Then there’s Allen Ginsberg’s definition from The Fall of America back in 1963 that goes like this:

Well, while I am here I’ll do the work –

and what’s the Work?

To ease the pain of living.

Everything else, drunken

dumbshow.

As a survivor, I have done a lot of the Work, but I have also come to realise that there is a belief surrounding this Work that is perpetuated by the 8 week groups, the therapeutic goals prescribed by insurance payments, the “happily ever after” narrative that we inhale daily. This belief is that when you do the Work, and you do it sufficiently well, the Work will be done. When it is done, you will then step into the stream of the happily and ever after.

This is a giant lie that we’re all selling ourselves. We have built to mythic proportions the hero’s journey, the narrative that a Survivor is someone who has overcome. Overcome suggests an endpoint, a ceasing, an arrival after which there is no more Work to be done. Overcome says that you will reach a stage where your past, your wounds, your pain will be healed, completely and irrevocably.

Instead, it seems more real to say that the Survivor has all the symptoms of a phantom limb. The wound is healed. There is a scar. But that isn’t the sum of the Work, just the beginning.

The Work is dealing with the burning sensation in your pelvis even though you haven’t suffered that particular pain in years. It’s waking in the night to the memory you thought you’d erased. It’s seeing the same mistakes played out time and again when you believed it was over.

Is It ever really over? Why do we expect it will be? Do we expect survivors of war and bombings to be stop flinching when they hear a loud car start? Will a veteran never again wake up in a sweat after yet another dream where his friend is blown up in front of his eyes? Studies seem to suggest that is an irrational expectation, and society seems to be more accepting of the ongoing consequences of this sort of physical and psychic trauma.

Why do we expect this to be different for survivors of different types of war? Why do we expect that the vestiges of sexual assault and molestation, of boundary erasure and manipulative love, will magically disappear because someone has been doing the Work?

I certainly had that expectation for myself. I truly believed that I would one day be “free.” Heaven knows I prayed for it often enough. To never again smell something that brings up overpowering waves of nausea. To not jump when someone comes up behind me. To not feel my body go numb when physicality becomes overwhelming. I’m still waiting for this freedom to arrive, and I have begun to expect it never will.

I’ve also extended that expectation to others, including friends and partners. If they are doing the Work, I expect that they will stop having intense anger, stop needing extreme amounts of attention, start being capable of activities they were never capable of before.

But I was wrong to expect this of myself or of them. I cannot know where someone else’s Work will lead them or which path they will choose to travel at what point in their life. I cannot know when they will decide that particular Work is not worth pursuing further, because something else needs their attention.

Beyond that, there is a pain of living that a Survivor never loses, because it’s etched in the cervices of their body, in the corners of their minds. And even the slightest bit of shame or confusion can trigger a whole new onslaught of memories, of fear, even of physical pain. With every major life change, like the loss of a loved one, a divorce, even a much longed for child being born can require more processing. At every point where a person’s being shifts and stability is lost, when they are truly living, they experience that pain. Then they can choose to drown again or return to the Work, painstakingly rebuilding their raft out of the wreckage. If they have done previous Work well, they may have large pieces of the prior creation to draw from, but there will invariably be days when it seems like none of that effort mattered, like they have returned to the beginning all over again.

I have been here multiple times. With the ending of a marriage, of a relationship, the loss of parents, the loss of friends, and even the birth of LA. That last one shocks me even now.

There has never been a way to express the maelstrom of emotions that flooded through me after his arrival. Joy, of a kind never felt before, most certainly. A bit of fear that I was not nearly as prepared as I had hoped. All the usual feelings you read about in books. But there was also pain and a deep sadness. At first I imagined it had to do with the child that poured out of my body and onto the linoleum floor, lost to me forever. That was certainly part of it. But it was also the sadness for when I was born, for when the world was still new, my parents present, a world I don’t remember except through photographs and the stories my father told me. That little baby with her blue and pink hat, face scrunched against the bright lights, she disappeared too soon. She became an adult for all the wrong reasons, and I grieved for her as I held LA in my arms. I grieved for all those years taken away from her. And I grieved for all the years taken away from so many others like me, statistics on paper who are still subject to the completely real pain of living.

That grief on receiving new life into my arms, coupled with sleepless nights and general exhaustion, slowly undid the Work that had been done before, forcing me to a place where I had no choice but to start the Work again.

You either do it, and keep doing it, and hope that in doing it something good will remain for the next round, or you fall into whatever is your personal version of a drunken stupor. That’s the part they really don’t talk about.

The post On Doing the Work first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

The best advice I have found that manages to work for both mindfulness and parenting comes not from a Tibetan Buddhist or an enlightened psychologist. It comes from a children’s book written by Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees called Giraffes Can’t Dance. I had never heard of this book until LA received it as a gift for having the bravery to be born.

Online sleuthing determined that the authors of this colourful volume are British, it was first published in 1999, and its MRSP was $6.99. The British part is obvious from the text. “Clot” is not a word you hear in the US outside of the hospital setting. God save the queen, because these fine representatives of their land packed a lot into a book that cost less than 7 US dollars.

In brief, this board book narrates the story of a giraffe named Gerald who is embarrassed—bullied by the other jungle animals—because he can’t dance. Apparently every other animal can—and apparently there are no other giraffes to back poor Gerald’s play. Instead, he slinks off, meets a cricket who convinces him that he just has to find the right music, and voila, Gerald dances like no other, earning the admiration of his previous critics.

There’s a lot to be said about this book, about being the gangly, awkward one who doesn’t fit in (Hello! Me!). It has a lovely message about self-acceptance and focusing on what you love instead of what everyone else is doing, encapsulated in Gerald’s final exclamation:

“We all can dance,” he said, “when we find music that we love.”

Because nothing is perfect, it should be noted that Africa is a giant continent, and the animals at this jungle dance are not actually found in every part of the continent. Indeed, giraffes don’t inhabit jungles. They inhabit the woodlands and plains areas. I know this, because I spent a significant chunk of time living in an area of Africa with no lions or giraffes. Snakes, certainly, but they are not invited to Gerald’s jungle dance.

