The movement in our words

One of the many gifts my long term supervisor and mentor has given me is in developing my skill and expertise in how to bring play and curiosity to the words which show up in therapy. 

They might be wholly inadequate for the task. Conversely, they might be beautifully articulate, gaining gravitas when said out loud, opening a gate to long trapped feelings which tumble out behind them. There can be so many of them that a game of now you see me now you don’t ensues, with what needs to be understood confidently hiding in plain sight. Shrouded in words which let nothing be known, let no-one in. 

Shy and faltering, in a rush to be welcomed and known, confused and stitching themselves together as they are spoken, repeated and repeated on repeat trying to work something out … 

As a therapist I have learnt, am still learning, when my words are needed, when space is needed. When to match the pace of what is said to me, when to slow something down. Bringing respect and patience to what is said, not rushing in assuming I’ve got it, instead letting something unfold. When does one word jump out at me, either because it doesn’t quite fit in the sentence, or its an unusual usage for it, or it holds so much feeling that my whole body tingles in response. What does that words say. 

In my own musings and process I also enjoy playing with words. I enjoy the ambiguity of poetry, words which have no attachment, available to each reader, whatever their interpretation. The impact on each reader unique, as words land and are used just as they are needed, in that moment, for that reader. 

Something akin to this feels available in the therapy room. Guided by an experienced therapist, curiosity is brought to your words; the way they arrive; which words need to really be held tight; which words need to be examined; and which feel a relief to let go? The flow of your words offering a gateway from what is known to enquiries beyond that which was assumed, that to which we thought we would arrive becomes where we actually arrive, in an upside down twisting of time and consciousness.

What a gift it is to daily practice this art.

As humans we are natural born sense makers, and I played with the words of this in a poem I wrote some years back now -

The sense making from no-sense

The sense making of non-sense

The sense making which makes complete-sense

The grieving of non-sense having to make complete-sense.

I returned to the poem recently wondering what it would be like to subvert my own words. Commonly we say to make sense and find meaning. Currently the world makes little sense to me, most definitely the task of making it make sense, or finding sense in it, would be a time consuming one. But within my own life, where I can bring more impact, what value is there in playing with these words? To find sense and make meaning?

My poetic answer to this would be that I find sense in acceptance and tenderness towards myself, and I make meaning in finding a humility in my losses. And I could leave you there, to play with the words by yourself. You might choose to leave me here to do just that. But for me I want to go on.

James Hollis suggests every 5 to 7 years we undergo a major change in our lives, I don’t know how he has gathered data to support this statement, but having lived for several decades now, it feels experientially accurate. Change and loss rearranging my life, in regular waves. In a similar rhythm to the waves of a tide, these waves of change and loss come in different sizes and velocities. Some gently wash me to new shores, bringing ripples of change, and some have untethered me from all I thought I knew and hoped for. 

A more accomplished poet than myself, Mary Oliver writes - 

Every year

Everything

I have ever learned

In my lifetime

Leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation

Playing in my words finding sense and making meaning, have gathered up loss, scooping it into the enquiry.

It’s personal, I am not coming up with a universal truth, but for me, for now, there is something about finding sense, and making meaning in the waves of change and their rhythmic pulls between loss, regret, and possibility. And in the humble acceptance of it all as me, not me and more than me.

I am writing this at a point of mourning in my life, the ending of an important relationship having catapulted me into a grieving process for my own youth. I look back over a life which has brought me an astonishing distance from where I started. Younger, or are they older, versions of myself, and the me of now, hardly recognisable to one another. Woven in the waves of time; waves of change; waves of regret; waves of possibility. Woven into and through the waves of loss in my life.

I cannot go back and relive those days. But nor would I want to. Not even to bring the wisdom of  hindsight, for it would change the pathway of my life. My life has not always been wonderfully sunny, but with each wave of change, and the losses therein, I have grown into a richer, more fuller version of myself. This is my journey of becoming - me, and without them I would not be recognisable as the me of now. And I want to be that me.

However, whilst I can not go backwards I can carry myself forward in time. In my reflections I realised accidentally I had started to resurrect and live some of my childhood dreams. Nearly 60 years on from first telling my parents when I grow up I am going to live by the sea, I now do. It has made me wonder what other lost, or delayed possibilities might accompany me as I rethether, and grow through another wash of changes at this point in my life.

Perhaps what is truly important never gets lost, it just lays dormant waiting for the right time?

When I started writing I thought I’d write about grief, the universal, inescapable accompaniment to life. It was my starting title, but my words took me elsewhere. I end reflecting, sense finding and meaning making are relative, personal, evolving, refusing stasis.

I have enjoyed the reflective journey that has guided me in this piece of writing. I sit allowing myself to feel both the sadness, and a sense of the miraculous, in how I have been fashioned in the regrets and possibilities of my life’s losses.

