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Caught in-between: The messy middle of shifting stuck patterns

Meg-John Barker — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 16:54:00 +0000

Note: This post was written towards the end of May. Since then the challenges out in the world, and in my relationships with myself and others, have shifted again. But hopefully these questions of how we navigate in-between states are still relevant, even as the nature of that in-between shifts.

As lockdown eases I’ve felt a similar easing in myself. I’m not as trapped in trauma as I have been for much of the last few months. The fear/shame feelings are not such a big part of everyday life. I haven’t had a major flashback in a while [update: except for the massive one I had two days after writing this post, ah well it’s a process].

However there has been an edgy, uneasy feeling of late. I fear that emerging any further from my own personal lockdown will mean ‘going back’ to old patterns I really don’t want to return to. There’s a sense of not being ready, certainly, to engage in more challenging situations until these new ways of relating to myself, others, my work, the world, have had a chance to bed in a little deeper. At the same time there’s also some frustration, a pull to engage more, to be ‘through this’: to be able to work on bigger projects, to deal with urgent situations, to approach things I’ve been protecting myself from in order to address this trauma, and to get a little stronger.

It’s back to fear and shame again of course. There’s both fear that I will over-stretch, overwhelm, and override myself again, and shame that I should be able to do more, go further, reach some kind of imaginary destination point of recovery or fixed-ness.

The in-between state

I’ve found it helpful to return to a chapter in Pema Chödrön’s book The Places that Scare You about ‘the in-between state’. She speaks of a time in the warrior’s journey of addressing our stuck patterns when we’re completely fed up with our old ways of being, but still wish that outer circumstances could bring us lasting happiness.

We know that our usual habits are no match for suffering, but we still want to go to them for comfort because we can’t quite trust our new ways yet. We struggle to hang out in the gap left by dropping our old strategies, and just to be with the agitated energy of that place without trying to get ground back under our feet. It’s hard to hold the uncertainty and paradox of it all instead of going back to binaries of good/bad, right/wrong, truth/lie, etc.

Bringing these Buddhist ideas into dialogue with the trauma literature I’ve been studying, I see that most of my recent struggles have been around a draw back to those old habits of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, realising they’re just not working for me any more, but struggling to be with the edgy, agitated feelings left in their wake.

Flight and freeze

I’m tempted back to flight. At those times it doesn’t really feel okay to keep focusing on this inner work, despite everything I know about how necessary that is for me, for everyone around me, and for my outer work. I think I should be out there more, I should take on more, I should be working on a ‘big project’ again instead of these blog posts, I should get the decks cleared, I should read about something other than emotional trauma because the world is on fire.

When I try to push through with this it doesn’t work. I force myself to answer emails and I know I’m being less human and connected than I want to be in my replies. I start a blog post but it feels dead and unappealing: so different from the lively, fired up kind of writing I do when I wait till it’s really calling me. Working like this feels zombified and dehumanising to me and to others.

Flight doesn’t work for me any more. So instead I have to sit with the fear feelings that come up when I push through, and the shame feelings that come up when I’m not ‘doing’. I have to keep learning to be warm, kind and tender towards them – towards the parts of me that can’t ‘do’ like that any more, and towards the parts that struggle so much with ‘not-doing’ – instead of ignoring or overriding them.

When flight isn’t working, I’m tempted back into freeze. Instead of sitting with that appalling shame feeling I could just give up and fall into the black hole of scrolling social media or Netflix binging. But that doesn’t work anymore either. Like Pema says:

We’d give anything to have the comfort we used to get from eating a pizza or watching a video. However, even though those things can be pleasurable, we’ve seen that eating a pizza or watching a video is a feeble match for our suffering.
Pema Chödrön – The Places that Scare You

Every time I engage with any of my go-to comforting activities from that place of trying to avoid feelings or distract myself, I feel worse afterwards – and often during. The flickers of tough feelings become flames or even fires in the background in order to be noticed.

This doesn’t mean never doing any work, or anything gentle, of course. It means continuing to notice how I’m engaging in both work and gentle activities. It means returning to the gap – to sitting still – whenever I notice I’m treating myself non-consensually around work, or around the desire to distract from tough feelings. It means staying with the edgy emotions – along with everything else in that moment – until I know that I’m in a position to make a kind, consensual decision about what to do next, and returning to the gap if those emotions return, as many times as it takes.

Fawn and fight

In contact with others I notice a draw back to fawn and flight. When I don’t really feel okay about giving myself this time to focus on addressing trauma I feel like I should be engaging with others differently. I feel like I should say ‘yes’ to every request for my time and energy. I shouldn’t have boundaries around what kinds of contact feel okay – and not okay – for me if those conflict with what others want from me. I should have capacity for interactions that I still don’t feel ready for.

That old fawn pattern manifests as quickly responding to every email request with a ‘yes’, before I’ve had chance to tune into whether it’s something I want, or to get enough information. It manifests as not feeling able to honestly explain what I’m going through and the limits that might put around things I may previously have had capacity for (ironic given that it’s out here for all to read, but there it is!) It manifests as jumping back into contact with others the moment I feel I might be ready, rather than leaving it a couple more weeks to be sure.

A few weeks ago I went straight from solitude to a very busy walk where social distancing was impossible, without thinking about the impact such a sudden shift would have on my nervous system. I didn’t feel able to draw back, to find another way, or to figure out what I needed afterwards because of not wanting to be difficult or awkward for another person.

As with flight, the answer is to hang out in the gap with the feelings before responding, for as long as it takes, for as long as I don’t feel ready. If I override myself I will have a backlash of fear, especially when I’ve offered something more than I really feel able to give, or overstepped my own boundaries.

This also means staying with the shame of being where I am, with this very limited capacity, and having to let others know that: not always being the person I would like to be for them – in fact not even close. It feels hugely shameful to say that I can’t yet manage being in a busy area, or that I may have to cancel something if I’m badly triggered that day, or that I still can’t manage to be open and kind in some relationships in the ways I’d like to be.

As with the move from flight to freeze, there can be a move from fawn to fight: from what Love Uncommon calls the broken house to the fortress of solitude. When the fawn feelings are unbearable it’s tempting to go the other way: to go over difficult exchanges, or problematic emails, or tough relationships and judge the other people, even to be drawn to point out their behaviour in shaming ways.

Now that I’m outside of academic systems this comes up particularly around any engagement with people who are still embedded within them. I’m shocked by the tone of some editors and reviewers who are expecting huge amounts of free labour and still give their feedback in harshly critical ways ‘you must…’, ‘wrong’, ‘unclear’, etc. When engaging around assessing students – something I still do a little of – I’ve been in dynamics where the desire to follow academic procedures are clearly placed well above both student well-being, and my well-being.

At such times my head can get very noisy rehearsing stories about how and why others are wrong, what I should say to them, how to ‘win’. There’s fear that whatever I do or say they – and their systems – will override me anyway. There’s shame because I know my response is helping nobody and actually taking me further from the kind of connected and boundaried contact I’d really like to have with others.

If I can stay in the gap, at these moments, I can reach that place where it all dissolves and I see that their attempts to control me and shame me into behaving as they want, have made me want to control them and shame them right back. I can see the whole tragic drama and how I’ve become caught up in it. Then it can dissolve and something much more tender can emerge in its place. I’m humbled by the times I have managed to ‘drop the storyline’ I had going about such situations – as Pema puts it – and have been surprised by a very real, vulnerable, connected interaction where I’d assumed that was impossible.

Dwelling in the in-between state requires learning to contain the paradox of something’s being both right and wrong, of someone’s being strong and loving and also angry, uptight, and stingy. In that painful moment when we don’t live up to our own standards, do we condemn ourselves or truly appreciate the paradox of being human? Can we forgive ourselves and stay in touch with our good and tender heart? When someone pushes our buttons, do we set out to make the person wrong? Or do we repress our reaction with ‘I’m supposed to be loving. How could I hold this negative thought?’
Pema Chödrön – The Places that Scare You

Hanging out in the in-between

So with work/play, and with relationships with others, the answer is – still – to hang out in the gap, in the in-between, with all the agitated feelings that come with that: to welcome those feelings warmly into the big open space of the present moment, to stay with the uncertainty and paradox of it all.