The particularities of geography and zoology notwithstanding, what keeps me loving this book despite endless readings is how tuned into the concept of mindfulness it seems to be. When the cricket tells Gerald to listen to the wind in the trees for inspiration, he utters these brilliant words:

“everything makes music if you really want it to…”

That, in a nutshell, encapsulates so much of mindfulness practice. You stand where you are. You notice all the tiny details that you blithely ignore at any other point in time. The blades of grass suddenly seem greener. The snow is more textured. The brick on the building is lighter. And the multiple layers of sound that surround you fill your entire being with the present just as it is. Every second becomes relevant, filled with meaning, because you choose to pay attention.

In the moments when I manage to become mindful, I experience something similar to what Gerald experiences: I get in touch with myself. Sometimes, I even manage to accept myself. And there is generally a great deal of joy in that brief pause.

Similarly, Gerald also has a lot to say about parenting in a similar vein. There is actually a concept Pamela Druckerman calls “Le Pause” in her book Bringing Up Bebe. Le Pause is what Druckerman describes as the French sleep method, wherein a parent hears a child cry out in the night but does not immediately run to their side. Instead, the parent waits to see if the child is in need or just talking in their sleep.

To be clear, I don’t hold much with sweeping generalizations about entire cultures. Not all French mothers follow one method any more than all Canadian mothers do. Additionally, it could very well be that the mothers Druckerman knew were fortunate to have babies who slept easily. If anyone tries to tell you that there is a singular method to getting a child to sleep, especially if they are selling you something, run away. As the mommy of a child who did not sleep through the night for the entirety of his first year, I can affirm in retrospect that, despite my endless guilt and self-flagellation, it wasn’t about me at all. LA just wasn’t that sort of baby.

Sleep training aside, the pausing has been crucial in dealing with the anxiety that I feel about caring for a child. Are you a parent if you haven’t worried that you will make some devastating mistake and ruin his entire life? My need to soothe his anxiety would compel me to rush to his side too quickly; I probably even woke him up by accident at times. My response wasn’t about his needs; it was about mine. It was about the triggers that a crying child produced inside of me. It was me projecting my fears onto him: fears of abandoning him, of depriving him of connection, of failing as a parent.

Now that he’s a bit older, I’ve come to realise that this pause is also important in other areas of parenting. He struggles with a toy. Do I swoop in and make it work or do I take a moment, pause, and let him see he could figure it out for himself? He attempts something questionable, like climbing onto the sofa. My instinct might be to quickly stop his climb, take him to the safety of the floor. But that isn’t going to teach him anything in the long term. Instead, I have to pause, move to a position where I can catch him if he falls but allow him to try it on his own. If this methodology sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s emphasized in educational philosophies like Montessori and RIE. It’s also key to childhood development, since as William Stixrud points out in The Self Driven Child, kids who have healthy control over their lives are more successful as adults. They are capable of making wiser decisions based on knowing themselves and not needing the voice of someone else to guide them all the time.

This makes me wonder, as I tend to do, if Gerald may have been a baby giraffe whose mother was not particularly mindful. Did she swoop in to help him instead of encouraging him to trust himself, to listen to his own instincts? Did she steal his ability to hear his own music?

One of my deepest hopes is that LA will always be able to hear his own music and smile his delighted smile even if no one else is listening.

The post Giraffe-Like Mindfulness first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

I stood frozen to the spot as the words slammed into me, knocking my breath out of my chest and flooding me with the dark heat of shame.  I started to disassociate which allowed me to make a joke, to pretend it meant nothing.

She may have had no idea how her words would land. Or maybe she did, because, from the vestiges of my trauma, I had hurt her.

I have no way of knowing intent, only effect.

What I do know is that the person who spoke those words to me was one of the few people I trusted completely. She had seen me curled in a ball on the bathroom floor, fighting the waves of panic slamming into my body. She had helped me apply the electrodes of the TENS unit to my abdomen, sending electrical current through my body to counteract the pain caused by invasive physical therapy. She is one of five people who knows the names of both of my abusers.

But that day she walked away. My trauma was too emotionally expensive, my break downs unattractive. There were other people out there who had far less to manage.

Everyone has trauma. It’s part of the process of living, of sharing space with others.

When the trauma is particularly complex or was mixed in with other traumas or occurred in secret, it has longer lasting effects. Trying to understand that sort of trauma when you’re someone who has not experienced it like trying to understand starvation when you have always had enough to eat. You believe it exists. You’ve seen the skeletal children on television documentaries. You may even cry a bit. But your pantry is still full of food.

One of the hardest realities I’ve had to face is the judgement from others when trauma rears its ugly head. People get tired of the dark days, the behaviours that keep tripping me up, the pain that comes seemingly out of nowhere. They know someone else who “had a hard time”—past tense—but “got over it”—past tense again. This is said in order to spur me on to do the same as quickly as possible. Strangely, no one wants this more than I do for myself. And no one feels the shame of failure more intensely on the days when I fall sideways in my healing journey.

Shame permeates everything about sexual assault, like the shame of not fighting back enough or being somewhere you “shouldn’t” have been. It makes sense, then, that childhood sexual molestation, has even more shame attached to it if it occurred over a long period of time in secret. While an adult survivor of rape may be able to call on a community of friends and family as a support system, as a counter to the shame, allowing them to be resilient, children who are molested generally do not have access to that sort of system. Instead, we have the long-term physical and emotional consequences of the abuse., and, as studies have shown, secrets cause pathophysiological consequences that are still being explored.

Given the havoc it wreaks on our professional and personal lives, most of us would be thrilled to put it behind us and never think about it again. We would never again be overwhelmed by memories and sensations, never fight dissociation, never need to take another shower to cope with the feelings of dirtiness and shame.

