Awesome Writers

The Tarot of Tuesday’s Emotions

I was indulged with several readings at a coffee shop on Tuesday morning by a gifted friend in JC who is studying tarot. The reading I’m going to talk about here is a 5-card Life Purpose spread that is telling me a lot about emotions, which is delightfully aligned with the Constellations topic for Winter 2025. Here goes:

Card #1: II Wands (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies how I’m really doing right now. The fact that it’s reversed tells me something about surprise, wonder, enchantment, emotion, trouble, and also fear. What Jessica Dore says about it in her book, Tarot for Change, is that this card has to do with staying stuck in a wrong situation to avoid the disappointment of something not living up to what my fantasies about it were. It’s about how one walks away from such fantasies, and back into flow; into what really is. The two wands represent a doorway of sorts. Each wand, or staff, represents an aspect of this particular moment in time. One staff rests on a battlement (war, suffering, chagrin), and the other is fixed in a ring (riches, fortune, magnificence). The picture is worth a thousand words. The man in the image holds a globe in his hand, and he’s standing in front of a stunning vista that is apparently his domain. Will he focus on the replica or the real thing?

Card #2: VI Swords (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies what I am really good at. The fact that it is reversed speaks of declaration, confession, and publicity (proposal of love). According to Jessica Dore, this card is about breaking old patterns, which involves being honest about how I may be actually choosing things that bring me suffering and connecting with the fear that lies at the heart of that choice. This requires that I be willing to do what’s necessary to bring my attention to the emotions that I have for so long avoided (with good reason). This exact location, Dore says, is where the pattern can be broken.

She compares what happens in this realm as “driving a bus of monsters toward what matters to me.” The huddled figures on the raft that is crossing the water could represent self doubt, self criticism, feelings of inadequacy. The card, she says, points at the act of moving through inner obstacles on our way toward what is personally meaningful. Hell yeah. I’m good at that. That’s what I do. “Fear is not just a thing to be tolerated, but in fact an indelible part of living in alignment with what’s precious.” “Fear is the cost of admission.” Accepting fear as part of who I am, my mantra moving forward could be: I am willing to take a new route if it’s a better one. I am willing to grow.

Card #3: King of Cups – This position in the spread signifies what my purpose is, right now. (It is not reversed.) This card showed up in several places during the morning reading extravaganza, and each time it was upright, which tickles me no end. Cups, it appears, have to do with emotions. And as I well know, emotions appear to defy logic. Dore says that the cups suit is about delineators. “To understand water is to give oneself over to its currents, instead of trying to put it into containers with labels.” This card signifies, she says, that we’ve talked and reasoned and prepared enough, and now it’s necessary to drop into the water itself. And according to this spread, this is my purpose, right now. Go figure.

“People in cultures all over the world in geographic isolation from one another have generated and told stories with motifs and characters that echo or resemble one another since time out of mind. Queens belong to the realm of imagination while kings belong to the domain of will. But for King of Cups – King of Imagination – will looks different.” Here we see a more receptive application of will, or active acquiescence. So my mantra might be: I am prepared and ready to do what is required in order to accept and stay afloat as the waters rise. Luckily, the card tells me that I have the competence to find resolution where others have been unable to.

“Emotions are often passed down through generations until they reach someone who has the right set of resources and abilities to resolve them. Clearing a space for them to emerge, unfold, and find full expression.”

“The King of Cups protects the rights of emotions to have and experience the full cycle of life: to be born, to have a safe space to fully express and to die, eventually.” Emotions have a beginning, a middle, and an end (unless, of course, we clamp down on them to keep them from moving through, or otherwise repress them).

“Knowing this helps us to become willing to actually feel what we feel. Humans can endure more pain when they know it’s time limited.”

“This is the way an emotion makes its way out of an individual, out of a family, and ultimately out of a bloodline. And so if you are feeling something big and deep, consider your kingship.”

My takeaway from this card: I have the tools and temperament to usher the thing through once and for all, and this is actually my purpose now.

Card #4: II Swords (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies whatever might be getting in my way. The fact that it is reversed speaks of Imposture, falsehood, duplicity, disloyalty. Swords are the domain of thought. I have long been aware that I rely heavily on my mind. This card tells me that I can use my intellect to my advantage and that I have skill at this. But it also signifies that it is my mind that can get most in my way. Fears of imposture, duplicity, disloyalty. Working with this card demands that I continually examine which thoughts I give weight to, and which ones I choose to speak out loud. It asks me to be exquisitely aware and present when I speak about who I am and what I desire right now. This has been a particularly important aspect of my life right now, as my identity shifts and morphs as I step more fully into these roles in my life that acknowledge and honor even more of me. Dore also points out that this card is about honing knife skills, which involve cultivating a bit of cunning.

In staying in contact with what one knows to be true, Dore says, sometimes you need to lift your head up, roll your shoulders back and act like you know. Here’s an interesting line from this chapter: “I’m too scared to admit what I know, or to do what knowing requires of me.” And keeping the blindfold on (not making a decision) can be protective when it’s not the right time to make a choice.

“We form an alliance with ourselves by choosing narratives that are supportive and empowering rather than disparaging. If you wouldn’t describe a friend who was hesitating to act on what they know to be true as ‘confused’ or ‘lost’ maybe don’t talk about yourself that way either.” I really appreciate this.

