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I'm not sure where she got the idea. I'm not sure if she knew what she was asking to do when she asked. Without even knowing it, I knew she was on to something. All I can ask for is that it saves her from turning out her light. I hope it saves her from letting someone else tell her that she needs to be quieter, dimmer, less bright, muted somehow. Silenced.
I hear the stories everyday. Sometimes the age varies. The context usually varies. The players vary, although it's usually initially an influential member of the family. It's usually in relation to someone who has a much louder voice and the ability to control others through fear. Their control is often passive and from the outside can even be seen as kind. That, of course, makes it even more confusing and harder to spot. So those who suffer learn to suffer in silence. Their voice gets smaller and smaller. Where does it start? Can it be stopped early enough so as to not move through life having to always work on confidence? How do you create presence? We know to look for it in early teenagers. We know to stop and try and cultivate self-esteem in the pre-teen. Is that too late? I know the stories I hear start before those difficult teenage years. The supportive system needed to survive the teenage wasteland was already too many steps away by then. Having a five year old has opened my eyes to a thousand things I would have never thought about. Her quiet voice when trying to tell someone what she needs has been a thought at the back of my mind. I quietly tell myself it's something she will grow out of. But, how? Why would she? I try not to blame myself for her shy tendencies as it is. How can I help her without drawing attention to her quiet voice in a why that suggests she should feel bad about it. It's a fact that we are telling children to be quieter as much if not more than we are telling them to speak up. I can see how she can get confused. Standing there listening to her recite her 'magic words' at her second karate lesson I saw something. I saw the part of her that needs to earn her confidence. I saw how early on she needs to be empowered to be loud, to be proud, to feel strong, to feel presence. She needs to be able to own her own light and shine it bright. Here's to hoping she gets to build that foundation and instead of curling her shoulders forward, huddling over she can stand tall and say, 'mommy, I am here!'.
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After years of trying to control my world by having a tight six pack abdomen, I've come to realize my real power comes from filling up my belly, letting my gut hang out and leaning in to the experience before me. With that comes breath, relaxation, and a power to conquer the world. --
If you read my facebook post the other day you'd think that I had finally hit a great milestone in my eating disorder recovery. That's not exactly the case. I moved past my eating disorder years ago. The experience I had that led to my post was a milestone that happened on the back of a horse. What led me to that milestone was a complete implosion on the back of a horse. A few years ago something changed. Up until then I thought I was pretty fearless. Certainly a number of factors were at play, but what I watched manifest inside my body was a physiological response to fear that I could not control. My mind could be aware that the fearful thing I was predicting had an equal chance if not better of not happening. My body, on the other hand, was trying to freeze. It would have been better if my response to fear was to fight or even to flee (which it did try sometimes). I've spent a lot of my life holding back and being afraid. I've constricted those muscles and my experiences. It manifested most with Sparrow because it held in the moment consequences. He imploded or I imploded, then I imploded or he imploded. I stopped breathing. I drew up, constricting my breath and my presence and he learned to hold his breath, draw up, constricting his presence with the power of refusing to have faith. I never blamed him. We went from nearly conquering the world- at least, what was going to be the height of our world- to falling. Nothing in life is linear. The ideas that there is a predictable order is a fallacy. It's a prevalent fallacy among obsessive-compulsive folks. The idea that control can diminish fear instead of realizing the idea that we can hold fear in our hands is the utmost illusion. Yet, instead of trusting... instead of leaning in... instead of letting my belly hang out open to what would come, I started sucking back. The problem was it didn't stop on the back of a horse. It began to happen everywhere. That's the power of what we do. We rarely do anything in a vacuum. We do it on a grand scale, even when you can't see it. It's powerful. It's in our essence. We look down. We shut down. We don't speak up. We hide. We stay home. We run away. We listen to what's inside our head. We allow ourselves to be bullied emotional. We suffer the physiological consequences and physical manifestations of turning off our light. But, who's the bully? It's not you. It's not them. It's me. I control looking someone in the eye. I control riding to that fence with my belly full of air, full of essence, full of faith. I control the volume and the channel of what's in my head. My future is what I what it to become. With my belly hanging out, I want it to become all that I can achieve. What I can achieve is not up to anyone else. What I can achieve is a product of what I want to deliver to the world. It's not about what the world is trying to deliver to me because running away and hiding from that never taught me how to manage those moments and make them work. It's the working that life is about. In the land of Vikings and sea monsters being highly tuned into your environment is just called survival of the fittest. Have you ever considered what kind of stock you come from? If you are descended from Dog Beard and co. odds are that you could feel the vibrations of a moving sea monster above sea. If you couldn't you wouldn't likely have many descendants around today. The necessity of a having a highly tuned fight or flight system was of complete essence. But all this begs why in the heck are we talking about sea monsters and vikings?