Right now I’m trying to notice the desire to rush through this ‘in-between’ to get to some imagined destination where I can do all the work from that lively creative place, treat myself gently, and navigate all my relationships with others with the perfect balance of compassion and consent with them and with myself.

A big question, for me, is what it would be like to really allow myself to be where I currently am, instead of trying to get somewhere else: to let this be my life. It strikes me that a lot of my nightmares through this period have been of being trapped back in bullying schools and workplaces, and in homes with non-consensual relationship dynamics. I’ve done much in the past years to free myself from non-consensual outer systems, where others involved are not keen to shift those cultures and dynamics, but the inner system still defaults so often to non-consent.

Allowing this to be my life – this commitment to consensual compassionate treatment of myself and others – involves freeing myself from those internalised non-consensual, controlling, systems, which is a much bigger ask, and requires a whole lot of time hanging out with these feelings, in the gap.

The major practice now – and perhaps forever – is looking out for those four Fs sneaking back in and – when they do – radically noticing the feelings, returning to the gap, refraining from any action until I can engage from a place that is consensual, compassionate, and able to hold the paradoxes. Sometimes that will be a small gap at the start of the day and then crack on. Other times I will have to return again and again to the gap as it keeps coming up. Sometimes I’ll make a choice to go into that four F response to survive the moment, because nothing else feels possible. Then at least I will commit to returning to the gap, and being with whatever feelings that brings up, as soon as it is safe enough to do so.

What I’m aspiring to with the four Fs is:

Flight: Only go to work when I feel called to it, grounded in what I’m offering, and consensual with myself around it.

Freeze: Only go to gentle things when they really feel gentle, rather than being an attempt to avoid something else, or a form of gentleness I think I should enjoy rather than actually feeling called towards.

Fawn: Only offer things to others which feel right, rather than coming from a place of craving something from them, or shaping myself for them.

Fight: Only engage in contact/relationships where I’m being treated consensually, and endeavour to be clear with others what that involves instead of allowing non-consensual treatment. Resist being pulled into non-consensual behaviour back, recognising how hard it is to be consensual within non-consensual systems, and trying to be open to the full human being rather than this current behaviour.

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Plural tag: This post was a team effort.

The post Caught in-between: The messy middle of shifting stuck patterns appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Plural conversation about fear(others)/shame(self)

Meg-John Barker — Fri, 15 May 2020 15:30:00 +0000

This post is a plural conversation about how I’m understanding and working with the trauma response of fear/shame, and how it relates to the existential dilemma of being-for-others versus being-for-yourself.

Lately I’ve been writing blog posts in two different formats: the regular style, and a plural style, like this one, where I work things through in conversation between two different sides of myself. This time, as an experiment, I’ve tried writing on the same theme in both formats. You can read the regular version here. Feel free to pick just the format that works best for you. Or, if you like, you can read them both. I’m fascinated by the different potentials opened up by the different formats, and how they compare for readers, so feel free to give me any feedback about that.

James: So it’s you and me for this one kid.

Jonathan: I think it’s right, because I’m the one who seems to hold the fear/shame the most. We see me as the vulnerable child part of ourself: the one who learnt that it wasn’t safe to express feelings. When we feel that plunge into fear/shame now it feels like it’s me who is panicking: sending out the alarm.

James: Why is it me you want to talk with about it, d’you think?

Jonathan: In our inner world you are the protector. You keep us safe. When I was little I read the James Bond books and I became kind of obsessed with them. I used to imagine James Bond training me to be more like him.

James: And what’s that like?

Jonathan: Fearless and shameless I guess. Bond is so brave. He never lets fear stop him. As a kid I felt like such a coward: always frightened of everything and bursting into tears. Bond always knows the right thing to do. He’s never plagued by self-doubt or guilt or all of the things that I feel so much of the time. He just gets on and does what needs to be done. I guess he knows that he’s okay, whereas I’m pretty sure that I’m not.

James: That’s also why you love that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the character of Jonathan who you’re named after. In that episode the frightened, bullied, self-doubting kid puts all of his fear and shame into a monster – separate from him – and that leaves him as this amazing superhero type: brave and confident.

Jonathan: But that episode also shows that it isn’t the right approach doesn’t it? If we try and eradicate our fear and shame we create a monster. We end up hurting people.

James: Including ourselves. Personally I love that Jonathan character far more when he is the vulnerable, sensitive kid than when he’s the superstar. And that goes for our own internal Jonathan too.

Jonathan: *blush*

James: So that’s us introduced then: the protector and the vulnerable child. Shall we talk a bit about what we’re learning about fear/shame as a trauma response?

Trauma and fear/shame

Jonathan: Okay so I guess it was super helpful for us when we read Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD. He describes emotional flashbacks as a plunge into fear and shame. That really connected for us. It’s the combination of fear and shame that we find so horrendous. We hadn’t heard them put together like that before. Trauma response as fear/shame.

James: Do you want to say a bit about what it feels like for you? If that feels okay, describing something so hard.

Jonathan: I can. I suppose that’s part of what we’re learning: that the fear/shame feeling was always something we tried to get away from because it feels so horrific. But actually trying to escape it only makes it worse. We need to turn towards it to understand it, and to learn how to be with it given that we do have it.

James: But gently, slowly, with a huge amount of compassion for how hard that is.

Jonathan: Right. So you talked a bit about the different zones of fear/shame in that blog post you wrote recently. We call them flicker, flame, and fire. For me flicker feels like a slight uneasy underlying feeling, like something isn’t quite right. It’s hard to put your finger on but things are not flowing easily, it can feel a bit jagged, or scattered.

Flame is more obvious. Something is wrong. There is fear: my chest is tight and constricted, there’s an adrenaline lump in my throat. My thoughts are noisy and clamouring, often leaping from one thing to another. And intertwined with all the fear is the sense that I am bad. I’ve done something wrong or am about to do so. The external world feels dangerous and so does the internal world because I’m not okay.

James: And fire? Again, go easy if you can.

Jonathan: That’s the overwhelm feeling, what Pete calls the emotional flashback. With flicker we can carry on with what we’re doing and override the feeling. With flame it’s harder, but we can manage it. With fire there’s no chance.

James: How does it feel?

Jonathan: It’s the worst. I feel like, locked back into me I guess, this side of me: the vulnerable little boy. It’s total panic. I feel incredibly small and fragile, incapable of anything. I couldn’t hide my emotions if I tried. I’m abject. And I also know that it’s not okay. I feel like other people would be disgusted with me if they saw me. I feel like I have ruined everything. Like I should give up. It would be safer for everyone that way. It’s physically painful too. The tight chest is like a vice. And it feels permanent: like this is all there’s ever been and all there’ll ever be. I’m desperate to escape and everything I do locks me in more.

James: I’m so sorry Jonathan. It’s so cruel that you have to go to that place: that you’ve spent so much of your life there.

Jonathan: Thank-you James. It’s helped to read that other people have that experience too. And what you wrote about trauma in the body. That makes a lot of sense of why it feels so desperate and permanent. Exploring this plurality is big because it mostly feels like only part of us is in that place now – not all of us – so we can access another part of us to help talk us through it with kindness.

Trauma and consent: Fear/shame and others/self

James: Can you tell us what you figured out, about how fear/shame maps onto relationships with others and with ourself?

Jonathan: Yes. We’re not sure whether this is how it is for everyone who experiences this, but this seems to be how it is for us. I made that chalkboard comic a while back. It imagines me as a little kid always desperately trying to figure out complex equations about how to relate to others. I realised that most of those equations are basically the same double bind. It’s always felt like either I can override myself and please others, or I can stand up for myself and upset others.

