Katharine

Working With Our Collective Shadow

August 5, 2019 by Katharine

I walked into my yoga class this morning with an unusual and irritating edginess. For an early Monday morning, after a restful weekend, I actually felt quite wound up .

Over the weekend my husband and I were not connecting as easily as I might have wanted. I felt that we were a bit like those magnets that have different and opposite poles that keep them from coming together no matter how hard you try.

I thought to myself as I rolled out my yoga mat, that it might just be the heat, or general life stressors that are affecting each of us differently.

I remember that he was talking on Saturday about his own distress about the shooting in El Paso. He was also talking about global warming. I can remember thinking to myself, as he was expressing his distress, that I honestly could not take in any more bad news. The world just seemed too full of bad news. I simply felt very little capacity to think of any more.

Because I chose not to relate to his conversation, I pushed him and his feelings away. Why? Because they really are my own. I was pushing my own distress away. The end result of my suppressing my own anxiety and sadness was that I was literally unable to connect with him. I could not connect in any meaningful way while I was shutting down inside.

My yoga teacher offered everyone in the class a sticker that was a gold star. She laughed about how her children got gold stars throughout school just well… because! We all got a gold star for just “showing up” to class. I felt a bit surprised, after this small act of kindness, that I started to cry.

She asked everyone to place their gold sticker in the upper corner of their yoga mat. She said something to the effect of, “No matter what you are feeling in these terrifying times, just give yourself a gold star for deciding to show up.” She then invited us to sing. I usually don’t sing in class because I am shy; but, this time I sang OM SHANTI out loud.

I cried some more.

I noticed that our normally packed yoga room wasn’t so full today. I thought about the various reasons that people might not show up for class: heat, vacations, battle fatigue?

I then began think about the shadow. From time to time someone will ask me in a phone consult if I work with the shadow. I find this question to be most interesting. “Why are they asking, ” I wonder. After all, I am a Jungian Analyst and we do have an eye, ear and nose for shadow.

While I tell people, “Of course, yes, I do work with the shadow”, I also wonder, privately to myself, what is this persons connection is to their own self love.

I don’t mean this in a new age kind of spiritual bypassing way; I mean that very often, shadow business comes out of a deep avoidance with ourselves and what makes us human. My personal experience in my office is that while there are cases where people might seemingly “love themselves” in a malignant and narcissistic way- most people don’t love themselves at all. They actually have too little regard for themselves. This hatred toward themselves is often a root cause for many destructive behaviors. This becomes a vicious cycle because destructive behaviors then increase a feeling of self hatred and around and around it goes.

This brings me back to my husband and the weekend shootings in Texas and Ohio.

It is my feeling that if we cannot humbly care enough about ourselves, how in the world can we care about others?

When we are afraid, we close up to protect ourselves. It takes courage to say, “I am actually worth looking into my own fears, anxieties, blame, selfishness, greed, pride, arrogance, power, self seeking, control, or worse- indifference.”

When my own spiritual tank is full, I feel humbled, open and often quite fragile. I consider this fragility to be a human strength. The open and vulnerable shakiness allows me to be even more receptive to others. I listen better and I am not so caught up in my own “bla, bla, bla.”

My husband was right. There was very good reason to feel overwhelmed with sadness. Because I was unable and unwilling to be touched by this despair, I was not available either to myself or to him. This means, I am not available to anyone. In Buddhism, this is called The Cocoon; it is a cozy, claustrophobic, ego/ignorant state complete with a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign.

When I began to cry in yoga, my heart immediately opened up. I felt more available. Honestly, I felt more human.

I know that we are tired of crying. I am. But a broken heart is the antidote to indifference and the insidious need to not be touched by pain. It takes courage to stay awake to the pain and suffering in ourselves and others.

Be broken open. Let your humanity spill out. Love yourself for showing up. Love yourself for being willing to look not only at our own shadow stuff, but the collective shadow business that is erupting everywhere. We too are a part of that dark shadow. I feel that we are part of that collective shadow because we are also a part of the collective light of awareness, consciousness and a willingness to confront it and show up in our own lives.

