The Hardest Part of Change is So Very Small

Photo credit: Jonathon Rieder pixabay.com

There’s a lot of energy and momentum in making change. When you begin something new you feel can feel energized and excited. You can feel the effect of whatever the new thing is. You can feel the impact of the new thing on your identity (I’m the kind of person who…..). And you can begin to imagine a future where the new thing is just part of your routine and not new.

But the shift from new to routine is a big one. This transition has to pass through that messy middle phase of learning. It has to pass through that middle phase of integration. It has to survive the all the mornings and afternoons where you believe that you can skip that day. The gauntlet of “Maybe this isn’t the change I want to make.” Or, “Was this a good idea to begin with?

The hardest parts of change are so very small. They are moments. They are quick thoughts. “I could just do this tomorrow.” “I don’t have time today.”

You start doing a new behavior—walking, or yoga, or mindfulness (or writing more frequently) and it goes along pretty well and then there’s a day or two where you have events that interfere or parts of your routine that are off and suddenly that new change, that new behavior is inconvenient. It’s not difficult, it’s not harder than the day before, it’s just not easy.

The fact that what interferes is small is what makes it hard. When we are confronted with big challenges – we often rise to the occasion. We know to muster our resources. We rally.

But when the challenges show up small. When they are simple everyday thoughts that are soothing and make sense in the moment we don’t interrupt, we don’t argue. We nod politely and go along.

The biggest catalyst to change is constancy. Staying in contact with the thing you are trying to do or learn to do. It’s about frequency rather than depth. In many ways the principle of beginning any new behavior or change is not really different than the way we need to create any relationship or friendship. You are building a relationship both with the new behavior AND the part of you that is doing the new behavior. You are spending time with it. You are encouraging it. You are getting to know it and the different things it wants and needs. And most of all you are showing up for it –even when its inconvenient—even on days when you may not want to. You are becoming a good and decent friend to it, and yourself.

If you think of the new change as a friend—then the issue isn’t whether or not you will spend time together, but how. And for how long. I have a dear friend I talk to almost every day. Some days it’s 5 minutes, some days it’s an hour. Some days it’s a text. But the important part for us is connecting at some point in our day. So the issue for change is how you can connect with it—spend time with it that day. It won’t always be the same. Maybe you are trying to make friends with walking—and it’s a really busy day of errands—can you take it along? Can you park farther away from each of your errands and get your walking in that way? Or can you walk around the block at the end of the day and use that walk for mindfulness and gratitude—and be content with a small contact with it, even if it doesn’t look like your imagined goal?

The problem with behavior change is that it is usually connected to a goal or an outcome—and there can be an all-or-nothing quality to it. There’s a ‘right way to do it.’ And on days that are inconvenient—or where we have other pressing priorities, we can fall into that do it/not do it mentality. But friendships and relationships are different. They aren’t all or nothing. Each moment of connection doesn’t have to be a peak experience. You can just hang out together. You can sit quietly together. On bad days, you can just be a comforting presence.

And that’s what we need to bring to these middle parts of change. A kind comforting presence. The ability to stay connected to the new behavior. To be in its presence. To bring it along or sit beside it—even on days where we feel a bit rushed. To be okay with it not being exactly what we hoped that day—but because it’s now a friend, confident that it will be there tomorrow. That together you can figure it out and stay the course.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Making Peace

Photo Credit: Gabriella Juri

“In peace building, solutions arise from relational resources: the solution shows up in the who first, not the what. ”

— John Lederach, The Moral Imagination

I spent the early part of this week at a conference for the Federal workforce doing two presentations on integrating a trauma informed approach into their work. Most of these folks were EEO counselors, investigators, or lawyers—and they come into contact with trauma both in the stories and experience of their clients, but also importantly in the vicarious trauma and moral injury that listening to those stories can create. The impetus for bringing this work to this group is the part of a new directive for agencies to prioritize ensuring that employees who are responsible for receiving, investigating, and/or resolving complaints are well-trained to communicate with employees in a trauma-informed manner. This is especially crucial given what we now understand about the effect of trauma on attention, memory, coherent narrative, and time—all of which can impact a person’s ability to report that something harmful has happened to them.

In my presentation I also focused on trauma’s impact on relationship—how a person who has experience repeated relational trauma will often not trust help—and given that workplace complaints need to be registered in a timely manner—the lack of belief in help and relationships mean that people often do not seek help in time.

And while there is a grief and a sadness about the impact of trauma on relationship. The fact that relationship is so central to healing is what makes me hopeful.