I remember this pivotal moment so clearly from schooldays. When I went to middle school I got a clear message from everybody there that everything about me was wrong. And I felt that way at home too. I realised it was a simple choice. Either I could turn myself into what they said I should be and belong. Or I could stay being ‘myself’ and be outcast, hated.

James: It felt like a choice between yourself and others: a binary either/or.

Jonathan: Right, and I chose others: I chose belonging. It felt like I constructed this person – almost like those nerdy kids in that eighties movie Weird Science. I created this Frankenstein’s monster of everything I heard that I should be, and she was the side of us who operated in the world. We call her Max. It was like I was hidden away in the chalkboard room figuring out the equations and sending her information about how she should be to win love and approval, and then she would follow the programs.

James: That describes it really well. And how does it relate to fear and shame?

Jonathan: The choice of others over self is fear, and the choice of self over others is shame.

James: And that feels like the choice you have to make over and over again?

Jonathan: Exactly. So we repeatedly get faced with that choice: either be who you are and get rejected, or be who they want you to be and get love and approval. We can’t choose to be who we are because that shame feeling is horrendous – it’s what we’re running from. But choosing to be what others want you to be is treating yourself non-consensually, or allowing others to treat you non-consensually. And the more we’ve done that, the more we feel this fear around it. It used to be that we could manage to ignore that fear, but now it is so intense we just can’t.

James: And this particularly played out in relationships and work for us I think. Having felt that you lost love and approval – at home and at school – as a kid because something was wrong with you, you imagined that if you could find somebody to love you, and if you could do well at work, then maybe it would prove you were okay after all.

Jonathan: But it’s so impossible James because if you turn yourself into what you think partners would want you to be – or if you work in the ways that play the game – then it’s never really you who is getting the love or approval, even if you do manage it.

James: So you never entirely lose the shame: the imposter syndrome sense that you’ll be ‘found out’ at work, or the belief that if a partner saw the ‘real you’ they would reject you.

Jonathan: And meanwhile the fear feeling can intensify because – on some level – you know you’re treating yourself non-consensually: making yourself into something for others, or working way beyond what you have capacity for.

James: So it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Fear if you’re for-others, and shame if you’re for-yourself. And this seems to be how our understanding of trauma maps onto our previous – more existential – understanding of relationships. The existentialists like de Beauvoir and Sartre wrote a lot about how people felt they had to choose self-over-others (freedom), or others-over-self (belonging): either objectifying yourself for others, or others for self. We wrote about it in the conflict chapter of Rewriting the Rules, and this blog post.

Jonathan: And that’s what the chalkboard room – where I’ve been stuck all my life – feels like: a series of impossible equations. Do I choose incapacitating panic or do I choose horrible shame? Now it seems that every time anything comes up in our life which triggers such a choice I instantly find myself in the flicker, flame, or fire of fear/shame.

What we do now

James: Do you want to go through an example of what we try to do now, when we feel those feelings? We thought it might be helpful for people to read the kind of conversation that we have.

Jonathan: Yes. So what we try to do is to pause whenever we notice those feelings. We also check in a few times a day whether any of these feelings are up, because otherwise we can easily just keep busy or distracting ourself without noticing it. We’ve started trying to pause between activities and have this kind of conversation before moving onto the next thing.

James: And how do we actually have the conversation?

Jonathan: It used to be like this – written down in our journal – between whichever side of ourself was feeling the feelings – often me – and a side who could support them through it – often you or Ara. Now we start the day with journaling like that, but we can also do it as an out loud conversation. When we do that we sit by the window and talk between us. And – often at night – we do it more as an imaginary conversation. We picture two parts of us in a room in a house we all share, sitting and talking together.

James: Let’s do it then kid. We start with noticing. How’re you feeling right now?

Jonathan: I feel, um, some nervousness, some feeling like I might not be okay.

James: What does it feel like in your body?

Jonathan: It’s not huge: not that super scary vice adrenaline feeling. But my thoughts are a bit scattered. My breathing is definitely shallow: a bit fast. That’s familiar.

James: So we’re going to pause and give it some room now – this feeling. You’re safe here with me. I’m going to be with you through it. And we can take as long as you need.

Jonathan: I remember just before we sat down I felt bad for having this feeling. We’d been excited about returning to this blog post before, but the tough feeling was starting to dull that excitement. It’s often hard to be creative when this feeling is here. I was scared it might get worse.

James: That makes all kinds of sense doesn’t it? It’s tough to be with fear/shame and you’ve been feeling it so much lately. No wonder you feel relieved when it’s not around, and don’t want it to come back.

Jonathan: I guess this time it helped to remember that we were going to write this conversation. So in a way it was good to have the feeling here so we could do it for real.

James: Right, and one of the useful things to remember is that each time we feel this way it’s an opportunity to understand it better: how it works for us; what helps.

Jonathan: I’m not bad for having this feeling?

James: Not bad at all baby boy. This is just how trauma works in the body remember? Something triggers us and the sympathetic nervous system kicks in, so we start to feel speeded up and constricted. And the emotional part of our brain is sounding alarm bells.

Jonathan: Okay.

James: Can you try breathing a little slower?

Jonathan: Mmhm. Oh my shoulders were all tensed up.

James: We can relax those too. Tell me what else you’re experiencing right now as well as those fear/shame feelings.

Jonathan: Well… I can feel the breeze, on my bare legs. That feels nice. The sun is making geometric shapes on the floor of the room. The colours of the rug look really bright in the sun. I can hear jackdaws calling, a car going by.

James: You’re doing so well. Breathing a little deeper again.

Jonathan: *breathing*

James: So can we welcome this feeling: the fear/shame? Extend a little warmth towards it?

Jonathan: *swallows* I feel it mostly on my forehead now, like a furrow. It feels like I want to scan for trouble you know? Like what if something’s wrong? What if I’ve done something wrong?

James: Mm that makes so much sense doesn’t it?

Jonathan: It does?

James: So many hard things have hit this last year, one after another, and now a pandemic. It’s so understandable to be worrying what the next thing might be, whether you’ll be able to cope.

Jonathan: It’s the hypervigilance feeling isn’t it? If I can just keep scanning everything then I won’t mess up and get something wrong. I’m trying to avoid shame, but it throws me into fear because I think about all the things I might get wrong, and that’s overwhelming and scary.

James: Can you be with that furrowed forehead scanning feeling and feel the rest of this moment again? Not trying to change anything, just being with it.

Jonathan: I’ll try. Okay. I’m breathing. The air feels cool and soothing, almost like I can feel the sea in the air: the moisture. The sky is this faded denim blue. I can hear seagulls. There’s a feeling in my chest now. Sinking. I’m worried I’m getting this wrong. That it won’t be a good blog post: won’t make sense to anyone. That I’m ruining it for you.

James: You can’t ruin anything here Jonathan, not with me. But can we welcome that feeling?

Jonathan: I’ve felt it so much of my life. It’s so hard to stay with, not to just want it to go away.

James: We don’t have to stay with it right now. If it feels too intense we can just focus on soothing you, come back to it when you’re calmer.

Jonathan: No I can. I want to.

James: Sure?

Jonathan: Sure.

James: We’re not aiming at anything here, just hanging out with this feeling, trying letting it be part of our whole experience.

Jonathan: Okay. There’s me and you talking, and there’s this room and the sea and sky beyond, and there’s a feeling like I might not be okay; wanting to think over everything that happened today in case I did anything wrong. My body twitched when I thought of that.

James: Another trauma response. It’s welcome too.

Jonathan: It is… because… I know this feeling has been trying to help me. I know it comes up when I’m in danger of overriding myself. It’s only so loud and confusing because I ignore it so much.

James: That’s right.

Jonathan: I keep remembering this thing that happened earlier. Is this okay? I don’t know if I’m doing this right?

James: It’s just fine Jonathan. What did you remember?

