Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

Are You Resilient?

What is Resilience?

It has been called the great puzzle of human nature.

Is it something some people have and others do not?  Is it something you can learn?  Some research on resilience talks about genetics and a predisposition towards resilience.  Here are diagrams of a seesaw with a fulcrum to illustrate this.   Your life experiences and genetic predispositions sets this fulcrum to make your seesaw go up or down more easily.  Adverse childhood experiences make moving the fulcrum more challenging.  It can even make resilience out of reach for some people.

However, it is people who have had the most adverse life experiences and somehow have overcome them that inspire us the most.  Who are these people and what did they do?  The answer to these questions can help us understand resilience.

Resilient people possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief  that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. You can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualities, but you will only be truly resilient with all three.

Viktor Frankl was preoccupied with survivorship/resilience during his dehumanizing, life threatening experiences in concentration camps in Nazi Germany.  He later traced the roots of his resilience to a sense of purpose and the acquisition of meaning.  He then expanded meaning into three dimensions: purpose, mastery and autonomy. He wrote about in his famous book, “Man’s Search For Meaning”.

Other core characteristics of resilient people include the ability to form strong attachments to others and the possession of an inner psychological space that protects them from intrusion or abuse.

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom,” says Dean Becker, the president and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, quoting from Diane Coutu in her Harvard Review Article, “How Resilience Works.”

So how can we train ourselves to become more resilient?

Realism versus optimism is key to resilience.  Do I truly understand and accept the reality of my situation?  It’s an important question to ask since we often slip into denial as a coping mechanism when facing difficult life experiences. Can I form meaningful relationships while preserving my own boundaries?  Can I find a greater meaning even in the most wrenching circumstances or trust that it will become clear later?  Can I improvise and dig a tunnel even if I only have a spoon – like one of the famous concentration camp escapes in Nazi Germany?

When I touch into my own sense of resilience I find two different varieties.  One of them I will call the bulldozer.  She will bulldoze her way out of a situation — head down, full steam ahead.  The other one is softer and requires that I slowly sink into myself. What I find there is a kind of confidence and reassurance that I can handle whatever I am facing.  This one I will name Helene, after my grandmother.

My Nanny Helene, as I called her, was the great love of my early life, and she loved me back.  I was her first granddaughter and she adored me.  It is an amazing feeling to be adored and I am sure this contributes to resilience, although I do not find it mentioned in the literature.  My grandmother was a great dreamer and she always seemed to make her dreams come true, whether it was creating a successful restaurant in Washington D.C. or moving in the great social circles of the city.  At a time in the 1950’s when many women spent hours putting on make up, doing their hair and dressing to perfection before leaving the house, my grandmother stuffed her dyed blond hair under a cashmere beret. A hat pin was the last thing she needed to keep the beret on her head while she rushed around the city — a career woman before her time.

She compensated for my grandfather’s dementia and devised constructs, as resilient people do, to make meaning out of suffering.  With only one breast from a mastectomy, she bought her bras from a dismal medical supply shop.  For her resilience was a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world and building a bridge from a present day hardship to a fuller life in the future.

Resilient people  face reality with determination, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air.  This describes my grandmother.  I inherited some of these qualities from her, along with two of her hat pins.  And here they are.

 

 

Acknowledgement: I drew heavily on the work of Diane Coutu, and her Harvard Review and her article, “How Resilience Works.”

 

Safe Passages To Intimacy and Passion – Change of Format – 2 Spaces Left – Register by September 1st!

With Tom and Wendy Hubbard

An  In person Course, September – December 2018

By delving into the deepest levels of desire and conflict that generate our fantasies and sexual preferences, we can stop feeling as though we are victims of alien sexual impulses and compassionately appreciate our own needs and foibles.

As sexual shame dissolves in response to insight, our capacity to enjoy our sexuality increases. Even more importantly, as we understand our sexuality we understand ourselves.

Two In person weekends are in Charlottesville, Saturday 10am till Sunday at 4:00pm

Passages to Intimacy and Passion Fall 2018 Dates:

October 13th and 14th 

December 15th and 16th

The Class also includes one personal or couples session between October and December to map your own sexuality and find your own compassion, understanding and freedom from shame and joyful sexual expression. 

