Go Be

I’ve been thinking about hope lately, and where hope is helpful and helps you sustain effort or perseverance and where it might actually get in the way. Where having hope is more of a form of denial or numbing—where it might keep you from action rather than support you into action. I’m thinking about a conversation with my therapist many years ago where she talked about a more ‘mature hope’—a hope that could hold disappointment—a hope that took in the world the way it was, took in the losses that were there and kept putting one foot in front of the other anyway.

I have always been hopeful and optimistic, but as I was driving home today from a rejuvenating weekend in nature—I reflected on where I got to practice not just hope, but what I might call ‘hope-in-action.’ Where you don’t just imagine a brighter future, you simultaneously do something.

It was the summer of 1980. I was 15 and a Girl Scout Camper. There were maybe 30 of us on one side of the lake. We lived in two different tent units and there was a stone building where we ate our meals and hung out around a central fireplace. There was a bathroom in this building that had imperative, “Go Be!” written in 2 foot letter cut outs from wallpaper on the mirror so you couldn’t miss it. The ‘Go’ was in one print—kind of faded. And the ‘Be’ was in another print -bright and floral. The ‘Go’ had once been part of a different sentence, “Good Morning” and now had been repurposed into the directive for action.

The first night of camp the Camp Director Joan told us about the command written in the bathroom: that we were to imagine the summer we wanted to create and go do it, go be it. To become the best versions of ourselves. She directed us in a activity to brainstorm all the things we would love to do in our time there and be as bold as we could be. In our brainstorming a group of us wanted to go backpacking and canoeing on the same trip. We didn’t want to choose. She said, “if that’s what you want, then come to me with a plan.” And so we spent the next two days planning. We kept thinking of reasons why it might be too big of an ask. It meant a long time away from camp and a bunch of resources to pick us up and drop off equipment. She said, ‘keep planning.’ So we worked with counselors to pick a hiking trail that wasn’t too far away in the Western Catskills and we risked asking for the canoe trip we really wanted which included Skinner’s Falls. In the end, we had a plan, we had an equipment and food list, and we had a plan to get into canoeing and hiking shape. The Combination Trip had been born.

Of the actual 7 day trip I remember flashes: hiking under the canopy of trees—the Western Catskills being high on greenery and low on scenic views. I remember the excitement of Skinner’s Falls and life-jacketing down the Delaware where the Mongaup river flows in—trying to keep my feet up and my head above water. I remember putting up tents and making meals high above the river. But the details of the trip aren’t what stays with me.

What stays with me is the experience of starting with hope and living that hope into action. And living hope into action requires more than just a big idea or a feeling of optimism.  Often hope is so big and feels so out of reach that what hope actually needs is ballast. That summer of ’80, ballast came in the form of Joan’s supportive discipline to take our idea and put in the work of planning it. The supportive discipline not to do it for us, or even to tell us what would or wouldn’t work, but the request to keep planning and working with each other. The requirement to stay with the tedious parts of planning and preparing. To hold onto what we visioned and hoped for, but to slow down and create the structure that would hold it.

So maybe a mature hope is one where we can ‘go be.’ We can imagine a better future, and we can hold ourselves with patience as we work toward it. We can hold both the shiny picture we have in our heads and the mundane or dull work that’s required to bring that hope into action. We can hold all the parts of ourselves in one place long enough for our hopes and our abilities to link arms into action. Go be: be big, be tired, be helpful, be stubborn, be friendly, be scared, be experienced, be new, be bold, be angry, be brave. All of it. Go be.

 © 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

The Other Side of Fear

“Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. ”
— George Addair

I am on a train headed toward Boston and away from New York. Which has me thinking about the idea of moving towards and away and about how one chooses what they want—whether you are choosing to move toward something or away from something. And much of our ability to make those choices is impacted by our experience of trauma—whether you have a history of trauma or whether your trauma is the more recent effect of the pandemic. Are you moving toward what you want or away from fear?

I have often said that trauma shatters.  And the pandemic shattered many of our old routines and ways of doing things. And it has shattered many norms and structures that may or may not have served us before. And with all of the coming apart—we have an opportunity to choose how we put things back together.

Trauma makes decision making difficult—because the usual means of decision making—paying attention to wants, needs and preferences is short-circuited by survival mode.  I am not knocking survival mode. It’s a crucial capacity for resilience—and it’s the reason many of us are still here and able to heal and grow and enjoy our lives. But the problem with trauma is that survival mode becomes a gear that we forget to shift out of, or more accurately—we don’t even know we are in it—and therefore we don’t think to shift out of it.

