Category: Blog

Recently one of my children had a birthday. I couldn’t help myself but buy a sappy card and gift and fuss over him and how wonderful my life has been since he’s been here. And then it hit me. Why am I so sentimental at these times?  Is it just about this young human I am trying to raise…or is there more to the pangs of joy and sorrow that hit me like waves, lapping at me one after the other after the other? Is it really just that this little boy, now becoming a wonderful young man, has spent another year on this earth with me?  Or is there something much greater stirring in my soul?  

Well you know my motto…stay curious!  So I did. I started thinking what is sad about this day for me. Because tears are always present in my happiness around my kids’ birthdays. And sometimes I think we blow too quickly past the tears of joy concept. We just think it’s all good. That only happiness should be present at such a joyous occasion. And yet there it is. Unmistakable tears that I am trying to gloss right over and tell myself mean only that I am excited at the prospect of another year on earth with this beautiful child. But that’s not it. Something more is there. And how many times have I stopped one of my clients in their tracks and held their “feet to the fire”, so to speak, so we could explore the true nature of a complicated and multi-faceted feeling that has presented itself and not allowed them to gloss over it? Honestly folks, its been so many times I can’t even count. I would never let an opportunity like that pass up without trying to help a client uncover buried and unprocessed emotions, so I am deciding not to pass up this opportunity for myself either. 

So there are the obvious reasons an occasion like my child’s birthday may cause me to tear up. For starters this guy is another year older and another year closer to being an adult, out on his own in this really tough world. That’s not only sad to think about, because I love having him in my life as much as he is now, but also sad because I don’t know what this world is going to throw at him and don’t want to see him suffer at the hands of the realities this world will most certainly throw at him. There is something more to these tears of mine though. It’s not just the small little boy I miss seeing or the prospect of his losing this innocence. There is something that runs deeper that that. Something older than that. Something almost archetypal underneath this aspect of grief my child’s aging brings. 

So what do I do?  Well of course I keep staying curious. Only now I’m really curious. If this sadness is not drawn out of the obvious things that one may think about as their child ages, then it has to be something rather interesting don’t you think?  Of who am I kidding? I think everything is pretty interesting.  This one has really pulled my attention though. So I started to think about what are the ambiguous griefs here or the good griefs I am not recognizing. Certainly one of the good griefs is that as my child ages and starts to become his own person in this world, some doors are closed, while others are opened when I see the man he is becoming. I am starting to know what kind of person he is, the way that he thinks, the things that he’s interested in, etc. This is not the meaning behind my tears though. Yes there is a child he was not or a man he will not become because of choices he is making and has made, or maybe even ones I and his father made as his parents, but that’s not what these tears are about.  Well…not really anyway. 

So that got me thinking a little more and getting even more curious about whether this sadness is not for or about my son at all. Sure, it’s the celebration of his birth that has brought this complicated wash of feelings on for me, yet there seems to be something bigger driving them. I started to realize that it may be me I’m crying for and about. And not in the ways one would expect. I am sad that he isn’t little anymore, but truly I am more happy than I am sad. Really. I love seeing him grow and knowing him more as his older self. He is such an interesting human. And I really am happy to see all that unfold. Much more than I am sad that his little self may be gone. I have loved all the years, months and days, and truly get excited to think about the many more days, months, and years there may be to come. 

So what is it about these tears of joy that seem to ring a familiar bell about myself?  What kind of silt is at the bottom of this river of grief that is running underneath these feelings?  And if it is a grief about me, what part of me is grieving or am I grieving for?  

Then it hits me, as these things often do when I have been staying curious and mindful about them for a while. I am sad for the part of me who felt forced to make choices for her son that now looking back she may have made different decisions about. I am sad that this young mother in me doesn’t get to know how wonderful things will turn out even though she isn’t happy about the decisions she did make and the opportunities she didn’t get to have. I want her to know I forgive any indiscretions she thinks she may have made, because honestly there were no mistakes. Those were points of learning and she and the son that has come to be are all the better for them. 