As I stood there, my back against a rented Toyota Corolla, being told that I was too expensive, the inky black shame of my childhood crept out of its hiding place. Shame that I had allowed myself to be hurt in the first place. Shame that I hadn’t managed better, healed faster, been stronger. Shame that I had ever shared my story.

Shame whispered to me, “You are damaged. You will always be damaged. No one can love damaged things.”

At its heart, as Brene Brown often reminds us, shame is tied to unworthiness. Shame tells us we are flawed and we do not deserve love or belonging or connection. Shame is a powerful tool, because it keeps us from building a support system we can rely on. And it keeps us in silence and alone.

Caught in the moment, but with my adult self not present in any way, my child self showed up. Alone and vulnerable, she accepted again that she was flawed, that her only value was what her body had to offer. She was definitely not worth the price of having to deal with her trauma.

I would like to say this story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. The person I trusted wanted more light, less darkness. She wanted easier conversations, fewer unexpected triggers. She had the ability to walk away, so she did.

My child self did not have that option and neither does my adult self. As the saying goes, wherever I go, there I am. The shame will likely always haunt me, and I will often be tempted to accept it as truth. I will drive myself hard to be more than enough to make up for what I think I lack. The problem is that shame thrives in the dark places, becoming ever more monstrous the longer it floats beneath the surface.

What I wish my adult self had been mindful enough to tell my child self at that moment in time was that no one was more worthy of love and belonging than she was, because she had nothing to be ashamed of regardless of what someone else spoke over her.

Part of my work in the aftermath has been digging deeply into the shame that has always lurked inside of me, stealing my joy. As tends to be my case, I found solace in art, particularly in the Japanese art of Kintsugi, when a friend sent me a link to an exhibition at the Met. According to the curator, in the 15th century artists began turning broken pottery into artistic masterpieces instead of discarding them. Carefully placing the pieces together, an artist seals the cracks with an epoxy laced with gold, silver or platinum. The final result is not the original piece, but instead of hiding the breaks, keeping them out of sight because they are ugly, they become beautiful and are put on display.

This has given me hope, because it tells me that the work I do, the shame I battle, is not for nothing. If I can find a way to see the broken places as an invitation to become more beautiful, what was once ugly is transformed. In the Reformed tradition of Christianity, they would see Kintsugi as a form of redemption. As much as I shy away from religious terminology, there is something about redemption that can still move me, because it holds within it the notion that nothing broken is ever lost, just transformed into something even more beautiful.

Grappling with my trauma, taking responsibility for its effects, comes out of my deep desire to shield LA from its repercussions as much as possible. That includes being honest with him about it whenever I can be, and being honest with those around me so they can help me protect him. Most of all, it means I have to accept I am not my trauma, but it is a part of who I am. My faith is that constant, persistent work will lead to a sort of redemption out of which, I hope, will come someone more beautiful, someone he can be proud to have as a mommy and someone I can be proud to hold out into the light.

The post Speaking of Trauma and BMWs first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

A few months ago, I took my first solo trip with LA to visit some friends. Armed with the knowledge that my own mother had done many trips of longer duration with two children, not just one, I was confident I would overcome any potential challenges with ease. In retrospect, I realise my mother and I never had an actual conversation about any of those trips. She had a particularly intense hatred for the Detroit Metro Airport, which I knew was based on flying through there, going through customs and being left with two small children, ripped open luggage and no one to help. Beyond that, she was the personification of strength and control when travelling. My mother was the type of person to micromanage a trip down the last detail, although my guess now is she learned to be the micromanager from that early experience in the Detroit airport.

Not being a micromanager myself, I assumed it would be exponentially easier since I would go with the flow as it were. I set up a 5-day trip. How hard could it be? I was going back to somewhere I used to live to see people I knew who wanted to meet my baby. Only 4 and a half hours of air time total, one stop at Chicago O’Hare, an airport I know like the back of my hand. Easy.

False.

LA is a miracle baby in many ways, from arrival to health to magnetic personality. But it appears he has terrible travel luck. Although I had taken this exact flight many times, never with a delay, we were delayed going and returning. There was plenty of rough air—what they now call turbulence, I assume because “rough air” doesn’t have the scary connotations of “turbulence” yet. Unlike the earlier flights when he was a tiny infant, LA did not feel compelled to nap once in the airplane. He did feel a need to jump incessantly in my lap, bite everything around him despite us being in the middle of a pandemic and, at one particularly excruciating point, he managed to grab the hair of the lovely lady sitting next to us. There was far more to that trip, most of it negative, but I came out of it with some important questions to help next overly optimistic traveller do better than I did. Although I’m not sure there is a way to do better. I think it’s mostly about survival.

First decision: The car seat. Do you gate check it? It’s safer for the car seat, but you have to carry a baby, a backpack and a car seat around an airport. What about sending it to the luggage hold? That could lead to damage. Final answer: repurpose the stroller pram pack and use an entire roll of bubble wrap to protect the seat. It worked. Good decision.

Second decision: Layover time. Do you pick the shorter time so your child spends less time in travel and potentially avoids losing his mind in a small tin can? Or do you pick the longer layover so you have time for a leisurely stroll and change in a family bathroom? Don’t be like me. I picked the shorter time. Of course, for a solo traveller, or even adult travellers, a quick rush from one terminal to another is a piece of cake and saves having to sit around in the airport deciding if you do or do not want an overpriced bag of trail mix. Except LA got us delayed so much that we almost missed that second flight. Quick rushes with babies pump your body full of stress hormones, force your body to perform feats it really should not attempt, and leave you feeling like you just climbed through a garbage can. Bad decision.

More useful tips.

Dress for success, not to impress. Feeding babies on flights is like cleaning out the horse stalls in a barn. By the time the flights were over, I was covered in puffs, fruit and substances I couldn’t even recognize. Similarly, avoid bringing food like fruit on airplanes. Stick with dry options. LA loves fruit, but he also loves throwing it around.

