the story and those involved, I do not feel at liberty to share the details. I did, however, feel the desperate need to share how it made me feel, if only to write the words down and get them out of my head.

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The Balm of Spring

Spring is certainly coming.  Every morning after I wake the girls up, the dog and I go for a 10 minute stroll around the neighborhood and in the past week I have noticed that we aren’t walking in the dark.  I no longer need to use the flashlight app on my cell phone to find the mess he leaves in the neighbors’ grass and clean it up.

During our mid-day walk, I have seen tips of crocus and daffodil bulbs peeking out of the ground and the camellia bush someone has espaliered across their front fence has five open blossoms already.  This morning while I prepared my coffee I saw the little black-masked chickadees chasing each other through the air around the branches of the cherry tree just outside the window.

As I packed snacks for Eve’s class this morning (they are taking four days of standardized tests and some of the parents have volunteered to bring in ‘brain food’ each day for all the girls to help them make it through the endless, boring hours of answering questions at a computer screen), the paper towel I was using to hammock the bunches of grapes split down the middle and grapes went everywhere, collapsing the bag, rolling across the counter, landing in the sink and on the floor.  I was instantly aware of a message playing in my head:

Today is a day to pay attention.


I realized I was simply going through the motions, not paying complete attention to anything around me.

You see, yesterday evening I was responsible for causing psychological and physical trauma to another human being.  Directly responsible.  And while it was entirely accidental and I never would have intended it, I still felt the weight of it in my heart this morning.  Despite the fact that I did the right thing and stayed to ensure that everything was okay, despite the fact that the man I hurt, a complete stranger, assured me repeatedly that he was fine, that I shouldn’t worry, I saw the faces of some of the witnesses.  I watched one woman cross her arms and close her face in judgment. I heard the sharp words of another who questioned me and I felt Wrong.

I engaged in all sorts of self-talk last night when I was done sobbing and questioning myself.  I reminded myself that one accident does not change the person I am, does not negate the warmth and love I intentionally radiate out into the Universe every day.  I progressed to wondering why I thought I was exempt from making big mistakes, effectively reminding myself that I am human like everyone else.

But I still woke up sad.

During a break in the rain this morning, I pulled the leash over CB’s head and we quietly strolled through the neighborhood.  While I recall looking at this house we live in during the Spring months last year, I have not yet lived a Spring here and I was reminded of the potential beauty that will surround us in a month or so.    Trees are beginning to form the tiniest of leaves and buds, bulbs are poking up all around in flower beds and the birds are flipping from bush to bush gathering nesting material and chatting all the while.

I came home, lit a candle in my office, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

Ever since the accident yesterday, I realize I have been working hard to find some reason that this happened.  I have also been working really hard to ‘talk’ to those two women who were so angry with me last night, to defend myself and explain when I know their judgment was more about themselves and their fears than anything they thought they knew about me.

What I learned this morning by being quiet and really listening, really paying attention, is that Spring is coming.  I need only to settle in and raise my head and heart to the sunlight and continue to stretch for the warmth in order to use what is already within me to rise up and flourish.  That by listening to myself and the core of who I know I am, I can truly hear what I need to and express it in the best way possible.

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