Card #5: Ace of Cups (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies how I can love myself so I have the energy to fulfill my purpose. The fact that it is reversed speaks of mutation, instability, revolution; House of the false heart. This card was exactly what I needed during this time, as my focus is on emotions; on seeing and dealing with them newly. I have not known my emotions well enough to name them, much less to be true to them, but I am willing to grow from here. It is the work of a lifetime, making good enough friends of our bodies so that we can access what is alive in us in the moment.

Ace of Cups represents “House of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance, fertility; Holy Table, felicity hereof.” In this chapter, Dore talks about how psyche is something we exist within – it’s bigger than our physical body. She points out what mystics have known for centuries, that internal and external life are linked. As this card shows up in a spread, it might be asking, What is my environment expressing through me?

This card is also linked to the High Priestess, and the practice of contemplation (as the creative process of coming into dialogue with other forces such as emotions). Breaking down the roots of the word contemplation, she points out that “The prefix con-, meaning ‘with,’ tells us that it’s a collaborative process, and templum, the Latin word for temple, connotes a sacred space where a deity was believed to reside.” And so to contemplate is to engage in spiritual dialogue, which, like all dialogues, is going to involve both speaking and listening.

This card encourages me to slow down enough to listen. “What you’re listening for might be an invisible force, like that of helping spirits, energetic currents, or a Higher Power. Or you could be listening for something concrete, like a river over rocks, birdsong, a groundhog’s rustle through high grass. This way of being in a receptive relationship with what surrounds us seems difficult for modern people of the West to understand. We think in terms of the individual, the hero, the character who performs tasks and overcomes obstacles.

“But the cups, in addition to being emotional, are also symbolic of a certain receptivity, as a cup receives water. Receptivity implies relationship and asks us: What would a more relational way of engaging with our surroundings look like? What would happen if we reoriented the imagination toward a way that sees the self both as dreamer and that which is dreamt?

“Could we make room for the possibility that what we feel and experience in the flesh house of the body is not always rooted in a private individual experience, but comes from an ecosystem to which we belong? What if, for example, rather than seeing ourselves as taking a walk through the woods, we see ourselves as being a wave of energy rippling through the consciousness of a family of redwoods? How would this change the way we move through the environments we dwell in? How would it change the way we relate to our experiences?

“Emotions are how we understand our raw experiences, not in an evaluative or judgmental way as with intellectual understanding but rather as an intuitive, felt, cellular-type knowing. The trick – and what’s taught in many behavioral therapies – is learning to suspend action for long enough that this kind of knowing can move through us.

“In her Dear Sugar column, Cheryl Strayed once advised a reader, ‘Don’t own other people’s crap.’ And I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. To understand the cups suit, we have to get clear on what aspects of our experience even fall into the realm of ownership. For example, my behavior is something I can ‘own’ or be accountable for, while other people’s behavior is not something that I can or should. But with emotions, it’s not always clear who ‘owns’ them. I’ve woken up heavy with the boulder of my grandmother’s grief on my chest, breathed deeply while sweating from the fire of my mother’s rage, and I could say, ‘That’s theirs, not mine,’ if I wanted to, but what good would that do? Emotions are living energetic currents with life cycles of their own. They tend to survive down the vertical and horizontal lines of human relationships – through generations, through communities – until they arrive to the place where they can be fully experienced and expressed. That can take a while.”

I’d better stop before I owe Jessica too much for using her material, but I think you get my point. My reading was a blessing, as is Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance & Growth. Maybe I’ll put you in touch with my tarot reader friend, too, if you want. She’s amazing.

I’m on Retreat

and I’ve told many people that I’m taking time alone. I explored a niggling worry back in the deep recesses of my mind about whether I was making best use of this time; taking my retreat seriously enough. So far, the answer is a deep and resounding YES. It’s felt divinely guided. It doesn’t appear that anyone (ethereal or visceral) wants to punish or even scold me for sidestepping my isolation for an evening with friends and family the first day or driving to St. Louis to be with a friend getting medical results on the second. I’m thanking my lucky angels for all of it. It’s all as it should be. The sunshine warmed me as I ate my Ethiopian leftovers (yesterday). Today I put the finishing touches on the wonky tarot reading we didn’t finish on Monday. This morning I’ve typed up the notes I wanted to share from Sarah Peyton’s hardback book. Feel free to check that out here. It’s just so juicy, so relevant and so comforting. I finished reading Your Resonant Self Workbook, in bed yesterday morning. I hiked to the creek at the bottom of the hill twice yesterday, the second time with paper and matches so I could build a fire, sit back and read from another great book.

In a nutshell, here’s the tarot reading. I drew 3 cards from a traditional tarot deck and am referring to Jessica Dore’s book Tarot for Change, with some of my personal story interwoven.

4 of Cups – Throughout my young life, I had been resistant to taking the good stuff that was being offered to me. Somehow I couldn’t see it. I was too hurt and sad and angry.

9 of Cups Reversed – wish fulfillment, contentment, victory, success. Reversed it speaks of Truth, Loyalty, Liberty. To accept what we want requires us to also accept the pain of not having it. This card is asking me to articulate my desires from THAT place. This retreat is the time to turn inward and care for feelings I haven’t had the courage to look at before. What do I want to acknowledge and validate so that I can heal and grow beyond it?

