Liberation Therapy

I thought:
maybe death
isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us-
as soft as feathers-
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow-
that is nothing but light-scalding, aortal light-
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

Mary Oliver

What's meant for you requires no force. If it's for you even effort will flow with ease.

Ruptures in relationships are a natural part of relational cycles. When we do repair work after ruptures have occurred, our nervous system learns that repair is possible and that conflict is safe. On the other hand, when we repeatedly experience emotional abandonment after ruptures, our nervous system learns that repair isn’t possible and that mistakes, mishaps, miscommunication, and messiness are unforgivable, casting us out of sacred union and threatening the sense of tribe that our systems are hardwired for.

In truth, relational messiness is where growth occurs. We do not grow by armoring up and ignoring our strongest emotional reactions in favor of intellectual reasoning about who is right and who is wrong. Growth is directly proportional to our willingness to be vulnerably in our bodies with our sensing feeling world. In not abandoning the aliveness within ourselves or the aliveness of the other, we show up in not knowing. We show up in shaky spaciousness, open-hearted and curious about what the relational field is trying to teach us. We allow it to smooth out our historic wounds of emotional abandonment while inviting us out of the trance of unlovability, deepening our capacity to love and be loved, even in the messiness of it all.

Art by Zero 2024

In light of my 40th birthday, I wanted to share the new baby (project) that I gave birth to. The Letting Go Project is a conscious living & dying organization with the aim of bringing conscious dying to those with who have a life-threatening illness. The vision is to bring conscious dying work to more people in a way that expands our understanding and experience of what it means to die and what it means to be conscious. Feel invited to check out the website and shoot me a message if you're interested in volunteering. Also, please pass this along if you know of anyone who could use these services.

Home | Letting Go Project Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do. It is also the most fruitful. To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way - in the newness of each moment where all is possible and nothing is limited to the old.

Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.

― Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

You don’t need to heal, because you’re not broken.
Healing is a fallacy and paradox. If there’s any healing at all, it comes in embodying our wholeness.

I woke up a few mornings ago to a message from a friend thanking me for pointing out a blindspot to her. She said that sharing my observations with her helped her to expand in new and meaningful ways. Her beautiful message came on the heels of a situation with someone in which conflict came up and the other person chose not to take accountability for her part or do repair work and use the situation as a teachable moment. Seeing these two situations side-by-side in contrast illuminated some valuable truths.

Unmasked people unmask people simply by living vulnerable, transparent, and earnest lives. Also, authenticity attracts authenticity and anything unlike it cannot survive the blinding light of truth, the piercing quality of curiosity, and the nakedness of exposure. It's like that line from The Face of Another, "In love—people try to unmask one another." It's easy to know who your people are when you're unmasked. They're the one's who are with you when the s**t hits the fan. They're standing there alongside you in the mess, not hiding out or pretending like it's not happening, just in it and looking honestly to see how we can use it to expand together.

"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within" ~ James Baldwin

The felt sense is simple and elegant, yet it is billions of times more sophisticated than the most powerful computers. It consists of awareness, sensation, subtly, variety, and rhythm. - Peter Levine, Walking the Tiger Home

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Felt sense:
A physical and emotional awareness of a situation, person, or event that encompasses the whole of a situation in a given moment. A conversation your body has with you before your mind can change the story.

People respond in one of three ways when hurt: by moving away, moving toward, or moving against that which feels painful.

We often defend our most vulnerable parts, simultaneously ensuring that we will go to our grave lonely and armored.

We must run headlong into heartbreak, getting curious about and turning towards our uncomfortable emotions, as well as turning towards the other person when we’re injured.

We must take an emotion-embracing courageous stance that emphasizes mutuality over individualism, authenticity over shame.

Repair after relational ruptures holds the potential for us to use conflict in a teachable way, where we can help one another to learn, grow and strengthen psychological safety, rather than eroding it through avoiding repair

A healthy relationship isn’t one in which there’s an absence of conflict, but rather where there’s the presence of repair.

To enter relationship intentionally and with care is to enter into a friendship in which the intimacy gradually increases over time. Like firing a kiln, it’s a lengthy process where the heat of the kiln gradually increases to avoid breaking the fragile ceramics inside. Similarly, if we enter the heat of intimacy prematurely, we risk breaking the fragile relationship that’s taking form.

