The Whirlpool of Placeness

You know how when you go back to the hometown you grew up in, how you almost feel like a child again?  Sometimes you can feel it in your whole body, like you’re being transported back in time.  For some, this can be a good feeling, yet for others it’s not always comforting.  

I was having coffee with a good friend of mine the other day, and we were talking about the quickly approaching holidays, and how we can get thrown back into ways of being that we thought we’d outgrown – or at least felt we should have outgrown by now.  But this is much more difficult than you’d expect.  Our brains and bodies are essentially prediction machines, constantly working to get us safely and efficiently through life.  They don’t have time to assess every single moment of our lives, so they predict what’s about to happen.  They say,’ this situation looks almost exactly like that other situation, so let’s have the same reaction, since that old reaction seemed to work well.”  By the time you celebrate your 18th birthday, you will have spent nearly 158,000 hours practicing how best to cope with the situations of your youth.  When you return to the place or people from your past, it’s no wonder you feel like a kid again, flooded with the sensations and feelings of childhood.  Your brain and body are saying, “Whoa!  This smells and looks and feels exactly like all those other times.  Here are the reactions, and feelings, and coping methods you need to to get through this.”  And all of this happens nearly automatically and without any effort on our part.

I like to think of this phenomena as a ‘whirlpool of placeness.’  It’s the everything about a place or the people in it that causes our mind and body to revert back to an earlier time and way of being.  It can happen against our best intentions to be different.  It can be powerful and relentless, sucking us down into ways of being that we thought we’d outgrown.  It can leave us reacting to situations in the present using the coping skills we learned in the past.    

The holidays are coming up fast, and for many of us that means putting ourselves into situations that can drag us back into stressful ways of being.  But it’s possible to return to our roots and interact with our heritage in a present and mature way.  It’s possible to be ‘present-day you’ in the placeless of your past.  It’s possible to not revert back to the same reactions you had back way back when, even if everyone else is acting out as they always have.  You absolutely have the capability to overcome the whirlpool, once you have the right navigation tools.  

Some of the most potent tools are:

• Stay present and calm

• use a slow and even breath to stay calm

  1. tune into what your body is feeling to stay in the present

• Bring curiosity to the forefront

• ask yourself questions such as, “I wonder what…?” Or, “I wonder how…?” to bring your mind out of past thought patterns. “I wonder what Uncle Joe would do if i smiled instead of arguing with him.”

• Be kind to yourself.

• take a break if the whirlpool is getting too strong

  1. realize your reactions are coping mechanisms that worked for you in the past, but that you now have a choice in how to react.

Ultimately, remember you are living in the present. It might feel like you’re being sucked into the whirlpool, but really you’re standing firmly on the shore you’ve created for yourself.

Walk Your Own Path

Our culture teaches us that we should be strong and resilient.  Weakness is frowned upon, and asking for help is seen as a weakness.  Am I telling you anything new??  I’m all for asking for help – but only as a concept apparently, because I’m terrible at asking others for help.  It’s just not how I was raised, I guess. 

I know I’m not alone in this.  By asking for help, we can feel that we’re burdening others, or that we might lose face by showing our ‘weakness.’   By asking for help, we might feel obligated to following through with the advice given.  Maybe we were made fun of in the past for showing our ignorance about how to move forward, so we’re reluctant to expose ourselves again.  Often, it just feels like we should know what to do, that we should be in the driver’s seat, and if we wait just a little longer maybe we’ll figure it out and won’t have to ask for help. 

And you know what?  I wholeheartedly believe that you are the best authority of what you need to do.  You are in the driver’s seat, right now, at this very moment, whether or not it feels like you are.  You might be dealing with fear because you’ve been down a similar path before and you’re worried the same result could happen again.  Or maybe you’re feeling unsure about the future because you stuck your neck out before and it didn’t work out.  All of these feelings can keep you from clearly seeing the next steps you need to take.  But they don’t reduce your authority in understanding what’s best for you. 

Getting help and advice from others is valuable.  But we also have to understand ourselves well enough, and have skills in place to know where we want to go in the first place.  We have to walk our own path.

If you’re the kind of person who finds it hard to ask others for help, then learn how to be your own best advocate and counselor.  Once you have these skills in place, your need to ask others opinions on what path you should take will become a distant memory. 

Your wisdom is deep.  Go find it.

I Am The End

My Mom was a Nazi.

I don’t mean that in some petulantly figurative way. She really was. At 12 years old she stood before her class to lead the morning ‘Heil Hitlers’ in her classroom. All the kids were Nazis. The teacher was a Nazi.They had no choice.

She was born out of wedlock, a practically unforgivable sin then, and was hidden in an attic at the beginning of her life to hide the shame from the neighbors. Her Dad meant the world to her, he was everything to her. Against his will, he was forced to join the German army. She lost him to a Russian concentration camp during the war.

She survived the bombing of Dresden. She survived formative years spent with a mother unable to heal from the emotional wounds of her own life. She survived the eventual estrangement from her family after she had the courage to make a new life for herself. She escaped through the Iron Curtain from East Germany when she was only nineteen. Alone and with a single suitcase, she was lured by the promise of the West. But the past came along for the ride, as it always does.