Is a gold star for just showing up enough? I don’t think so. I do think that we need reminders that we are all really doing the best that we can.

These times are dark and I don’t have any indication that things will change anytime soon. But my yoga teacher also read a quote about faith. The jist of the quote was that faith is the bird singing at the darkest part of dawn because it has faith that eventually the dawn or awakening is coming. The light and the dark go together. You cannot have one or the other. One actually informs the other. It is the light of awareness that can see the shadow. In my own experience in my office, it is this very light of awareness that softens people and allows them to cry. I am grateful that I could see my own shadow this morning on my yoga mat. May that awareness be a small drop in a bucket of collective change.

In fairy tales it is often weeping or tears that can break a spell.

Just as it is said that the Buddha was born from the tears of the great goddess Tara, the mother of compassion, we too can wake ourselves up from our own spell. Weeping in hard times does not make us weak. It allows us to maintain our humanity. Maintaining our humanity is crucial in these dark, confusing and terrifying times.

Weeping connects us to our own compassion and courage. Our tears may keep us safe from falling into the most dangerous of collective shadow: indifference.

“We need to look at the fragility of life. Illness and obstacles are a gateway to experiencing truth and reality and vulnerability. It takes courage and strength to do that, as well as gentleness and fearlessness.” – Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Gentle Yoga: A Nurturing Practice for Our Trauma Outside of Session Time

May 18, 2019 by Katharine

We now know that our bodies both contain and store emotional pain as well as our traumatic memories. People often don’t appreciate that symptoms of PTSD can be experienced, oddly enough, as both intrusive as well as avoidant.

Intrusive symptoms can be experienced as flashbacks, nightmares, as well as physical pain and anxiety including panic attacks. Avoidant symptoms, which in my experience is much more common, look more like disassociation, disconnection, a feeling of being numb or checked out. Sometimes people with PTSD are so numb that they even believe that they are actually doing ok! Although people can report to me that they “feel ok,” we might talk together and begin to notice that there is actually an absence of joy, desire, or even any interest to connect with others. In other words, “I feel OK, ” can often be code for, “I actually don’t feel much of anything.”

Fortunately, neuroscience, especially polyvagal theory, has helped us tremendously in understanding how PTSD can be both expressed as activation and stress in the body as well as numbness, avoidant feelings such as isolation and numbing behavior. Resolving trauma creates new pathways of feeling safe and connected- even within ourselves. No longer do people need to feel isolated and lonely because of trauma. Trauma finally has a way to resolve itself. That solution, that I practice with both myself as well as with my patients, is called Somatic Experiencing.

According to Dr. Peter Levine, the originator and developer of Somatic Experiencing, trauma is basic survival energy that has been locked in the body and nervous system. He is talking about life energy- literally the energy of life itself. This energy is powerful and it takes time for people with trauma to be able to build capacity enough to feel it so that they might once again feel alive. Paradoxically, it can be this very life energy that feels quite threatening and even terrifying to survivors of trauma.

Little by little, stitch by stitch, in our work together my patients and I slowly begin to work with their bodies capacity to feel this powerful life energy by simply focusing on sensations in the here and now.

It is not unusual for people with trauma to feel that their body is the very thing that has betrayed them in the first place. Usually, especially when there has been a great deal of trauma, the body does not feel safe enough to experience pleasure or pain. There can be an emphasis to focus on what is wrong or what might be wrong both mentally as well a physically. Traditional psychotherapy is often geared toward the focus of what is “wrong.” For trauma survivors, this focus is not helpful at all. The nervous system is already hyper vigilant toward what is “wrong.” What if we focused on what is actually right? What if we focused on what is sane, stable or working? What if we befriended our bodies and discovered that it has been doing a wonderful job taking care of us and helping us to survive but it needs our gentle help in relaxing and feeling safe again?