We all have the right to clear and direct communication. And for those of us with autism, it's not only a right but an essential need.

--

The Right to Clear Communications

I have the right to say anything as long as I do so in a nonviolent, nonharmful way.
I have the right to ask to be listened to.
I have the right to tell you my feelings are hurt.
I have the right to speak up and tell you what I really prefer.
I have the right to be told what you want from me without assuming I should know.

~ Lindsay C. Gibson-Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.

― Marshall Rosenberg

I first heard Chris Germer speak while attending Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science. He forever changed my world when he said that when we’re in pain, we often pass our pain on to others or we self-attack, or if you’re like me, you do both. Chris said that if we met our pain with compassion, it would offer us the necessary soothing to break the cycle of trying to get out of pain through externalizing it or internalizing it. For years I practiced sitting in my pain in a crude way. I would own it and feel it, but I wouldn’t offer myself soothing and comfort. I had no models for soothing, as the adults that I grew up with didn’t offer me soothing as a child. As it is for many of us, my caregivers didn’t have parents who offered them soothing through an empathetically attuned relationship, and so they couldn’t offer it to me. This is how we pass on misattunement generationally.

Offering ourselves compassion when we’re struggling gives us the opportunity to begin to metabolize our pain through empathetically meeting our suffering thereby breaking the cycle.

While I believe that we need an empathetically attuned ‘other’ to repair the empathetic failure that has occurred within our families of origin, we cannot even begin the journey with another without our own well-regulated nervous system and a wellspring of empathy towards ourselves and the other to draw upon when things get hard.

While mindful self-compassion seems simple, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Simple things are often the hardest, aren’t they. Self-compassion is a moment-to-moment softening into each emotion, sensation, and thought. It asks us to have mercy on ourselves. To wrap our expectations of ourselves and others in a warm blanket of unconditional understanding. It asks us to be fully human and beautifully imperfect.

Holding an inner or outer conflict quietly instead of attempting to resolve it quickly is a difficult idea to entertain. It is even more challenging to experience. However, as Carl Jung believed, if we held the tension between the two opposing forces, there would emerge a third way, which would unite and transcend the two. Indeed, he believed that this transcendent force was crucial to individuation. Whatever the third way is, it usually comes as a surprise, because it has not penetrated our defenses until now. A hasty move to resolve tension can abort growth of the new. If we can hold conflict in psychic utero long enough, we can give birth to something new in ourselves.

– Marion Woodman

I am the light and the parts
Fractured. Whole. Evanescent
A kaleidoscopic image
Pieces of glass that appear broken
Refracted by light
A changing landscape of images
Transforming into an infinite universe of possibility
Flowers and insects
Laughter and tears
Connection and separation
Concealment, revealment
A dance so divine
Planets and magical dividing cells
Our last breath into the unknown
A cancer diagnosis and feeling alone
I am the light that illuminates the brokenness
I am luminescence itself
Some people call me love
Others can’t see me beyond fear
But please know
I’m always shining through everything that’s here

~ Zero X

Giant kaleidoscope by Masakazu Shirane and Saya Miyazaki

keeping my heart open in my “no”

is a sacred space where I have mercy for myself

while accepting the other person as they are

If it doesn’t feel risky it’s probably not vulnerability.

Practiced vulnerability seems common these days and comes from speaking from our heads. We’re saying a truth that we’ve come to terms with in ourselves and therefore doesn’t challenge us to stand on the edge by exposing our tenderness and being seen feeling our feelings.

Genuine vulnerability is speaking from our bodies. We are authentically sharing from the aliveness of the moment, exposing what sensations we’re feeling, what emotions are present with us, exposing the stories we’re telling ourselves about the situation or the other person, our desires, and of course, exposing what we need in that moment, especially from another person.

At the deepest level, vulnerability is a relational experience of speaking from the body and listening from the body.

