Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

When the weather moves

I get very excited when I watch a weather system move in across the sky.  Here on the Bay I watched one the other day.  It was bright and sunny on one end of the beach and ominous black clouds build up on the other end, moving across the sky towards me.  I felt energized and excited.  I remember a time sitting at a winery with my then five-year-old grandson. He is drinking “the best lemonade he ever had,” and I am drinking a glass of Chardonnay and we are both equally excited watching the weather move in across the mountains.  It looks dramatic and in minutes we are forced inside by the gale.

Why does this simple movement of weather invigorate me so?  I sit with this question as I watch the storm begin to scatter rain around me.  And the answer is simple.  It is a rare and wonderful privilege to witness cause and effect.  So often we wake up in the morning and experience the weather we are having.  We are ‘in’ the weather but we did not see the weather in the making.

This to me becomes a rich metaphor about life.  We are so often ‘in’ our lives but miss the causal elements.  How did I just fall and hurt myself?  Why am feeling out of sorts today?  Why did she get cancer, he a massive heart attack, when she/he was so healthy?  Why did the cancer return when she followed all the protocols?  How did we lose money on that investment when it seemed so sound?  How did I miss the red flags in that relationship? Why did I not see their true nature earlier?  I could go on and on, right?

Often in an attempt to attribute cause when we are at the effect of something unpleasant we turn on ourselves or to some kind of superstition. I was so clumsy, I have always been unlucky, I am stupid, gullible, etc. This is painful when I do it to myself and very painful to witness in friends and clients.

While training to be a trauma practitioner one teacher’s favorite intervention was to say, “no wonder.”  Given what happened to you as a child, no wonder you struggle with relationships, addiction, depression, anxiety, life in general.  Helping make those cause and effect connections can be very healing.  You struggle not because you are broken or something is inherently wrong with you but because anyone who lived through what you did would have difficulties navigating life. But the struggle itself has given you more heart, strength, wisdom, resilience, kindness and courage.  This can make life feel whole again.

I realize I am writing the plot of the Wizard of Oz — a storm moves in … life happens and Dorthy meets characters who help her acquire qualities she has been lacking and also plenty of life’s problems.  She then hears about a scary Wizard who can solve all her problems. But she gets to see behind the curtain to see that the Wizard is an ordinary man operating machinery that projects him writ large and ghostly.  She gets to see cause and affect.

No wonder my first therapist had all the characters of the Wizard of Oz lined up on his book shelf!

The day the storm moved in I got a rare glimpse behind the curtain.  There are so many mysteries in life.  To simply be with the mystery (the disconnection between cause and effect) requires that we trust some bigger force or bigger context.  We have to trust a Wizard of sorts that is pulling strings we cannot see.  Faith and trust are so much better than attributing blame to ourselves or some eroneous force.  But they are harder to muster.  That is why watching this storm move in is such a privilege.

Watering Grasses

Last week I spent several hours watering grasses.  We had planted several thousand tiny grass plugs along the sandy banks of our shore at our bay house to help stabilize the sand.  Two days later the sun is intense and the little ones are drying out.  My husband Tom got out a huge variety of garden hoses including some borrowed from neighbors and we begin the task of watering each one.  “Water each grass twice.  The first one is to prepare the plant to drink, the second time is so that the water will be absorbed,” Tom instructs.

Even though it is early morning it is already blazing hot and about an hour into the project Tom points out that the hose nozzle I have been gripping has a lock that will hold it on.  Just like when you pump gas for your car!  You do not have to hold down the nozzle the whole time.  I use the lock and am grateful because my hand was getting cramped and tired.  However as we proceed — for another hour — I notice that I can’t seem to remember to stop pressing hard on the trigger, even though it is now locked in place.

I immediately know that I have a metaphor worth writing about!  How many things in life do we do with more effort than required!  I know for myself: many.  For example, on the long drive back to Charlottesville later in the week I notice that I am gripping the steering wheel instead of simply touching it lightly to steer the car.  What might we do with this extra effort if we could re-direct it in a useful direction?

Psychiatry professor and author Dan Siegel teaches that our brains act as anticipation machines.  It learns from past experience in order to prepare for what is happening next.  So our states of mind that develop from our experience and emotions influence the way we direct energy and attention now.  He includes our attachment influences that also determine the development of each of our individual temperaments.

My daughter Lanz and I were talking earlier in the week, planning and strategizing for our family gathering — eleven strong — in the next few days.  We are both always on!  She says, “I had to work to belong.  It was not something that was just handed to me in my family.”  I know this is the same for me too.  I thought belonging was something you had to earn.  Oh, the effort we expend! It does help hold the orbit of our family together but is also perhaps more than is really needed.  How do we tell our brains that we already belong, that there is a a lock on belonging already set without us putting out all the extra efforts?