Unfortunately, for many people who have only experienced “verbal” or talk therapy, implicit memories evoked while talking more often than not bring with the memory a sense of hyperarousal of their sympathetic nervous system and a sense of helplessness, fear or shame and rage. In and of themselves these emotional states are not necessarily a problem. When they are chronically experienced alongside the memory of a trauma, these emotional states become problematic in that that there is no way out of this repetition of the original trauma by focusing on those emotional states. The body needs a new “brain/body map” in order to feel relief. A different solution is needed. We do not need to look directly into the face of Medusa and turn to stone. In the office with me, we focus on this innate solution. The body organically knows how to resolve the trauma. I am literally just a witness who encourages the body into its own wisdom and subsequent recovery. People often feel an immediate shift in their state of being after an SE session with me. I encourage befriending their own bodies outside of the office in between session time with me.

Gentle Yoga classes can provide people with a slowed down sense of themselves in a body. Following the breath while focusing on what part of your body is moving allows for a kind of synchronization that our nervous systems respond to as both sane and safe.

When we are dysregulated, we feel neither safe nor sane. Indeed, we are actually not even in the present moment. As a Buddhist, this is the very definition of insanity. The mind and body cannot relax. We are unable to be right where we are without judgment. We are not synchronized in body and mind.

If you are interested in trauma work, but are too afraid to approach your own body or don’t even know where to start, try attending a gentle yoga class. Begin to make friends with your own body. See what you notice, or not, while in class. Simply notice where you are when you begin class. Just notice yourself on the mat. Take time to slow down even more during class to check in with how your body might be feeling right here and now.

Most importantly, notice how you are experiencing yourself in a body after your class. Was there a shift? Were you able to experience anything pleasurable? Did you have any feelings of being safe? Were there moments of feeling unsafe, uncomfortable or panicky?

Working with resolving trauma can actually be easy. It does not have to be hard. You have already been through the hardest part. Whatever happened already happened. Your body just needs some very specific attention and care to complete whatever was unable to complete in order to defend and/ or protect yourself. Actually being in your body is a very empowering experience. Trust me, you are worthy of being able to feel empowered and alive in a body. You have already made it this far. You and your body are really pretty darn amazing! Making friends with your body is actually the very first step in healing trauma.

I love Nina Simone singing Ain’t Got No, I Got Life. In the beginning of the song she sings about what she “ain’t got.” This is very much the language of trauma-loneliness, alienation and a profound sense of loss. By the end of the song she celebrates her body and that she indeed has life, herself and most of all, she has her freedom; no one can take that away from her. The celebration of feeling alive in a body is very much how the resolution of trauma can feel. Enjoy.

Conversations about Trauma, Violence, and Recovery

August 4, 2018 by Katharine

Dear Friends,

I don’t know if any tickets are still available, but if so then please join me for a discussion after the play Extremities. I have been invited to assist in a conversation after the play about the relevance of Extremities in our current 2018 culture, violence, #MeToo, and the somatic approach to resolving trauma. Looking forward to seeing you there!

The director of the play Tina Alexis Allen http://tinaalexisallen.com has just published a book that I highly recommend. Her book is about dangerous family secrets, lies, and truth telling. Her book is entitled Hiding Out, a Memoir of Drugs, Deception and Double Lives and can be found on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Hiding-Out-Memoir-Deception-Double/dp/0062565672

More info: dynamo-studio.com/projects

When The Attempt For Connection Fails

June 30, 2018 by Katharine

I feel so fortunate and grateful to have developed a wonderful community of friends and colleagues in the Somatic Experiencing world. Perhaps there is something about people who come together to learn how to heal trauma that already creates a unique kind of bond.

People who wish to relate directly with trauma are brave. We are brave because in learning how to relate and treat trauma, we must be experiential, meaning, we must relate to our own traumas. We know that there is definitely a way out. Trauma doesn’t need to be a permanent state of being. In fact, our bodies were not wired for it to be permanent. That is very, very good news and Somatic Practitioners know it.

We know that stress, especially chronic societal stress, can be profoundly dysregulating not only for individuals but also for the “societal body.” Society as a whole suffers just as if society itself were one giant being. The more complicated life becomes the more our own bodies have something to say about that ongoing stress and lack of simplicity or care in our own lives. This is true when we hear about the trauma and stress of others. As a society we are affected by the mistreatment, outright abuse, fear, and anxiety of others. We are society. We are that great big giant being. That great big giant being is affected.