I am sad for the part of me that is that young mom, meeting her child for the first time and beginning to know herself in a way that she never had before. She will never experience the newness of motherhood again in that way.  I am sad about that and yet so grateful this is something I get to miss, because so many of my friends, family, and other women I have known have not had the same “newness to motherhood” feeling I was afforded. Their experiences were different. While it is sad I cannot feel this “newness” for the first time again, I am so fortunate that this was part of my story. 

And beneath these parts of me, I grieve for an even younger part of myself whose life was forever changed by decisions beyond her choosing that set me on a course to want to be a mother much more than I wanted to learn who I was and what I wanted in this world. You see, from a very young age I knew I would be a mother and that this was a calling chosen for me long before I was even old enough to know what all that entailed. It was a role destined TO me as much as I was destined FOR it. I chose part of how it came and under what circumstances it finally happened, but the truth is being a mom is something that had been chosen for me long before I was pregnant with and had my first child. And I feel sad for the little girl inside me who was rushed into that role so swiftly that she did not learn about who she was first. She was not rooted in herself when she became a mother, so her becoming a mother for the first time also thrust her into adulting when she had little tethering to what would constitute her adult self. I feel for this part of me. I think she thought that arriving in motherhood would be some kind of Garden of Eden that it was not. It left her searching for years for the other parts of herself that she had not solidified before starting her journey towards being a mother. I grieve for this little one too.

And yet, I believe whole heartedly that things happen as they are supposed to and these journeys I’ve made through my lifetime and my children’s lifetimes were meant to happen as they have.  I wish I could go back and whisper into the ear of all the younger parts of myself and tell them, “Do everything exactly the way you are going to. Don’t change a thing. And don’t worry about making mistakes. You will. And guess what? They aren’t mistakes. They are the right decisions at the right time to help you be the person you will become. And I love the person that we become. So don’t change a thing!”  

So maybe when you’re perusing Amazon.com looking for the right gift for the holidays or picking out a sappy card at Hallmark that you think really explains how you feel about that child, you’ll have a tear or two come to your eyes. Or maybe you don’t have kids and this context will come up some other way, when you realize you are at a juncture in your life that moving forward is mandatory and being who you once were can never happen again. My challenge to you…STAY CURIOUS!  Don’t blow off those pangs of sorrow mixed with joy.  Feel them. Think about them. Live them. And love them. You are exactly where you are supposed to be and your feelings are guides for exactly what you should be paying attention to. Stay curious and you might learn something about your journey that you never saw coming. 

Letter to my son:

My boy, you are such an amazing being. You have such a kind heart.  You have always been sensitive to the needs of others and cognisant of your impact on them.  I love this about you. Perfectly imperfect! I am writing you a letter to help you understand my hopes for you and to acknowledge that I may not have poised you as well as I could, but I did the best I knew how with what I had.

I know this world can be challenging, yet I also know that you are ready for this challenge.  The world may ask you to be tough, to be successful, to be, to be, to be… I hope you see the flaw in this reasoning.  I hope I have given you eyes to see that these social constructs are not yours, they are not any of ours. They are derived from years of collective fear in the scarcity that there is never enough.  Never enough power. Never enough money. Never enough youth. Never enough success. Never, never, never enough. The fear of scarcity is false. It always has been, yet our feeding these ideals has lead us smack dab into the middle of a war with ourselves.  We don’t always see that though. Instead we continue to internally oppress ourselves by aspiring to these ideals over and over again. I’m here to tell you anything that is born out of fear, uses fear to continue to feed itself. In this case, it uses a blind fear…one that is not able to be seen or heard such that we forget it’s there…or worse, believe it to be the truth.