Do not sacrifice your mental hygiene for physical hygiene concerns. Option a: you keep the baby clean, off the floor, away from germs. Consequence: he screams on the flight. Option b: you let the baby risk contagion, crawl on the floor with him and try to head off any attempts to lick the floor. Consequence: he naps on the flight or at least coos quietly. If you value your life, choose option b. Your fellow passengers are not the kind, patient people you would hope they would be.

All considered, LA was a stand-up little guy. He charmed his way through three of four flights despite his noise level and on one flight even garnered compliments on his behaviour. I attribute this partly to him having a personality and smile that compels a more charitable attitude out of the grouchiest individuals.

Still, I would be nowhere without mindfulness, in this case mindful gratitude.

Gratitude has been an ongoing practice for years. It often takes the form of adding a line to my journal about something I am grateful for that day. Sometimes, when life is particularly hard, I will try to speak it out loud, making it more concrete and tangible. I can’t pinpoint when I began this, but it may be one of the more positive results of my childhood: I’m deeply aware of my privilege, and I have little problem admitting it.

In difficult situations, though, there is no time for journaling, so my process works something like this: Feeling stressed? Anxious? Take a breath, look around, note the sounds, the objects around, then try to think of one thing I am grateful for in this moment. It seems simple, but it’s not as easy as it seems when you’re struggling to breathe. If you can manage to do it, however, it does help. Or at least that has been my experience.

On this particularly difficult trip, when LA had had enough of everything after being delayed nearly 2 hours, and we were tossing about in a tin can somewhere over the Great Lakes, I grabbed hold of that mindfulness practice like those yellow life preservers the flight attendants buckle on during the safety demonstrations. As LA shrieked in annoyance and tried to twist his body enough to bang the chair in front of us with his feet, I took a deep breath, focused on the sounds of the engines, the air above my head. My breath slowed, even as my grip on LA continued, and suddenly the haze cleared. I was able to remember the many flights spent watching other mothers struggle with their children and hoping that would one day be my story. Here I was. That longing had become my reality. My entire mood shifted from worrying that he was bothering people to being grateful he existed. An additional bonus was that my mood shifted his mood, and he switched from shrieking to laughing. It was still loud but far more delightful.

Long story short. Mindfulness matters. This does not mean I am eager to do this again any time soon. In fact, LA’s godmother requested I take a trans-atlantic flight to visit her. She has never travelled with a child on an airplane, and it shows. I told her we would have to wait.

The post Mindful Travel first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

Godishness owned Sundays. We were not allowed to play outside, do homework or see friends. Instead, we went to church, returned home for lunch and rested until it was time to get dressed and head out to church again. If you didn’t want to sleep in the rest period, you were allowed to read, but your options were limited. The book couldn’t be secular—not related to God. I may have tried to push the limits with reading the Encyclopedia once or twice, because, after all, God made the world, but otherwise, it was a dreary day for someone who enjoyed books.

Now, my Sundays are radically different. They are still days for rest, but I spend the day with LA, playing and laughing. We take walks to the park to use the swings. He naps in my arms. We do household chores, because he loves to “help.” We read books. 

There are days when I feel a rush of guilt, when the past comes back to whisper in my ear that I am destroying his life by not raising him in a strong community of faith that meets multiple times a week and will teach him how to live. On a good day, this feeling is followed by New Order reminding me mentally that “Guilt is a Useless Emotion.” 

Just another day in the week
Waiting for an opportunity to step in front of me
Maybe I’m losing my mind
Searching for another place in another time

Choosing to parent with mindfulness means accepting that those are my thoughts, but my thoughts do not necessarily reflect reality. They only create my experience of what is real. It is not true that my child is not being raised in a good community. It’s just a much more varied community, one full of people who care for him exactly as he is. I don’t want any institution teaching him how to live. They did that to me. and I almost died from their attempts. I want him to know that the world is much bigger than the walls of a church, that love exists in many forms, that God cannot possibly be contained to a denomination. This what rational processing tells my anxiety.

Granted, my rationality depends on it being a day when the sun is shining, the breeze is cool, and I have had 8 hours of sleep. In other words, it’s rare. This is because I have what some people term Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS). Coined by the psychologist Marlene Winell, RTS describes the way that trauma from religion can affect people. It’s a relatively new term that isn’t even in the DSM unless you consider it under the large umbrella of PTSD. But what it boils down to is a way of understanding how people can have a physical, emotional or psychological response that is traumatic and due to religious situations and structures.

When we talk about childhood trauma, the default is to think of violence or sexual trauma, occasionally verbal or emotional. Religious trauma sounds almost absurd, because religion is generally considered to be a refuge, a place for healing and community. I will be the first to say that I know many people for whom this is very much the case. Beliefs in God, Allah or any number of divinities give people strength to overcome addiction, to restore broken families, to lead a life of purpose. 

That is not my experience with religion, because I was raised a Christian fundamentalist. This is not the same as Evangelicalism, although they have more in common than they like to admit. Contemporary fundamentalists include individuals such as Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell. In a later post I may link to a good description of the difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism and explain more about how the particulars of this sort of thinking create trauma, but for now, suffice it to say, most of what you hear about fundamentalism is true. It’s dogmatic. It’s authoritarian. And it’s all about indoctrination, but they like to call it “salvation.” 

It’s difficult to pinpoint an “expert” on RTS, because it’s relatively new and still evolving. The term has only existed a little over a decade and the Religious Trauma Institute, the first site to undertake studying RTS systematically, was established as recently as 2019. Due to this lack of research and study, much of what I will say regarding RTS is purely anecdotal, since it can’t be anything else. But, there is a good video that explains the effects on RTS on the nervous system from a clinical perspective, here.

This much I do know: I had RTS long before I knew what it was; I just thought I felt the way I did because God hated me. The effect of RTS is so powerful that, even after years of working on my issues, of rethinking my theology and my relationship with the world, just walking into a church building can prompt my body to tense up, my breath to become shallow to the point of hyperventilation. I used to bitterly joke that I was literally allergic to church, to Sundays. 

