Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Unknowing and the Door

    In times of crisis, we’re likely to experience some regression. Young parts of us that seek out some authority to blame, some authority to hide behind, someone bigger and more powerful who can be responsible for dealing with this beautiful and at times terrifying world.

    Those who step into authority, as parents, religious leaders, politicians, healers, and more may have sensed the strangeness of realizing that projection falls upon you. That you, a human being yourself, as fallible and seeking of safety as anyone else, have been targeted as the one who is supposed to know what’s going on. The right next thing to do to keep people safe. The right way to be in the world to be whole.

    And, if you have that authority, you likely do have something to offer. An insight, a process, a plan that will lead everyone through the door from distress to desire. From crisis to normalcy. From illness to haleness.

    Yet when we’re on the side receiving that projection, we might feel pressured to behave as though we know more than we do. To be the authority and show no doubt. And sometimes it helps, but often it becomes a barrier to the qualities that made us an authority in the first place, what we needed to practice to accrue that power and insight.

    Perhaps the world needs less certainty and more courage. As a therapist, my best offering is my curiosity and a process that helps the client to heal and know themself and discover both the door and what’s on the other side of the door. I may have an idea of what I think is through the door, or I have my biases of what I think should be, but in those moments I am the least curious and the least helpful. What I offer best is the capacity to be in the not-knowing with others, but not to be crushed or overwhelmed by the not-knowing but to let it enliven us. To be excited by the not-knowing, the risk, the opportunity for transformation and the possibility that the other side of the door will be even better, although different and not free of problems.

    In times like these, I feel we are all sitting in a great unknowing. There is a giant door through which we are passing, collectively, ready or not. No one knows for sure what’s on the other side. We can practice all of our tools, all of our good skills, stick to our goals, but some of us are feeling a sense of pause even in that. What if this goal I’ve been following is no longer relevant when I move through the door? What if all my work toward being recognized at my job falls to the wayside as the industry collapses? What if my grievances with my friends become buried beneath so much reality? What if all of this fear was for nothing? What if some day I wish I’d had far more fear?

    Together we sit in our questions and unknowing, with all its terror and numbness and crankiness and unexpected moments of levity, peace and joy. And even with crisis and pain there is the possibility of richness, of seeing how all our lives we’ve worn a way of seeing that was never fully true. We’ve been ruled by a wounding that’s no longer relevant. We’ve been controlled by fears that simply do not matter. Even in this pain there is the opportunity to set aside all that we’ve been told to like about ourselves, want for ourselves, fear so we can protect ourselves, and discover the truth of who we are.

    And if we know that truth, this door could strip away all that no longer serves that truth. We can sacrifice what was burdensome and unnecessary in the flames of aliveness. We can allow the waste and the garbage to be stripped down and pass through, fierce and sharp and ready to make a new world where the old once stood.

    To pass through the door is to die. Our bodies may live and our consciousness may persist, but something in the way we’ve lived must die. Something we believed about ourselves and the world must die. Our illusions of separation. Our illusions of control. Our illusions of independence.

    And each of us carries our own piece of that death. Instead of worrying about the death of the world, let us tend to our own. Let us keep our bodies alive, and grieve, and care for each other, and let ourselves be changed so that the soul has more room to breathe and adapt to what is beyond the door.

    An image of several doorways in a row.
    Photo by Filip Kominik on Unsplash

  • Mitigating the Effects of Social Distancing

    One of my topics of interest as a therapist has been reading research into the impacts of chronic loneliness on people. We are truly social animals that thrive—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually—in connection with others. When we feel safe, understood, loved and loving, valued, and have regular physical contact with other humans.

    In a recent tarot reading, more prescient than I’d imagined, I drew for the Spirit of this Age the card The Hermit. It is the work thrust upon us, horrifying and rife with potential. To be asked, and in some cases ordered, to let go of the trips and events we looked forward to experiencing. To avoid our big community events, the workplaces where we regularly play out our lives among colleagues, to minimize social contact. To spend time with ourselves and the people with whom we cohabitate.

    Much is being said about the demands of this moment to practice mutual aid. And with that is relearning how to be alone. 