While so much around us has evolved the human body hasn't evolved hardly at all. What this leads us to a body full of systems that are set to survive harsh environments. Those who couldn't feel the vibrations of the sea monsters quickly perished at sea. The response to use fear to attack, to flee, to fight meant survival. But what does it mean today? What happens when you feel the vibrations of the sea monsters? Living off of a full throttle parasympathetic nervous system (the one that helps fight sea monsters) is more than just a little distracting and it leaves us searching for sea monsters to fight. A sea monster today can be anything that we have decided is out to get us- it's our programming if you have made it from hardy stock. Sometimes it's a sound outside the window. It's a distracting smell. It's a voice inside your head telling you that your pants are too tight. It's a look from someone across the way that you are convinced is about you. It's that nagging feeling you have that someone is going to be disappointed in you. All of those things used to be sea monsters and they were something to fight off. Most of our fighting today has turned into freezing. Most of us as women were taught that it's not becoming or lady-like to fight. We've learned to freeze and fight within ourselves. We blame ourselves. But what if it's just a programming designed to fight sea monsters in a sea monster free zone. Sometimes we are closer than we think. Sometimes we exert way too much energy making things way more complicated than they need to be. Sometimes we focus too much on the wrong part of the equation trying to control the outcome. Sometimes all we need to do is to apply a little pressure and follow up with a little confidence. Sometimes all we need is a horse to teach us all these things in less than an hour.
I'm always a little surprised what happens in the arena. I'm a little surprised how hard it is for me to sit and watch waiting for the lesson to happen. That's when I realize how hard it is for me to be a co-therapist instead of THE therapist. I'm grateful that Sparrow humors me. I usually forget how difficult tasks are in the arena for most people because most people haven't spent over 300 days around horses every year for the last twenty years. A simple lunging exercise turned out to be way more difficult and illuminating than I had planned for. Of course, everything that happened was exactly what needed to happen. Couple dynamics are fascinating. Giving two people something to do that neither have any experience in can bring up all kinds of nasty messages. It's a pretty quick way to see what a couple does in their 'real world' without the censorship of self-report getting in the way. The session starts with a decision to try the task together with the option being to pick one or decide to go at it as a team. Going at it as a team is significant in some obvious ways. Watching to see how hard each works to solve the perceived problem illuminates some pieces that may be a little less obvious. With the first half of the session the over-functioning part of the couple is clearly over-functioning. Sparrow isn't moving a whole lot and neither is the other half of the couple. It's amazing how hard people will try and get a 1200 pound animal to do something. It takes a lot of effort and energy. The over-functioning side of the couple is also only about three steps from heading in to treatment. You can answer for yourself if she should be the one spending the most energy. She's also not willing to address that she shouldn't be running and dragging a 1200 pound animal. Regardless, it's clearly not working and the over-functioning one feels stupid, depleted, and frustrated. The help she's getting from her team is marginal. While she's focused on dragging Sparrow around she's hardly engaging him and focused on solving the problem as the answer was defined. She keeps looking to the arena for the answer. The answers are rarely that external of ourselves. At this point ignoring the third party in the room but expecting it's participation is a mistake. You have to learn to take some power over Sparrow if you want him to do what you need him to do. The eating disorder is usually the third party in a couple that no one is really talking about. Facing Sparrow created a great deal of fear- even before the connection was made that he represented her eating disorder. In fear we tend to fight, flight, and freeze. A simple redirection to focus on applying pressure to something if we want it to go away and there is a lot of freezing. It's hard to have confidence when you don't know what's going to happen. It's hard to commit. It's also important to realize that we are closer to the answer than we think we are. Even when we aren't. It's the willingness to commit to believing that makes the difference when we are too often willing to give up after only a few tries. We give up when we are tired, depleted, frustrated, and feeling stupid. We listen to these words more than the words that tell us we are over the hump, close to the end, or more than halfway there. Committing to ourselves takes a lot less energy than trying to control a 1200 pound animal. |
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