Tag: healing

Airing the Wounds Out

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“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” – Winston Churchill

My kids and I spent the weekend with my brother and sister-in-law. Sitting around their semi-circular teak dining room table with a padded bench seat, I was reminded about a conversation we had there about a year ago.

“My mom said I should go find another mom,” My daughter said to my brother and sister-in-law. It was all I could do to not explain but because they are wise, they teased out the story from her. She was having a fit that seemed to be part of what came with being four because I wouldn’t let her do something. It had been going on for a while (it seemed like a fifteen minutes although it was probably five) and she said, “I’m going to find a new mommy, a nice one.” and I said, “Go!”

In the months after it happened she kept bringing it up and part of me died in shame whenever she did. She’d mentioned it a few times to just me and I’d apologized profusely. “I said something that I shouldn’t have because I was angry and frustrated, Sweetie” I said over and over again but then it came up again with two of her most trusted other adults. I sat there listening and they talked through it.

Listening quietly to that unfold was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. But love did two things as I watched. It held me silent, knowing that unpacking the hurt for my daughter was far more important than defending myself. And I also felt held by the love of my brother and sister-in-law. I could trust that they know me well enough to know my strengths and weaknesses and all the care I put in between.

In the year since that conversation, my daughter has never brought up that comment again. My silence allowed my daughter to talk about her hurt without it being compounded by feeling ashamed to talk about it. In addition to eating great meals of delicious food, there are so many things we’ve done at that table in my brother’s living room – colored pictures, worked on crosswords, celebrated birthdays, had long conversations about life, reviewed the fun of the day. But now I add to that list – relaxed into our imperfections and healed mistakes.

Unplugging the Chain Reaction

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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” – Rainier Maria Rilke

Yesterday as I was meditating, my daughter came downstairs and interrupted me. She said she was scared about school. Given that it was only her 3rd Monday since in-person school started, it’s not a surprise. But my meditation time is sacred to me. I’ve found essential in helping me fill my pool of grace for the day so after I held her for a moment, I told her she could snuggle on the couch while I meditated. After a couple quiet minutes, she asked what I was reading. I didn’t answer. After a couple more quiet minutes, she said meditating reminded her about the small greenhouse they made at school. Instead of finding my calm, my whole system was on overdrive. I felt protective over my space and time that have so little of. I felt angry that I’d gotten up early and couldn’t even control my own experience for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe I let her be there in clear violation of the rule to wait until her clock turns yellow and then she made it about her.

And then when I reached that last feeling, the one about her making it all about her, I realized I had just lit up like a string of Christmas lights as my meditation teacher, Deirdre, likes to say. I connected a single experience with a whole chain reaction that had mostly to do with my ex-husband. He was a master of taking something that I wanted to do like hiking and make it all about him. He’d say “Let’s go!” But then he’d say we couldn’t drive to far so he could be back to watch a golf tournament on tv. And then he’d dilly dally getting ready because he couldn’t find his favorite socks. Then we’d finally get into the car and he’d need to stop so he could get a double-tall latte. When we finally get hiking, he’d go about half a mile and say he didn’t want to go much farther because he didn’t want to be sore the next day.

While I assume it’s completely natural for a 5-year-old to make things all about her, it was a tiring for a 30-something man to do the same. But what interested me about yesterday is that nine years after I ended that relationship and many years since lost its hold on my heart and mind space, that something simple could light me up like those proverbial Christmas lights. AND that it could do that while I was meditating to restore inner calm is the ironic icing on the cake.

The only fix I have is to unplug the string. To see the trigger and in recognizing it, steal its power. My daughter and I have been reading Harry Potter. They have an incantation, “riddikulus” that turns something scary into something funny. And maybe in doing that, I can reach a new level of meditation, one where I can do it when everything isn’t calm and quiet but even a little unsettled as well.

Healing the Divide

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“In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.” – Albert Einstein

There’s a divide that runs right down the middle of my family of origin – I call it tree people and forest people as inspired by the phrase “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” The tree people are so good at details that they are the ones you want to invite if you need help painting a room or weeding a patch of garden. The forest people are generally better at navigating the ups and downs of life and are the ones you want to invite when you need advice or help troubleshooting a systemic problem. Even with different perspectives, we managed okay until a tree person sued a forest person. Now it’s hard to see that we all stem from the same ground.