There are some hard conversations that need to start happening and I know, my love, that your generation is our greatest hope in these efforts.  I do not envy this position, however you would not have envied mine either. I am of the generation that let this all continue to play out and is now having to face the knowledge that we are in large part responsible for keeping ourselves in this condition. We are just waking up to this now and it is never any fun to have to look in the mirror and see that you were the one keeping yourself miserable.  Of course it is never that simple. We don’t hold all the cards to our oppression, but we do hold many…and I would contend many more than we have been aware we do. This is actually an empowering revelation, because it means within us is the power to heal these issues. Here is the bind though…internalized oppression works in large masses only. If only one or two facets of the group drink the kool-aid and try to convince the rest of us this is the way it is and the way we need to be…well the rest of us look at that, laugh, and move on.  For it to work, internalized oppression needs large numbers of people to buy in. Reversing the power of internalized oppression will take the same amount of people to overturn it as it does to keep it in place. Here is where you come in my son. Your voice, your gender, your generation, you are poised to start this movement of push back on the established oppressions we have believed in for so long and lived in as our reality for too long.

You are given a great gift of opportunity here, and this carries with it a great responsibility.  I pray I have prepared you enough. That I have instilled in you the values and intrinsic worth to stand up and say, “No more”, “Time is up”, because “This is all of us.”  You are a young man that passes as white in our culture. You are privileged in your education, financial standing, education, and supportive family and friends. I know that your culturally created position in our society puts you in a position to make a large impact on this movement out of our internalized oppression.  It starts with having uncomfortable conversations about what your parents, and their parents, and their parents’ parents and so on, have done for centuries to wound our nation. And I am telling you, it is mortally wounded.

I have worked with many individuals as a psychologist and over and over have seen how sometimes the smallest of traumas snowball into the largest of adult wounds, which contribute to those adults continuing to wound themselves and others in the same ways they were wounded in their families of origin.  Our nation is no different. It is our collective family of America. It has a colorful past. We love to celebrate its victories, but we are not as generous in honoring the wounds it has had and this hinders our healing. We need healing desperately. We need to talk about these wounds to release their power over us. We need your help desperately.  No more resentment. No more stale mates. No more pointing fingers, assigning blame, and denying one another’s painful intergenerational traumas. No more. This is all of us, my son. We will all stay oppressed together or we will all heal together. We are inextricably connected and we cannot change this fact. And just like any intergenerational family trauma, it often takes just one generation to wake up and without judgment towards themselves, their parents, their parents’ parents and so, this generation starts to normalize the conversations that are hard.  They start to acknowledge the devastation that grows when a painful emotion is denied generation after generation. I have seen this healing catalyst many times as a therapist. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. It can start as gently as when your little sister turns to me when I have been short tempered and she tells me, “Its ok mommy. I get mad too sometimes.” It’s genuinely said in a way that normalizes and acknowledges the pain and honors it too. I pray for you, my son, that you and others like you will be this simple and kind voice that firmly compels us to move forward and step out of our pain and internalized oppressive suffering.

It will be hard work, but such sacred work too.  I hope that I have given you enough tools to do this.  I hope that I have loved you well enough and long enough that no matter how difficult the beginning of this healing process is, you stay the course with it.  I promise to do my part. To acknowledge my oppressive nature on myself and those around me. I promise to make changes and not buy into a cultural ideal that can only occur at the expense of others.  I know it will be hard and some of my generation will not be ready to face how their buying into societal norms and constructs has inadvertently empowered oppression to keep occurring. I promise you though, I have seen this before…that young voice, full of hope, and lacking the tainted nature of years of participating in the system as it is…I have seen this young voice move mountains in traumatized families.  Please, my boy…my love…please know that we are awaiting the healing powers of your young voice to start this healing. Because #thisisallofus

Oh and don’t worry….I have another one of these letters for your sister;)

Love, Mom

“Be one who nurtures and who builds.  Be one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart, who looks for the best in people.  Leave people better than you found them.  If we could look in to each other’s hearts and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently.”      Marvin J. Ashton

I hope you have been finding this series stimulating.  I hope it has stretched you a little in how you are thinking about the things happening in social media these days.  Change is hard, and any “movement” is asking us to bring about change.  We do not know what the outcome of that change will be and this uncertainty is one of the very reasons change is so hard on us.  Last week we talked about how when negative emotional content is as pervasive as we are seeing it in all forms of media right now, we are absorbing this negativity.  And absorbed negativity will do one of two things, it will eat at us or it will eat at others.