A few women stayed after my talk to talk about how to bring these ideas into their agencies—and one of the women thanked me for the presentation and said, “blessed are the peacemakers.” And I paused for a moment and breathed in that sentence.

I love the word ‘peace’ but I can’t say I have an intimate relationship with it.  Peace has either felt like a country too far away to really visit –like Australia-- or a state of being that I can’t fully imagine. And I certainly never considered myself working directly on its behalf—and yet the woman continued: ‘that’s what you are doing – you’re bringing peace. I’m doing it too. It’s your gift. It’s my gift. We’re dropping pieces of peace wherever we can.’

Thanks to delays and a long flight home I had a lot of time to think about this—and essentially begin to make peace with my idea of peace. I realized first that there are just so many ideas we have in our heads and our hearts that we haven’t updated. My ideas of peace were formed in high school and college when the world in my mind was mostly an all-or-nothing affair—and since I didn’t really understand the word ‘safety’ –peace was a far-away abstraction.  My current images and definitions of peace were stuck in this time capsule of beliefs.

But after years of healing—I actually know, in my body, mind and heart what the feeling of safety is. I know that feeling of rest, comfort, refuge, freedom. It is a feeling of expansiveness and ease.  It is a place of wonder, rather than fear. So now if I slow down and look at the word ‘peace’ -- I realize I actually do know something about what peace feels like. I can imagine that peace is a state that I can bring to others through my work—a small ‘p’ kind of peace if you will.

I thought of the reading I’ve done about peace processes in post-conflict countries and how one of the tasks of peace processes is reconciling differences of the past and envisioning a future. Peacebuilding may be the embodiment of integration—the ability to hold past and future in the present: to stay grounded in all three at once.  

But more than anything-- peace building, like the repeated trauma that necessitates it, is about relationship—and therein lies the hope. It may just be semantic—peace building may just be the term for healing and integration at a larger system level—but if so, I love the idea, as the wise woman I met yesterday suggested, of referring to the healing work we do with ourselves and others as peace building. Referring to those who do this work as ‘peacebuilders.’ And I love the idea that our small acts of relationship and healing is connected to a larger peace. We can feel helpless to create peace in a world full of conflict—if we only sit in the idea that to create peace means to tackle the entire world at once. Instead, it feels manageable—even empowering and hopeful to believe that we can build peace in every conversation we have. That we know that our ability to say hello and listen for the response—smile and wait for the smile in return—just those acts—might be weaving a fabric of peace. That if we nurture ourselves and our relationships—we are nurturing peace- “dropping pieces of peace wherever we can.”

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace

By Lederach, John Paul

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Beautiful Defenses

I spent the morning walking in the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. It’s a museum of spiky spiny plants of all shapes and sizes: Saguaro, Prickly Pear, Organ Pipe, Golden Barrel. These are plants you would think twice about touching. These aren’t plants you want to hug, or you want to hold. They scream: Survival! Back away! Not too close!

These are plants that guard their limited resources with all they have. They are the poster children for protection—for defenses. These particular plants developed to survive in this particular environment over the course of time. Their protections are called ‘adaptations.’ Most cacti gave up true leaves, trading soft leaves for hard spikes—the better to protect themselves from water loss and protect themselves from being eaten. And while the 104-degree heat had me searching for shade and water—these plants are succulents—able to hold water inside their flesh, bracing at drought. Cacti are beautiful, sculptural—they are protection or defense made art—made beauty.

And then I begin to think of our human protections: isolation, shutting down, aggression, cynicism, avoidance, mistrust—I think about all the ways people who have been hurt try to keep themselves safe—especially safe from the intrusions or judgments or disappointments of other people.  I’ve worked with and known plenty of people who also grew up in deserts—emotional deserts—and they too had prickly, spiky personalities—designed to conserve any resource they had—and keep anyone from getting too close. Their words and behavior had sharp edges to them—and these sharp edges gave them protected space. These protections were also created in particular environments over the course of time. These protections were also ‘adaptations.’

Until today I had never pondered protections as beauty: maybe it takes seeing cacti in their natural habitat—and not in some airless cacti room in a greenhouse. Seeing them against the bright blue sky. Maybe it takes seeing them in bloom in great numbers—all prickly and beautiful near one another. But mostly I think it takes slowing down and getting to look at them over the course of hours. Getting to notice the shapes, sizes, colors and differences among them. Being in their elements of dry land and oppressive heat where they looked happy and I doubted my ability to last long. Being in their element allowed me to appreciate their protections—protections for the environment we were in—protections I didn’t share.