In Hozier’s poetic lyrics  -

All things end, 

all that we intend is scrawled in sand

Slips right through our hands

And just knowing that everything will end

Should not change our plans when we begin again

We begin again

Perhaps one of life's biggest challenges is living with its uncertainty, intangibility, and the inevitable losses that come with its changes. In the writing of this piece the knowing that I would not go back and change anything has stayed with me. How do I bring that knowing into my future? Life, when truly lived, is full of both joy and suffering. How we respond to our own suffering, is essential to our full becoming.

My parting Questions -

I love Emmy van Deurzen’s quote ‘Life, if we take it seriously, can be a work of art that is ours for the making’

It brings to mind life as a collage, what gets intentionally placed, and what gets washed away in waves of change? How do we live creatively, in the changing landscape of our life? What are we attached to, and what was never ours to keep? How do we hold on to ourselves when we get untethered? How do we bring a tenderness and acceptance to ourselves so, with each wave of change we can mourn, reflect and find the courage to step in and begin again?

These might not be quite the right questions for you. Others might have emerged. Please get in touch if anything you have read has sparked an interest to look more suearmstrongtherapy@gmail.com

Do we Have to Call it Trauma?

‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ - TS Elliot

Over the years of my practice I have come to know key themes which sit at the heart of what it is to be human, and regularly show up in a person's therapy journey. Each time I sit exploring one of these key themes with a new client, wonderfully, I learn something new. Learning I take with me into my own life and to the next client I sit with. Repetitive, relational alchemy.

One such theme often enters as a question - do I have to see it as trauma? And we are inevitably discussing what therapists term little t trauma.

The trauma we all, regardless of the privilege of our childhood, experience. These are the repetitive, often unintended, relational misattunements of our childhood.

Behind the question many of us don’t want to blame, or feel anger towards, our parents - ‘they were doing their best’, ‘it’s a difficult job’, ’they loved me’.

For some who experienced financially advantaged backgrounds it is hard to allow themselves to know the emotional deprivation they experienced in an environment which in so many other ways felt privileged. Others may be reluctant to disrupt a healthy present day relationship with their parents by dredging memories from the past to talk through in therapy.

Whatever we call them - little t trauma, childhood wounds, relational wounds - it is important to explore these relational misattunements. We need to give voice to our experiences, not the experience as it has been cemented in family folklore e.g. you were a difficult baby, you always struggled to share, you had terrible tantrums, you were a shy thing. 

Once we start to talk from our experiences, we are bringing a loyalty to ourselves, and a good therapist will gently hold the emotions that get stirred in that.

Yes we can hold a kindness towards our parents and the challenges of their task, and we can also allow ourselves to feel anger, hurt, and disappointment for our younger selves.

Giving permission to notice how experiences, and the messages they carried, in the formative years of our family of origin is essential to understanding the make up of our unique learning ground for what it is to be in relationship, how to love and be loved. We can start to understand our unique adaptive relational blueprint. The blueprint we step forth into the world with.

Relational patterns that have come to feel so familiar, as if they were innately us, just our personality … Yet they are just an us in response to ...

Lise Bourbeau offers one possible framework for thinking about these relational wounds of childhood and the arising adaptions, which she categorises in five soul wounds -

    Rejection

    Abandonment;

    Humiliation;

    Betrayal;

    Injustice.

I can already feel the pull to push these words away. They, like the word trauma, hold a weight which maybe doesn’t quite feel right, which we don’t want to level at our parents, which we don't want to see in our own experiences.

Bear with me …

Remember miniscule misattunements, if there is a repetitiveness to them, can cause damage, and give rise to learnt patterns of adaptation designed to keep us loved and safe within our family environments. For instance betrayal, could look like inconsistency in a caregiver’s presence, moments of not being there when a child needed support, rupturing the ability to trust, leading to responses in which we learn to expect little for ourselves as a way of staving of disappointment and hurt. Belittling jokes or throw away comments can chip away at self worth, and lead to humiliation. This can come with a learning to stop noticing ourselves, a good protection against feeling the pain of the put down. Instead we start to prioritise others to gain care, or we might develop what more recent literature has explored as a fawning response. These learnt ways of being, which we know don’t serve us, feel very hard to disrupt.

The list below is not designed to be exhaustive, you might be reading it and shouting yes that's me, you’ve got it, or you might recognise yourself in several of the patterns, or you might want to add one or two more of your own -

    adopting a stance of fierce independence, with a correspondig struggle to delegate;

    a pattern of over-giving, over-enduring, absorbing blame;

    taking on the needs of others before your own;

    requiring yourself to be highly disciplined and striving for perfection;

    a reluctance to show vulnerability or depend on others;

    patterns of withdrawal or becoming emotionally distant;

    diminishing yourself in response to feeling too loud, too visible, too needy, too messy.

The intrasingence of these ways of being often enter therapy in frustration, self attack or self loathing. The loyalty to ourself has been sacrificed to the greater loyalty to our family. We might not want to blame our family, but we find it easy to blame and shame ourselves. These patterns are somehow understood as our own making, reflective of our own inadequacy.

Therapy offers a way of challenging the assumptions we hold about ourselves; retelling our past with our own voice; bringing tenderness and understanding to how our relational history developed and shaped us.