Survival mode is about protecting yourself—and these protections don’t just protect you from trauma---they become part of the fabric of who you are. They become part of the way you see the world. They aren’t choice so much as habit. And the habit of survival mode is to move away from fear.

And the thing that keeps us from unlearning survival mode is believing that moving away from survival mode will mean an absence of fear. Believing that the new behavior or choice will feel good. That if you choose to do the new thing and not the survival thing you won’t feel fear or anxiety. In fact, doing the new thing or heading into a new set of behaviors will often increase your fear. The problem is that the feeling of fear isn’t a reliable source of information about the present. It is an old map being used in a new territory. You feel fear and move to protect yourself by doing the old habit. And if you want to unlearn survival mode this isn’t how it works.

If have protected myself by not relying on people or asking for help—the opposite behavior—asking for help —will actually increase my fear—it will increase anxiety. Not necessarily because of what is happening in the present, but because of what I have experienced in the past and now anticipate happening again. Survival mode is about protecting myself from the trauma that already happened. It is an insurance policy against terror, helplessness, or being caught off-guard. If I continue to do things by myself, I will remain in survival mode. If want to move away survival mode and towards health—then I have to risk fear and anxiety to try something new. I have to live through the fear.

The key to unlearning survival mode is getting to the other side of fear.  I don’t think there’s enough discussion of the other side of fear because it’s a totally unfamiliar place. The reason it’s hard to imagine is because it’s a place that’s actually brand new. And brand new places, especially in adulthood, often defy language. When you have lived inside fear for so long—you get really used to the constriction of living there. And on the other side of fear—after crossing the bridge or the tunnel that is filled with fear—there is an expansiveness that is new. An elasticity. And it is this new expansiveness that gives you the beginning of your freedom of movement towards something that you want rather than moving away from fear.

The other side of fear isn’t the end point—it’s the space that allows the shift. This is what I think is missing in the discussion of most transitions. We think of transitions as moving from one pole to the other. And the truth is that transitions require a middle space—a space between this or that. The middle space is the space where we get to experience something new—which means we actually get to experience the present—what’s happening now—and not what already happened. And in the present is where we actually get a choice. It is where we can actually feel what we want or what we need because the information is available, and it is relevant.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Even Better

One of the happy unintended consequences of the decade that psychology training requires are all the wonderful people you meet and all the ways these people change who you are and the way you see the world. I was lucky to have wonderful supervisors and clients who were my teachers about healing and growing. Supervisors who helped slow me down from the achievement zip-line that the educational track had me on—with one supervisor famously imploring me to ‘get a B’ that semester—to shift my view from perfection to really feeling and understanding what was happening—to allowing the messiness that is necessary for learning and growth. And another supervisor who helped me hear the ‘other conversations’ that the kids were having as they played with me. To listen to the melody, not just the lyrics.

But training in psychology (or medicine) is also a team sport: you are always with other trainees—other colleagues with you on the learning journey—and it’s less apparent sometimes in the moment to know what you are learning from them—other than them being fellow survivors of the hundred hour work weeks, looming dissertations or under-resourced health systems.

But as I drove north today in what turned out to be more traffic than I wanted, I heard the phrase in my head, ‘Even Better.’ And I smiled, because this phrase was entirely the gift of my fellow Post-doc Julianne.

This phrase came from Julianne’s mother. As Julianne taught me: whenever her mother would run into something that normally would make someone annoyed or angry—her mother would survey the situation and say, “Even better.” And she would find that even better.

The story that encapsulated this approach as I remember it 20 years later was a time when Julianne, her mom and her sibling were taking a bus to a family event—a birthday party or a baby shower—and they got off the bus –and they were lost. They had taken the wrong bus. They were far away from where they were supposed to be and too late to get back on the bus and get there in time. As it turned out, the bus stop where they got off was actually the bus stop for the zoo. So her mom said, “even better, let’s go to the zoo.” And that’s what they did.

Of course --not every disappointing or difficult situation can be seen through the lens of ‘Even better.’ That’s not my expectation or why I am sharing this story. There are lots of situations that are dire, unjust, tragic and dangerous for which you would never say, ‘even better.’ Nor do I think people shouldn’t feel annoyed or disappointed. I don’t think anything is wrong with feeling your feelings. But I do think that there is a lot of expectation in our lives that things should happen smoothly, or effortlessly, or that they should turn out a certain way. That we are supposed to plan, organize or be efficient enough for nothing ever to not go as planned. And we can find ourselves buried under disappointment or anger that we are in that situation for much longer than the event deserves.