LA was born in the pandemic, so I was able to postpone guilty feelings since churches were not even open. But, when they started to open up again, I found myself sobbing over feeling like a bad mommy for not taking my son to church. I had just enough clarity to message a dear friend who kindly listened to my hysterical outpouring of fear that I was condemning my child to eternal damnation. Wisely, she said, “Breathe. Just breathe. That’s not the God I know or you have told me you know.” 

This is why you will find me on a Sunday morning feeding my little guy spoons of oatmeal and listening to gospel music, because a church is not usually a safe space for me. We look at birds fluttering in the yard, blue and red brown. He laughs with delight, and I tell him that he is loved exactly as he is. When the voices intrude, and the guilt increases, I breathe. 

The post Sacred Sundays first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

Several years ago, my brother bought a home with an unfinished basement. To his disgust, he soon found that there was an unidentifiable leak that dripped incessantly and caused flooding. He employed the handy method of the bucket under the leak, emptying it as necessary to avoid water backing up all over the basement floor. But he did not like having to do it and frequently let me know via text message. Unfortunately, there was no one else who could do it since it was his house, so he trudged down there dutifully on a regular basis to haul the bucket out into the yard.

There is something similar that can occur to those of us with trauma: we can have bucket issues. I say this based on observation and my own experience. For much of my time in therapy, I focused on what was done TO me. By this I mean, I learned to have emotions, to ground myself, to accept the painful places inside of me that responded to external triggers. The usual suspects for blame emerged: my abusers and the people who enabled the abuse. 

A few months ago, though, I realized there was an unexpected deleterious effect to all this work. I was becoming unbalanced. By focusing so extensively on my triggers and reactivity, I was ignoring the way my trauma had been spilling out on people around me, in some cases for years. Although I try to be a thoughtful person who puts others first, I started to see that my self image was not in line with reality. My true self may be someone who is thoughtful and kind, but I had completely ignored the necessity of dumping out the bucket. My thoughtfulness and kindness were being drowned in my obsessive focus on my trauma to the exclusion of all else. 

I had allowed myself to be enveloped in a fog of victimhood that was impenetrable and manifested with some narcissistic traits like lacking empathy for others or feeling a sense of entitlement because I had suffered more than someone else had. I thought mostly about what was good for me, not what was good for anyone else. I failed to listen closely, to show concern and care, to love. 

Consequentially, I caused deep damage, some of which I will never be able to undo. 

The problem with trauma is that even if the leak in the basement isn’t my fault, I’m still the only person who can take that bucket out to keep it from overflowing. No one else is responsible for that bucket, because I am the home-owner.  

This isn’t to say other people cannot be supportive through the journey, occasionally helping me carry the bucket up the stairs. But when it turns into “me, me, me” all the time, that’s a problem. I’m not a person who enjoys admitting to mistakes, so having to first reconcile myself with this took time. Then, to reach out to those I’d hurt, to admit my shame to others, was even more painful. The most you can say is “I’m sorry,” even though you both know it’s not nearly enough. 

In my case, the individuals whom I hurt were mostly gracious and forgiving. The bitter pill is that sometimes you cannot rebuild some bridges that you’ve burned. You cannot rebuild trust, rebuild connection, rebuild relationship if two people are not involved. Nor can you force a person you have already hurt to be willing to rebuild anything. Although I have never struggled with addiction to substances, I imagine this is a bit what it’s like to be in recovery, working the 12 steps. You can try to make amends, but sometimes, as I was told, “it’s just too late.” 

In mindfulness practices, there is what is called “the conscious witness” or the “neutral observer.” The basic purpose of this observer or witness is to step outside of the chaos of your thoughts, your reactivity, and observe without passing judgement. When you manage to find your witness, you can detach from what is happening in your mind allowing you to be present and aware. You can see yourself as you are, not as you wish you could be.

In theory, I love this idea, but my personal observer and I have a somewhat tense relationship. Even though I have never read mindfulness masters suggesting that the witness has a name, I call her Linda. If you were around in 2014, there was a viral video of a kid named Mateo who was trying to convince the camera-holding Linda to not punish him for eating cupcakes. When trying to deal with my personal observer, I often find myself in Mateo’s position saying, “Listen, Linda, listen.” Except Linda is not interested in listening, because Linda is not easily manipulated. She is the voice reminding me that our actions have consequences, that there is nothing personal in that reality, but it is what it is. This is why I have a love-hate thing going on with Linda. She tells me what I would rather not hear, and no amount of denial works on her. 

Several months ago, I was happily blaming all the wrong people for my suffering and feeling justified in doing so. Then Linda showed up. She raised her eyebrow at me. Oftentimes, Linda does not need to speak to get her point across. My suffering was my own doing. By allowing myself to focus on my leaky faucet, I had completely ignored the overflowing bucket, and everyone around me was starting to drown; they had to save themselves. The consequences of this were the suffering I was experiencing. I really hate it when Linda is right. 

The post Leaking Trauma first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

This is a blog on mindfulness, but I’m no expert on the subject. The title of the blog should be interpreted as me sending a wish into the universe that I will somehow muddle my way through becoming more mindful, more aware. 

Much like the children in the state of Alabama up until earlier this year, there was no meditation in my childhood. Instead, I was taught that meditation—and yoga—was one step away from opening the gates of hell. Mindfulness=New Ageism=Satan. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that many of the greatest mindfulness teachers are actually Buddhists, following traditions that predate Christianity, and certainly do not consider themselves to be at all “New Age.” Thus far in my journey into mindfulness, I have yet to find anyone waving crystals in my face or using psychedelics. There tend to be stones, cushions and a lot of chances to journal. The level of dialogue in a room full of mindfulness practitioners reminds me more of graduate school than a cult. 

Another myth dispelled. 

Confession 2.