As a 22 year old I just wanted what I was taught to want. So as a married adult woman, living with a husband and a child for 4 and 2 years, respectively, I was entering a place where I had to decide who I really was, and what I wanted from my life. As an 18 year old, I hadn’t been able to imagine anything else but being a mother and a homemaker. But that wasn’t working out so well. As my then husband complained, I was just so predictable. My higher self was urging me to try something else. And so I did. Boy have I learned a lot about desire since then.

Words of compassion from Jessica Dore: “Not knowing what you want is often rooted in things that weren’t your choice and aren’t your fault.”

It’s okay if I’m still trying to figure out who I am and what I want. It’s okay if I’m still learning to make a good wish.

4 of Pentacles – Crowned figure, Pentacle over the crown. Clasping another pentacle over the heart. Pentacles under both feet. Holding very securely that which I have. (knowledge, concepts, ideas). Pentacles in general signify physical behavior.

Jessica Dore looks at this card through a different lens: “Transcending and accepting limitations or blocks through the physical body. Moving stuck energy through the body via breath and gaze with gentle curiosity, not force. Reframing and perspective shifting = storytelling. When we relate differently to something, we tend to behave differently around it. Stories don’t mirror life, they shape it.” – Mary Van Hook, a social worker

The simple fact of identifying a block means movement is happening. Hitting a wall is not a bad thing. It helps you know that you need to find a door or a window by changing course slightly or drastically. Or dig a tunnel.

Calling something a block or a limit or a challenge “is a protest in itself, a statement or declaration that you’re not okay with being contained in this particular way and you most certainly do not plan to shape a life around some limitation that really doesn’t need to be there.”

Learning to live in harmony with blocks. My body has areas of stuckness and limitation. Which attitudes and narratives are most effective for clearing blocks? And for learning to live better with them? The pentacles at the crown block awareness. The pentacles at the heart block connection and understanding. The pentacles at the soles of the feet block action.

“With any kind of block, the first task is to be present enough to notice that it’s there – whether it be physical, behavioral, energetic, emotional, or psychological – rather than either avoiding it altogether or trying to muscle through it.”

It’s not dangerous to investigate blocks. But when I do it, I need to do it with gentleness, giving myself full permission to back off anytime it gets to feel like too much.

Noticing the block is something to celebrate. That’s when I know I’m ready to do the work.

Poke around. Find the malleable parts. The parts that have some give. Where transformation can happen, little by little.

Super excited to see what the rest of my retreat will bring. I’m here until Friday!

Tarot Reading for Today

This spread perfectly describes my takeaway from a recent Constellations Circle. Absolutely love Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change

Six of Cups The intellect sifts out what is true; the will reaches out for what is good. But there is a third dimension to reality: Beauty. Our whole being resonates with what is beautiful. When we experience beauty, we start to speak about emotions, and the more we are touched on an emotional level, the more we seek to celebrate the experience, and it’s there that we begin to create ritual. Benedictine Monk David Steindl-Rast writes that all rituals have to do with, and celebrate, belonging.

The tenderness of the image on the Six of Cups cards tells a secret.

What if, all I’m trying to do here is to create rituals that have the potential to mark, preserve, and facilitate a return to emotional experiences that are sacred to us?

To feel safe is sacred.

To be soothed is sacred.

I am a lover of beauty and belonging. I am a lover of deep emotional resonance. I am just trying to recall some sacred feeling.

I am exploring new ways to recall those feelings – and new rituals for feeling safe and soothed.

Page of Wands: Childlike Enthusiasm, Innocence, Wonder, Youth. Knowing absolutely what I like and don’t like. According to James Hillman (along with Bert Hellinger): We each come into the world with a calling.

There is something (apart from nature/nurture) unique about each of us – a part of our being that is connected to our “daemon,” which was similar to the Roman concept of genius: Something that you are, that you have, that is not the same as the personality you think you are.

Mythologist Martin Shaw: as adults, too many of us have become “heavily defended against experiences of our own beauty.”

What do I love?

What captivates my attention?

What grips me?

What lights me up? What claims me?

Invitation to reconnect with something raw and original within us, something many of us relinquish as we cross the threshold into adulthood.

My specific calling is never far from reach.

Wands show me how to protect the spark and keep it safe so that it can warm me, and also warm whole villages.

Nine of Cups

Values Clarification. If I’m going to do the hard work of change, what will make it worth it? A life compass. Am I moving toward or away from what is precious?

Knowing what you want is deceptively challenging.

Exploring what we desire can be hard because:

Often the physical reality of our lives doesn’t line up with what we desire.
- To accept what we want requires us also to accept the pain of not having it.
Identifying what’s personally meaningful and articulating desires from that place is often in and of itself a whole healing process.
Making a wish sounds like fun until you realize you have no idea what you want. Until you realize you’re not even sure what it feels like to truly want something and are not convinced you’d know it if you felt it. This experience of finding a void where a wish ought to be can be profoundly distressing.
Not knowing what you want can bring up shame. “I’m 60 years old. I should know who I am by now.”