My Dad was stunned into silence by the rumblings of her mental thunderstorm. My sisters and I lived in a constantly confusing scenario of trying to not cause any waves, not knowing if we were causing waves until it was too late, trying desperately to put a smile on her face, trying anything to make her happy, and ultimately failing.

My sisters and I have a running joke that whenever we hit a difficulty in our lives, we blame it on Hitler. You know what they say…It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

This far removed from WW2 I can see – I can feel – the echoes and patterns laid down then. They live in me. Intergenerational trauma is definitely a thing.  In both physical and emotional ways, I’m descended from, and still connected to, events that occurred long before I was born; even before my Mom or her Mom was born.

I’m the lucky one, though. I live in a time and space where I’m able to face these echoes and patterns and see them for what they are; simply momentum from the past, and I refuse to let it carry on any further. As much as I am able, I will not pass this on to anyone. I decided this decades ago. I saw through the fallacy of blame that wants to scream, ‘why did you do this to me.’ I understood how casting blame kept me forever bound to that from which I wanted to be free. Since that realization, I’ve been dedicated to finding ways to bring me back to me, to finding ways to help me shed the influence of the past. A few things worked fairly well, but they were things that took a lot of effort, and didn’t seem to stick. When I discovered The Realization Process and TRE, I realized that I’d found tools that worked nearly instantaneously and effortlessly to dissolve the influence of the past.  And now I teach these tools to others.

I’ve experienced that it’s possible to stop the destructive waves that are my inheritance. Doing so has helped me create a way of being in the world that is the most beneficial to myself and to those I care for. I don’t blame my Mom for what she passed down, or even hold her responsible. She wasn’t born in a time when she had the tools or support she needed to heal her trauma. But I do. The negativity of the past stops here. I am the end.

‘Tis the Season for Giftin’!

So, it’s Christmas time again.  Gifts are on a lot of people’s minds.  Gifts have been on my mind a lot lately, too.  Not because I’m excited to know what’s sitting under the tree for me (ok, maybe I am a little bit,) but because I know what true gifts are.  I also know why they are so important, and I know that everyone – even you – has lots of them.

I realized something a while ago that’s still ringing my bell.  Each one of us carries around arm-loads of gifts all the time.  I know, crazy huh?  These gifts are the ones you were born with.  These gifts are things you’re really good at doing, the things that excite you, the things that make your heart grin.  Gifts are usually thought of as talents, aptitudes, and ways of being.  “She’s a gifted writer.”   “He’s great with kids.”  Our gifts bring us happiness, connection, and income throughout our lives.  But here’s a big thing I realized about gifts that really bumped up the joy factor for me.

These gifts that we think are ours; these talents we were born with, the joy-making aptitudes that have been such good use for us…they aren’t our gifts.  They aren’t gifts that we were ever meant to keep for ourselves.  They aren’t celebratory gifts given to us on our birth day.  Our gifts are meant to be given away.  They are gifts we carried into the world to be given to whoever needs them most.

One of the most magical things about these gifts is that when you give them away, instantly you have more to give.  Your gifts are inexhaustible.  They’re always available to hand out willy-nilly to the world.
And there’s another magical thing about all this gift-giving:  You get back magnitudes more than you ever give.  Try it.  you’ll see.

So, give, give, give of your beautiful self.  Don’t be stingy.  You were sent here with arm-loads of gifts for the world.  It’s your job to figure out how to give them away, and who the recipients are meant to be

This Is A Lie

Lately I’ve been awash in not-knowing.  This has come about by an intense focus on trying to figure things out.  I’m learning that this is totally okay, and actually may be preferred.  As I’ve been pushing to get my coaching practice up and running, I’ve been pushed to the edge of what I’m comfortable with over and over again. And it’s been great!  It’s felt like entering a maze made of carefully balanced cardboard walls.  Once you lean up against one of the barriers, it simply falls over.

Have you heard the saying, “If something is true, it’s opposite must also be true?”  This lesson has been whapping me upside my head for months now.  I felt like I was caught between two Rock’em Sock’em Robots.  Most of the things I thought were ‘too big,’  ‘too hard,’ and the big one: ‘I’m not good at that,” not only turned out to be completely false, but completely the opposite of what I thought at the beginning.  What I though was too big or too hard turned out to flow along and become easy once I got moving.  What I thought I wouldn’t be good at, I found I could exceed what I thought I was capable of, and in ways I hadn’t even thought of.

The biggest lesson out of all this is I’m now seeing that the things I shied away from were actually some of my greatest assets and talents.  Weird, huh?!?

Here’s a link to a fun video that illustrates a slightly different, yet hopefully parallel, description of what I’m trying to explain.  http://sivers.org/jaddr

What are some things you’ve discovered that you were actually pretty good at, where before you thought you had no talent?

If you’ve been wrong before in assessing your worth, how can you trust your negative self-talk now?   Hmmm?