    Loneliness is a social hunger, according to John Cacioppo, who researched it extensively. When we go too long without social connection, that loneliness begins to affect our system in ways that resemble trauma—more anxiety, escalated mistrust, difficulty regulating and calming ourselves, increased sensitivity to real or perceived rejection.

    Social connection and touch—consensual touch, whether it is hugging, hand holding, arm around the shoulder, massage, cuddling, or sexual touch—help to soothe us, promotes calming hormones that decrease the effects of stress on the body, and helps us to release natural opioids that ease experiences of pain. Our sense of meaning emerges in part from our relationships to others—how we are useful, how we are helpful, how we are influential.

    Here’s a few interesting things. Loneliness is fed by mutuality in relationship. If your primary social contacts are people you pay or people who engage with you as a role instead of a person, that meets other needs but not social hunger. Also, loneliness differs from solitude in that the latter is chosen. When we feel we are alone and it’s not our choice, that becomes very painful.

    As we practice being alone to decrease the spread of illness and stem the flood of patients to an overwhelmed and underfunded medical system, we might try some things.

    Remind yourself that this solitude is a choice you are making to care for yourself and your community, and that can make a different choice. Each choice you could make offers its own personal and collective risk, but allow yourself to have the choice, and to consider your options and risks, and decide.

    We each have different appetites for socialization, both our levels of hunger and ease of satiety. Some of us get lonely easily and need a lot of social connection, while for others simply getting a cup of coffee is more than enough contact. Don’t judge your level of need and consider ways to diversify social contact as you can. Call friends and family. Schedule video chats or text chats. Think of someone you’d like to get to know and reach out to them. We already have a great icebreaker. “Wow, this is a weird time. How are you holding up?”

    At this time, where I live, all public interaction is not banned, mostly large groups. You may make some agreements with individuals you know to meet and connect in the ways that will serve you, knowing you’re sharing risk but also that if one of you gets sick you can give the other advance warning.

    But with trying to make time to connect, and all the ways we distract ourselves, we may still reach moments where we feel trapped, isolated, and empty. There are times when we may choose to engage in numbing, soothing, checking out, or freaking out, and I do not fault anyone for that. We may also use this time to practice being companion to ourselves.

    Meditation is one beautiful practice, and I offer a few guided ones that may be of help.

    Journaling is another, whether using pen and paper, a computer, or narrating your thoughts into a recorder. You might simply journal about whatever is on your mind, then listen to it later. Or you might consider telling yourself your life story, writing about the moments that stick out to you, what was interesting about them, what they meant to you, how that meaning affected your later decisions.

    For those who are interested in tarot and other kinds of divination, those are great frameworks for self-reflection. You could simply ask yourself a question, draw a card or stone, and then journal about what you think this tells you about your question.

    Think about how your life has been lately, prior to pandemic. What have you enjoyed about it? What do you wish was different? What fears do you have about doing things differently? What are the risks? Given that we are a time in which extraordinary things that were once said to be impossible are now occurring, consider how you might use the malleability of the moment to change your life when the crisis passes. Do you like working from home and not commuting? What if you just… kept doing it? What do you imagine that would be like?

    A person sitting cross-legged on a rock amidst water looking at a sunset. Photo by Keegan Houser courtesy of Unsplash.com

    What is scariest and most beautiful is the potential for deep intimacy with yourself, to be exquisitely present to your full experience and be able to be with it without trying to fix it, suppress it, push it away, agree with it, or argue with it. A part of you feels bored, and you are there with it. A part of you feels restless, and you are there with it. A part of you says the world is falling apart, and you are there with it. Breathing. Feeling the contact of your body with the ground. Feeling how you are more than this thought and feeling.

    If you are a spiritual person, you might take time to pray or engage in a longer practice. Deep practice helps us to have more space with our experience, which offers a buffer to the destabilizing effects of loneliness.

    And if you can’t take it anymore, go for a walk. Be outside for a while, not necessarily interacting with folks but feeling the sun and air, spending time among trees and blooming flowers. Find a quiet place to sit and simply stay for as long as you can, still, watching what happens around you when you are quiet and still. Let yourself be enraptured by nature. I find this profoundly calming.