Humans tend to rely or go back to what is most familiar for regulation. This is one way that we attempt to feel safe. Unfortunately, what is most familiar can also just be a very, very bad habit– an old “trauma map.” Addiction and accompanying denial-aka: Didn’t Even Know I Am Lying, in its many forms, including various relational addictions can fall into this pattern. In our hope for a different outcome/different connection, we can actually deeply betray and even harm ourselves further. In some places they call this going to a hardware store to purchase some milk. It isn’t the hardware store that is the problem. The problem is that we have gone looking in the wrong place for something that we are not going to receive. The person, institution, group/collective body simply does not have what we need.

Our bodies are incredibly sane. It is only in understanding what it is that we are needing that we can find the proper situation or person to provide the connection/care that we seek. I often help the people who struggle with not getting their needs met know what it actually somatically feels like to be safe. I help them to understand that what they need is very valuable. Some people, like some collective groups and families, are present, open and able to relate directly with what is going on with traumatic events with honesty, humility and willingness to listen and change. Other people, groups, families, institutions can not be trusted. Be mindful of places, people, groups who use scapegoating, blaming, shaming, alienating, lying and control tactics when faced with frightening truths about themselves. These are not safe places to look for care.

I appreciate that the Somatic Experiencing world has a very deep understanding of early trauma states and how to work with them fully, openly and compassionately. Human beings actually need other human beings to help us to regulate when our nervous systems have become dysregulated. Human contact is a very important part of relating to trauma states. A deep component to trauma is where a person has not felt safe nor supported either during or after the event. Both the feeling of safety and support are very important human needs. In other words, a part of what makes something a trauma is that the person felt or continues to feel alone in trying to understand or survive the original event.

I feel that when we are looking for contact with another human being, this search for contact comes out of basic sanity within us. We are looking for safety. We are orienting. If our nervous systems are dysregulated and there is no one who is able to connect with us, then the trauma can become even more entrenched in our system. This is where I see peoples nervous systems collapse into very deep depression or much, much worse. They can simply give up on life. They no longer feel human and they certainly don’t worthy of connection.

So many of my patients express to me how lonely they feel. We know that people have become more and more isolated and that social media creates a false illusion of connection.

I have a squishy koosh ball in my office. When someone is feeling particularly lonely, I invite them to play a game of catch with me. This eye to eye contact as well as hand eye coordination immediately gets the ventral vagal system playing. This is our social engagement. We need social engagement to have healthy and happy nervous systems. Just a few tosses back and forth shifts the nervous system from dorsal vagal to ventral vagal. What this means in lay terms is someone moving from a state of being shut down, helpless, hopeless and lonely to emotionally present, calm and engaged. The ventral vagal has a calming and soothing affect on our stress. Sometimes, the simple question of “would you like some supportive touch right now” helps.

Images of children being separated from their parents at the border can be tremendously dysregulating for most of us. Our natural empathy and compassion simply cannot bear seeing these children and parents suffer. Our great big societal body is under great stress.

In these times of great societal pain, do not isolate. Find the support from others who can meet you right where you are. Above all else, please do not be going to the hardware store for milk.

Someone in pain recently reached out for connection with me. In that connection they shared this with me and I would now like to share it with you.

If you are brave enough

to stay with your pain-

to refuse to abandon yourself during the breaking-

to feel it all-

your reward

eventually is a brand new life.

The newness is so terrifying-

and hard-

and it’s also the whole damn point down here.

Don’t look back- we’re not going that way.

That’s then.

This is now.

Carry onward, warriors.

-Glennon Doyle

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America’s Deep Dive

December 13, 2017 by Katharine

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.” ~ Joni Mitchell

Lately I have thought about the eclipse that passed over the United States this past fall. I have thought about how complete darkness was experienced, in the middle of the day, for some parts of our country before the light returned.

So much has occurred since then- since that total eclipse; and there are very few people that I speak with lately who don’t feel a sense of profound concern about our fragile democracy.

This is a dark night of the soul for America.

Awakening, it is said, can only occur after a dark night.

