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.

My son was born as my father lay dying of terminal cancer. There were tears in my eyes when I placed my son into my father’s arms for the first time and tears in his when he accepted he would not live to see his grandson grow up. Death has a remarkable power to strip you of artifice, of your false self. In the weeks leading to his death, my father and I dismantled our egos and hid nothing from each other, not the good and definitely not the bad.

With my tiny son snuggled in his arms, my father asked me to be a better parent than he had been.

That promise was the beginning of this blog.

“Mindful Mommying” starts with the premise that just as every life path is distinctive so is every parenting journey. This is especially relevant for those of us who come into parenting having survived childhood trauma (emotional, sexual, physical), familial cycles of abuse or religious indoctrination. Regardless of intentions, when trying to free ourselves from the pain of the past, it can be easy to slip into unconsciousness, to blindly repeat ingrained patterns or create new, unhealthy ones.

As Shefali Tsabary points out, “It is no surprise we fail to tune into our children’s essence. How can we listen to them, when so many of us barely listen to ourselves? How can we feel their spirit and hear the beat of their heart if we can’t do this in our own life?”

While I am a firm proponent of seeking professional support for healing and parenting, there is not enough therapy in the world that would have prepared me to be the mother to this child. My therapist was not there two days after his birth when, thanks to pandemic precautions, a random nurse took my child away only to bring him back with blood on his navy blue and white striped sleeper. My therapist was not on call when I had to hand my child over to a complete stranger and find enough courage to believe he would not be harmed while I did my job.

When LA was born, I knew I had no choice but to become a mindful parent so that when my wounds surface—as they have and will—I don’t give them the power to control another child’s life. Mindfulness tells me that my challenges may be unique to my circumstances, but they are only as powerful as the narrative I give them. When I am not a victim, but an aware survivor, I face the job of parenting from a pro-active position that denies what Tara Brach calls the “trance of fear” that traps us in reactivity.

Mindful mommying is about being a mother who happens to deal with trauma, but who refuses to allow that to singularly define her experience of parenting.
“To mother” is the technical verb form. If you are anything like me, you wince at the word “mother,” associating it with criticism, with never being enough, with impossible standards you cannot ever meet. You do not wish to be a mother to your child.

“To mommy” is the verb I chose instead, because words are power. To mommy is to have a chubby hand patting my face in the early mornings hours; it smells like milk and laundry soap. It sounds like the Darth Vader noises my son makes as he experiments with pushing his breath through his voice box. It feels like showing up in my life every single day, regardless of how I feel or what has been triggered, because I am determined to be his mommy, not his mother.

Beverly Engel encapsulates the difficulty of being a mommy when one was raised by a mother when she says, “For some reason […] I imagined that I’d escaped our family curse. I should have known that it’s not that easy.” Before I became a mother, I would try to mentally prepare for what not to do with a child. I would sit on park benches watching children with their parents.  Pinching an arm. No. Yelling in anger. No. Roughly pulling a child to her feet. No.

There is no real way to prepare for when triggers push me into a space where my first impulse is exactly what I know not to do. At those moments, generally at 3am when I have had two hours of sleep, l feel the beginnings of a disassociation coming on. My self starts pulling at its moorings, detaching ever so slightly, lifting into the air and heading for the ceiling.

What happens next is all in my hands, and I know from repeated visualization and practice that I must do the exact opposite of what comes naturally. I must remain present, ground myself and breathe. I must remind myself that I am an adult, that I am capable of caring for myself, that any threat I feel is in the past. When I know that I am anchored in reality, I can care for my child as his mommy.

In this struggle, I know I am not alone. RAINN statistics tell us that in the US alone, roughly 1 out of every 9 girls and 1 out of every 20 boys are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. The numbers do not count children in violent homes, children who are emotionally or verbally abused and so forth. They do not account for duration or familiarity level. The numbers only tell us it happens, that it is incredibly common.

Scores of important research studies done on the effects of trauma in childhood and quite a few clinical treatise try to approach the damage of child abuse in order to suggest strategies to combat this epidemic or to heal its survivors. I’m happy that these all exist. When it comes to parenting as the survivor of childhood abuse, however, the pool of resources starts to dry up.

Since my day job is as a researcher, I’m no stranger to finding source material on a variety of topics. Imagine my surprise at how little exists on this topic outside of academic databases. Try to read these studies sometime, and you’ll see why this is not a positive outcome. Here’s a snippet of a conclusion from a study in 2012 published in a reputable scientific journal. The researchers conclude that, “in the current psychiatric nosology, multiple comorbid diagnoses are necessary—but not necessarily accurate—to describe many victimized children, potentially leading to both undertreatment and overtreatment.” Allow me to translate in case you don’t have time to look up what nosology means: We conclude that child victims often have multiple issues at the same time which means they are at risk for getting not enough treatment or, conversely, too much.

There is presumably a great deal of useful information to be gathered from these studies, but first you have to clear the hurdle of discipline specific language. You also have to accept that most of these studies are hedging their bets a bit. Whatever they find, they could be wrong sometimes, because humans are complicated. They are definitely not about to give you a roadmap to being a parent.

If you prefer to avoid the scientific lingo, you can go to the easier reads. I found a smattering of insights across the web, some blogs, a few e-books, anthologies of survivor stories. These are good for what they are, but hardly seem adequate to the enormity of the task the statistics on child abuse suggests we are facing.

I have yet to come up with a good answer as to why this disparity exists, because it seems like an important market if one accounts for the population statistics. Consider Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead book from 2018. In it, she teaches people how to be better leaders using insights from her research on vulnerability and courage. Dare to Lead was at the top of the NYT Bestseller list and sold over 2 million copies. Now, don’t get me wrong. That is a great book, even if you’re not a leader, and I love Brené Brown. Her work has been fundamental to my growth as a person. But the numbers say there are more people parenting with the burden of trauma than there are individuals who want to learn to lead. Except we have no book on the NYT Bestseller list.

Where do we go from here? I have absolutely no idea, but this site is the beginning of my process of finding out the answer to that question. My parenting bar is high, perhaps too high, but I am determined to do better by my son. I owe it to my father. I owe it to my son, and I owe it to myself.

The post Being a Mindful Parent With a Side of Trauma first appeared on Mindful Mommying.