    This time appears to be calling us to practice solitude and mutual aid, both aloneness and community-mindedness. I cannot think of a call to action that would better say “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”

  • Tend the light in your heart

    Billions of us walk through the world carrying something incomprehensibly precious and tender, a heart radiating with the potential of loving sweetness, courage, strength, and inspiration. These hearts, which have never existed before and will never exist again, made of the earth, nurtured by the age and society in which we live, hold the candle of our souls.

    And it is as though each of us knows that this candle within is the most precious and vulnerable part of us. Those of us who live daily with the physical, spiritual, and emotional violence of the world have learned to guard it well at the cost of letting the light shine forth. Those of us who have had gentler, safer lives tend to react as though each little jostle and confrontation threatens to blow it out, and may be too precious and fearful of seeing how resilient the candle could be.

    Imagine billions of us walking through the world guarding our precious candles, eyeing each other to see if this is a person with whom we could share our light, or from whom we must shield our light. Imagine that when our hearts get jostled and we fear the harm to our candles that we bark our fears out to the person who accidentally bumped us. When we are so focused on protecting those exquisitely sensitive lights it can be hard to differentiate an intentional threat from an accident. And at times that distinction doesn’t matter—they need to back off whatever their intention.

    Your light is more resilient and more profound than you can imagine. Far from being vulnerable to extinguishment, it may transform every shock and jostle into more energy, more aliveness. And still we must walk with it as though it is precious and worthy of care and attention. We must sit with the possibility that it is no one else’s responsibility to tend our light because they have their own that requires its own exquisite care.

    And yet it is possible that if we each tended our own hearts, letting them grow strong, fierce, and bright, that their flames could draw to us those who would love us better, who could reflect back the beauty of our hearts.

    We may be waiting for a time when it’s safe to let out the light of our hearts. A future in which there is enough freedom, enough kindness, enough resources to make it safe. We may dream of finding a bonfire burning around which gathers our true community, those with whom it is safe to finally be ourselves.

    And when we walk in the world, among billions of hearts nurturing their private flames, it seems such a transformation is impossible, or so big and far in the future. We walk in towns and cities built upon decades to centuries of growth, contraction, upheaval.

    Such deep change is possible, whether it is in one person’s life, a community, or a world. But it requires long term, diligent, patient effort with no guarantee of success. Such a transformation is its own tender flame that requires care and attention.

    It is an illusion to imagine the work is ours alone, that only our hearts can ignite the necessary fires. Larger forces work their will. Thoughts we believed were ours alone appear in the mouths and words of strangers. In truth there are thousands of fires burning, illuminating the truth we feel, and when we reveal our own light, we feed those flames in ways we cannot imagine.

    The strangest trick of it is, we need to tend our own hearts. When I tend your heart and do your work, it is for nothing. When I tend my heart and do my work, miracles unfold.

    When the malice or inconsideration of others is too painful, it is right to guard your heart with firmness and kindness. When your heat feels too sore and tender, it is appropriate to withdraw and tend the hurt. Grief is necessary, but neither cynicism nor despair is practical. Rest, then return to your work.

    Photo by Mike Labrum, courtesy of Unsplash.com

  • Your life is a fire bringing light to the world

    There are times when I have the fantasy of helping to usher in some widespread social transformation, a collective goal that uplifts us all if everyone could get on board with it.

    Lately, though, I’ve been noticing cities. There are so many cities that are dense with thousands to millions of people. Cities built upon decades to centuries of growth, contraction, upheaval. At best I could only know and influence a fraction of a fraction of the people in my city. Not enough to transform a world.

    And in my work I’ve become deeply humbled to the reality that deep change is possible and it requires long term, diligent, patient effort with no guarantee of success.

    And it is also an illusion to imagine the work is mine alone, that I am responsible for changing billions. Larger forces work their will. Thoughts I believed were mine alone appear in the mouths and words of strangers. Thousands of fires burn with the same truth, and sharing our truth feeds those flames in ways we cannot imagine.

    The strangest trick of it is, I have to work with what’s mine to do. If I did your work, it would be for nothing. When I do my work, miracles unfold.