When the visit ends and everyone leaves and we have done the many loads of laundry and reclaimed the kitchen as mine again, I notice my whole system feels differently.  It is not just that everyone is gone and it is quiet, but my vigilance is gone.  I realize that I have been constantly scanning for where everyone is and what everyone is doing the whole time we are together.  Even though it makes no difference to the outcome of our time together.  EXHAUSTING!

In the class I am taking with Dan Siegel he continues to describe the subcortical networks in our brain.  The ones that come on line early in life are all about survival.  They have three imperatives; to protect, connect and correct.   If in our early experience our protection was threatened  we will be more preoccupied with and fear, anxiety.  If our connection was threatened we will be more preoccupied by separation distress and sadness.  If our sense of right and wrong was threatened we will be more preoccupied with anger and rage, always wanting to correct the situation.

Knowing your particular propensity, you can then work with your state of mind and begin to change it.  With attention and intention you can slowly observe your state, with openness and objectivity, without being fully lost in it.  This is what I was doing in a small way, saying to myself, “Huh, I am still squeezing the nozzle even though I have the lock on”.  My big aha moment in Dan’s class so far is that the various networks in the brain are by nature inhibiting.  So if I am in my threat or fear response I cannot feel inside my body or outside my body at the same time.  When I am concentrating on being present to my five senses or doing a body scan through my body, I cannot feel my threat response.  This is why meditation works to retrain the brain because the more you focus on being present to inside and outside the body, the more you train your brain in that direction.  Conversely, the more attention you allow to anxiety about protection, connection, or correction, the more this is your constant preoccupation.

I want to take all the extra energy I expend that is not useful and apply it to being in this moment, absorbing it with all its delicious sights, smells, tastes and sensations, rather than letting my anticipatory brain run the show taking me into some protective mechanism based on a future that has not happened yet and never will.  But people can say, ” all that worry and look, it turned out just fine”.  And that does not compute to this part of your brain.  It is only with moment-to-moment attention and intention that you can re-direct yourself to here and now.

This is re-invigorating my daily practice.  I hope it will help you too.

 

 

Oh How We Suffer — Imposter Syndrome

Imposter Syndrome is rampant.  When it was first introduced in 1978 it was thought to mainly affect women but soon it was proven to be equally distributed between men and women with 70% of us suffering from it at some point in our lives.  I suspect that percentage is low.

The research suggests that one of the causes is demanding, overly protective parents.  This makes sense because this type of parenting can take away your self confidence and agency.  Brené Brown loves to say that struggle is what builds confidence and resilience.  If parents protect us from our struggles we do not feel capable to take on life’s challenges.

In my work with clients and from my own observations I have come up with another compelling reason that some of us suffer from Imposter Syndrome.  One of my clients is tormented by the voice in her head that says in a mean tone, “You do not know what you are doing, you are not keeping up to date in your field, you are going to do more harm than good.”  I ask her, “I wonder what job this voice has?”  Since Imposter Syndrome is not a mental illness I know that this active, instructive, mean voice is trying to help in some way.

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I Want to Write About Faith…

 

“I want to write about faith,” is the first line of one my favorite poems by David Whyte.  He continues, “but I have no faith myself…but let this then, my small poem…be the first prayer that opens me to faith.”

I have always loved this poem because from my experience, it describes the process of faith so honestly.

Recently a client asked me, “Wendy, do you pray?”  She is in the midst of her own struggles with faith.  “Yes I pray,” I said, “and prayer for me seems to have seasons.”  The answer came out without thought.  And I was pleased with it.  I have spent many years trying to ‘install’ a prayer practice in my life.  I memorized “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace, where there is hatred let me sow love…etc.”  I learned ancient chants in odd languages, repetitive songs in Portuguese and most recently prayer beads each morning at the edge of the ocean.

During the Pandemic something changed.  The tremendous longing I felt to reach God — to feel some sort of communion— not to feel so alone, diminished.

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The Mandala Moment

This past fall a class gathered to take a deep dive into the topics of Autonomy and Authority.  Eleven of us from around the world took on the challenges and the promise of this work.  First we opened up to an audacious concept that infinite possibilities are available to us at any moment.  It is amazing to tap into this energy — that all you can imagine already exists waiting for you to grasp it!  Then we had to examine deeply what is in our way of actually doing so.  Each of us looked and felt our young emotional dependency, waiting for a parental figure, a gate keeper, to give us the permission we felt we needed as children.  In this mindset someone or something was in the way of what we wanted — of all that was possible.  We each had to answer the question — what do I really want when I wait and lean on another for all that is already waiting for me?  This was a vulnerable place.  I could feel each of us literally grow up a bit as we began to activate in our selves what we wanted from another.

Next we embraced another huge, expansive idea. If you focus inward and are willing to go through the uncomfortable emptiness, you will find everything!  This is a challenging practice. We found constant distractions.  And then we found that what was in our way was how we all give over our attention to outward authorities and wrestle with them instead of finding our own inner authority.  The promise of an ongoing practice of turning inward versus reaching out is that we will experience vibrancy, aliveness and an unleashing of our innate creativity….

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