The Question

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second.

—Virginia Woolf

Sometimes, we just don't understand why or what or how.

Sometimes the question overwhelms any answer we could possibly give to the grief, the loss, or sudden change in circumstance or history.

We may have been conditioned not to know how to respond to change without allegiance to what we learned from our family or culture. Perhaps we have been shamed or punished if we challenged the norms of our communities. Maybe we were alone in our thoughts or questions. If no one else was really there to support us to think for ourselves or help us through, it was hard to trust or find a safe space to land. We may have built cocoons of apparent safety or comfort, sometimes at the cost of living a fuller life that would include dipping into the unknown.

Surely, in the journey of recovery, our old beliefs about ourselves can fall apart. However, the part we possibly never trusted in ourselves can grow, quickening the impulse to question. At these junctures, and throughout the life ahead, this kind of inquiry may beckon us to reach deeper inside and utilize a new curiosity despite the old prompts of shame or fear.

Perhaps we stop and consider the question beyond any previous answer, and then approach and even embrace what is yet unknown.

Our eyelids flutter as we awaken to the bright wind of change. Those questions remain; in fact, we have more questions than ever. It is what happens with growth.

Indeed, it is the questions beyond the creaking door that remind us that we are truly and wondrously alive.

We open the door.

"One-liness"

I am proposing that we reconceive the dream. That we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.

—Eve Ensler, Insecure at Last: Losing it in Our Security-Obsessed World

"One-liness"

Every survivor has known loneliness⎯the kind of solitary pain that comes before, during, and certainly after the wound of sexual trauma. There are few words to truly describe this experience, and often, too few who will listen, hold or believe unbearable, perhaps unsayable, truth.

You may have been instructed or threatened with words or customs to keep your story secret. Perhaps you keep all that you carry to yourselves, either directly or through the unspoken family lineage. These secrets are the legacies of shame that bury themselves deep within the DNA of the psyche, calcified in your body and nervous system.

Perhaps you were punished or shunned because you dared to use your voice or your actions to reveal the truth. You may have devoted your life to political or legal work, to self-sacrifice and long hours of service, perhaps sacrificing your own health or wellbeing to continue to feel apart from connection. You might have created new avenues of psychological, physical or spiritual bondage by recreating abusive practices within yourself that further isolate you from real connection.

These kinds of one-liness can be a chosen separation, a lifestyle that has been embedded by trauma to survive. However, one-liness cannot protect or keep you safe any more than secrets can. It is often most present in the midst of family or social gatherings, when the performance of connection is so starkly different from the actual experience of disconnection. Neglect, one of the most devastating aspects of the loneliness of abuse is so often unrecognized from the outside. In this loneliness, you learn to become invisible even to yourself when you believe you don't matter.

This form of isolation is not solitude. Solitude is regenerative and necessary⎯truly essential to centering the self and reconnecting inside. Isolation is the other end of solitude. It is generated by depression, anger, or fear. It leads to less life and vibrancy as you go down countless rabbit holes of possible dangers, distractions or addiction, instead of making real connection. Isolation distances you because of the fear or pain of abuse. You may keep yourself in this tight capsule of isolation or one-liness to feel safe, but it won’t feed you nor make you feel any more secure. The result is a profound loneliness that only replicates the pain of the past.

How do you reckon with the wounds or habits of isolation? How do you manage or cease contact with those who have hurt or harmed you, especially family members or partners?

Maybe you experiment with new connections that resemble the playbook of the past.

Or…maybe you risk seeking relationships that have the capacity to nourish you and perhaps allow true mutuality in the connection. Maybe you begin a new friendship and actually enjoy the experience, not only by being truly seen by the other, but also by getting out of your own way in the exchange. Maybe you take the chance to let someone in.

It may be a challenge to trust yourself enough to differentiate between the toxic "woundology" of a trauma bond and the real depth and freedom that honest connection generates. Of course, this means you may have to feel the scary reality of caring, or the possibilities of loss that are natural consequences of life and death.

It may be worth the risk.

You will know when you can actually hear and listen without numbing out or simply waiting to have your turn to speak. It will be easier to share and to listen, to speak your truth, laugh freely, and...connect honestly.

You know you are on the right path when you begin to notice that you are not front and center in your exchanges, when you are as interested in the other and an active part of the conversation—neither star player nor non-player in each exchange. You begin to experience and feel the warmth of true connection.

You will know when others matter, because you matter.

You will know when you are less concerned with whether you are recognized for what you do or how you perform, but recognized because you are simply enough.

You experiment with new thoughts, new choices, new realizations…and new connections.

You may still feel lonely at times, which is recognizing a longing for meaningful connections.

But you are on the road to recovery, discovering a way out of isolation.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is essential to being human. Taking the great risk to finding connection and true community is the road to healing.

1.  Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World  —Eve Ensler

   https://www.c-span.org/video/?195040-1/insecure-last

2.  Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.    —Louise Erdrich

Rage, Grief, and Healing

The recent events in our country have exacerbated the bitter and exhausting challenges of race, gender, discrimination. This challenges all that is supposed to be the birthright of a human: freedom, equity, and safety. This is the experience of any survivor whose life has been silenced, ignored, or betrayed.

Rage is that primal experience, beyond anger, beyond reason, raw and embittered. It often masks terror as the loss of freedom with a false sense of power.