So, Doc, what are we supposed to do about that?  Its not like we can stop people from being jerks online.  True.  We cannot control others’ behaviors, only our own.  Yet we hold some of the most powerful tools in our own behavior.  Ok Doc…what powerful tools are those?  Kindness and compassion.  These two tools can help to redirect the energy of negativity into something more constructive.  I want to be sure that we are all on the same page about what that means however.

Kindness is a means by which we deliver our communication with one another and compassion is the means by which we receive it.  We cannot control the actual content of communications always, but we can always control the way we give and receive it.

Sometimes it is easier to describe what these definitions are not, rather than what they are.  Kindness for instance does not mean just being nice.  It does not mean that we are looking to say things in a way that others will be pleased by what they hear.  Instead it is more about showing one’s intention as a bridge of love, while we may possibly be delivering a very difficult message.  I have sat with many people in my office, talking about very difficult things, and have had occasion where the most therapeutic response I can give them is to reflect their own responsibility in their suffering.  This is not an easy message to hear.  No one wants to know that they had any part in what is hurting them, and most of us want to rise up against this and defend ourselves.  There is always a way to deliver this message with kindness. To be on one another’s side in an effort to want to change what is being talked about, while simultaneously communicating a difficult message that would seem opposite to what one another wants to hear.

Compassion is another means for us to meet one another where we are at, when on the surface of the issue there seems to be conflict in our meanings. Compassion is not feeling sorry for someone (sympathy).  It is not knowing better than someone else and having the foresight to see their errors.  Compassion is feeling with somebody (empathy).   In the faith tradition I was raised in, we say, “There if by the grace of God go I.”  This is a reminder that I could be in the very position another is in and I should always receive information with this in mind.  Showing understanding that we too could feel the way that another is feeling and want to say the things that they are saying, takes pause.  It takes patience.  It takes courage.  And most importantly it makes us vulnerable.  Vulnerability of putting ourselves in another’s shoes is difficult, yet it is also truly the only path to understanding and demonstrates great strength.

So, while we are not in control of the content we are seeing in the media and this content is likely to stir a myriad of thoughts and feelings, we are in control of how we give our messages to one another and how we interpret the messages of others.  And when we start to listen and speak with this kind and compassionate approach, we will begin to transform the message without ever changing the content.  We will start helping ourselves know that this is about all of us.  That acting in kind and having compassion for all perspectives will open us up to the knowledge that we help all our cause when we start thinking of it as ours, not theirs versus ours.

My challenge to you my friends…take that pause before you respond.  Think from a stance of compassion.  Say your words with kindness.  Know that the message you are sending is not only in the words but in the manner in which those words are delivered and received.

Be well my friends.

So, here it is.  Part 2.  I know you think that I am going to wax eloquent about #Metoo movement and my opinions on the significance of last week’s events.  But you would be wrong.  Sure, I have opinions on that kind of thing, but “This is about us…all of us.”

So, there are plenty of great conversations and some not so great ones happening about the Dr. Ford/Judge Cavanaugh issue and I will encourage you to go look at those to have more discussion about that issue.  This blog is going to cover a broader issue that is more interesting to me.  What issue is that you ask?  Well my peeps, that would be the mental health of all us and how what we are seeing play out in the media is having a toll on us all.