Making a wish might be hard because:

Your feelings were constantly invalidated, so you don’t trust your own sense of what you like and long for.
You’ve experienced a lot of frustration trying to get your needs met in life, which makes it difficult to want to try. Feeling hopeless about or quickly shutting down anything you have an inkling of really wanting is how you’ve learned to feel safe.
The people you relied on in childhood were unpredictable or erratic, so you developed the skill of scanning and tending to other people’s needs at the expense of your own needs as being necessarily dictated by the needs of others, so it’s hard to untangle them.
You developed a protective strategy commonly known as perfectionism, which means you organize your life around avoiding contact with any potential indications of being inadequate, defective, or unlovable. Wishing for or trying new things is a direct threat to that defense.
When you were growing up, no one around you had any coping skills, so you didn’t get any, either, and instead you carry an intense fear of the feelings that come with wanting something and not getting it. Fused with a belief that those feelings are unmanageable, the stakes of having a true wish are simply too high.
A heart’s desire sprouts from a sense of self that’s sturdy enough to have preferences independent of external factors.

There are so many factors that go into the maturation of a budding sense of self, and probably infinite ways to botch it, so even though adolescence is technically the time when we are “supposed” to be doing the work of figuring out who we are and what we like, there are enormous swaths of us doing it in all decades of life. And we’re often doing it not just once but over and over again as the conditions of our lives change, and with them, our wants and needs.

Sometimes, learning to make a good wish is the work.

Credit goes to Jessica Dore, author of Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-care, Acceptance and Growth

What we Really Want – Redux

A new look at what can be accomplished in groups.

In my travels I’ve met people with varying opinions about bamboo. Some love it. It grows fast. It’s tough and strong, durable; doesn’t break down for a long, long time. For this reason, it is a good choice as a renewable resource. A woman I met in Mexico told me she was dedicated to removing bamboo that had been planted and become a nuisance. She teaches people what can be done with bamboo, and she finds new homes for the plants when she can. So inspiring, the things people find as their calling in life.

I was thinking about this woman when I was working in a new garden patch in my back yard. Last fall, I decided to reclaim a patch of earth from a particularly stubborn, tenacious grass that grows back there, which has been serving to cover the ground quite well for decades, requiring nothing but sun and rain and an occasional trim. But I decided to put in a garden, with watermelon, basil, parsley, mint, greens and tomatoes. And now I am face to face with this plant – grass, bamboo’s second cousin – that has root systems deep and well established, intertwined and strong and formidable. It meets the blade of my shovel like iron. It snickers at my attempts to remove it. So I get down in there with my hands. I can find the roots when I get under them, when the soil is damp, and when I’m not in a hurry. Exerting myself in this way, connecting with dirt and plants really does something for my soul.

In the office, I’ve been fielding more requests for support groups and other types of groupwork. That is where a lot of my creative energy has been going as of late. The pattern that is showing up in my one-on-one work has been the particularly tough, entrenched impact of intergenerational trauma that is blocking real progress and growth in the lives of my clients. It shows up as stubborn and tenacious and sometimes appears impermeable to change.

The feeling is of being really mired in something that keeps sucking one in. It’s requiring me to take a different look at the way I can offer myself in service to them. Just so you know, it’s always mutually beneficial because my clients always mirror me and help me move through the processes I desire to work through as they do their work, and they always inspire me, whether they realize it or not.

I’m noticing that this new shift in the work I’m called to do demands a new level of humility. It demands that I continuously search out new resources. I am pushed to continually search for the right tools, and to make care for myself a sacred priority.

The really good thing about this is that the kind of trauma my clients are bringing to me these days responds to Systemic and Family Constellations Therapy.

And that is what I want to tell you about now. Here is a brief description, in case I haven’t already shared this with you. Over the next weeks, I plan to share on some various themes that I’ve come across in my studies as I’ve been working toward certification. I’m proud to say that yesterday I completed and submitted my application for Advanced Certification as a Systemic and Family Constellations Facilitator. I also bought and planted those herbs and greens in my little garden patch, and now it’s raining. I look forward to seeing what comes of this new vision – of working with others in groups to make real shifts in our experience, to removing obstacles to our being truly generative, vibrant, and expressive of who we came here to be. I hope they have a short acronym for Systemic and Family Constellations Therapist Facilitator, Advanced!

Here’s the certificate!

My most recent vision is this:

To more powerfully perform from a place of embodiment so that I can stimulate and support the change that is desired; to collaborate with others to bring about not just a quick fix but transformation in the felt sense of people that I work with – that we finally know what it feels like to be held, to be supported in community, and believe that there is Something Bigger that we can lean into. And that joy and peace are our natural state, and that it is available to us in these bodies on this earth. To know what it feels like to be supported to move toward what we want, what we desire, what we need to make this life truly matter. And to celebrate all the movement (large and small) toward this goal.

Playing With Subtle Energies: Explaining the Unexplainable

Hello Friends,

Many years ago I was introduced to this mysterious, powerful, and beautiful therapeutic modality called Family Constellations. Immediately fascinated and enchanted, I sought out a group or a therapist here in the Midwest, and had my own constellation done. I had to drive all the way to Sedalia, MO and the group that assembled there was quite small, yet still powerful. That therapist has since passed on, and I’ve moved forward in my life as well. In Mexico, I learned that Family Constellations work is extremely popular, and most of the therapists I met had been trained in it, use it in their therapies, and many offer regular groups. In 2013 I attended a 5-day “congress” about Family Constellations in Acapulco, Mexico, attended by a huge number of people, with speakers from all over the world, and my adventures south of the border kicked off that way – in the realm of the magical, Explicando lo Inexplicable (Explaining the Unexplainable). I began attending these groups in Guadalajara as often as I could. Often they brought me to tears, even in Spanish, because they worked with something much older and much more powerful than words. And I could feel things shifting and reaching greater integration in my body, a deeper, very resonant feeling that my problems are not so unique, and that so many of them have been passed down, from past generations. In the world of Family Constellations, things can be put right though. Repairs can be made, and it is a truly beautiful and awe-inspiring thing.