    Grief is necessary, but neither cynicism nor despair is practical. Rest, and return to your work.

    Photo by Jan Kaluza. A bonfire burning at night.
  • For the People Whose Caring Entraps Them

    For the People Whose Caring Entraps Them

    There are people who will use the best of you against you.

    There are people who will receive all the love and strength from your healing heart and still reproach you for not having more to give.

    There are people who will look to your integrity and say you are at fault for their harming you.

    There are people who will flail and cry out that no one’s helping them while their erratic movements push away your outstretched hands, draw out your kind and patient direction, draw you into the water beneath them.

    You are the strong ones, the competent ones, the rocks, the mothers, the fathers, the warriors, the nurturers, the caregivers. You are the ones without whom “everything would fall apart.”

    And that is a truth that is also a lie that keeps you trapped. You who learned to set aside your wants and needs, to shelter your vulnerability while caring for everyone else’s, you have learned to believe the wellbeing of those around you depends on you.

    You have learned, through disappointment, not to expect much of others. You have learned that your plate can only be filled after everyone else has had enough, only to find others took more than their share and there is not enough for you.

    You have forged an identity around this suffering, a self-righteousness that is poor compensation. Your Self has been buried beneath the mighty weight of obligation, a burden you cannot help but carry and others seem all too willing to avoid. 

    If you are the only one “keeping it all from falling apart,” then “it” should not be together. 

    We need you to stop doing our work. 

    We need you to let us struggle more.

    We need you to stop saving us at the expense of your joy, to stop resenting us for the burdens you are unwilling to put down.

    We need you to let us grow strong enough to carry our own weight, by no longer letting it weigh you down.

    We need you to learn from our neediness, to finally tend your heart and draw the circle around its home. To know that no one’s wants and needs are rational, and yet they are worthy of care. To know that your wants and needs are worthy of the care you give to us.

    We need you to stop resenting us for giving more than we give back. We need you to match your giving with what you receive.

    We need you to know your limits and abide them, and not yield to our incompetence, our pleading, our helpless desperation, so that finally we will learn the secret.

    The secret you have always known: there is no one who knows the right thing to do. There are only those willing to accept the consequences of doing. 

    We are in the last days of the age of emperors and martyrs. Now comes the age of radical community, of interdependence, of one precious and irreplaceable Self in community with others, equal in worth and dignity.

  • Favorite Writings of 2019

    In this year, some of my favorite psychospiritual nonfiction essays were published either through my blog or Gods & Radicals, as well as an essay in Witches & Pagans magazine.

    A clock with roman numerals and astrological symbols.
    by Fabrizio Verrecchia courtesy of Unsplash

    Alchemizing the Lead of Masculinity

    A piece of writing reflecting on both the poisons and the healing gifts of masculinity. I understand many masculine folks in queer and Leftist circles found this validating and speaking to their experiences. Some readers were upset by Part 1 and had some hard words for me, while some readers who were upset by Part 1 but read through to Part 2 found they appreciated the essay more than they expected. Perhaps if I started with the “good stuff” and then moved to the “hard stuff” it would have been more palatable, and yet the purpose of the work was that alchemy, in which we must confront the Lead before gaining the Gold.

    “There is room for all of us to continue growing and integrating more of our wholeness—both the strengths and the places of shame. Those who say that calling men to reflect on our capacity to cause harm gives us an unhealthy vision of humanity are those who want men to be emotionally fragile and isolated. If we have power, we are capable of causing harm. Period. If we are unable to be accountable in our relationships, then we cannot have relationships.”

    The Prison and the Key: Pagan Perspectives on Suicide – Part 1 ; Part 2

    This writing was a few years old by the time of its publication, but I’m grateful it found a place to be. The roots of this essay run all the way back to an assignment I had in high school to analyze a moral issue from religious perspectives that supported it and condemned it, and I chose suicide. Finding a religious perspective that supported or condoned suicide was challenging. When a beloved friend and coreligionist died by suicide, I felt called to take up the assignment again from my new spiritual home.