Meditation has always terrified me. Long before I heard of mindfulness, I learned about meditation through the backdoor of a yoga practice that began in graduate school to compensate for not having enough insurance for physical therapy. After yoga practice, there was often a chance to do a seated meditation session in silence with other practitioners. These people tended to be a bit crunchy and ethereal—as if they were on another plane from the rest of us. Or so I believed. Since I wanted to belong—an ongoing preoccupation for most of us but definitely for me—I tried to join this group a total of one time. All I remember from that excruciating experience was gritting my teeth, biting back the urge to run screaming out of the room, feeling a little bit proud of myself for sticking with it, only to peek at the clock and see a total of 2 minutes had passed.  

In anguish, I consulted my yoga teacher, who taught me about the phenomenon of “monkey mind” and, from years of knowing me, laughed a bit when I explained my experience. “For you,” she said, “it might just be that 2 minutes is what 20 is to another person.” 

What she said did not spark any clarity at the time, so I resigned myself in that moment to being a meditation failure. She was absolutely right, though, because I was diagnosed late in life with ADHD. Had I known this at the time, I would have spared myself years of living with a narrative of impossibility. It’s not that I’m incapable of meditating. I just have to do it in my own way. Strangely enough, this is exactly what mindfulness teachers tell you if you listen long enough. Some people anchor themselves in their breath, others in their hands and still others in sounds. Some people can float on astral planes for hours while some of us get in 10 minutes and call it a win.

I was not ready for this knowledge as a graduate student. At that point in time, I was still tied to the belief that there was A Way to do things. A Way to be a graduate student. A Way to be a yogi. A Way to practice meditation. As usual, my inability to meet The Way was interpreted as a personal failure. There began my difficult relationship with meditation.

Confession 3.

I am still not amazing at this mindfulness stuff. Or meditation for that matter. I use any and all assistance available to me. I use post-it notes, timers, cellphone apps (the horror!). As an obsessive lifelong learner, I signed up to take the Power of Awareness course hosted by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield—after reading an appropriate number of reviews, of course. Rip the Band-aid, face your fear, detach from any expectation of becoming an expert meditator. Since I’m only in week two, so far I can affirm that I enjoy the tinkling bells, and I still am mostly mindless, not mindful. 

Confession 4.

I’m programmed to try to be an expert in as little time as possible. It explains the PhD, among many other life choices. What this also implies is that mindfulness as a practice is probably the least likely path one would expect to find me following. You cannot become an expert in mindfulness overnight. Nor even in a year. Patience and detachment are required, my two worst nightmares. The only part of this course that I feel fully competent to manage is the journal. They said, “Be sure to journal when you’re done practicing.” My eyes lit up, and I scurried to my pile of journals to pick the right one. For the record, it’s orange. Currently, my journaling consists of phrases like, “Why did I sign up for this?” Or, “You want me to remain present for how long?” 

In this sense, I am on the same page as LA. When sitting in a meditative posture, I find myself twitching. My mind hops to wondering if I might be hungry—even though I just had breakfast– and I am tempted to sigh with frustration even though practice is supposed to be silent. I imagine this is how LA feels in the middle of the night when, in his crib, he wakes up to discover he is not being cradled in arms. Is he hungry? Most likely not. Is his diaper wet? Also no. Is he twitchy? Absolutely. Should he howl out of his frustration, call for company? Obviously. 

One of the challenges I see in raising LA is that he also seems to struggle with patience, more than some children. Forget about detachment. It doesn’t help that he’s at the stage where he is beginning to find his voice. He’s quite sure wearing diapers is an imposition, as is putting on a shirt. He feels strongly that sitting in any form, on the floor, in the highchair or in the bathtub, is not as good as standing. He transmits this belief at high decibel levels since he’s preverbal. I would like to say to him what my friend says to me, “Breathe.” But unfortunately, he does not know the hand sign for breathing. 

Dealing with LA is teaching me a great deal about the voice inside of my head when I meditate, because somehow, most days, I muster up enough patience to be kind and gentle to him. My mommy tone says things like “I know you are twitching and want to get out of your chair right now but sometimes it’s good to be seated. Like when we need to eat. Look! Here’s some food!” 

This is a luxury I do not permit myself, even though I am also twitchy. What would it look like if I had more patience with myself as I practiced instead of allowing the inner voice to shred me for everything I feel I am doing incorrectly? 

The post Muddy Mindfulness first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

Currently, LA is obsessed with textures. He pats everything with his hand, testing it to see if it’s hard, rubbing it if it’s grainy; although I wince when he decides it’s a suitable option for tasting, I try to restrain myself from stopping him. He’s particularly drawn to wood and brick, to scratching at it with his little nails. When he encounters a new texture somewhere he turns to me with a look of delight as if saying, “Mom! Isn’t this amazing?” 

One of my commitments to being present in his life is not using my cellphone while on walks with him.  I want to see what he sees, point out the birds, the leaves, anything I would not notice otherwise. I want to interact with him, not someone else, to enact what Tara Brach calls “the only way to live,” which is to see every minute as an “unrepeatable miracle.”

This does not come naturally to me, nor to anyone these days I imagine. I have a Type A personality, which means I need to accomplish things, to end my day feeling as if I moved something forward. As a child, I spent most of my time in my head, planning what I would do when I finally escaped the bonds of isolation and authoritarianism, when I would leave home and be free. Although adulthood and freedom has not turned out to be quite the same as I imagined it would be, I still have a tendency to keep that mindset of thinking about what’s next instead of what is now. The gift of LA in my life is to shift me out of future planning, grounding me in the present, because he lives in the pure present, and unwittingly forces me to do the same. 

This is mindfulness in action: learning to live in the present, to experience what is, not what is not yet. To live in the present, I’m learning, involves letting go over and over again. Letting go of control. Of outcomes. Of attachments. As much as I tried to embrace this concept for years, it wasn’t until LA came into my life that I found a guide to enacting this process. By watching LA be present, I am learning how to do the same for myself. 

Down the street from the house, there is a “creek.” Because this particular street makes a good loop for a quick walk, we pass by it often. Before LA sees the creek, he hears it, and his eyes light up with excitement. He cranes his neck around the side of the stroller until the water comes into view; he stares down in fascination. 

