The Beginning

There is something that happens when your system settles into a place that it trusts. A place it doesn’t visit often, but it knows the way you know the creaks in the floor of the hallway upstairs in your childhood house, or who is coming up the stairs by the sound of their footfall. Your body knows this place, relishes this place, seeks this place out despite our greatest efforts to be anywhere but there.

It is a quiet place, this settling. It is nourishing and peaceful. And if you stay there long enough you begin to see that there is something even beneath the quiet. Some steady pulsing, slow and rhythmic, like the heartbeat of an ocean you once knew. The quieter you get, the louder it becomes. Maybe it starts in your solar plexus, beneath the quivering you feel just below your sternum. And slowly it spreads from here, spiraling outward until even the furthest reaches of your pinky toes feel full of this pulsing, feel full of presence.

And this fullness then begins to grow, to push out, to expand the boundaries of your body that you once thought were so solid. But in fact, here you are in this minute, growing, expanding. And in this expansion you feel a strength, a force moving beneath the pulsing, filling up these new boundaries. You push, stretch, breathe, fill your lungs and feel that center point of the spiral soften to allow for more depth, more expansion. It is courage, yes, but deeper than that even, it is a trust in the strength that is coursing through every cell in your body. It is a trust in your ability to repair. It is a trust in your ability to inhabit your body. It is a trust in your inherent resiliency.

This, my friend, is a trust in your deepest capacity – for growth, for healing, for movement, for love, for repair, for presence. This is home and the fullness of your existence.

Radical Validation

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” - Carl Rogers

It’s raining today. A soft shower that soaks an already saturated ground. Winter in Portland and I’m finding that once again this external world is so aptly reflecting my internal world. Saturation has become commonplace these days: a soaking through of concepts, ideas, theories, and ideologies. The life of a graduate student, I suppose.

I ride the bus in to my office in the city, a half hour respite during which I do nothing but stare out the window and listen to podcasts. Recently, a story on This American Life gave me pause. It was a story about a young woman who had been sexually assaulted. In the course of the investigation, however, many people (including those closest to her) expressed doubt as to her truthfulness. So much so that the case was eventually dropped. To add insult to injury, she was then accused of false reporting. I won’t get in to the conclusion, which is both satisfying and disheartening, but hearing this story made me think about an article I read on the Existential Therapy approach to trauma. One of the main principles of this approach is Radical Validation.

I read this article, nodding along vigorously and underlining with wild abandon, until I came to this section. Radical Validation. It is not that I don’t agree with the concept, far from it really. It is that I am saddened and surprised that entire articles need to be devoted to a concept such as radical validation. Have we really become so afraid of wounds (ours and others), so obsessed with doing something that entire articles need to be written about the importance of validating someone’s experience, the importance of honoring someone’s story without immediately trying to shy away from it, shame it, or deny it?

I do not believe in a top down approach. I am egalitarian to the core. Maybe it’s my Libra tendencies, this need for equality. Or maybe it is simply that I believe that everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has an experience and just because I may disagree with their experience doesn’t mean it’s not true. And beyond that, even if factually it is untrue, our brains are so complex that the line between reality and fantasy can become so blurry, so fuzzed over that it can be hard to distinguish between the two. And yet, we don’t take the time to listen to one another. We spend our time crafting our response, rather than hearing what someone else is saying. We prepare our defenses or design our own stories, without really paying attention to what is happening for the other person.

To have radical validation we first need to listen, really listen to one another. This listening doesn’t mean we have to agree, it just means we are willing to sit and hear another’s story. We all have our wounds. And we all hurt and mend in complicated, sometimes unfathomably damaged ways. But when we listen to one another, we give those wounds a chance to breath. We stop digging at them; we stop making them deeper, more entrenched. We see one another, in all of our pain and complexity. And we pause here, in the listening; we sit in this still place together just for a moment. It is here that we see each other, here that radical validation occurs, here that we can say, “I see you. I hear you.” And in that brief moment, even if only for a breath, the nervous system can settle, the defenses can quiet and for that one moment we can stop working so hard at damming up our traumas and pain.

Carl Rogers, the daddy-o of Person-Centered Therapy said it so precisely, “I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person. So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person's inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?” 

Beneath the theories and techniques and speculations on mental health, mental illness, and psychology lies one seemingly inalienable truth: no one gets out unscathed. Trauma, suffering, grief, heartbreak, these are unavoidable realities of this existence. Can we wear our scars and battle wounds as doors to compassion? Can we not shy away from the immeasurable grief that accompanies this existence, and instead invite it to the table, listen to it, allow it a space of full existence, and in such a process wrap it in scarves and shawls of compassion?

I have a solar powered prayer wheel that sits on my desk. It spins at any amount of daylight. It spins even when it’s cloudy and raining, as if, even today, it knows that there’s something else beyond this persistent soaking rain. That sounds about right to me. 

The Stenographer

It goes like this.