I’m telling you about this now because I have a desire to play with the subtle energies of this therapeutic modality, and as I am still learning how groups in general work, I won’t be charging what most constellators charge. And I want it to be available, even for people who have limited resources. Contact me if you want more information, if you think you and a few people in your community might like to set something up. We need anywhere from 8 to 18 people, and a place that is quiet and large enough for us to move around in.

I can see how my exposure to Family Constellations as well as my training and background in CranioSacral Therapy both shape and affect my EMDR practice, and I now use a kind of hybrid of all three with my clients. We have started a constellation group in Columbia and our first four circles have been extremely powerful. Having the ability to take my work into a group context excites me no end. I’ve included a couple links so you can check it out below. Let me know what you think.

https://www.ulsamer.com/family-constellation/family-constellations-according-to-bert-hellinger/

Rupert Sheldrake talks about Family Constellations and the morphogenic field. You may want to Google that topic and follow your own curiosity.

The swirling blue on white figures in the image I include with this post make me think of the “as above, so below” phenomenon that we see in nature, and the correspondence between different planes of existence. Here, I almost see both the neurons that make up any living organism (or a brain!) and the humans that make up any living community. The design was part of the 2013 Constellations Congress I attended in Acapulco.

Learn about the Zulu origins of Family Constellations here.

Transformational Spring Reading – Hold Me Tight

I have been thinking about belonging, and the various points in my life when I felt I more or less belonged. At this particular phase where I live a rather secluded life due both to personal choice and the more recent COVID-19 pandemic, all of my attention is going toward taking care of my most basic needs, I set up my daily schedule so I can get all of that important self-care stuff in like I never have before. My house is set up so it can be as efficient as possible. If I didn’t make a concerted effort to do it, I assure you, it wouldn’t get done.

The quality of my life, of my future, depends on how well I meet my basic needs. This was also true when I was an infant. Like all infants, I had many needs and obviously a good many of them were met because I survived, right? I am here writing this blog post. But as I am getting more clear on my unmet infant needs now, my home was set up primarily to meet everyone else’s needs because either they were providing the income necessary to put a roof over our heads or because they were attending to one urgent emergency after another, juggling financial hardship and probably postpartum depression, leaving me not feeling particularly safe or cherished. The home was not set up to make sure that my unique needs were well met.

I have more clarity about this today because of a book I’m reading called Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, by Dr. Sue Johnson (a little hint as to what I was needing and not getting). The book’s basic premise can be summed up with an acronym, A.R.E., which stands for Accessible, Responsive, and Emotionally Engaged. The level of belonging I felt in my family of origin was directly proportionate to the degree to which I felt that my caretakers were accessible, responsive to my needs, and able to emotionally engage with me.

The quality of my relationships and my adult life have been a reflection of the absence of the accessibility, responsiveness and emotional engagement that nobody but me was even aware of. Through this lens, I can finally see what it was that caused me to create relationships where I did not feel connected or safe. And now that I am in the process of parenting myself well, I am experiencing what it feels like to be safe and connected, if only to myself. And it is with great joy and anticipation that I can say that I feel as though a whole new world awaits me. As a result of the ongoing dedication I have to caring for myself well, and books and other resources such as this, I am broadening my vocabulary, my capacity to experience new things interpersonally and educating myself about what is possible when we feel truly attuned to, and are accessible to our tender selves, responsive to our own needs, and committed to staying emotionally engaged with ourselves – uncomfortable emotions, vulnerable needs and all.

I see a very different life opening up for me, where the dialogue involves a whole lot of listening to and paying attention to what delights me (even if that sounds silly or selfish), and at the same time offering myself an environment that provides safety, along with the structure and tangible practicalities that are necessary to meet the more typically recognized needs like adequate rest, good enough hygiene, sufficient exercise, hydration, routines that ensure that my spiritual needs are met, human connection and remedial care that my body requires after a lifetime of neglect. A lifetime of not being sure that I was the kind of person who could get attuned to, responded to, and emotionally engaged with – at least with a parent or a primary partner. Holding it all together on the outside is a very different thing from feeling that sense of safety and true belonging on the inside that is a result of strong bonds and healthy intimate relationships, whether it is the mother-infant dyad or the couple who knows how to stay calm and listen and offer assurance when his or her partner is experiencing intense emotions or an automatic reflex that harks back to an earlier traumatic moment.

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love, by Dr. Sue Johnson is a godsend. It is just the material I needed to catapult my healing work forward. I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to experience more depth, connection and oxytocin in intimate relationship.

“…once distressed partners learn to hold each other tight, they continue reaching out to each other, trying to create these transforming and satisfying moments again and again. I believe that A.R.E. interactions turn on this neurochemical love potion honed by millions of years of evolution. Oxytocin seems to be nature’s way of promoting attachment.”

