Emergence is the space between healing and growth

I don’t know how your therapist spent the pandemic, but mine raised monarch butterflies. So, yesterday while I was struggling to explain my frustration and impatience with myself, she told me a story about how a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis. How it emerges with a body that is full of fluid and bigger than we think about butterfly bodies, and how its wings are curled and crumpled.

And I began to cry. I could feel those crumpled wings.

Those crumpled wings that I was ashamed of. Crumpled wings I wanted to hide or ignore because I was so deeply disappointed, after years of hard work, to emerge crumpled, instead of whole.

She continued: a butterfly rests where it emerges and must flap its wings over and over to fill up its wings, to bring the fluid from its body into its wings and help its wings expand. She explained how this takes a lot of time, and lots and lots of flapping.

And I continued to cry.

I cried from that exhausted relief you can feel when you realize that you are not alone. I was suddenly in the company of millions of small delicate souls, who emerge from one of the biggest changes a being could make—and yet still need time to become whole. I felt an expansive permission to be where I was. I sensed the beginning of forgiveness for all the judgments I had placed on myself. I felt the love that the universe extends to butterflies and could feel, even for a moment, that I could extend that love to myself. I was surrendering to a fight I had been unaware of until that moment.

I could feel my shame lift. I could feel that my emergence with crumpled wings wasn’t because I had done it wrong or was hopelessly broken. I was reminded in a way I could not ignore that emergence is continuous.

Crumpled wings aren’t an error—they are a part of the very nature of emergence. I could finally feel my messy in-between place as a place in its own right—as a place that is necessary. I could see that the task of becoming requires you to rest and stay where you are: that growth requires both rest and stillness.

And growth requires awkward flapping. Flapping to feel yourself grow, to feel where your edges are, to feel the power and possibility of what you have created. Flapping that brings all the work of healing into the power of your wings—draws all that painful work you did to heal into your cells --so that you come to inhabit yourself differently—and inhabit your world differently. And I felt deeply, in my heart, which now hurt, that this tender space of stillness and awkward flapping was precious and sacred. This place I had covered in shame, was in fact a place of wonder.

© 2021 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Osaka should be a verb.

Osaka /oʊˈsɑ.kə/verb

1)    To disappoint others to care for oneself.

2)     To decline an invitation to a gathering in order to better care for one’s mental health.

3)    To say no to cultural pressures that are physically or mentally harmful.

This week Naomi Osaka pulled out of the French Open rather than engage in the press conferences associated with, and required by, the conference. She risked her reputation and her year’s training in order to protect her mental health, a courageous and brave act.

For years I have worked as a therapist and an executive coach helping people who say that they don’t know how to say, “No.” I try to help my clients see that every time you say ‘Yes’ you are actually saying ‘No’ to something else, and usually you are saying ‘No’ to yourself. There is no free ‘Yes.’ By saying ‘Yes,’ you are usually making others happy or comfortable, and typically leaving yourself out of the equation. People know how to say ‘No’—because they say it to themselves all the time. What they don’t know how to do is disappoint others in order to better care for themselves. They don’t know how to Osaka. As in, “I’d love to come over tonight to help you, but I’m afraid I am going to have to Osaka and stay home.”

If we had a word for the trade-off between disappointing others and disappointing the self, people would be able to learn the skill earlier and be better able to grapple with the relational issues that hamper Osaka behavior. The clarity of Osaka would help people shift the problem from a yes-no dilemma, to a dilemma about disappointing others versus self-care. It would require people to acknowledge the self—and the other. It would require people to acknowledge the fullness of relationship—relationship to others and relationship to self.  “It isn’t easy for me to call you to Osaka for this meeting, but I’m trying to take better care of myself so I don’t get burned out again.”

Not only would the word Osaka help us say the ‘no’ we need to say, but it would also help all of us hear that ‘no’ differently. Oh, it’s not just ‘no’ it’s Osaka. As in “She couldn’t make the event this weekend because she had to Osaka. I’m going to miss her, but I am glad she could take care of herself.”

And yes, there are times when we can’t or shouldn’t Osaka. When we need to rise to an occasion, take one for the team, or do the right thing. When someone else’s needs are more important or should come first. There are important times in our lives when we choose or need to be uncomfortable or inconvenienced or even burdened in order to support someone else or an entire group of people. When we choose or need to stay up all night, or go to the meeting, or sacrifice something that is important to us.