There is a stenographer in my brain, a small creature with wiry hair and a bit of a hacking cough and a nervous habit of tapping its fingers whenever they’re not busy taking notes. This stenographer’s job, its only job, is to record every judgment passed by someone about someone else. That’s right. Making note of critiques and judgments that I have heard people make about other people. This stenographer does a great job of this recording and each one gets filed away. When the moment calls for it, when I am trying to make a decision or acting on an idea, this stenographer flips through a never-ending file-o-fax containing every note they have ever taken and tells me what to do. Is this making sense? My actions are policed, I police my actions, based on judgments made about other people. I think the idea here is that if I make note of that and don’t do whatever that person is being judged for, then I won’t get judged. It’s clever, really, that I have hired this stenographer. Technically they have been working for me for longer than I can remember, but I’m fairly certain that there was a day sometime in my past when I decided it would be a good idea to put out a want-ad and take care of this. But the thing is, that while I’m pretty sure they came on board to help filter and help me figure out how to function in our world, they have gotten really loud at this point. They are there in nearly every moment, thumbing through old recordings, a chirping voice in the back of my head saying “don’t do that” “don’t say that” “don’t wear that” “don’t write that.” They have gotten so good at recording all of the judgments that it seems I have very little lee way left, there isn’t much that someone I know (oh believe me, myself included) hasn’t passed judgment on.

But the interesting thing about this is that none of these are judgments directed at me. It feels, in some way, like I never got the rule book but everyone else did and so I’m just taking notes as I go along from what I assume is this rule book that everyone else has. In fact, when a judgment is directed at me, I don’t often internalize it, at least not in the way that I do for all of these.

And because curiosity seeps from my pores when anything related to the human condition arises, this tendency of mine made me pause and wonder, and then dig a little deeper. And I came up with this. Sometimes the intelligence inherent in our beings is so profound, so brilliant, that I am humbled and astounded and reminded that the day-to-day workings of my mind have got nothing on the intelligence of being human. Here is what is happening, here is why the stenographer got hired: they keep me safe. It’s as simple as that, and also one of the most complex pieces to navigate when it comes to our mental and emotional bodies. I am not going to get in to the chemical explanation of what is going on in my brain when the stenographer is on the scene – I don’t know neurobiology or neurochemistry well enough to do that justice. But, at the core, this stenographer is trying to keep me safe. They are using this litany of information, all of these past judgments and experiences that have been experienced by others to tell me what is safe in this moment. Now, typically the way the nervous system engages with the world is by reacting to present stimuli based on past experiences. And yet, for some reason, my nervous system is basing this not only on my past experiences, but also on other people’s – specifically the ways that induced shame in other people. And so, in the simplest distillation of this, the stenographer is doing their damnedest to keep me from being shamed, or more precisely from feeling shame. You see, shame shuts us down. Shame shuts us up. Shame keeps us small. Shame enables us to be controlled, to surrender our autonomy and power. Just ask Brene Brown, she’ll give you an ear-full about what a powerful weapon shame is, how destructive it can be. And fear of shame is certainly a logical way to try to avoid that weapon.

So, as the stenographer wields fear to fend off shame, I dive deeper into the mechanisms at play controlling my actions. Fear is necessary and important. Fear is good and useful even. I don’t think it is about being without fear, but instead the opposite. I think it’s about being with fear. Sitting with it, listening to it, honoring it sometimes. And then also letting courage sit in on the conversation. I don’t believe in fearlessness, I believe in courageousness. I have long said that I admire people who can devote themselves wholly and completely to their craft. This is true, but I think what’s more is the courage that it takes to express yourself in a way that is then open to criticism. To put your heart in the hands of the world and trust that even if they break it you’ll be ok. That silencing your heartbeat is not worth saving yourself the pain of heartbreak.

My favorite writers are those that write because that is what their cells are calling for them to do. They write in ways that don’t make sense, they write stories that are entertaining only to them and a handful of people. They are self-centered. We are all self-centered. Writers perhaps more than anyone else, because what is writing if not a personal exploration of what it means to be human? Our own experience of it. Even if that experience is from the perspective of a being not even closely resembling us, it is still us. We are in every character, every sunset, every image painted upon the page of the most mundane and sublime moments in life. My favorite writers are fierce in their courage. And graceful. They are honest. They create because they can’t not.

And I write this blog and one of the voices in my head is a strong one about “who wants to read your ramblings?” How self-centered of me to think that these revelations are things that people want to read? But, the truth is, I don’t expect that you do. I write because that is the way my heart beats. I write because it helps me make sense of those days when nothing makes sense. I write because I am a recorder. I write because this is fleeting and so am I and writing is the only way that I know to slow down and get quiet with the moment. I write because it is my meditation. I write because the words come to me and I have to put them somewhere. And this damn stenographer has gotten so good at telling me what words to put where and what to listen to and what to silence. But, the more I listen to the stenographer, the harder it is to hear the words. The more I have to work to sit down and open up. They are messing with my creative juju.

I write this for you, because maybe you know what this feels like, maybe you know a stenographer somewhere in your mind, or an inner critic, or you did get that rulebook and have been trying to burn it over and over. I write this to ask you to keep painting, to keep singing, to keep running, to keep building, to keep dancing, to keep moving your body, to keep growing. It is rare, in fact, that a sentence comes from my fingertips without someone specific in mind. But mostly, I write this for me. I write this because it scares me to. I write this to invite fear and courage to sit at this table together with me. I write this because it feels vulnerable and shaky. I write this because the stenographer is telling me not too. It is too cliché, it is too vulnerable, it is too honest. Yes. I think this is the most honest thing I have ever written.