This is not a beautiful creek in any way. It’s actually a runoff to keep the neighbourhood from flooding, a serious problem in an area with mountains and a great deal of rainfall. The water swirls around concrete chunks left over from some building project along with the leaves, rocks, tree branches; LA takes it all in as if it were a miracle, the manmade and the natural. His perspective is radically different from my own. His curiousity is immense, untouched by shame or cynicism.

He reminds me that everything depends on the perspective I choose to take. When I look down, I focus on the ugliness of modernity, the plastic Walmart bags that floated downstream from somewhere else, the random Chick-fil-a cup tossed over the railings. He sees the excitement of water regardless of its unattractive surroundings. Or maybe the surroundings aren’t even unattractive to him, just different. What he sees is ever changing and full of newness, all the important things to see, to hear, to enjoy.

I move myself to be at his level, to see what he sees and try to understand what makes this so attractive to him, because he has had an intense love affair with water since the day he was born. If a faucet turns on, he swivels his head to look, reaches out his hand to touch it even if he’s across the room. Even when he was tiny, he had no fear of water whatsoever. It could run over his head, into his eyes, and he would blink as if it were nothing. He would sink down in his tub, his ears underwater and his feet in the air, his eyes looking up at me in complete peace and contentment. LA is not a peaceful baby. He is a curious, on the go, sort of baby. He’s not into waiting or quiet. Except in the water. In those moments where his world settles and he is surrounded by water, I feel peace emanating from him and am reminded of everything that is beautiful and calm in the universe.  

As grateful as I am for the mindfulness courses I have taken, I have learned more from LA about how to remain present than from anyone else. When I am focused on the future, or the past, I let the present slip by and fail to see the good things that are happening right now all around me. The end result of this is a skewed view of life, one in which the darkness of my past can far too easily control my narrative. I lose hope. I lose joy. And when that happens, the trauma wins. When I switch my focus to the present, to what is good and loving, I detach from trauma as my defining feature. It becomes one of many features, not the most prominent and certainly not the most important. 

When I choose to stay present, to focus on the bluebirds in the trees, the way the light dances across the leaves in the trees, I see everything I have to be grateful for, everything that surrounds me and offers me the chance to keep building, keep enjoying, keep making the ugly beautiful. 

Since I was denied a childhood by trauma, being a mommy has given me the gift of recreating a childhood, of discovering what life looks like from a space of innocence and delight. It shows me what life could be like, and it empowers me because it reminds me that I have the capacity to protect that space for someone else, for my beloved child. 

The post Perpetually Present first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

“Victim” is a charged word. A 2020 article in Time pointed out the complexities surrounding the term, noting that the tendency is to prefer the word “survivor.” We like that word, because it connotates being alive, having some power and control. As the author, Kate Harding, points out, the origin of the word victim does not signify anything other than someone who had a bad experience that was not in any way deserved. Nevertheless, in contemporary parlance, the term victim became a negative, pushing us to self-designate as survivors. 

Being both survivors of sexual assault, my relationship with CP (from friendship to relationship to co-parenting) has had to deal with questions of victimhood in serious ways. Early on, we would get in horrible fights which, in retrospect, we now know were due to unconscious triggers that we had not yet learned to identify as such. Although emotions would run high, the fights would play out in a surprisingly systematic fashion, like two chess players facing each other across the board. Attack. Defend. We would find ourselves locked in a vicious spiral where neither of us was acting as a rational adult. Instead, our child selves would glare at each other across the living room, brandishing any verbal weapon available from the arsenal in order to inflict maximum emotional damage.

When we reached the point where both were so triggered that every single instinct we had honed to survive our childhoods was on alert, and our minds were bent on self-preservation at any cost, someone’s voice would run cold, their eyes narrow and they would throw down, “Stop being a victim.” Checkmate. By throwing out the word “victim,” you won, guaranteeing your own safety at the expense of the other person you claimed to love and, ultimately, to the detriment of your relationship. 

Despite preferring to call myself a survivor, before becoming one, I was a victim. No wording can change that. I was a victim for years. Until I made my peace with this, before I consciously explored what it meant psychologically to have been a victim for so long, I repeatedly engaged in destructive patterns that meant I would be a victimized again. 

One particular pattern took me through multiple relationships, each ripping my heart to pieces as I stood in its wake, alone, exhausted and sobbing. That was the pattern of learned helplessness. One of the classic psychological studies on trauma that explains this concept came from research in the 1970s by a man named Martin E.P. Seligman. While animal experimentation makes my blood run cold, his studies established the connection between resilience to trauma and questions of control. What he discovered is that dogs who were repeatedly subjected to traumatic situations without being given an option to escape, gave up to the point where, even when a way of escape was eventually offered, they were incapable of taking the way out. Although later studies have nuanced these findings, there are some key components to learned helplessness that particularly apply to those of us who survived childhood abuse. 

We are all aware of what is like to be helpless, to have a complete inability to control one’s circumstances. Babies are helpless, for example. Studies have shown that evolutionarily, we are neurologically wired to see babies as adorable, to have a surge of desire to protect and care for them. That’s what helps the species survive. Children continue to be mainly dependent on their caregivers as they grow, asking for their needs to be met the best way they know how, aware that they depend on their caregivers for survival. The psychologist Ross Buck discovered that children whose caregivers ignore or punish them when they ask for a need to be met tend to shut down. This does not mean they stop needing or feeling stress. It merely means they stop expressing their needs, knowing they will not be met anyway. The consequences of this are long-lasting, similar to what was found in the studies with the dogs. 

When a child is repeatedly subjected to abuse or neglect, they shut down. The stress remains the same, but they cease to request assistance. Not only that, but they can get to the point where they become so accustomed to being helpless, they are not capable of seeing anything else. This mechanism, when it persists into adulthood, can lead to an ongoing state of learned helplessness which Gabor Maté defines in his book, When the Body Says No, as “a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so.” 