If you are continuing with me from last week’s blog, you recall that I took us through an exercise of evoking emotion.  It wasn’t a long blog and the visualization was rather simple, and yet, when done right should have evoked some real emotional response from you.  (If you haven’t read that blog, go back and do it…it’s a good one, I promise).  So, think for a minute about how much of an emotional response you had last week after reading the blog and also think about what, if any, affect it had on you the rest of the day.

Why is this important Doc?  And why do you find this interesting?

Well folks, here is why.  We are steeped day to day in stress.  Good stress, bad stress, fun stress, strenuous stress…all around stress.  It comes from our responsibilities to family, friends, coworkers, and honestly to all of us.  A good stress for me is having to get up earlier than I would like to get both myself and my three and half year old ready in the morning.  She is so into brushing her teeth and picking out her clothes and showing me how big she is.  It’s darling, but it is also an extra half hour of an already crunched morning.  I am tired just thinking about it right now, and yet I wouldn’t give this stress up for the world.  A strenuous stress for me is cleaning the house, which I would love to give up if anyone is offering.

When we know our baseline is stress and then are inviting in more emotionally evoking activity into our “down time”, what do you think is going to happen?  You got it…more stress.  And how much stress do you think any one of us can take?  Well that is the really interesting part for me.  Of course, the standard answer to this is “It depends”.  But no lie folks, it REALLY depends.  It depends on how much resiliency you have built up, what your home life is like, where you work or whether you work, how your social life is, your genetic make-up, and on and on and on.

So, the upshot of my point today is, this level of conflict in our life is detrimental and if not well balanced out, it will start to leak out in ways we may not mean or want it to do.  Remember how I asked what you felt like the rest of the day after reading my blog…well, this is what I am talking about.  If you evoke negative emotion it will come out.  If you consume negative emotion it will come in.  And once it comes in, it will make its way out again.  Your resiliency will predict if that is done in a healthy way or in non-healthy and sometimes even abusive way.  And when I say abuse, I am not using that word lightly.  And I am using it in a broad sense.  We “self” abuse through negative self-talk, emotional eating, abuse of drugs and alcohol, among other things.  And we “other” abuse when we cause conflict, yell, say hurtful things, and otherwise cause relational disruptions.  This is real people.  If you have ever seen the movie The Green Mile I would liken it to the green cloud of bug like stuff that the John Coffey character would suck out of one person and then spew into another.  When that stuff was sucked in it made him sick until it was released.  And when it was released it made the receiver sick as well, unless of course it was released into the air and disbursed without harming anyone. Every time you read, watch, or otherwise engage in the “Us vs Them” conflicts that you are seeing used in all media platforms, you are sucking in some of that bad stuff.  That negative emotion has been absorbed into you and will have an impact on you or others if not disbursed in a constructive way.

Remember this as you are engaging with this emotionally laden material.  Even when the topic is a good one to be aired, the emotional toll it takes on all of us is very real.  Be mindful of this.  Take care of yourselves with it.  And do not underestimate how much of a disruption it can and will cause you if you aren’t taking it seriously.  This is the landscape in which the stress you already have in your life will be occurring.  How much of it do you want to let in?  Be intentional.  This is an added emotional need you will have to address.  Be sure it is something you are choosing and not something you are inadvertently exposing yourself to because the average American adult looks at their phone somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 times a day depending on age.

What is happening in the media is affecting all of us, whether we directly engage or not.  Because as long as some of us are engaging, all of us are in play to be affected by the negativity that can result from these conflictual interactions.  Now, here is the good news…(It’s about time, Doc because this has been a Debbie Downer blog today.)

…the positive energy of emotion works the same way.  It will spread with the same amount of fervor and I would contend is the only real solution to dispersing the negativity in a healthy way.  How you ask?  Well that will be part 3 of this series.

Did it again, didn’t I?  Looped you in for another blog.  Come on, at least you may have learned something.  And if not learned something you at least want to go watch a really good movie, The Green Mile.

‘Til next week…be well my friends.