Cost is $795.00 per person. Overnight and meals are on your own. Snacks and drinks provided 

Course limited to 12 people – contact Wendy   whubbard0@gmail.com  to register 

 

 

Healing The Shame Of Sexuality

(Photo taken at Ephesus, a Greek and then Roman city that flourished around the time of Christ)

 

I have been exploring Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness in which he describes the hub of awareness as the center of ourselves and the spokes and rim as the things we take in from the  outside world: our senses, our mind thoughts, our relationships, our body sensations.

Practicing this for several days I became interested in my hub, the essence of me that is me — the center.

This is a new variation on many practices of I have tried over the years.  I have always found some resistance to going into the center of myself.  In the past I have  thought I was afraid of how little would be there, that I would find that I am really just made up of everything going on outside of me.  I am very ‘other’ focused.

This time I began to notice something new stir in the center of my being.  The word feminina came into my consciousness.   It is a word my husband uses to refer to me often.  The word means feminine in Portuguese.  I have noticed that I have a slight aversion to him calling me this name.

This aversion, as I really explore it, contains a lot of strong emotions and is a microcosm of myself as a sexual woman — fear, shame and lust.  In the center of my being I find my sexuality as an integral part of the essential me!

When I was becoming a woman at age 14, my mother was becoming a man.  She had a radical mastectomy and then took hormone treatment which made her voice lower, and hair grow on her face.  This was horrifying to me and I understood — this happens when you are a woman.  I also knew that  for women there was another type of danger, whispers of pregnancies, getting in trouble, being a bad girl.

My own budding sexuality, although active, went into hiding, laced with shame and isolation.

This may be a common experience for women even though my coming of age experience with my mother was unusual.  The photo above depicts  Medusa looking very ambivalent herself, some 2000+ years ago. It adorned a wall of a home in ancient Ephesus.

If I am Feminina, what does that mean?  Pressure to be something, the receptacle of endless need?  I have not had many positive associations.  AND that is changing!

My husband and I have been working with sexual fantasies and preferences in a new way in our teaching . Of course it has been so healing for us as well.

Sexual fantasies  and sexual preferences are a great way to find a view into the center of yourself.  Our sexual fantasies are working underground on very above-ground issues.  The main issue for each of us is how to resolve the inherent conflict between two of our most basic needs; arousal and safety.

Through fantasy we can have our arousal in a safe and private place.  Our fantasies are also busy resolving other issues.  Inside our fantasies we find our deepest wounds.   Some of our fantasies are direct.  I was used as a child so my fantasies are about being used.  Others compensate and are indirect.  These fantasies provide us access to what was denied us as a child, power, importance, admiration etc…

Finding your sexual preferences by exploring pornography can also be so helpful.  I was always put off by pornography – above it all.  But now I see images of women like me.  Doing things I like to do.  I always thought there was something wrong with me.   I am normal after all!  I feel my shame lift and freedom take its place.

I love this quote from  The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel  by Jamaica Kincaid.  She is describing a young women who turns 14.  “And so, too, the smell of my underarms and between my legs changed, and this change pleased me. In those places the smell became pungent, sharp, as if something was in the process of fermenting, slowly; in private, then as now, my hands almost never left those places, and when I was in public, these same hands were always not far from my nose, I so enjoyed the way I smelled, then and now.”

What if each of us could embrace our sexuality with all it’s bodily manifestations in this way?  What freedom awaits each of us as we can feel normal and accept the fullness of our feminina.  For men I am sure there is an equivalent experience of isolation and shame around sexuality.  Let’s all come into the light that is our own unique yet normal sexuality and see what a beautiful vehicle it is to work our our deepest issues and come into contact with the deepest center of ourselves.

 

 

 

The Dry Desert of Self Contempt

Each of us has words we say to ourselves silently that we would never speak out loud to anyone else.  These words become so familiar they barely reach conscious thought but they carry very negative energy.  With my clients we have excavated phrases like “you are such an idiot”, “you are a fat big”, “you do not even deserve to live”, or “you are worthless” and more.  You might be interested in listening for what you say to yourself.  This self-contempt is so painful, but is actually meant to protect us.  If we say these things to ourselves we will fend off the criticism of others.  We will whip ourselves into better shape (smarter, thinner, deserving, etc).  Sometimes these words were said to us and we have internalized them.  Sometimes we just lived in an environment where our significant others interacted with us in a way to make us draw these conclusions.  For example, one of my client’s Dad was a policeman.  When he came home after a long day of work all he wanted to do was watch police chase videos on TV or Pornography on the computer which was in the living room.  His Dad did not delight in him or show interest in him.  He drew the conclusion that he must be an idiot and he now has trouble focusing on tasks — finishing things he starts.  This of course confirms his phrase “You are such an idiot”.