If our understanding of a relationship is one that doesn’t include our role, then it’s likely that our understanding is incomplete. At this juncture in my life, I’m admittedly so much less interested in what my friends or partners did than in why I chose to be in relationship to those people and situations in the first place and how I was moving within them. I know that understanding my role is where relief is and where I get to make new choices.

I’ve been known to have long gaps between my romantic and platonic intimate relationships and inviting new intimacies. Like, very long gaps. I’m grateful to have had the wisdom to take my time because it’s allowed me to fully digest what happened in those relationships and to integrate what I’ve learned in a meaningful way. Doing so is a kindness to myself and the next person I invite into my life. It ensures that I’m not reenacting the same patters in a new dynamic and makes room for a fresh experience.

To be free from relational patterns that are not serving us, we need so much courage and openness. The courage to not hide in a story about what’s wrong with the other person. The courage to not take up a story that helps us keep our idea of ourselves in place. The courage to look honestly and compassionately at ourselves, cutting through a lifetime of self-protection. We all externalize. Our attention goes outward and we’re distracted from looking at our own feelings and patterns of behavior. It’s okay that this happens. It’s human. The work is in noticing it and coming back to the aliveness of our experience, getting curious about and intimate with what’s happening so that we can love and be loved in new and more fulfilling ways.

Written From the Body

About four years ago I was on retreat with Pema Chodron, the Buddhist queen of discomfort. Not too long into the retreat, she introduced the zones of tolerance, a tool that I was familiar with from my education and training as a therapist, as well as the canon of work on mindful self-compassion. I use the zones of tolerance a lot in my work. In short summary, the zones of tolerance look like a bullseye. In the center is a circle that represents our comfort/safe zone. A layer outside of that is a circle that represents our challenge zone, and the outer circular layer is the overwhelm zone, also known as our threshold. As you can imagine, the comfort zone is where safety and familiarity are. The challenge zone is where we feel some tension, but not overwhelming tension. This is where our growth edges are and where we can learn most effectively. As you may have guessed it, the overwhelm zone is where our threshold is. In the overwhelm zone, the demands on our nervous system exceed our ability to meet those demands. We are no longer able to learn at our threshold and instead we experience trauma. Because we all have different nervous systems, histories, and skills in self-regulation, these zones differ from person to person. What is challenging for me and what is challenging for you may be totally different. This is why trauma is subjective.

For most people, the work is in stepping into the challenge zone. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that the work is in stepping into the challenge zone, then dipping back into the comfort zone. It’s an ongoing vacillation between these two zones; between expanding our capacity and soothing ourselves. What shocked me in Pema’s iteration of the zones of tolerance was that she said that for people with extensive trauma histories like myself, our work is in being in our comfort zone. I’ll never forget her saying that. It was a breakthrough moment for me. It was the first time that anyone had ever given me permission to be comfortable. It was the first time that being comfortable felt like it could okay. Having spoken to many trauma survivors since then, I’ve learned that many of us will compulsively make a beeline towards discomfort as a way of reliving trauma. That my last two partners, and most of the partners throughout my life, became physically aggressive at some point in the relationship is not a miss on me. I was moving towards what I knew, the charge of an unhealed wound. Trauma survivors are so familiar with pain, discord, harshness, and the like that to move away from these experience is counterintuitive. Often, we don’t know that we’re in pain, or if we do, we believe that at some level, we deserve it or that it’s just the way life is. But for the most part, early in the journey, pain is an ambient experience that we live with and being at our threshold is home. We are masters at being split off from our bodies. We learned that our bodies are not reliable narrators, that the pain that we feel is to be endured rather than met with compassion or heard with wisdom. Our bodies live at the threshold, never knowing safety or softness. We experience life in a contracted state.