– Dr. Sue Johnson in Hold Me Tight

Attached – A Book Review

Attached. The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love. By Amir Levine, MD, and Rachel S.F. Heller, MA

I found reading Attached to be a tasty experience. So tasty in fact, that I read it again before putting it down. It was very much like eating a cookie. I raced through, devouring each crumb, excited to have found a book on attachment so easy to read; that the authors so clearly had researched and taken due diligence to present. I learned a great deal while reading it, not just enjoying each nibble, the richness of its texture and balance by myself, but I also shared and reflected with other people – therapist friends and relatives who were reading it alongside me. How exciting to see such a phenomenon as attachment come so fully onto the public stage in such a palatable form as this! And by the time I had read it twice, I felt myself changed somehow.

Since I am a psychotherapist, I found that Attached gave me heart, and a good many angles through which to enter the topic of relationships and help my clients move toward deeper intimacy and satisfaction in theirs. Equipped with these tools and this knowledge it is easier to emerge from past failures with a sense of hopefulness and courage to try again.

I have always been intensely interested in relationships. Long before I became a social worker or a psychotherapist I was devouring literature on intimacy and connection. And as a person who has failed at relationships enough times to write ten books, I am especially grateful for Levine and Heller’s book. I believe that it provided exactly the right ingredients and precisely the right texture and crunch. I no longer identify as one of those poor, insecurely attached blokes who are not relationship material.

After finishing Attached for the second time and taking a separate, two-week webinar on attachment with my sister, and beginning to follow another phenomenal relationship, intimacy and dating expert, Ken Page, I can now say, with some certainty, that I am not as dysfunctional or broken as I previously thought. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that I have a predominantly secure attachment style. And yes, I was missing the cues that could have saved me so much time and heartache, had I come across this book decades ago.

What I’d like readers to know is that if they’ve failed at relationships, it may not be because they are jerks or incapable of empathy or are somehow broken. It’s because they are still acquiring the basic skills to recognize a healthy, life-affirming relationship and what it actually feels like to be in one.

The thing I find missing in virtually all of the popular approaches on dating and intimacy is the concept of the emotional flashback, which should not be confused with attachment style, though does contribute to many of the behaviors this book talks about.

As you learn and grow and partake of the popular literature, make sure that you don’t over-identify as an avoidant or ambivalent or disorganized person. What happens to me, and it may happen to you too, is that the prospect of new love, and the hope of connecting deeply is so moving and so tantalizing that I can lose my balance if I am not adequately caring for myself and tending to my important needs. Intimacy serves as a portal into our deepest wounds, for better or worse, and as we become more mature connoisseurs of sweets, we gain important tools and discernment about which desserts leave us with a belly ache and which ones actually leave us feeling stronger, more ourselves and deeply, truly satisfied.

Difficult Women – Book Review

Roxane Gay’s title, Difficult Women, speaks to any woman who has felt difficult to love. I had long since owned that title and studied the qualities that made me “difficult” in relationships. I had searched tirelessly to identify the conditions to which I might attribute this unfortunate state of affairs. So when my sister, the day before her wedding, gifted me this book and began to explain her intention, maybe for fear that I would feel labeled or defensive, I waved her off. Thank you! I told her. I love it already. Gay’s writing pulled me in from the very first paragraph. Her voice captures all the ways women might be considered difficult in intimate relationships yet at the same time looks deeper at who they are and why. We come out of this reading experience so much richer for having explored these stories with her. They are fiction – products of Gay’s imagination. But for me, each is a window into a rich and ornate chamber of its author’s mind. This book leaves me so much richer, with a stronger sense of how a woman might be loved well, even if temporarily. It leaves me with a broader vision of how a woman can allow her difficult self to be loved and why that might add value to her life. It leaves me with a clearer personal understanding of the complexity of myself, love and relationship and the natural grit and beauty of coupling in its infinite forms.

And I feel a little less difficult after having read this book.

Other books by Roxane Gay I plan to read:

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

An Untamed State

Bad Feminist

Ayiti

& several comic books in Marvel’s Black Panther: World of Wakanda series

“I vigorously encourage women and people of color to be ambitious, to want and work for every damn thing they can dream of. We’re allowed to want, nakedly, as long as we’re willing to put in the proverbial work….I am ambitious because I love what I do, not simply for ambition’s sake. Ambition is what allows me to take creative risks and try things I never thought I could do. Ambition makes me a better thinker and writer. Ambition makes me.” — Roxane Gay

The Body Keeps The Score – Book Review

One of my favorite things to do is reading good books. I finished reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score some months ago, but it has taken me a while to report on it. Besides having gleaned 25 pages of quotes, I’m feeling the need to go back and re-read the whole thing. This was a book of serious ahas. Van der Kolk is himself a survivor of early relational trauma – a fact of which he was unaware until well into his professional career. Currently the Medical Director of the Trauma Center in Boston, he is also a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School and serves as the Co-Director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress Complex Trauma Network. You can read more about him here.

“Trauma,” says van der Kolk, “drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.” Its effects are profound and lasting when it occurs before we have language to describe it or even hope to get the help we need. But, “like a splinter that causes an infection, it is the body’s response to the foreign object that becomes the problem more than the object itself.”