‘Even better’ is a shift of figure and ground. Life doesn’t happen the way you wanted or expected. It doesn’t happen the way you hoped—you take the wrong bus or you get re-routed on your drive. The materials don’t show up for the program. Or the internet doesn’t work and you have to run it over a cell phone. More people show up for dinner than you planned and you turn your dinner into a casserole. Or, as happened to me this spring—my flight from a work event got cancelled and rebooked for three days later—so I had to reconfigure my work and plans that were supposed to happen the next three days. I was stressed and anxious. But then a colleague who lived in the city where I was stranded called me the next day and had found a place to rent bicycles—and I spent an afternoon riding bikes with a friend on a bike path—something I would never have done that week, so -- even better.

And today I smiled and thought of it as the traffic slowed to a halt and I could feel the rising frustration: I should have left earlier. I should have taken a different route. But when I heard ‘even better’ in my head—it quieted those voices. It made me take a deep breath and look around. And when I did I noticed I was in a beautiful part of the Hudson Valley. I looked at the mountains nearby. The green. The blue sky. And took in the landscape the way I usually take it in when I am hiking, or the way you take it in when you purposely pull in to one of those places that signal ‘scenic views.’ It was right there all the time, but the busy moving traffic had me paying more attention to the road and other cars. But stopping was actually even better: I got to be where I was.

 © 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

*And if you want a fabulous book that does a figure-ground shift on time and time management, I highly recommend Four thousand weeks: Time Management for mortals by Oliver Burkeman


She let herself go

What I find amazing is that the statement, “She let herself go” is considered an insult, instead of a cause for celebration. True, it is what is said about (mostly women) who have gained weight or stopped caring about their appearance in the way that ‘they’ think you ought to care. It is a statement of judgement. Of lowering your standards. It implies that ‘she’ once had it together, and now she longer does.

My work life is reawakening from Covid and my travel and ‘in-person’ work is resuming again. This past week I was in Fairbanks, Alaska to work with a team and had planned in 2 extras days before the work started as a buffer against flight delays which have become the norm. One of my Alaskan colleagues asked if I had ever been Denali National Park and I said no. I’ve been working in Alaska for a decade now but had yet to go. It always seemed like a too big of trip to add on to an already busy work schedule, and I often wasn’t there in the summer. But here I was with two extra days in the height of summer, and she generously offered me her car for the weekend so I drove the two hours down to Denali.  

The second day of hiking I walked for four hours in wilderness on a trail that went to three different lakes. I had the trail entirely to myself. Just wind and birdsong. Wildflowers blooming everywhere: fireweed, delphinium, bluebells, bunchberry. And as I was hiking along the trail, that old refrain, “she let herself go” came back to me. It came first from the feeling of having ‘let myself go’ on this adventure to Denali. “I let myself go.” And the statement jiggled in my brain because it’s a statement that is supposed to make you feel bad about yourself, yet what I actually felt was exhilaration—and freedom.  I began thinking of how often this refrain is used. All the times as a kid I heard the adults say it about people they met at the store or who had come for dinner. Said in whispers as they left. How it was said to me by a less-than-caring relative when my marriage ended: “well, you did let yourself go.”

I thought of being back at work in person and having to wear pants after gaining weight during Covid. How I hadn’t gotten new work clothes in two years because all of my work was on Zoom and how in some ways we had all ‘let ourselves go.’  We let ourselves go in ways we hadn’t imagined we could. We let go of our dress codes and our old routines. We let go of the ways we thought we could work together and found new ways. We let go of the priorities we once had and are now in the transition to figure out what they are again.

I found myself hiking to a rhythm of ‘let…go…let….go…let….go…’

And as I hiked, with each footfall, I began to wonder what it would really mean own this statement ‘to let yourself go.’  If you really let yourself go, what would do or what would you stop doing? What would you stop caring about? What would you care more about?

If feels like the life equivalent of that moment at the end of a long evening of wearing really uncomfortable shoes—where you kick them off and stand in your bare feet. Where you feel relief not only in your sore feet, but your whole body—in your whole self. All the ways we hold ourselves back. All the ways we hide the parts of ourselves we aren’t sure about. All the ways we constrict our emotions, our words, our voice.

So rather than fearing the statement: she let herself go. Let’s seek it out—let yourself go. And if we hear someone saying “she let herself go’ about someone else, let’s smile and reply: good for her.

 © 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

*And in this spirit of ‘she let herself go’ I am going to be posting more frequently, and perhaps less eloquently. I have found that over time I had a higher and higher standard to write this blog to the point that I wasn’t writing at all. It is my intention to write once or twice a week now with pieces less polished and perhaps with more questions than answers. I understand that this may be more frequent emails than you wish—and you are welcome to unsubscribe and check in on the website when you wish.