Jonathan: How I was hurrying in the kitchen, and I shut my finger in a door, and it hurt but I just carried on doing what I was doing – putting the dishes away. I didn’t even stop to feel the pain or to see how badly I had hurt it. I had an immediate thought that I was stupid for not getting my hand out of the way, and then I, like, automatically tightened my chest and sucked my breath in so I wouldn’t feel it and kept going. It was only because we’ve been doing this that I even noticed that it had happened. And then we paused and let me feel the pain in the finger, and feel sorry for myself for having got hurt and for being so mean to myself about it.

James: And that was a fear/shame feeling you had immediately? It can be useful to recognise that right?

Jonathan: Yes. Shame for being careless and getting upset about it. Fear at how I automatically override myself to avoid inconveniencing anyone else. Like even when there’s nobody else around to inconvenience that’s still my go-to.

James: It’s so sad to think of you doing that over and over again through your life: in physical and emotional pain. It’s no wonder the fear/shame trauma responses come up so much now.

Jonathan: It is sad isn’t it?

James: We’re finding another way now aren’t we? Gratitude for the tough feelings because they have finally stopped us in our tracks and made us see how we override ourselves. Now they come up whenever we’re in danger of doing that and make it impossible to do so. And that is scary, and it’s messy and confusing at times, but it has fetched us up here, committed to doing it differently, to learning about this experience deeply, and befriending ourselves through it.

Jonathan: I’m thinking about that move from the either/or of fear/shame to the both/and of protection and connection. You know we’re trying to explore in these situations how we might move out of binary fear/shame logic.

James: What are you thinking?

Jonathan: In those situations I feel I have to choose between shame if I acknowledge the pain and express it, or fear if I override myself and keep going. Maybe if I slowed down I could have protection and connection instead. Like the protection of you – or one of the others – speaking kindly to me about the fact I got hurt and said mean things to myself about it. The connection could be – like – letting other people know what happened. Or feeling for other people who this happens to.

James: Like this right now.

Jonathan: I guess so.

James: You’re doing so well kid.

Jonathan: Really?

James: Absolutely. You just did it. How brave was that?

Jonathan: You helped me.

James: I’m so glad I got to. But this isn’t one-way you know?

Jonathan: No?

James: No way. It’s really not a great thing to be incapable of feeling fear and shame Jonathan, however you might imagine that it is. Remember how we’ve written about the importance of being able to feel all feelings. I love how full of feeling you are. I see how it enables you to feel for others, and connect with them. I’d like more of that: to learn from you as we continue to explore this plurality.

Jonathan: You learn from me?!

James: Yep. And I’d also like to remind you that it’s not brave to do things when they don’t scare you. The real bravery comes when you’re frightened and still do them – like you’re doing.

Jonathan: Thank-you James.

James: Any time. Really.

If you liked this you can read the more standard blogpost on the same theme here.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Jonathan and James.

The post Plural conversation about fear(others)/shame(self) appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them

Meg-John Barker — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:50:43 +0000

Something hit me recently: one of those things that must have been staring me in the face for so long but somehow I never saw it. And now that I have, I can’t unsee it. We can’t get out of our mental health struggles the same way we got into them.

The research on trauma and mental health suggests that a huge part of the way we generally got into them was non-consensual treatment at the hands of other people and/or the world around us. So whatever we do to recover, heal, or otherwise address our issues, it has to be done differently: from a place of consent, care and friendliness for ourselves instead of a place of fear, shame, and harshness.

The master’s tools

Audre Lorde famously wrote that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. This means that we can’t dismantle systems and structures of oppression using the same kinds of mechanisms and tools that were used to put them there in the first place. If we try to do it that way we generally re/create corrupt systems rather than finding our way to some genuine alternative.

We can see many mental health struggles as a set of inner systems and structures which were put in place when we were treated non-consensually during our lives, often in childhood, but also through traumatic experiences which happened later on. Most of the main therapeutic approaches agree that when we’re taught that we have to be a certain way in order to receive care and protection – or to avoid punishment or rejection – we develop survival strategies in order to cope.

Trauma and survival strategies

It’s these survival strategies – in the form of habits and patterns like addictions and compulsions, fear and anxiety, depression and distancing, anger and acting out – which we end up addressing as adults, when we realise that they’ve become a problem. They may be rooted, for example, in physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect at home, in particular traumatic events that happened to us, in the discrimination and hatred we experienced due to being part of any marginalised group, and/or in being repeatedly sent back into unsafe situations such as bullying or otherwise hostile school environments.

In our current culture few of us escape such experiences entirely. Few girls reach adulthood without experiences of sexual harassment and assualt and without learning the ways they will be denied agency and regarded as second class citizens throughout their lives. If you are part of an oppressed group you will soon come to realise how differently you are treated: how your body, labour and life are valued less. School is a pretty non-consensual situation for even those who escape the more obvious forms of trauma there, much of which is normalised. Most families pass on messages that children should override their self-consent in order to conform to normality, hide their feelings and/or meet others’ expectations.

All of this occurs within a wider culture which rests on teaching people that they are lacking and should be different to how they are in order to ensure docile and productive citizens, and in order to sell everything from drugs to diets, fast food to fashion, soft drinks to spirituality.

Treating ourselves non-consensually in the name of recovery

The problem is that – once we become aware of our mental health struggles, our habitual patterns, or our unhelpful survival strategies – the way we go about trying to address them often mirrors the very way they were put there in the first place. We try to fix ourselves, we push ourselves too far too fast, and we force ourselves to do all the things we’ve been told will help, punishing ourselves we don’t find ourselves improving as quickly as we felt that we should.

This has been brought home to me recently in a few ways. I’ll share my own experiences here and then give a few further examples where this might apply.

Trauma work

First I’ve been struggling particularly in the last year or so with what I’ve learnt are called emotional flashbacks: quick plummets into fear and shame which result in feeling very small, fragile and incapable of anything. I realise I’ve experienced these at greater or lesser intensity throughout my life, but the literature on cPTSD has helped me put a label to them. After reading a few books on trauma I fixed onto an idea – also common to many schools of therapy – that it could be useful to use current triggering experiences to connect back to earlier memories of traumatic events, and to revisit those in some way to loosen their grip.

Being somebody whose survival strategy tends towards the overfunctioning end of the spectrum, I grasped this idea and ran with it. One day, for example, I decided to write down all the traumatic memories I could think of in order to start revisiting them as a regular practice. Needless to say the result of this was not in any way pretty. I’m learning that the only way to do this kind of work is slowly and gently. If you try to push through, or force it, you end up retraumatising yourself and doing nothing to loosen the grip of the habits you’ve developed in order to survive.

Mindfulness

Another example is mindfulness. As regular readers will be aware, I’ve always been skeptical of the mindfulness movement from a social justice perspective, and a lot of my work involves attempting to weave Buddhist thinking and practices together with social understanding and engagement.

However, I definitely bought the Buddhist mindfulness idea that it was generally a good idea to put time aside every day to sit, to notice your thoughts, and to keep bringing yourself back to the present. I figured that should be helpful to enable me to become more present to everyday life, to learn how not to get carried away into reactivity when hard stuff happens, and to notice forms of oppression acting through me and working to dismantle those as much as is possible.

What I actually found was that my fifteen minute meditation at the start of every day ranged from – at best – sitting with my noisy mind carrying me away for fifteen minutes and feeling a bit bad that I hadn’t come back to the present at all by the end to – at worst – taking a fifteen minute journey into precisely how bad I felt about myself.

I’m now reading an awesome book by David A. Treleavan called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness which brings mindfulness into dialogue with trauma-informed therapy and social justice. It’s helped me to make sense of these meditation experiences. As someone with regularly recurring cPTSD symptoms, meditation like this can be counterproductive unless engaged with in a trauma-informed way. In fact many – if not most – people experience some mild to major re-traumatising when they try to just sit with themselves without having any awareness of how trauma works. In pushing myself to meditate every day like this, with the idea that it must be good for me, I think I’ve been making things worse, and certainly not better.