The problem with most human defenses is that we don’t see them in the environment that created them. We see them in different contexts—often years later—where the old defense no longer makes sense. We see the Golden Barrel cactus trying to make it in an English perennial border. It’s spikes looking unnecessary in the temperate weather—and awfully aggressive compared to the geranium or petunia next to it.

Where are your soft easy leaves? Why are you turning pale with all that water and nourishment?

I’ve often explained that the trauma that most people experience is repeated relational trauma: the trauma of child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, racial violence, war. These are the harsh, desert conditions that have people develop their protections and defenses. And repeated trauma is really three forms of trauma: what did happen (the traumatic events that happened); what aided survival (the protections and defenses you use to survive trauma) and what didn’t happen (the growth and development that doesn’t happen while trauma is occurring.

And the reason that healing from trauma is so difficult—is that our culture loves to focus on the first form of trauma—what did happen. We are a culture obsessed with trauma stories—believing that the story alone is the cure.

And the story of your trauma is necessary for healing, but it is not sufficient. Because you also have to sort through the protections you created to survive and decide what is still serving you and what is getting in your way. And once your protections are more adaptive to the present—you can begin to work on the growth and development you missed while the trauma was happening.

Working with your protections is the core of healing and working with your protections is really hard. It’s hard to give up your spikes. It’s hard to stop seeing the world through the lens of deprivation. Working with your protection is the slow, repetitive, tedious part of healing, It takes a long time. And it both wildly underestimated and under-celebrated.

In many ways shifting your protections to match the garden that you are in is exactly what healing from trauma is: gradually letting go of your spikes. Letting yourself grow leaves. It’s true that I have appreciated that defenses are useful. Indeed we can’t live without any—they are crucial for our mental health. But today I understood how much you have to appreciate the protections first. How much you need to see them in context —how much you also need to seen in them their beauty.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

Getting to Know the Overgrown

In all the discussions of growth—the focus is most often on what needs to be grown. What is new, tender and needs encouragement and care. And this is as it should be—this is quiet, difficult , important work. Right now I have tiny foxglove seedlings in seed trays on lighted shelves in my living room. They were outside on my porch with other seedlings before the squirrels in my back yard enacted The Great Seedling Massacre of 2022 and dug up all but the foxgloves and the broccoli rabe. So despite it being warm enough outside to grow, I brought the tender helpless seedlings inside to get bigger before I can plant them out in the garden. New beginnings need protection.

But my August garden is reminding me of another side of growth that also needs attention and care, and that is when things become overgrown. Right now my perennials are five feet high: daisies, echinacea, black-eyed susans, butterfly bush—with some annuals tossed in—sunflowers, zinnias, fennel. So many flowers in a small place. Reaching up, reaching out, falling on each other, vying for space and sunlight. Collectively, if you like a bit of chaos, it’s beautiful. But it also needs tending. I need to prune back what has already bloomed which may allow the flowers to keep blooming. I need to cut back or pull out some flowers to give the rest some more air and space. I need to figure out which one may need to move to a location that better suits them.

While I have spent a lot of time learning and practicing beginnings, I am less practiced at the sorting that needs to happen in order for things to have their time and space. Mostly I have fostered the delusion in my garden, and in my life, that you can (and really, should) be able to do it all at once.

I think some of that is from the survival mode of trauma—you don’t learn to live in the now, so you are always protecting yourself from what already happened, and always hoping for and imagining a different future. You are never where you are standing. You overplant your garden because you don’t trust everything to grow. And you don’t deal with the current garden because you start planning the one for next Spring in your head. So-- the act of sorting, of prioritizing, which is such a necessary skill, remains unpracticed.

Working with what’s overgrown is working with what is.  And really, the kinder way to say that is acceptance. Or even, radically, seeing the overgrown as abundance. I want to sort through my life’s garden with the same questions that I use to sort through my flower garden: What am I growing that is important to me and what are the conditions that those things need in order to really grow and be effective? What needs more attention? What needs more space? What needs to come out? What needs to be moved?  

And what part of the chaos and messiness is just fine the way it is?

In the mornings, finches cling to my sunflowers and eat their breakfast. And all afternoon in the sun, bees of all sorts and sizes go from daisy to zinnia to echinacea. Swallowtails sit and flap their wings on my yellow fennel flowers. Sometimes, the overgrown can be nourishing. And sometimes it can be too much. The trick to knowing the difference is to really pay attention to what is getting nourished and what is getting crowded out or dying off. The trick is seeing what has grown.

© 2022 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD