Change the culture.
“Change the culture.” Jackie Summers. “We’re living through a second Civil Rights movement. It started with the death of Trayvon Martin, and hit fever pitch last year with the murder of George Floyd. It isn’t enough. They. Keep. Killing. Us.
While we’ve made significant legal progress, the predominant culture is still to see non-white people as other, and lesser-than. We are perceived as threats, waiting to happen. White friends, I solemnly charge you: change the hearts of your kin. Make the treatment of any person of color as unpalatable to them as it would be if you found out it…
My Grandmother’s Hands, by Resmaa Menakem
In the very excellent book, My Grandmother’s Hands, by Resmaa Menakem, he refers to people like Malcolm X and James Baldwin as having settled bodies and focused minds. The book is about racialized trauma and he uses the terms white body supremacy, white bodies, black bodies, and police bodies.
It is a fascinating study and insight into historical trauma and how that lives in our bodies.
He refers to clean pain and dirty pain. Dirty pain is that which is pushed down, not able to be seen, and thus not able to be metabolized. …
We are inspired to know our truth. We discover we are worth knowing.
Dr Gabor Maté speaks about the effect of traumatic experiences as being disconnecting. Nurturing authentic connection with ourselves is thrilling, painful and raw. It is the aliveness we long for and it is a bold move.
What does disconnection look like in our ordinary everyday life? Our past experience leads us to predict that the present moment is likely to be painful and overwhelming. We respond to potential threats with our survival responses of fight/ flight/ freeze/ fawn.
Have you ever been introduced to someone and literally ten seconds later you don’t remember their name? I have. Sometimes it’s a…
“She’s stuck in her head.”
My drive for emotional safety overpowered care for my body.
We have many words to describe the very common dissociation of ourselves from our bodies. “She’s stuck in her head.” “I live from the neck up.” We feel like we are at war with the drives and compulsions in our body. We numb out and act out.
These are trauma responses. The result of traumatic experiences (including emotional neglect) is that we disconnect from ourselves, our sense of value and from the present moment. When we are overwhelmed and feel powerless, we do our best to escape.
We disconnect because…
We can accomplish a lot driven by fear. And what a price we pay!
How do we move about in the world when the fear abates? When the drive to compete disappears? When we validate and value ourselves internally?
We can accomplish a lot driven by fear. And what a price we pay!
Fire at my heels! Driven by fear!
Sit for a few minutes and notice your response to these words. Stay in the perspective of the observer. Remain in touch with your whole body and with your breath.
Notice thoughts. What are the words or pictures, memories and associations? Feel the sensations or energetic response in your body. Sit with that as…
When people objectify us, we feel erased.
Objectification is when we use another person as a way to fill our needs. This isn’t the interaction with others that happens all the time. We are lonely, call a friend and feel better just by feeling understood. They do the same.
Mutuality is missing when we objectify someone. They have a habit of calling us late at night and talk at us for two hours even when they know we have to get up early. They use us as a way to let off steam without caring that they leave us all stirred up. We all do this to…
I startle so easily over nothing.
Take a few deep breaths and relax your whole body from head to toes. Look at these sentences and notice your response.
Someone came up behind me and I jumped a foot. I am frustrated that I startle so easily over nothing.
I was enjoying a visit with a friend, but the music in the coffee shop made it hard to hear. After I’d been there awhile, I felt like the noise was assaulting me. Whoa! Over the top response. What is the matter with me that I get enraged by loud noise?
At work there is a guy who…
You don’t need to prove it to a jury.
There are many ways to release anxiety. We might practice yoga, go for a swim, do a breathing practice, or connect with a friend. When we’re jumping out of our skin, we need strong action to down-regulate our nervous system. When we feel a bit uneasy and unsettled, we might choose something less intense, like witnessing our thoughts and taking a few deeper breaths.
Many people release anxiety through talking. It could be a stream of consciousness flow of words about nothing in particular, or show up as compulsive catastrophic thinking where we are drawn into endless possibilities of what…
Anger is a whole mindbody experience.
We get angry when our expression of personal power is hampered. We can only metabolize our anger by feeling it. We then can come to clarity around appropriate expression of anger.
There is a vast difference between a fight response, and feeling and appropriately expressing anger.
- A fight response is a reactive, nervous system, primitive brain attempt to protect ourselves
- In a fight response, we are emotionally flooded, disconnected from ourselves, and avoid feeling our hurt under the anger
Justifying thoughts and outrage recycle and intensify our anger. Why are they so mean? I hate the way my boss interrupts…
Pete Walker’s work, particularly on arrested self-protection has been helpful with this.
How does your inner child feel about it? From one person, this can be an invitation into curiosity and to heal disconnection. From someone else, it can indicate contempt for being foolish enough to fall for that inner child nonsense. How does connecting with and befriending our inner child intersect with identification and nondual philosophy?
When we experience something that overwhelms us, we disconnect. This is especially true during childhood when we were stuck in our family with very little agency to make things better. We have limited brain development and do our best to survive, often in circumstances of…