Staying with feelings

A final example is staying with feelings: something that I’ve always been a big advocate of, as you can tell from my zine of this name. But engaging with the work of blogger and trauma-informed counsellor Love Uncommon showed me a vital missing piece of these practices. It’s only a good idea to stay with your feelings when they are in the manageable range. When they have reached a high intensity – or tipped into reactivity – then it is far more helpful to soothe yourself until they are manageable again. As with the other points, trying to stay with feelings when they are overwhelming is often retraumatising and unhelpful, making the feelings more scary and harder to stay with, rather than less so.

A similar thing is true for conflict and staying with each other’s feelings. A lot of people have the sense that the best thing to do in conflict is to stay and hash it out. But if any of the people involved has tipped into high intensity reactivity – or a trauma response – then that is a really bad idea. Far better to take time out, self-soothe, and cool down, perhaps making a time to return to whatever the conflict was about when everyone is in a good place to do so. Staying when one or more of you is in a place of trauma is again a recipe for retraumatising yourselves, acting out your survival strategies in ways that tighten rather than loosening them, and making further painful conflict between you more, rather than less, likely over time.

Other examples

Other examples where people often take a non-self-consensual approach to addressing their mental health struggles would include forcing yourself to go to a form of therapy or support that doesn’t feel right for you, staying with a therapist who doesn’t feel good, insisting to yourself that you must ‘be better’ by a certain point, anything which rests on the idea of ‘pulling your socks up’ or ‘getting over it’, and engaging in any form of self-help which is based on the idea that you are broken and need fixing rather than that you are okay as you are and deserve support.

I’ve also had some interesting conversations with people recently who’re moving away from abstinence and restriction approaches to addressing addiction, self-harm and self-soothing to models where you allow yourself all the things you want, but engage with them consciously and intentionally with curiosity. One person said that any habit that harms us is oppression acting through us, so we cannot and must not respond with further self-harm and oppression.

It may seem paradoxical that some people experience way more radical shifts when they move towards the latter model, but it makes sense from the perspective that progress is only possible when we stop treating ourselves in the way that put the survival strategies or unhelpful habits there in the first place.

The role of fear and shame

Another part of this clicked for me after reading Pete Walker’s book on cPTSD (yes I am becoming a trauma nerd). He puts a lot of emphasis on the fear/shame feeling combo as being the key feature of emotional flashback and also – I realise now – a low level everyday backdrop to life for most of us with these kinds of past experiences.

Related to the idea that we can’t help ourselves using the same non-consensual approaches that hurt is in the first place, is the idea that fear and shame will not get us out of fear and shame. When we’re struggling we often try this kind of approach. We feel that we are bad people for struggling in these ways so we try to shame ourselves into addressing them or sorting ourselves out. We try to frighten ourselves into action by pointing out all the terrible things that might happen if we continue to employ our survival strategies.

There’s a whole additional post to be written about how fear and shame-based strategies don’t work for changing other people’s behaviour in a world where these seem to be the go-to strategies everywhere. Justin and I recently podcasted about this in relation to the fearmongering and shaming responses we’re seeing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fear and shame tend to make people frightened and defensive, and therefore more – rather than less – likely keep right on doing the things you don’t want them to do. The same is true with ourselves when we’re struggling. Like what could be a worse strategy for trying to cure ourselves from fear and shame than giving ourselves a load of fear and shame about our fear and shame. Think about it.

So what can we do?

So what I’m saying here is that if we treat ourselves in the ways that put our survival strategies, habits, or stuck patterns there in the first place this will solidify and tighten them, rather than dissolving or loosening them.

What is the alternative? Well it is a massive challenge within our current cultural context because it involves us treating ourselves – and each other – in the radically different ways which intersectional feminists from Audre Lorde onwards have been encouraging us to do: valuing ourselves and others equally, practicing self-care, sitting with the places in which we are oppressed and victimised and the places where we oppress or hurt others.

Such thinkers also point out that individual and systemic shifts need to happen alongside each other, given our interdependence. It’s hard – if not impossible – for individuals to change their inner landscape if the non-consensual outer landscape remains the same, and the idea that we should be able to do so harms us more. Engaging with others to share our experiences and work collectively is vital if possible.

For me a key starting point is self-consent. I’m trying to slow down my everyday life sufficiently to notice every time I’m drawn to override my self-consent. This is proving easier to notice now that many attempts to do so result in an emotional flashback plummet into fear/shame (trauma humour). But I’m also trying to notice the micro-moments of overriding my consent, the flickers of fear/shame that come up when I do that. I try to pay attention to what happened to elicit that response, to bring self-compassion to the situation to understand why that was my response, and to consider ways in which I might engage with whatever happened differently, in ways that don’t override my self-consent.

Slowness is another key here. This just can’t be done fast. Speeding up inevitably involves pushing through and getting overwhelmed. It’s helpful to tune into when I’m stepping out of my comfort zone into my stretch zone, and ensuring that I pull back into the comfort zone before I hit overwhelm. I was having a lot of quiet nights in before they became the default.

If fear and shame are a big part of the problem, then the solution is the opposite: cultivating protection and care to counter the fear and shame. Pete Walker talks about reparenting yourself and reparenting by committee. Other authors talk about cultivating a compassionate witness within yourself or befriending yourself, often alongside receiving a safe-enough and kind-enough therapeutic relationship to model what this might be like.

I’ll be writing more about how I’ve gone about this from a plural perspective, but basically it’s anything you can do to be kind and protective towards yourself rather than shaming or frightening yourself, and to treat yourself consensually instead of non-consensually.

Useful questions to ask yourself are: ‘what do I usually/habitually do under these circumstances?’ and ‘what would the opposite of that look like?’ You may find that there are several different ‘opposite’ options to play with. They may also be the ‘opposite’ of the experiences that resulted in your stuck patterns or survival strategies.

At this point you can bring those other practices back in. For me it’s not about stopping addressing traumatic memories, meditating, or trying to stay with my feelings. All those practices are immensely valuable, but only if done consensually, gently, gradually, and in ways that feel good rather than bad, and stretching rather than overwhelming.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.

The post The master’s tools and mental health: We can’t get out of our struggles the same way we got into them appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Locating our selves during the Covid-19 crisis

Meg-John Barker — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 15:18:32 +0000

Today is the first time I’ve felt able to post more personally since the Covid-19 pandemic began. In fact it’s the first time I’ve felt able to write this way in the last four months due to the extent of ongoing trauma and upheaval in my life. I’ve been fortunate indeed to have the podcast with Justin which has felt like a safe-enough place to keep doing the kind of work I find most meaningful while I’ve had to be so inward-focused.

I want to write here about how I’m locating myself within this period of crisis and uncertainty. I’m hoping that it’ll be helpful for me to set out what I’m doing – and what I hope to do – as well as being interesting for regular readers to get a sense of what they might expect from me in the coming weeks and months. Perhaps it will also be useful for you to consider doing something like this for yourself: an ongoing – necessarily work-in-progress – manifesto for how you want to treat yourself, others, and the wider world, during this time. If you like that idea I’ve included a series of prompts which I’ve found helpful at the end.

Trauma on top of trauma

Coming into this global emergency on the back of a personal emergency is a strangely double-edged experience.

On the one hand there is a sense of yet another huge earth-shattering thing occurring on top of all the major losses of last year (work, love, home, and my oldest and youngest family members). There can be a sense of intense fragility when one rug is pulled out after another after another. There is fear about what might come next, and shame about having so little to give just when it is so desperately needed: in my families of origin and choice, in my local and queer communities, and in the wider world.

One the other hand, in some ways I feel I may have some kind of a jump on much that people are facing right now. I’ve lived in a state of uncertainty and constant rug-pulling-out for many months now. Of course I need to acknowledge that I have major privileges which are protecting me from some of the worst potential outcomes for now. Although self-employed I have something of a financial buffer and a safe-enough place to live in a town when I have supportive friends. That’s a huge amount in comparison to many and I am deeply grateful for that.

This privilege is enabling me to do a lot of personal practice around trauma, sickness, and loss, as those things occupy by body and mind. Some of where I’ve got to feels revelatory to me: helping me to shift the habits of a lifetime. I’m talking with others who have been in a similar place and learning a lot from them too.