So I’ve thought a lot about the root cause (pun intended) about the pain in my family. And when I read the following passage about belonging in Brene Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness, it resonated as the real reason that my family is divided.  

“Even in the context of suffering – poverty, violence, human rights violations – not belong in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth. It broke all three for me. And when those things break, there are only three outcomes, something I’ve borne witness to in my life and in my work:

1. You live in constant pain and seek relief by numbing it and/or inflicting it on others;

2. You deny your pain, and your denial ensures that you pass it on to those around you and down to your children; or

3. You find the courage to own the pain and develop a level of empathy and compassion for yourself and others that allows you to spot hurt in the world in a unique way.

Brene Brown

My dad was a Presbyterian pastor and so the church defined our lives growing up. Amidst all the wonderful things that came with the church community – friendship, values, service and faith, came an unfortunate side effect of an expectation of conformity to an image of a good Christian kid. As the youngest kid, I think the inferred expectation of having to be a living example was much lower or it just didn’t phase me but I imagine that it was harder for my siblings. As such the feeling of not belonging because they didn’t fit the precise mold began early.

I think about this a lot with my kids. As a side effect of being at home together in this year of pandemic, although sometimes feeling cramped, we have enjoyed the luxury of more time building the base of belonging. Now with schools opening up and more activities available, I am both relieved to see my kids start to branch out and concerned with keeping that feeling of deep connection going. I saw some great advice posted by Tina Payne Bryson, co-author of The Yes Brain: How to Cultivate Courage, Curiosity and Resilience in Your Child: “If you are a parent of a baby or toddler, then I have two big tips for you: 1) Delight in your child. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but find time every day to truly delight in them. 2) Take care of yourself. You matter, too.” It’s great advice because when I delight in my kids, I’m present and celebrating who they are and it not only works for my toddler by also my 5-year-old.

I don’t yet know whether my kids are forest people or tree people. Seeing my family’s experience has taught me that I’m willing to work hard to ensure that my kids know that whichever they are, that we inhabit the same ground, stem from the same Earth and are fed from the same soil. We might not see things from the same perspective but I’m betting that if we know we belong together, we will be willing to share our experience, our lives and our delight. Here’s my hope – if I start with my kids then the goodness of healing will ripple out maybe to my family of origin and then beyond.

Oh, I’m Wounded

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“A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.” – unknown

“Mama, why don’t grown-ups cry?” my daughter asked when she was three. There are a lot of possible answers to that question – we do but it’s more often that they leak out of us unexpectedly, or that not as much shocks us because we have experienced more, or that we have more ways to communicate our feelings than young children. But it wasn’t until I was reading something last week that I found my answer.

The passage was a simple meditation on giving air to our wounds. And even though I’d read it before, somehow the light of life hit it just right this time so that when I read it again, I heard it as it related to me for the first time. “Oh, I’m wounded” I thought in surprise.

Twelve years again when my business partner sat me down to lunch to tell me of my husband’s infidelities, it was a clear enough owie. But as the years passed and we divorced, I reshaped my life and my work and then went on to have kids as a single parent, I could easily tell you that is far in the past in a manner and tone that is believable. And in many ways it is. I’ve owned my own part in the failure of our marriage, forgiven him for his and my two darling kids are proof that things worked out the way they were supposed to.

But the wound, I discovered, is in how I see myself. My ex-husband thought I was too independent. At first couldn’t even fathom that could be a deficit. From an early age as the youngest of three children in a family of big achievers, being independent meant I could keep up, being independent was a greatly praised trait and being independent became one of the pillars of who I was proud to be. Then came along my marriage and my ex who could pronounce the word with a particular emphasis and bite that hurt. In-de-PEN-dent.

But what struck me last week as I read that meditation was that I’ve allowed his criticism of a personal characteristic of which I am so proud to undercut my belief that I’m lovable as a partner. My ex-husband’s fear that he was unlovable created a belief in me that I was unlovable and I have never healed that wound. And saying that is hard so I imagine it’s taken me all these years to discover that because I wasn’t ready to air the wound. So here’s my new answer to my daughter’s question: grown-ups don’t cry because we don’t know we are hurt. Grown-ups bury things deep so that they can keep being productive, optimistic and claim some measure of success. Grown-ups need to listen to the advice they give kids when they get hurt: “Be brave and let us see the wound.” Because when we are vulnerable about the way we are wounded and have wounded others, we have a chance to heal it and inspire others to do the same.