One thing that I do know about human beings is that it is very often when we fear that we are going backwards that we are actually being asked to go much, much deeper. We are going deeper into a wound that has already existed. We must walk through it, feel it, experience it, surrender to it, and survive it in order to truly become a different and more evolved human being. This demands courage.

Patriarchy likes to see things evolving in a linear fashion. Progress. The truth is that we actually live in and experience cycles. Women live cycles. Women are not “heroic” about time. Every 28 days or so we surrender to darkness and blood. We surrender to matter. These cycles become a part of lives. Anyone who studies astrology knows that issues that we had at one point of our life can return in a different fashion later on in our life. How can something that we experienced as a child be perceived with more maturity and ability to feel as an adult? How can we take the wounds of our past and transmute them into wisdom and compassion for both ourselves and for others? After all, wisdom most often comes out of pain and the willingness to learn from it.

When couples come to me due to marital issues, they can often find, to their shock, that they have actually married one of their parents. It is often the parent that they have had the most difficulty with. Men can marry their fathers and women can marry their mother. The Universe doesn’t give us a pass. If we are willing, we are asked to look deeper and to change.

What we could not escape as a child, we can choose to work with as an adult. For some adults this means deciding to leave a marriage. For others, most others, people choose to use the situation as a means to grow up and heal vis. a vis. the relationship. This can be one of the greatest gifts that a marriage can offer to us.

Experiencing difficulties in our lives doesn’t necessarily mean that we are “going backwards.” It means that we are actually going deeper.

When it feels as if we are going backwards as a country I think, “No, we are being asked to take a deeper dive. We are being asked to tell the truth. We are being asked to realize just how precious our Democracy is. We are being asked to confront power dynamics, sexism, racism and tribal polarization. We are being asked to confront our deep national shame that our country was built upon the backs of human slaves. We are being asked to see where we have violated others rights and fallen asleep and forgotten to remember that “we the people” hold the power to change things. We hold the power. Thousands of years of patriarchy had us believe that there is an authority other than ourselves and as Gloria Steinem has said, “The answer is not going to be found in looking upward to a father who is in authority.”

When men and women come in to see me because their husband or wife has been unfaithful, it is hard for them to look and see how they might have some responsibility in the betrayal. It is painful to see that betrayal often begins with where we begin to betray ourselves.

When we blame others we maintain an addiction to victimhood. Taking personal responsibility by looking and owning ones own shadow is not easy, but it is what is required to grow and to change.

I believe that this is true for America right now. As a country, it is as if we are in a very bad marriage and it is horribly confusing. We are looking for the root cause.

If we are to grow, we can no longer blame. We must look. We must look at America’s shadow. We must look at the darkest truths of America’s soul. The President of the United States, in my very humble opinion, is unmasking the collectively agreed upon persona that Americans have hidden behind since WW II. We may just need to discover that we are our own government. Perhaps, right now, we need to stop externalizing leadership and what leadership is. Perhaps we will come to find out that our society is Basically Good no matter what corruption and disarray our government is in.

Lucifer means “Light Bringer.” Where we project the “devil” is where we might just find something important about ourselves. Where that light tends to land is something that we clearly have no control over. It is unnerving. When things are illuminated we see the dirt.

Please remember that the closer to dawn (awakening) we get, the darker the night is. At the other side of that darkness the sun begins to rise . We must take the long view. If you have a particularly hard time seeing in the dark, ask for some help. Walk with each other and have conversations. We are all in this together. I believe in us.

I know that change can only occur when one turns and faces what has been in hidden from oneself and American society is in a deep dive into its shadow. Let us all be conscious of this and what we choose to split off and have others carry for us.

It is only by facing what has been in the dark that one can truly become enlightened. Denying this essential truth is a very painful game of “hide and seek” that we will continue to play. I do not believe that any good can come from active denial and avoidance of the truth. It doesn’t work for individuals and it won’t work for a society.

When we realize that the way that we have been operating is no longer viable nor sustainable, then we must think out side of “norms”. This is where there is open space to begin to imagine brand new ways of being.

May I offer an inspiring documentary? https://www.tomorrow-documentary.com . Watch and let your mind open up to new ways of being in community, government, education, finance, and food production.

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