I feel like I’m learning how to live, how to love, and how to work kindly and consensually, for the first time. At a moment when perhaps all of us are being called upon to relearn how we do those things, perhaps I have something to offer from the work I’ve been doing.

Compassion in troubled times

I imagine that many of us are struggling with the question of what we can offer at this time and how to balance self-care and care-for-others. I’ve found this idea from my main teacher, Pema Chödrön to be a useful touchstone. It suggests that there are three kinds of compassion:

Compassion inwards is compassion towards ourselves which is a good and necessary foundation for daily life and also helps us recover – and increase our capacity – when we’re sick or struggling.
Compassion alongside others is compassion where we’re kind to them and they’re kind to us in a mutually supportive way.
Compassion outwards is compassion towards others when we have more to give than them, based on our particular capacity to offer, for example, financial, practical and/or emotional support.

It’s not that one of these is better than the others, it’s about recognising the need for a balance between the three, and also noticing which we need at a particular time, and focusing on that.

After what I’ve been through lately I realise that I’m at a point in my life where the first kind of compassion has become the most urgent, when previously I have perhaps focused on the other two. I’ve acknowledged many of the habits and survival strategies that have carried me through life so far, and how these have harmed me and others around me. It seems vital to turn inwards and address these habits and strategies now so that I don’t keep living, loving, and working in ways that cause harm. So I’m spending a lot of my time on therapy, on reading about trauma and recovery, on journaling, and on practising noticing the old habits come up and doing something different whenever I can.

I’m hopeful that the intense period of going through this process will come to a natural end at some point, perhaps followed by a sense of expansion outwards and having more to offer when it does. It can’t be rushed though. I’m discovering – as I will blog about soon no doubt – that this kind of work (changing the habits of a lifetime!) can only be down slowly, in its own time.

As I do this work though, I can tune into the places where I do have the other two types of compassion available. I ask myself regularly: What kinds of work and relating feel possible without old harmful habits kicking in? How can I live in such a way as to give my best to myself, to others, and to the wider world? For me some answers right now are that, while I absolutely could not hold therapy clients at the moment for example, I can certainly be of help to my writing mentor clients and a few others who I work with in this kind of way. While I can’t do romantic or erotic relationships at the moment – and other relationships with a history of shaky foundations – I seem to be pretty good at kind, consensual friendships, especially when I’m clear about my needs and boundaries.

The alongside kind of compassion feels very helpful to explore, especially given the need for collective forms of care and acknowledgement of our interdependence at times like these. I’m finding it really useful – for myself and for others – to hold sharing circles with friends where we each have time to feel and communicate where we’re at on a regular basis.

My collaborative work with Justin feels mutually nourishing and something that hopefully gives others something helpful. I’m keen to keep exploring with my collaborators – like Justin, Alex, and the Consent Collective – what we can offer together. I’m also keen to keep sharing the work of others who are engaging with this crisis in useful ways.

What do I have to offer?

I hope that this post might be valuable for those needing permission around the limits they’re experiencing on what they can offer at the moment. It’s hard to acknowledge these, but I remain convinced that overriding our self-consent and capacities in order to help others isn’t the way here. I think we’re likely to have much more to give – and less likelihood of offering things that are beyond our capacity or burning out – if we can recognise and allow for this. I’ll also be blogging soon about the idea that the way out of trauma and other mental health struggles can’t be the way that we got into them (i.e. non-consent or frightening or shaming ourselves). I think the same is true for helping others.

It’s vital to acknowledge the enormity of the current crisis and the impact that it will have on many of our lives, particularly those who are already the most vulnerable and marginalised. Within that caveat firmly in place I am interested to explore what might happen – individually and collectively – if we’re able to embrace the changes to our lives and what they can open up, as well as close down.

For those of us who are finding ourselves with more time due to cancellations and more solitude due to isolation, I’m interested in considering how those things might offer an opportunity for knowing ourselves more deeply and befriending ourselves in the ways that are vital in order for us to engage well outwards. Similarly, with so many of us sick, how might learning to care for ourselves and each other during sickness open up capacities for gentleness towards ourselves, and explorations of sustainable systems and structures of care?

On a wider cultural level I wonder whether there might be opportunities here to explore more consensual, collaborative, sustainable ways of relating, working, living, and caring for one another which have been desperately needed for a long time now, but which this crisis brings into stark focus.

What do I want to write about?

Over the last couple of months I’ve written quite a few blog posts which I haven’t yet shared. It seems that whenever I’m publicly open about some aspect of myself and get used to that, some other aspect comes forward which feels even more exposing to share. The latest one is trauma. The regular emotional flashbacks – and the impact these have on my immune system and physical health – feel very old and very vulnerable to write about. I do want to lift the silence now though – if I can – because I suspect many, many people are facing the same kinds of experiences in response to the global and closer-to-home crises they’re living through.

I’m getting a pretty good handle on how I can navigate flashbacks, sickness, and the background noise of fear and shame they leave in their wake. I’d like to share some of this in case it’s helpful for others too.

The other thing I’d like to share more is my plural work/play. Since publishing my zine about this two years ago, and my comic and FAQ last year, it has become a huge part of my life. It’s how I find kindness towards myself and how I navigate trauma responses but – more than that – nowadays it is how I do everything: how I write, how I live my everyday life, how I relate to others.

The current crisis is likely to mean that many of us spend far more time than usual in solitude. Here I wonder if – like the X-men mutants – those of us who experience ourselves as plural systems may have something to offer to everyone else. Many of us already know how to access soothing, caring, protective inner voices to help us through when crisis hits. We know how to ensure that time alone isn’t lonely (one of my selves would joke that you’re never alone with Multiple Personality Disorder, but there is something in what he says). For me plurality has been fundamental in navigating my way through trauma and I wonder if such explorations may be useful for others too. If so I – I mean we – are likely to be blogging about this more, and blogging more as dialogue between us too, so you’ll get to know the whole gang.

To conclude with a note to myself/ves, I would like to continue writing, talking, and reading about:

Trauma and how to navigate it,
Lifting out of fear/shame stuckness,
Dealing with isolation,
Befriending ourselves,
Embracing uncertainty,
Relating with one another kindly and consensually during hard times,
Writing and creating during crises,
How we can go about grieving the inevitable losses of the coming period – feeling the feelings for ourselves, for others, and for the world, and finding connection, compassion, and community between us through that process.

Locating your self during the crisis

You might find it useful to write, draw, discuss, or mindmap a similar piece locating yourself at the moment. It will certainly need to be a work in process that you keep returning to as things out in the world – and in you – change over time. It may well be useful to share this with those close to you, and to invite theirs in return. Here are a few prompts that might be worth exploring:

What was my situation heading into this time? Where was I in my life before this crisis hit in terms of fragility/stability? What baggage/habits/survival strategies am I bringing into this time that might be valuable to look at and address?
What are my specific needs and vulnerabilities during a time like this?
What are my specific skills and capacities at times like this?
What might social distancing and self-isolation open up and close down for me, knowing what I know about myself? How would I like to use any additional time/solitude that I end up getting?
How might I ensure a balance of compassion inwards, compassion alongside, and compassion outwards? What does each of these look like for me? How much of each am I needing/able to offer right now (any answer is okay)?
What ways of working and relating feel possible for me at the moment to do with confidence that I would be able to give my best, and not override my consent or capacity? How might I go about that?
How might I collaborate with others to create sustainable systems of care for myself, them, and others through this time?
What resources might I access to best support me in all of this?

Further resources: Justin and I blogged and podcasted about consent and Covid-19, and about managing stress around the crisis, over on megjohnandjustin.com.

The awesome people at The Consent Collective also put together this resource, Together Apart, for locating yourself at this time.

Patreon link: If you enjoyed this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.

Plural tag: This post was written by Ara.

The post Locating our selves during the Covid-19 crisis appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Embracing uncertainty: What does it really mean?