But we need to be able to better discern these decisions and know them as choices. Having language, having the word Osaka would help us learn this.

My dear friend Inger taught me so much about the word ‘No.’ She was very clear about her ability to say ‘No’ and I learned from her what a clear no meant: it meant you could trust her ‘Yes’ in a way I had never experienced. When she said ‘Yes’ you trusted it completely because you knew that if she didn’t want to do or couldn’t do it she would say a definitive ‘No.’ You didn’t spend any time second guessing whether you were asking her to do something she didn’t want to do, or whether you had overstepped your bounds. Inger was an innovator in the Osaka realm, before there was the hope of a word for it. When someone can say ‘No’ in relationship, then you hear their ‘Yes’ as true assent and not coercion.

If Osaka was a verb we would finally have language for the boundaries in relationships that we could all understand. Osaka is the ballast for people-pleasing. It is the ballast for the over-rotation we all have to be ‘good’ and ‘helpful.’ Having the language of Osaka would allow all of us to hold the needs of self-and-other in a new and healthy way. It would allow us to say our ‘no’ with a spirit of kindness towards the self, and it would allow us to hear a ‘no’ with a spirit of generosity toward the other. And who couldn’t use more kindness and generosity.

© 2021 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Trauma Engaged Nation

No more shall we bind up the nation’s wounds[1]--it is time to actually heal them. We need to be a trauma engaged nation which means that we must fundamentally change the conversation about trauma. Changing the conversation about trauma means moving away from the simplistic idea that the trauma we are trying to heal is the result of any one single event or one single story. Most traumas aren’t a single event but instead happen so frequently that they are woven into the fabric of our lives.  We need to stop discussing trauma as if it were a short-term trauma, like a car accident. Most traumas that we humans experience are what I call repeated trauma. Repeated traumas are the traumas of child abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, racial and ethnic violence, community violence, and war. Traumas that happen for months, years and generations. These are the traumas that we as individuals and we as a nation need to heal from and it is impossible to heal if we don’t understand the distinction between single incident trauma and repeated trauma.

Single incident trauma produces a predictable physiological effect on humans—startle response, increased arousal, narrowed attention, loss of sleep or appetite and flashbacks of the event— symptoms, which if they persist, we recognize as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. But what happens when trauma gets repeated? What happens when it’s not one frightening event, but a frightening event that happens every day for years? A one time trauma overwhelms the system—and you are caught off guard.  But imagine how exhausting it would be to get caught off guard every night for most of a childhood or a lifetime of racial discrimination? Our brains and bodies are designed for efficiency and survival which means finding the least demanding and most protective ways to cope. When trauma is repeated, we don’t wait to get caught off guard—instead we unconsciously, yet wisely, build a system of defenses against being overwhelmed and getting caught off guard again, because building defenses to withstand repeated trauma conserves our energy for survival. Instead of getting flooded with emotion, with terror, fear and all the responses to trauma --we go numb, we feel nothing and we do whatever we have to in order to maintain our distance from ourselves or others. Our lives become about self-protection.

Treating trauma as if it were a single event to move on from, and not a repeated trauma is getting in the way of healing ourselves and our nation. Repeated trauma consists of three separate aspects and each require different interventions for healing.  All three must be worked through in order to heal.

 The first aspect of repeated trauma is what did happen. These are the traumatic events. What did happen is actually the form of trauma that most people recognize and our media culture idolizes: we love a good trauma story. And we falsely believe that once the story is told, we have healed and we can ‘move on.’ Being able to share your trauma story is necessary, and it is a crucial part of healing to have your story validated and witnessed. But the story in and of itself is not sufficient to heal.

The second aspect of repeated trauma is what aided survival-- that is —the protections we used to survive the trauma. With repeated trauma, we don’t just experience trauma, we develop ways of surviving it and those behaviors get woven into our way of being—they become part of our personality. We may have learned to shut down or to not feel emotion. We may have learned to equate any conflict with the violence we experienced and equate assertiveness with the power that was used to hurt us. These trauma survival skills may have served us well then, but they often turn out to be everything that is wrong with, or interferes with, the behavior and conversations that are needed to heal. They interfere with getting and trusting help. And they interfere with being a source of trusting help for others. For example, as a white woman I am aware how my personal trauma history impacts my ability to hold shame, conflict and difficult conversations—how it makes me want to stay silent rather than assertively intervening in conversation or duck away from the role of the perpetrator that must be owned in antiracist work. How healing from our own trauma is required to support the healing of others. How it is required to contribute to a trauma-engaged nation.