I love this book because Van der Kolk gives me words for things I had no idea how to talk about before. And he validates suspicions that have nagged at me for decades. For instance, when I was 24 and had already ditched my first husband and abandoned my three-year-old son, I was puzzled by the lack of pain I felt. What was wrong with me, anyway? I had many explanations, some of which had to do with depression, being clueless about what I was going to do with my life, and feeling incapable of caring well for a small child while trying to do all those things that I had been taught that a husband was supposed to do. Van der Kolk calls this “Numbing.” In describing what one survivor of developmental trauma experienced, he says, “He desperately wanted to love his family, but he just couldn’t evoke any deep feelings for them.”

Numbing may keep us from suffering in the short-term, but long-term is another matter. “…though the mind may learn to ignore the messages from the emotional brain, the alarm signals don’t stop. The emotional brain keeps working, and stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize in collapse. The physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice when they are expressed as illness. Medications, drugs, and alcohol can also temporarily dull or obliterate unbearable sensations and feelings. But the body continues to keep the score.”

“After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their life.”

The seemingly endless path of breadcrumbs leading me back to my own trauma included my status as “stimulus seeker.” Though I am most likely on the mild end of this spectrum, survivors of trauma don’t feel quite alive if they aren’t in the middle of some kind of chaos. Says van der Kolk, “Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.”

“That is why so many abused and traumatized people feel fully alive in the face of actual danger, while they go numb in situations that are more complex but objectively safe, like birthday parties or family dinners.”

All of this is determined at a very physical level. “If an organism is stuck in survival mode, its energies are focused on fighting off unseen enemies, which leaves no room for nurture, care, and love. For us humans, it means that as long as the mind is defending itself against invisible assaults, our closest bonds are threatened, along with our ability to imagine, plan, play, learn, and pay attention to other people’s needs.”

Among van der Kolk’s research-based conclusions (and things to think about as you consider this idea he’s calling developmental trauma):

Exposure to stress relieves anxiety.
Addiction to trauma may be characterized by the pain of pleasure and the pleasure of pain.
Immobilization is at the root of most traumas (your heart slows down, your breathing becomes shallow, and, zombielike, you lose touch with yourself and your surroundings).
It is especially challenging for traumatized people to discern when they are actually safe and to be able to activate their defenses when they are in danger.
All too often, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with distressing physical reactions associated with repressed emotion.

Real healing, he says, has to do with experiential knowledge: “You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.” Here, EXPERIENCE, not UNDERSTANDING is what we need.

“…neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.”

Treatment

“Treatment needs to reactivate the capacity to safely mirror, and be mirrored, by others, but also to resist being hijacked by others’ negative emotions.”

“…the great challenge is finding ways to reset their physiology, so that their survival mechanisms stop working against them. This means helping them to respond appropriately to danger but, even more, to recover the capacity to experience safety, relaxation, and true reciprocity.”

Mindfulness, or the ability to hover calmly and objectively over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions, is one of the primary tools van der Kolk teaches his patients. This ability allows us to then take our time to respond,” he says, which “allows the executive brain to inhibit, organize, and modulate the hardwired automatic reactions preprogrammed into the emotional brain. This capacity is crucial for preserving our relationships with our fellow human beings.”

Increasing “interoception,” or self-awareness, is another important feature of recovery, van der Kolk says. “Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming ‘spaced out’ or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization. And also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning.”

Noticing and then describing what they are feeling is a process van der Kolk helps his patients learn. He begins the process by helping them talk about what is happening in their bodies, “not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on.” He also works on “identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure…their breath, their gestures and movements.” He asks them to “pay attention to subtle shifts in their bodies, such as tightness in their chests or gnawing in their bellies, when they talk about negative events that they claim did not bother them.”

“…many programs (that try to help traumatized people) continue to ignore the need to engage the safety system of the brain before trying to promote new ways of thinking,” van der Kolk says. He provides some ways to engage this part of the brain in his book. Among them are:

Yoga
Theater Programs
Breath Exercises (Pranayama)
Chanting
Martial Arts
Qigong
Drumming
Group Singing
Dancing

“Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms. Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe….Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.”

A few more nuggets I thought you might appreciate:

While you need to be able to stand up for yourself, you also need to recognize that other people have their own agendas. Trauma can make all that hazy and gray.
(As infants) our most intimate sense of self is created in our minute-to-minute exchanges with our caregivers.
Children’s disturbed behavior is a response to actual life experiences – to neglect, brutality, and separation – rather than the product of infantile sexual fantasies.
Our lives consist of finding our place within the community of human beings.
Babies can’t regulate their own emotional states, much less the changes in heart rate, hormone levels, and nervous-system activity that accompany emotions.
Learning how to manage arousal is a key life skill, and parents must do it for babies before babies can do it for themselves.
Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help.
Kids will go to almost any length to feel seen and connected.
Traumatized parents, in particular, need help to be attuned to their children’s needs.
Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing.
Early attachment patterns create the inner maps that chart our relationships throughout life, not only in terms of what we expect from others, but also in terms of how much comfort and pleasure we can experience in their presence.
It’s not important for me to know every detail of a patient’s trauma. What is critical is that the patients themselves learn to tolerate feeling what they feel and knowing what they know.
Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions.
Eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.
Social support is a biological necessity, not an option, and this reality should be the backbone of all prevention and treatment.
As long as people are either hyperaroused or shut down, they cannot learn from experience. Even if they manage to stay in control, they become so uptight that they are inflexible, stubborn, and depressed. Recovery from trauma involves the restoration of executive functioning and, with it, self-confidence and the capacity for playfulness and creativity.
In order to recover, mind, body, and brain need to be convinced that it is safe to let go. That happens only when you feel safe at a visceral level and allow yourself to connect that sense of safety with memories of past helplessness.
Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past; it is just as much a problem of not being fully alive in the present.
Antipsychotic medications such as Risperdal, Abilify, or Seroquel can significantly dampen the emotional brain and this makes patients less skittish or enraged, but they also may interfere with being able to appreciate subtle signals of pleasure, danger, or satisfaction.
As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself. Hiding your core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy, it saps your motivation to pursue worthwhile goals, and it leaves you feeling bored and shut down.