Meg-John Barker — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:24:17 +0000

An important idea that I’ve come across in various contexts is that of embracing uncertainty. I liked it so much that I ended each chapter of Rewriting the Rules with it, asking myself and the reader what it would look like if – instead of clinging to old rules or developing our own new ones – we embraced the fact that relationships are uncertain and that no one set of rules could ever cover them completely?

I was therefore troubled recently to hear somebody use the idea of embracing uncertainty in a way that was hurtful to their partner. I realised that I’ve been guilty of doing the same thing myself. We hear a frightened partner seeking reassurance and a sense of safety and, feeling limited and trapped by their demands, we point out that life is uncertain and use that as a way out of making any kind of commitment to them. ‘How can we know what’s coming down the road? You need to embrace uncertainty baby.’

Such an exchange can leave us with a comforting feeling that we are by far the more evolved, rational and philosophically sophisticated, person in the argument, as well as absolving us of any sense of responsibility and enabling us to avoid facing up to the pain that somebody we love is feeling. No wonder it is an attractive position.

The last few weeks I’ve been returning to my favourite source on uncertainty, Pema Chödrön, as well as thinking a lot about how it applies to my own life. I want to share some of my ideas about what embracing uncertainty means beyond this kind of basic understanding of life being uncertain (which, of course, it is).

If we subscribe to this more nuanced understanding of embracing uncertainty then we could see it as coming from a place of deep commitment rather than from an attempt to escape commitment. Also, instead of being about a liberation from pain and difficulty, embracing uncertainty becomes about facing up to these things in a way which is both hard and courageous. This is why Chödrön calls it a warrior path.

Going slowly

The first thing about embracing uncertainty is that it takes time. When faced with uncertainty in life we often find it incredibly painful and rush to resolve it as quickly as possible. In the example I gave before, of telling a partner to embrace uncertainty, we are not really embracing uncertainty ourselves. Rather we are rushing to resolve the situation by writing our partner off and denying what they are feeling. To embrace the uncertainty of such a tough situation of relationship conflict we would take the time to really listen: to both our partner and to our own panicky, trapped feelings which are driving our impulse for a quick resolution.

In times of profound uncertainty in life it is tempting to act quickly. We’re having a difficult time at work: quit. Our relationship is in difficulty: break-up. Somebody is out of line: reprimand them. Whether our action involves lashing out or running away, it is a quick response that gets us out of painful uncertainty because we either insist on the rightness of our way of seeing the situation, or escape the situation entirely.

Embracing uncertainty involves being prepared to sit with the situation in all its uncertainty for as long as it takes for us to be sure that we’ve seen it from all angles, and until we know that the response that we have come up with is that which is the most compassionate and ethical possible under the circumstances and for all involved (including ourselves and others).

During the time of uncertainty we need to refrain from acting however tempting it may be to do so. This may also involve asking others to give us the time that we need rather than giving in to their demands to come up with an answer. Thus it can also be quite a socially radical thing to do in a cultural context of quick fixes and immediate responses: being prepared to say ‘I don’t know what I think about this yet’ or ‘I’m not sure how best to respond, let me get back to you’.

Vitally though, embracing uncertainty is not about failing to act at all. Another misuse of embracing uncertainty would be to use it as an excuse for apathy or avoiding doing anything. Instead it is about a commitment to act in the most thoughtful and kind way possible having given ourselves enough time to look closely at the situation.

Leaning into pain

An idea which is frequently mentioned alongside embracing uncertainty is that of leaning into pain. When we take time to embrace uncertainty we are deliberately avoiding our usual instincts to avoid fear and suffering and, instead, determining to turn towards them, to lean into them, to really understand them.

This might sound fine in the abstract but we are actually talking about incredibly hard, messy, difficult work where we will be called upon to look directly at the things about ourselves that we feel most vulnerable and ashamed about. The situation wouldn’t be so uncertain and difficult if it wasn’t touching something deep and painful in us.

Therefore leaning into pain also involves knowing when we need to look at the situation and when we need a break from it to build up our strength . We simply cannot look at the situation constantly. If we do we risk getting so caught up in the tangle of different ways of understanding it that we can’t see it at all. We need to retreat, to look after ourselves, to treat ourselves kindly as somebody in a tough situation, as well as time – when we’re feeling stronger – to lean into the pain.

Leaning into pain involves taking a good hard look at what the situation means for us, what our habitual reactions are telling us to do (Fight! Prove them wrong! Run! Hide!), and why that might be the case. The partners in the example before might usefully ask themselves what they are bringing to bear on the situation. Have there been other times (in their past, in other relationships) when they’ve felt insecure (on the one hand) or trapped (on the other)? What vulnerabilities do they carry from such times? Are they convinced that, on some level, they are really unloveable? Do they believe that they are destined to hurt the ones they love? In what ways do we fear that we are ‘not really okay’ and how is this influencing the current situation?

Whilst leaning into pain can be incredibly hard, the clearer picture that we gain when we face these things that we are so used to running from can bring a massive sense of relief, once we’ve taken the time to really look at them. When we do then have conversations with those involved there is often a similar sense of relief that – however painful those conversations are – they are coming from a place of honesty where nothing is being hidden from view.

Getting off the hamster wheel

The real value – for us – of embracing uncertainty is that it offers us a chance to get off the hamster wheels which we all seem to create for ourselves. Perhaps we are all about gaining approval, or becoming a success, or avoiding danger, or a combination of these and other things.

The ways in which we respond to the stuff of life becomes driven by these motivations such that we find ourselves going round and round in the same patterns. Perhaps we find ourselves taking on a new project every time we get to a much longed-for endpoint. Maybe we burn our bridges every time we get bored. We might realise that we always shy away from opportunities when they appear. Or we might recognise a pattern of pushing relationships to breaking point.

Whatever our (many) hamster wheels, embracing uncertainty gives us the possibility of stepping off temporarily – perhaps even permanently. Slowing down means that we can see the patterns that we’re embroiled in. Leaning into pain means that we can understand better why we do it: what is so fearful that we are avoiding it by running faster and faster, and still getting nowhere.

When we embrace uncertainty we can start to see our hamster wheels and the ways in which they are hurting both ourselves and others. As well as engaging with the current situation in a more thoughtful, compassionate, and ethical way, we have a real possibility of stepping off the hamster wheel and beginning to forge a different path.

How to embrace uncertainty

So how do we actually do this in practice? The answer to this question will be different for each of us. Some find meditation a good way to slow down and lean into pain, others prefer journal-writing or talking things through with a trusted friend or mentor. It’s important to remember that balance of retreat and engagement: we need to build in time away from the situation to see it more clearly. I like to go for a walk in a wide open space where the big sky seems to relieve me from the pressure of the tangle, but retreating too will look different to everyone.

It is certainly worth – in calmer times – thinking through what works for us. How will we notice when we have become embroiled in the tangle? And how will we ensure that we take time to embrace uncertainty and lean into the pain instead of reacting quickly to close it down according to our usual habits?

The post Embracing uncertainty: What does it really mean? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

Suggestions for Fear and Sadness

Meg-John Barker — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:00:28 +0000

In 2010 Darren Langdridge, Andreas Vossler and I published a textbook which brought together experts on all different types of counselling to say how their approaches would work with fear and sadness.

When we wrote the book I thought that it would be great to do another book covering the same areas, for people who are not interested in studying counselling themselves but who just want to know about what different kinds of counselling suggest. As Mick Cooper and John McLeod have recently pointed out: different things work for different people at different times, whereas most books on the market cover just one approach in detail. Maybe I’ll write that book one day, but meanwhile here are what I personally think are the top suggestions from each chapter of the book we did write. If you find them useful of course you can always do the whole module (D240) through the OU.

1 – Introduction

Remember that everyone gets frightened or sad, and everyone also has times in their life when this becomes overwhelming. There is not really an ‘us’ (the professionals) and a ‘them’ (the clients or patients) because all people will find themselves both in the position of struggling and of helping others who are struggling.