The healing of this dynamic has some challenging but very clear steps.  Self-contempt is in our control.  First we have to excavate these phrases.  Listen for them in our background thoughts and self talk.  Then we have to challenge their validity.  Is it true I am idiot?  A fat pig?  This challenge immediately softens the energy these phrases carry.  Next we have to go into the early scenarios that began this self talk.  Go into the living room and feel how much you wanted your Dad’s attention and how he was not interested in you.  As you feel this also allow yourself to feel how this really happened to you.  You were a cute, creative kid.  You deserved attention and support.  You needed it.  Once you allow yourself to feel your feelings and really validate what happened, you are on your way to healing.

And we can get stuck here.  We can shift from self-contempt to contempt of the other and what they did and how bad it was.  This is a step in the right direction but not the end goal.  Staying in the loop of “it is me that is bad” or “it is you that is bad” is strong and compelling.  Self-contempt or contempt of others is self-betrayal.  It is only when we accept our selves and what really happened on our own terms and for ourself that we are free.  Then we can move to the next step.

Given what happened to you, anyone would have some of the problems you have.  It is real that we need support and attention when we are young and we will be left with deficits without this.  Pride or self-will may make coming to terms with our deficits difficult.  “I was humiliated for this as a child.  I do not accept the limitations.”

Pride and “you are a fucking idiot” often dance back and forth in a lockstep.

Try this exercise given by the Guide in Pathwork Lecture #240.  In meditation, bestow tender love upon every aspect of yourself, every neglected part, every attitude, no matter how distorted. Face yourself in truth and see if you can then find your true divinity and perfection.  This love must come from and to yourself and not by means of hating or rejecting parts of others.  Self hate is a prison for all of us.  See if you can make it conscious and know that it is not caused outside of you.  You alone can change this hate to love by accepting all of yourself without conditions. When we are in truth and love this is never indulgent.

The only way out is compassion. Compassion for our deficits and what really happened, and compassion for those who hurt us.

Then we can build a life based on what we need now.  My client is working on finding the attention and support he needs to focus and complete what he begins — to move through life with more ease and grace.

 

PURITY

While at the beach in Florida this winter I had a casual conversation with a stranger.  We quickly found we shared step-parenting.  Both of us each wrested with feeling included in a family not of our own making (at least biologically).

I agreed to send her an article I was reading about cultivating the good amidst our tendencies to see how we don’t belong or might be excluded.

The next day I saw her again on the beach and she said I had made an impression on her.  Like a yoga teacher she knew once, “I was pure”.  In the moment I dismissed what she said.  I found no place in myself to connect with purity.

I have fallen out of contact with Marie but her words stayed with me.  For a time they stayed in the periphery of my mind.  But I woke yesterday from a dream in which I was in bed, with purity as a young daughter lying  next to me.

What if I used the exercises of the great teachers, Tara Brach and John Welwood to make space and really embody this feeling of purity?  They both have similar four-part exercises to make space for, embody and receive support for difficult feelings.  What if this exercise worked for positive feelings too?

Today at a northern beach in the early morning I tried it. The first step in the process is acknowledging or recognizing the feeling. I acknowledged and recognized purity. That was not too hard. The next step, allowing purity, was more difficult.  Tara Brach says, “let it be as big as it is.”  This was challenging. I felt purity bouncing around inside of me ricocheting off all my un-pure, underserving places — whew!  The next step was to enter or get intimate with purity. This step was excruciating.  Images of destruction and crucifixion were swirling through me, of Christ on the Cross, parts of me dying so that purity could really enter my being.  Finally came the step of receiving support, letting my purity meet purity itself.  The bigger purity, the universal, non-personal purity.  In this step I merge with purity itself.  I let it consume me and it is me.  I have the the strongest and most pure sense of the true benign nature of the universe.

I imagine the color of purity and I let it fill me inside.  It is a light blue and makes my being translucent so all life and love and death can pass through.