I once had a partner who was very committed to being comfortable (many partners actually). A significant area of incompatibility for us. Often, she would walk into a room and see me sitting in a contorted position while working and she’d come along and adjust me by putting pillows behind me and propping up parts of my body. Then she’d say something along the lines of, “Doesn’t that feel better?” It did. I had no idea that I was even in pain until she showed me what it was like to be comfortable. We cross pollinated and I learned a lot from her inclination towards comfort. I don’t get the impression that she learned anything from me, but I think she was there to learn. While teachings on staying with discomfort are some people’s medicine, for people who have trauma histories, those teachings can be harmful if they’re not brought into their proper context, which is that ultimately these teaching are teachings on staying with what’s alive in the moment. Historically, I used these teachings to reinforce traumatic wounding and to deny aspects of life such as joy, pleasure, comfort, laughter, expressions of affection, my needs, touch, softness, and the lightness of being.
After stepping back from Buddhist spaces, and specifically a monastery that I had been practicing at, I recently decided to reengage. The reason I disengaged from the monastery was that the space, being an institution (among other things) brought up my institutional trauma. My trauma story is an epic tale. In short, between the ages of 12 and 18 I lived between institutions and the streets of L.A. While institutionalized, I was brutalized, forced into solitary confinement for days and months at a time spanning years of my life, and psychologically and physically abused. While all abuse is cruel, institutional abuse has a particularly potent flavor. Think the Stanford Prison Experiment meets Russian orphanages. The monastery pushed my trauma to the surface; prompting night terrors, disassociation, panic attacks, and a deep fear that I was trapped, not just inside of the monastery, but trapped in my body. From the outside, I mostly seemed like anyone else on retreat, and perhaps even a bit steadier in my practice, as I’m a maverick at solitude. Except my solitude was not the solitude of contentment. For me, it was an experience of going dark to the world. Shutting myself so far inward that I couldn’t be touched, a skill I learned from being sexually abused and needed during the years of institutionalization.

During my hiatus from the monastery, I started to anchor into my body in a new way. I took Pema’s teaching from the retreat and ran with it. I deepened into a mindful self-compassion practice. I took up working with clay and other creative mediums. I let go of my painful relationship with my father when he died, which was really the first point of pain and abuse for me. Also, I had a few kind and gentle friends along the way who simply by being themselves have shown me what gentleness looks and feels like. Somehow within all of that I started to cultivate a feeling of safety in my body. I was and am growing roots that are deep, grounding me to the earth.

In returning to the monastery, I was apprehensive but also ready. I knew that within the monastery walls and the discomfort there was a teacher and a teaching. I also knew that I had to be wise in how I approached this teacher. I reached out to a dear friend and monastic at the monastery, the teacher who was leading the retreat, and a fellow trans sangha member. Together, we created a plan. What felt true was that if I was going to create a new story, if this was going to be a new and different experience, I would need to stop hiding the wound and instead practice reaching out and letting my safe people into the wound to care for it with me. From the point of view of a traumatized brain, the presence of others signals a threat to our safety rather than a safe and soothing other to co-regulate with. Trauma has taught me the art of holing up and the high-level survival strategy of being self-sufficient to the point of intense self-awareness, a self-awareness that has taken care of me as much as it’s hindered me from being taken care of by others. Yeah, I see you overfunctioners out there. Other people have been so damn unreliable, haven’t they? So unreliable that we’ve learned to be hyper self-aware and hyper aware of other people’s unexamined stuff too. Ah... I’ve digressed (expect another post about this). Back to the retreat. After the retreat, I flung myself into the arms of the teacher and cried, I stood in front of her sobbing, unable to speak and deeply absorbed in eye contact. Finally able to get a few words out I said, “It was different this time.” Both of us were immersed in the rich intimacy of the moment. Several moments past and I said, “And I saw this kid. The weird kid that I always was.” She responded, “Yes, I was that kid too.” “And now that kid is trying to save me.”, I said. She said, “Yes! Those are our powers!”. Funny, I’ve been an adult my entire life. A perfect parentified child, and now, I hear my heart calling me to be little again, to be curious, open, joyful, vulnerable, and gentle, to return to something so much earlier than my wounding. Something wondrous.