2 – Diagnosis

We used the words ‘fear and sadness‘ rather than ‘anxiety and depression’ for the module because there are pluses and minuses to the more diagnostic categories. It can be useful to think about what is gained, and what might be lost, from taking on such labels. For example, they can make it easier to find others who are in a similar situation, to access support, and to feel legitimate in what you’re experiencing. But they can also mean being stigmatised by others or feeling as if you are stuck this way for good. Diagnosis can also be more or less useful for different people at different times, and doesn’t have to be the way you see yourself forever.

3 – Drug treatments and the biopsychosocial approach

People often link diagnosis and medication. It can feel like either you have an illness, you take drugs and therefore it is not your fault that you are struggling, or you don’t have an illness, you don’t take drugs and therefore it is your fault and you should ‘pull your socks up’. That’s a really unhelpful (but sadly common) way of looking at it. We become overwhelmed by fear and sadness for all kinds of complex reasons involving our bodies, our background, things going on in our lives, and the world we live in. Drugs can certainly help some people at some times, but taking them doesn’t mean you can’t do anything for yourself as well. And deciding that you don’t want to take drugs doesn’t mean you are struggling any less or don’t need support.

Interestingly the one thing that everybody we interviewed for this module agreed on (including celebrities like Trisha Godard and Stephen Fry) was that some form of physical activity had helped them immensely. It can be really hard to do when you’re feeling bad, but well worth keeping in mind just how beneficial it can be.

4 – Psychoanalysis

I’m not a great fan of psychoanalysis myself, but the chapter that Ian Parker wrote on this topic for the book was a real eye-opener about the starting points of the ‘talking cure’ of counselling. I loved Freud’s metaphor that we are like those ‘magic slate’ toys which kids have.

When things happen to us it is like writing on the front layer of plastic. Then that gets wiped clean, but there are still traces of the writing on the wax behind that will have an impact on whatever we try to draw next (the lines will get a bit broken and distorted). Freud believed in the value of exploring what there is back there on the wax layer which is affecting us now. And I think that is valuable as we often find ourselves responding to current events in ways that are hugely influenced by what has happened in the past. Making sense of that can help it to feel more manageable and understandable.

5 – Humanistic counselling

A key concept here is empathy. Can we cultivate empathy for ourselves and for other people? Carl Rogers proposed a challenge where each time you speak – in an argument or discussion – you first have to restate the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately and to their satisfaction, before you get to have your say. This might seem a long way from fear and sadness, but many authors are now seeing compassion as centrally important in these areas. If we can learn to be more understanding and kind in our interactions with others we end up feeling less alienated from them, and it also helps us to recognise that it makes sense when we struggle as well, and that we also deserve kindness. When people are feeling really distressed one of the best things they can do is just to make sure that they do one kind thing for themselves every day. It helps to remind them that they are as worthy of kindness as everyone else.

6 – Existential counselling

Existential counselling challenges our common idea that there are good emotions (joy, pride, happiness, etc.) and bad emotions (fear, sadness, anger, etc.) Rather it sees all emotions as important parts of human existence. When we have to make choices we often experience deep anxiety but that is part of embracing our freedom and really living. Similarly there are inevitably points when it all feels too much and we give up and retreat from the world. Existential therapist Emmy Van Deurzen suggests that emotions are on a kind of compass, from happiness (North) through anger (East), down to sadness (South), and back up through hope (West) to happiness again. We move endlessly around that circle – like it or not – so it is worth understanding all those states, and what we get from them as well as what is difficult about them, rather than trying hard to avoid some of them which means we might well get stuck in one place.

7 – Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT)

When we find something frightening or depressing we tend to avoid it, but often that leads to it becoming more scary or saddening rather than less so, and we can then become quite paralysed. Our world narrows as more and more things seem difficult. A very basicCBT idea would be to gradually approach the things that scare us rather than avoiding them (starting small and working our way up). Another useful CBT technique is to pay attention to the little negative thoughts we have throughout the day – like an ongoing commentary – maybe noting them down as we are aware of them and challenging each of them. Is it really realistic? What alternative explanations are there? Is it useful? How might I think about this differently?

8 – Mindfulness

Make a little time every day just to sit somewhere peaceful and breathe. The idea is to be comfortable without distractions and just focus on the sensation of the breath going in and out of your body. You will find that you keep getting carried off on thought processes and distracted by sensations and that is absolutely fine. Just notice that it has happened and bring your attention gently back to the breath. Notice how the thoughts and feelings bubble up and then pass away again eventually if you don’t get too stuck to them. The idea in mindfulness is that if we practice doing this regularly we will start to be able to bring the same accepting awareness to whatever is going on in the rest of our lives.

9 – Systemic counselling

The fear and sadness we experience feels like it is inside us and that there is something that we need to do individually to change it. Systemic counselling proposes that actually much fear and sadness is really in between people, in families, relationships, and groups of work colleagues. Think about your own dynamics with people you are close to: do you tend to bounce off each other sometimes in ways that leave one or more of you feeling bad? A nice exercise from systemic counselling is to take some different shaped stones or modelling clay and make a model of your family or group, representing each person as an object, and where they are in relation to each other, by the way you position them. Then you can move it around to show how you would rather it was. This can help you to be aware of how the dynamics in relationships can get stuck and also how they might shift.

10 – Sociocultural issues

Similar to systemic counselling, sociocultural approaches remind us that a great deal of our fear and sadness are about the culture surrounding us and how we are viewed within it. Being marginalised is strongly linked to experiences of distress, and we all occupy multiple sociocultural positions (in relation to race, gender, sexuality, age, class, (dis)ability and so on). It can be useful to reflect on which position you are in on all of these dimensions and what the assumptions are ‘out there’ about people like you. Do your experiences of fear and sadness relate to those assumptions at all? Are there ways of sharing these with other people who are in a similar position?

11- Context and setting

This chapter was all about counselling over the phone and online. One idea from it was to write about a time when you were feeling particularly sad or frightened – noting down what was going on and how you felt about it – without thinking about it too much. This was really an exercise to think about how people express their emotions online or over email, but actually researchers like Pennebaker have found strong evidence that writing regularly about our feelings is hugely beneficial. Private blogs and personal journals can be a helpful way of doing this.

12 – The therapeutic relationship

This chapter explored how different types of counselling involve different relationships between the client and the counsellor. Many people who decide to go for counselling don’t realise how many different types of counselling there are, and how they will all involve very different kinds of relationship and quite different focuses. I wrote a bit about the different counselling approaches here. It is definitely worth thinking about what would work for you and asking counsellors about their qualifications and approaches before committing to it. You should always make sure that they are accredited with one of the major bodies (e.g. BACP, UKCP, BPS). If in doubt, ask.

13 – Outcome research

As well as finding out about what approach might suit you, it is also worth checking out the research that has been done into the kind of counselling you’re thinking of going to. Mick Cooper’s book on this topic is very accessible if you are interested, and even online searches can give you some idea of whether the kind of counselling you’re considering has been found to be helpful for the kinds of issues you have. However…

14 – Process research

…perhaps the main research finding about counselling is that all of the main approaches (covered in this book) are generally about equally effective (with some exceptions like CBT being particularly good for simple phobias). According to the research, a good relationship between client and counsellor is one of the main things which predicts how useful counselling will be. So it is worth shopping around for someone you have a good rapport with. If you are accessing free counselling it is still okay to ask for a different counsellor if you don’t feel a good relationship with the one you have.

15 – Conclusions

There is always a risk with going to a counsellor that this will reinforce the idea that many of us already have that there is something wrong with us that needs fixing. Our commercial culture is very good at giving us a sense of anxiety about the things that we lack, and selling us products to relieve this anxiety. In this culture it is all too easy to think that we are not good enough. Therefore it is important to remember that going to get some support or talk through what’s happening doesn’t mean there is anything inherently wrong with you, and also remembering that counselling is just one of many ways of thinking things through, looking after ourselves, and getting support.

Find Out More:

My Staying With Feelings Zine has a lot more about approaching fear and sadness.

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