In my case, as a result of living my childhood in a situation where any type of independence was deemed rebellious, where God was interpreted through the lens of patriarchy and authoritarianism, where ongoing sexual assaults could not be addressed for fear of the consequences, I learned that when it came to control over my body or over important life decisions, I was helpless. This lingered for years. It covered everything from choosing a career—because there was so much pressure to not make a mistake and choose the “wrong” one—to relationships where the other person defined who I was, where my needs were secondary because I did not realize I could say “no” without paying the price. My first serious relationship told me flat out that we had to have sex regardless of my feelings on the matter, because it was the only way he could express how he loved me. No sex meant no relationship. Naturally, I complied, because deep down I did not believe I had any other options. 

Looking back, I often felt trapped against a wall when there was a door wide open to the side. I could not see it. I kept playing the same opening gambit, and I kept being checkmated. Staring at yet another loss, I would ask myself why I had to suffer so much, why I kept being in so much pain. It took years of therapy before I realized that the only way to avoid the loss was to stop playing that gambit, to learn a new strategy. I wasn’t helpless. I just felt helpless. I had to learn to see my other options.

I’m not the only one who keeps playing the same opening and hoping for a better outcome. There is no blame in this, because we are unconsciously pulled to the familiar, to the same gambits. Until we become conscious. Until we take steps to learn a new way of functioning that breaks the cycle. 

The post Queen’s Gambit first appeared on Mindful Mommying.

There is a lot to like in this term. For one it emphasizes cooperation instead of ownership, unlike the legal term, “shared custody.” For another, it clearly places the responsibility for childcare on more than one person since “co” as a prefix indicates that the job of parenting is shared. I have seen many children with parents where one person silently seethes with rage while doing the bulk of the childcare, usually holding down a full-time job as well. “Parenting” does not indicate that the duty is shared.

Co-parenting is not simple, but I’m not sure it’s any harder than other types of parenting when co-parents are friends and capable of communication. With the exception of people whose co-parent is an abusive partner, I have come to think that co-parenting is actually a better model, based on the fact that, by definition, it requires mutual cooperation, planned moments of sitting down to discuss options and strategies. My co-parent and I have to be on the same page, because otherwise everything falls apart. We communicate better now than we ever did in the past.

Successful co-parenting relies on the ability to put oneself aside for the good of the child. When disagreements arise, the question comes down to “What is best for our child?” Not my child. Our child.

Co-parenting with a history of trauma, however, requires a level of self-awareness that I never imagined reaching. There are days when I fail, when it seems I will need miracle to get where I need to be. Except I have no choice but to reach for more awareness, continually walking into uncomfortable places where I am forced to stretch and learn. Put simple: I cannot advocate for what I need or for what my son needs if I remain unaware. 

Despite not being traditional life partners, I rely on my co-parent more than ever before. I rely on them to be the counterpoint in situations where trauma rears its ugly head. When I cannot see clearly, because trauma has taken over. This is when they need to be able to be the voice of reason. Since beginning to co-parent, we have had to have far more discussions about trauma than we ever did before, because we are both survivors.   

Here are some random tips that have worked in my experience. Take from them what you will.

Consciously putting our child first over my desire to win. CP and I are both competitive, Type A people. We set high standards for ourselves, and tend to stand in our righteousness, as Martha Beck would put it. When I’m wrong, I find it next to impossible to admit it, although I’m getting better, which means we can end up in a disastrous situation quickly. Since LA is too young to have an opinion at this point, he cannot be the final say in the matter. When we clash, someone has to cede or, more often, a compromise must be reached. I have had to bite my tongue many times now, reminding myself that this is not about old issues in our relationship, or about losing or winning. This is about LA’s well-being, and no child needs to see his parents fighting even if it’s over what they both believe to be in his best interest.

Wrangling the winner/loser mindset into submission—usually by meditation—I implement the technique a friend refers to as “overriding priorities.” My friend is a lawyer, so she likes clear nomenclature. I ask myself: is this issue a life or death one for me? If not, I cede. If it is, I try to reach a compromise. For example, I was raised without screens. No television. No movies. CP had the opposite experience. I do have issues with screens, so ceding completely was not an option. I negotiated a compromise. Since another priority is to raise LA with regular exposure to other languages, I agreed to limited screen time and CP agreed to keep screen time to content in Spanish.

While setting aside the winner/loser mindset would apply to all situations, in a situation where coparents have histories of trauma, there are other important aspects to be considered. We have to support each other in taking care of ourselves. As much as it is my responsibility to care for myself, it helps to have CP notice that I am in a rough place and offer to take LA for a half hour while I go for a run. Sometimes, I’m unaware that I am trapped in the trauma mindset until it’s pointed out by someone else. CP could remain quiet, but because CP knows that LA’s wellbeing depends on mine, CP will sacrifice a half hour for me to have space to meditate. In order to do this well, words matter. No commands. Just suggestions from a place of kindness and empathy.

Clear boundaries are key. I tend to default to doing whatever is necessary to avoid conflict even when it means sacrificing my needs. This coping mechanism leads to exhaustion and an inability to function which is, again, not an option when a child is involved. I have learned to take a few minutes to go to a quiet place and write down how I feel, to try to discover why I am feeling that way. For example, a couple of months after LA was born, I felt a level of tightness inside that I could not shake loose. When I used the writing method, I discovered that I felt there was an injustice happening in regards to time, but I was afraid to speak up. Writing helped me see my responsibilities for LA were not daily occurrences but more sporadic–larger–time investments. If you haven’t had an infant in a while, you may not realize how often they have to go to the doctor to be checked. Plus, LA was born with a Cow’s Milk Protein allergy that took a while to identify. In the first two months of his life, I was in and out of the pediatrician’s office, radiology, urology and gastroenterology until we found the answer to his constant crying. 

It wasn’t until I could pinpoint the source of my feelings, however, that I could approach CP to try to find a solution. Awareness of how I felt and why I felt that way was crucial to renegotiating the terms. 

Coparenting is a matter of trial and error, of grace and compassion. It’s a practice, a lot like mindfulness. 

The post Mindful Coparenting first appeared on Mindful Mommying.