We all have protectors. Parts of ourselves that we’ve developed to relationally protect us. Some people’s protectors look like people pleasing, the empathic soother, being “the one who knows”, being of service to others, etc. I’ve found that the protectors that we developed to take care of us are often proportional to the threats that we’ve face. I developed a particularly fierce protector. My protector is intense, fearless, tough, sometimes on a high horse, difficult to read, cool and detached, as well as fiery, and covered in black tattoos. I’m beginning to call them Terry the Lovable Terminator. One of the things that kept Terry active in my life was homophobia and transphobia. As a q***r gender non-conforming person assigned female at birth, being labeled aggressive has been a way of stereotyping and demonizing me. If you are perceived as a woman who is not performing gender according to the social construction of gender, you are seen as aggressive. And of course, if you are a black woman, regardless of how well you preform gender, you are seen as aggressive (I see you out there and I love you). Examining my protector felt like giving in, like I was admitting that I’m an aggressive "othered woman" who hates all men and is looking to corrupt young and meek Christian virgins by bringing them into the coven of homosexuality. I’m not against that narrative. I mean, it’s funny and appeals to the antagonistic witch in me. The truth of course, is that I’m not aggressive and I became what I needed to be to take care of myself. We all did, and it’s okay.

There’s a point in our lives when our protectors are no longer needed. That point arrives when we begin to ground into safety in our bodies and we allow that safety to extend outwardly into the rest of our lives. It’s not so much a critical moment as it is a practice of deepening into the body. In my experience, the practice looks like noticing when Terry the Loveable Terminator is with me and then naming that I’m feeling unsafe. Once I’ve named it, I check in with my belly and soften it, I then scan up the center of my body, specifically checking in with my chest, neck, and face which runs along the pathway of the vagus nerve. By softening those areas, I’m sending a signal to my brain that I’m safe (hello Polyvagal Theory!). I then check in with my breathing and sometimes do some mindful self-compassion which can look like asking myself what I need in that moment or offering myself some empathetic support. I do this practice throughout the day. Softening over and over again helps me to open my heart towards myself and others, and it allows me to step away from traumatized Terry and towards the weird kid of wondrous magic. As I practice rooting in the body, I see my protector less and am more able to recognize other people’s protectors.

As I continue to process the patterns in my relational world to better understand my role, other than recognizing a clear trend towards harshness, I can also see that many of my partners have pervasively experienced shame. This is quite different from my own experience and from that of the people I’ve had the most supportive relationships with. I, for some freakish reason, am high in authenticity and don't experience shame reflexively (although I do experience it sometimes). What that meant for my relationships is that my unbridled enthusiasm for deep excavation and my unflinching curiosity and honesty would be experienced as a threat to their sense of self. I totally get that. Not everyone is on my journey (psychotic trip?). I've learned that to be compassionate to myself and others, I need to be unbearably explicit in letting people know how I do relationship because not doing so doesn't give people a chance to consent to the work and apparently can also cause people to throw glass bottles at me. About that, I’m still learning to listen to the wisdom of my body when it tells me that someone isn’t safe, isn't a good relational fit for me, or specifically when I sense that someone is holding a lot of shame or harshness (they’re often connected). I get it. I really do. Shame is the inheritance of many of us, and especially q***r people. I have space for that. I just don’t have space of it in the intimate realms of my life. Shame doesn’t make for a safe relational holding environment or a corrective experience, and for me, would be a walk back into the belly of the beast.

I have a friend who is a skilled medium. He gave me a gift that changed the trajectory of my life. He told me who I am. He said that he woke very up early in the morning, something that happens when he’s about to meet a high being. He said that I’m on a master path, that the people in my life should be bowing down to me (that absolutely should not be happening), and that I am the light and source itself. I was uncomfortable when he first told me this. Suffering from some kind of faux humility perhaps. I told him that everyone is the light. He said, “Yes, but you more so than others.” He meant this in terms of a soul’s journey; the trajectory of lifetimes of clearing away what isn’t us to reveal the light of love. It took me awhile to digest the information he gave me and to feel my way through it. When we met in Thailand, having seen each other in person for the first time, he said that all of the black I was wearing was in contrast to the beauty and brightness of me. I said, well, perhaps the black is self-protective. He said he wished that I could see myself the way that he saw me. I hope he now knows that I do. I see myself because he reminded me of my light. Now, I am standing in the light and it’s with the light that I’ll explore the dark caverns of myself and this world. With the kindness that the teacher at the retreat showed me. With opening to touch and letting people in. With the softness of my belly and the slowness of long breaths. With laughter and tears. With a rawness so alive that anything unlike it can’t take root and survive.