And there is a crucial third aspect to healing trauma which is often hidden— it is what didn’t happen. Repeated trauma is about what did happen and what didn’t happen. What didn’t happen was the normal developmental growth that would have taken place while the trauma was occurring. It’s not just the remembered acts of violence but also the necessary and healthy developmental tasks that you weren’t learning at the time the trauma was happening. A country at war isn’t building roads and schools, a child who is enduring abuse at home is not learning to trust adults and ask for help, and communities combatting violence don’t have time or energy to meet and create arts or education programs.

Attending to what didn’t happen is where survival stops and growth begins again. And not growth of what once was—because our country, like a child who has grown up in an abusive home, has never known a life without trauma—but instead it is growth of something new. And we all have a part to play in its healing.

Copyright 2021 Gretchen L. Schmelzer PhD

[1] Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

How do I live in a world without her?

“On the occasion of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg”

I’m sitting out on my back porch early in the morning looking out into the yards behind my house and the only thought in my head is “How can I live in a world without her?”

And my next thought is that this isn’t the I first time I’ve awoken early from a sleepless night with this thought and a broken heart. There is a disorientation, an instability, a deep disbelief of the world after the death of someone important to you. It feels like there is less oxygen. It feels like you have to move more carefully. And the denial of death always makes me want to wait, hope the news was a mistake, just sit still long enough, patient enough for them to return. And then you breathe and take in reality again. How do I live in a world without her?

When someone dies it’s not just that the world feels emptier without them, it feels like there is something in us that has changed. What is the world without them? Who am I without them?

It’s an odd day to be thinking about identity—as today is a pilgrimage of sorts. This morning I am meeting my colleague Eddy and we are going on a short trip to my hometown in North Jersey. Not because there is anything really special about my hometown, or that there is anything really to do, especially now with Covid, but because in our work and travels I have been close to Eddy’s hometown in Zambia, and now we’re closing the loop on an old conversation and going to mine.

We are mosaics. We are made up of pieces that makes us who we are: we are where we come from, we are where we have been, we are who we love and have loved, and we are what we hold dear.

 In American culture there is such an emphasis on the individual—that I am solely myself. But this notion of identity is an illusion and that illusion is shattered when someone dies. In that moment you can see and feel that the person who died held an important support rope for you. You may not have even noticed it when they were alive. But in their absence you suddenly feel vulnerable, wobbly, as if you could topple without their support. You realize that you could be who you were because of them.

It was my friend Eddy who taught me this. In our work in Zambia and across the world, he brought the belief he was raised with, ‘Ubuntu’ to our work. ‘Ubuntu’ means ‘I am because you are’— that we are who we are because of our relationships—we are who we are because of our community.  As the psychologist Jean Baker Miller says we are selves-in-relation. And this is the fact we feel most keenly when someone dies: I am because of you. And now, who am I without you?

We are mosaics and when someone dies those mosaic pieces must shift. When someone is alive, they hold those pieces of themselves and through our connection to them we feel the benefits and borrow the strengths of those pieces. And then when someone dies we have the work, the growth, of taking in, of integrating those pieces that we are able to. Taking in those strengths and capacities into our own selves—for us and the community.

That’s why our hearts must break. This is why we must fall apart. This is why grief shatters.  We need the brokenness. Without the brokenness we can’t take in the new pieces. Falling apart allow us to absorb the mosaic pieces of the other. It is this grief that  allows us to rebuild a world without them, that includes them. This is why time is so necessary to grieving. It takes time to weave these new pieces in. It takes time to remake our mosaics.

How do I live in a world without her? Maybe the short answer is I don’t. Because I bring her into my life every day. I stand in the voting booth and my grandmother is standing next to me. I dig up plants and share them with my neighbors and my mother-in-law is right there with me handing me the spade. I rearrange my schedule to make time for writing and my friends Inger and Janet are raising their glasses and toasting my decision. Our hearts break open and our mosaics, the world’s mosaics, get bigger. First, let yourself grieve. And then, let yourself grow.

 Copyright 2020 Gretchen Schmelzer PhD