This isn’t to reattribute blame. We do not want to get into a game of hot potato. Rather it enables a fleshing out of the nuance of our lived experience and its impact. It enables a softening and acceptance towards ourselves. We don’t just bring insight, we inhabit the nuance of this expanded understanding of our life. In so doing we allow our felt response, as feelings are known they move through us, and can be let go. The experience is empowering, as we find more active, fulfilling ways of being in relationship - with others, with ourselves, and with the world. For 'We need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed there is the possibility of wholeness, the possibility of joy’ Anais Nin

My Parting Questions -

If you were to listen to your story, your life history, as if you were hearing a friend recount it as theirs What would you say? What would you know or see? How different is this from the way you talk to yourself, or what you let yourself see? If there is a difference in the two, why?

Please get in touch if anythig you have read has sparked an interest to look more suearmstrongtherapy@gmail.com

When do you feel free?

When I asked myself this question the first thing that came to mind was the freedom I feel when I am able to fully engage in relationship totally as myself. Not in a life and soul of the party sense, but to allow myself to be known in whatever I might be feeling. Free from feeling too much, too loud, too messy or completely contradictorily too little. Free from holding myself to static expectations of myself. I love the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s concept of ‘formless states’, in which we are free from the pressure to even ‘make sense’.

I also feel free in moments in which I am totally absorbed, in my body, dancing, in my sensual self, in nature, playful light moments in my life. Free in animated, embodied flow. Free in the ritual and solitude of the making and savouring of my morning cup of coffee, waking up to myself.

I wonder what your answers were, and whether you too noticed two sets of answers - freedom from, and freedom in?

Perhaps I want to add a third freedom too, in which we are driven to fight for freedom for something. I’m reminded of a particularly passionate performance by Nina Simone in Montreux in 1976 of ‘I wish I knew how it would feel to be free’. Look it up if you get a moment, it is incredible. The performance holds and exudes her fight with white oppression: her fight for the right to her talent, and her music, performed her way. Her freedom in this moment, has brought inspiration to me at key points in my life for my own uprisings.

Freedom is a good thing right? Yet, both in my own reflections and in my clinical work the human ambivalence towards freedom becomes apparent.

Freedom might be feared. It isn’t for us; it is too big, it is too ruleless, it is too unknown, it’s too visible. The converse pull might be for privacy, or to be small as a means of going unnoticed. Here we can still experience freedom, but of a different kind, a quieter freedom, under the radar, in solitude. This is not the solitude which is life avoidant, rather, a solitude which can feel life giving and sustaining. In this there could be deep peace.

We are all probably familiar with the metaphor of the caged bird, singing on their perch, the cage door open, but they don't fly away. They are safe there, it's familiar. My own pull is to whisper ‘go little bird … there’s a big world out there’, but the bird stays and continues to sing, seemingly unaware of their confinement.

As a relational psychotherapist I guide clients to explore how their past has shaped the way they think and feel, they way they relate to themselves and others, the way the hold, and move their bodies, dis-ease, held in the body impacting physical health, giving rise to auto-immune conditions. 

I am a passionate believer in this work. It offers us freedom from stuck patterns of relating and ways of being which don't serve us, and gives us choice and agency in our current day lives.

This process is frequently not without its opposition. 

Those ways of being in the world, just like the caged bird, are familiar to us, we know what we are dealing with, at one point in our life they served us, and kept us safe. We might long for change, feel frustrated at the intransigence of patterns of behaviour which we know restrict us; cause us distress and pain. Yet we also fear the very change we seek. 

We have to hold the space for these warring factions, they both have a point of view.

Intrapsychically we can only ever truly seek freedom when we feel safe.

We all have a need, and a right to both freedom and safety, connection and privacy. We all have a right to not be captured in a definition of ourselves, either our own or others, rather the freedom to go on being, continuing to become. 

In a space held by curiosity, not assuming an answer, we can understand our own unique balance and tipping point in the tensions, and the supporting functions of opposites - not in the fear led stance of old survival patterns, but in a stance responsive to you, your feelings and your needs. A stance which acknowledges your choice.

Perhaps we feel free when we soften knowing we are safe in the others' response; knowing what we demand of, and for ourselves, is just; finding a little more trust in the universe; and in allowing the complimentary balance between connection and privacy and solitude. 

To end I find myself returning to Winnicott’s words

‘in life’s sophisticated game of hide and seek, it is a joy to hide, but a disaster not to be found’.

Is freedom granting ourselves permission to hide, and the choice to step forth and be known, and seen. For is it not in the activity of choice, not what we choose, where true freedom lies? Freedom to live actively as us.

My Parting Questions -

Letting Winnicott’s words land in you -

How do you hide in your life, when the motivation is safety? Do you have anything which hides because you are choosing not to look? How do you hide in a privacy which is nourishing, recharging, life giving? What has it felt like in the moments in your life when you have been truly found? What has if felt like in moments in your life when you have hidden so well you could not be found?

Please get in touch if anythig you have read has sparked an interest to look more suearmstrongtherapy@gmail.com