Echoing the pain of the past, rage often erupts in the present: Rage about war, oppression. Rage about the state of the earth and all that is alive and all that is dying. Rage about all the "isms" that seem to engulf us. Rage about the inequality and poverty. Rage from the disregard, the neglect, the silencing, the despair. And this rage may burn inside when there is fear of repercussion if we give voice to it.

Rage can destroy us and create collateral damage on those close by with its intensity. It can show up as a churning volatile anger directed outward--road rage, violence, toxic obsessions-- making a tight fisted world smaller and smaller. Sometimes that fear has hardened into volatility, as we explode on the outside, our aggression creating a false sense of security and power. Rage can also be a toxic freeze on the inside: when the brain and body systems simply shut down into an interior slow suck of depression and numbness. In either direction, it may be the one survival tool we know because of what we learned early on. It may seem like the only line of attack in the face of pain.

We feel this because we feel so vulnerable. We may wail and storm, cry or sit dumb and perhaps numb, collapsing into embryonic catatonia. Perhaps for some, this rage is a luxury. But either way, these aspects of rage do not serve to move the needle. For many it is a constant agonizing state. We can get stuck in the role of victim instead of courageous survivor.

Rage is a potent energy to be reckoned with, and like many of the shadows inside, it can be a force for good. But even in activism for change, rage will backfire into the toxicity of hatred mimicking those who do the harm, dehumanizing the other or ourselves. It will not accomplish what we seek. We cannot ignore the damage done by ones who colonialize or practice discrimination as a moral right, or those who legislate or institutionalize oppression in the name of safety or stability. But if we meet the hater's toxicity with revenge or violence, the hatred and the rage will only create a feedback loop inside, even a seething self contempt. Well meaning easy answers may fail to empower and even add fuel to the fire. Sometimes attempts by others to soothe can feel performative or even exploitive. This will not generate resolution, restitution or freedom.

It can take some time to find the safety to feel the immensity of this rage--and the churning grief that is its counterpart. Because in truth, grief is the unnamed and primary wound that rage camouflages. Grief is the important response to loss--the loss of unconditional love and the sense of safety that should have been there.

To deal with such rage is to reckon with the grief of what we have lost and what moves in the world around us. This is the deep work of recovery, the courageous movement from grief to a fierce love and a commitment to make ourselves and the world more whole. It is not an easy undertaking.

How do we begin to make this incredible energy into something that can be a true force for transformation?

How do we go beyond a simplistic response and recognize the reality of harmful distinctions and disparities (superior, inferior, color, gendered, able or disabled--other...) that cover the deep tension that is inherited from generations of trauma?

It is hard to swallow hatred, disregard or fear, especially when it is directed at you and so reminiscent of the original wound. It is a challenge to remember that the hater, the disrespecter, the one who wants to harm is also suffering. But the task of compassion for the aggressor does not mean compliance.

Our work is to safely and honestly dehypnotize ourselves from the kneejerk reaction of rage. It is a radical task of recovery: to free oneself from what was embedded in our nervous systems and our bodies. It is a concept survivors often fail to do first: the radical attention to kindness for oneself that in itself is an act of fierce and loving activism. We cannot erase our questions, our anger or resentments without first having the compassion for ourselves to feel the wound. We may need to find someone or others that will provide the safety to speak and share what we have lived through. We may need to walk away from the confrontation or breathe deeply before reacting when we must and should speak our truth. We may need to acknowledge the loss of love that created the primary response of rage.

Rage and the sacred and necessary work of grief are in response to this loss. Both are precious creative forces that have the potential to spur movement and the potential for healing inside ourselves and others. Imagine this energy that is in our bodies and hearts to create more aliveness, courage--and love. Imagine how to transform this potent energy into compost for change. There is power in this process, but it takes fierce compassion for ourselves and the situation we confront, especially when we feel the opposite. It may take a kinder approach to the task of healing and some time to build these particular muscles that combat fear and powerlessness. They require different sets of grit and courage, but they grow. This is the everyday practice of building up our courage and remembering all we have lived through.

We know this. But this time, maybe we don't have to do it alone.

—Mikele

Video: Hope Comes in the Place where the Hurt comes

Lost

Walking on the road, lost in thought. Lost: a curious phrase. Being lost in our thoughts, rambling around in the thicket of the mind, lost in the past, lost in ruminations about the future, rehearsals of conversations, triggers, the smatter of losses, blueprints, projects, ideas, obsessions, shadows, intentions, the grief of it all; words and pictures we could never speak out loud, as we scrape the walls of memory with a child’s raw feeling or a resonant reckoning of the age we are.

Lost in thought. We stop. This is where we are. it is now. There is no other place we can be. All the parts of ourselves, screaming, whispering, singing at once. Listen. Do you hear something beneath the noise? Do you hear you?

I invite you to consider yourself lost. This may be like being lost at sea, lost in the dark, lost in chaos, lost in the midst. But perhaps just be lost for this while. It is uncomfortable to feel so out of control. But with hand on your heart and one on your stomach, stay in the rocking boat, and hold on to the paddle. Eventually the storm subsides and it is still.

Being with the reverie, breathing in and out --slow. there is stillness between the noise and all that activity. Underneath that whirlwind is that place where creativity is, where presence is.

Lost may the first step back to found.

Mikele