I highly recommend this book.

Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.

Timing Is Everything – A Book Review

Nonviolent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg is one of those books you see on the shelves of people who are serious about effective communication. Everywhere. I kept seeing it. But when I picked it up it didn’t speak to me. Now I know why. What broke the ice, I think, was reading the NVC Workbook, by Lucy Leu, which was incomplete by itself but was enough to motivate me to try Marshall’s book again.

I was already mid-epiphany in my personal life – regarding noticing that when I got analytical, critical, judgmental or when I started comparing myself to others I was actually feeling vulnerable underneath – when I came across this passage:

“Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others are needing and not getting. Thus if my partner wants more affection than I’m giving her, she is ‘needy and dependent.’ But if I want more affection than she is giving me, then she is ‘aloof and insensitive.’ If my colleague is more concerned about details than I am, he is ‘picky and compulsive.’ On the other hand, if I am more concerned about details than he is, he is ‘sloppy and disorganized.’”

That helped me solidify my epiphany and make it a regular part of my mental health maintenance. Now, when I notice myself judging, comparing, criticizing, or analyzing, I can stop and gently ask myself: What might I be feeling vulnerable about? Underneath all this chatter, might there be a story that wants to be told? What, from my past, is this reminding me of?

Marshall Rosenberg is quite a revolutionary, and as it turns out, he’s an excellent writer too. His book explains how people can communicate with one another more effectively by using a lens of compassion – turning feelings into desires and needs. Looking back, the reason I could not access his message from the very first time I picked up the book was that I was still very confused about what my needs actually were, I was not clear enough on who I was to be in touch with what I desired, and I was completely cut off from my vulnerable emotions – that is until they built up so much that they overwhelmed me, and I lost control.

When you are at the right developmental stage, this book is a virtual jewel. I’ve been digesting it since I finished it in March, when I was on the beach with my daughter in Cuba. Here is another snippet:

“It is my belief that all such analyses of other human beings are tragic expressions of our own values and needs. They are tragic because, when we express our values and needs in this form, we increase defensiveness and resistance to them among the very people whose behaviors are of concern to us. Or, if they do agree to act in harmony with our values because they concur with our analysis of their wrongness, they will likely do so out of fear, guilt, or shame.”

When we are alienated from our needs, like many who experienced early relational trauma, we were not encouraged to have a strong sense of self, or we were shamed when we overtly expressed our desires or unpleasant feelings. What’s tragic about this is that when we are alienated from our needs, we are deprived of what we most need to grow socially and emotionally: sustained human connection. As Rosenberg points out, “…the more we are able to connect our feelings to our own needs, the easier it is for others to respond compassionately.”

In modern, Western society, women are particularly vulnerable to being socialized to put others first. As Rosenberg says, “Because women are socialized to view the caretaking of others as their highest duty, they have often learned to ignore their own needs.”

Safe human relationships have been shown to be the most powerful tool for helping people overcome early relational trauma. These relationships can be built in a therapy setting, but are just as powerful between people who have an adequate level of recovery, adequate attunement with their own feelings and needs, and the language to talk about it.

I’d like to create contexts where people can practice with others this skill of connecting feelings with needs, and communicating in ways that others are likely to have compassion for them, instead of feeling assaulted by their neediness or negativity. This often happens to people who have unresolved early relational trauma, and when others respond to their judging, complaining, or neediness by defending, retaliating or distancing. This sadly validates their early programming that people cannot accept them with their vulnerable emotions and backlog of unmet needs. Validation might feel good, but as they say in Al-Anon, “Would you rather be right or happy?” Nonviolent Communication is a book that offers a framework for blasting through the early programming, and forging authentic connections between people, organizations, and nations.

“All criticism, attack, insults and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message….behind all those messages we’ve allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being.” Rosenberg believes this applies to everyone. And his ideas are now being taught in mediation trainings all over the world.

(Former United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold) “The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is happening outside.” Rosenberg says that “If we become skilled in giving ourselves empathy, we often experience in just a few seconds a natural release of energy which then enables us to be present with the other person.”

Rosenberg’s Four Steps to Expressing Anger

Stop and do nothing except breathe.
Identify the thoughts that are making us angry.
Connect to the needs behind those thoughts.
Express our feelings and unmet needs.

I highly recommend this book.

Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion. Encinitas: Puddledancer Press, 2000.