    “When life feels like a prison, it is tempting to imagine the key that will release us, and to seek out all the possibilities for that key. We might imagine the key to be a perfect job, a perfect lover, the right medications, the right diagnosis. We might imagine the key to be something we know to be impossible, like a different childhood. In the greatest moments of despair, suicide might look like the key. I will not begrudge anyone their choices, but my belief is that the key is within the prison walls, within our hearts. We become free when we stop seeking the key and stop viewing our lives as a prison. “

    In the Midnight Hour: On Mattering, Will, and Hope

    This essay is both about my surprisingly existential crisis following a break-up but also in the context of collapsing empire and the threat of a collapsing ecosystem. In a way I feel like it’s part three of a trilogy of essays, which may have more to come, that began with “The Innocent Heart,” which was me attempting to kindly and rationally beg Americans not to choose Fascism; and then “The Cresting Wave,” which was me coming to grips with the reality that this historical moment would be us replaying the turn toward reactionary politics that has occurred cyclically in modern history, and figuring out how to be in the midst of that.

    “In the face of the most existential of existential dilemmas—the potential that our civilization, if not our species, could be in its final decline within my lifetime—I who had at times struggled with the depressive belief in the meaninglessness of my life now found even that familiar groove lacked comfort. In the past I found comfort in reincarnation and the hope of being born into a better future. Now I’d begun revisiting the belief in transcendence and the hope of leaving this hell world to a saner place. But none of these beliefs brought true comfort or meaning. They were, fundamentally, coming from a place of resignation and escape, not courage and liberation.”

    The Ripening of Grief and Loss

    This has been a year for grieving, though for many of my people grieving has been extending back to at least 2015. Grieving what is lost and being lost seems necessary if we are to envision what is to come that will transform and outlive the current tensions of our age.

    This piece is a poetic contemplation on grief.

    “There is no shame in loving and no shame in losing. We journey together until we no longer can. Some seasons of growth are longer than others, but in the end this is a world of ripening, harvest, and decay. Blessed are the ones who taught us with their hands, their mouths, and their hearts how to love more deeply and more courageously. Blessed are the ones whose absence still marks our hearts.”

    We Heal When We Feel Our Guilt

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was not a widely shared article, but it’s one I feel that is important, at least it was important for me to write in thinking through the meaning and implications of guilt. I’d forgotten that 2019 included the dissolution of two important relationships, with people I’d looked to as mentors who I then felt hurt by, and this article begins by addressing some of my learnings from that experience.

    “The seed of vengeance may simply be in the longing for having one’s hurt witnessed and validated by the person who caused us harm. An instinctive knowing that this could bring healing and relief. But so rarely are those who have caused harm able to bear the feeling of their own guilt and shame. Instead they defend against it, minimize it, reject it, or compel others to hold it. Lacking that outlet for healing witnessing, vengeance becomes that venomous instinct to cause them a hurt that will match the hurt we feel, escalating rather than healing discord. “

  • Post Break-Up Growth

    Heartbreak, loss, protracted and unwanted single-ness, and break-ups bring up the painful side of connection, when we are torn from intimacy and thrown back into autonomy. 

    We form attachments to people, we let them know us and become part of our lives, we form oxytocin bonds, and then we suffer the sundering of those attachments. Sometimes these break-ups are slow, and one person has had more time to prepare for it while the other feels blindsided. Sometimes they happen rapidly and take everyone by surprise, even if in retrospect it becomes obvious this was where things are heading. Sometimes they are circumstantial, sometimes behavioral. They suck.

    We all deal with break-ups differently, and we may deal with different break-ups differently. Some losses feel easy while others may be gutting.  Even for those of us who practice multiple relationships, break-ups may be surprising in their force and repercussions.

    While walking of labyrinth of maturation, we go through periods of looking outward for what we desire, and periods of turning inward to find what we desire, and each turn is a part of the same journey toward discovering and becoming our wholeness. It is true that people need people, and it is true that we can be self-possessed and learn to care for our needs. Discussing this, however, we tend to flatten out connection and autonomy and appear to bias one over the other, when truly it’s more a matter of applying the corrective influence when we become too unbalanced in one direction.

    The one constant companion in our lives is our Self, and the more we can love and care for our selves, the more resilience and generosity we can offer our loved ones. And the more support, love, and caring we can receive from our networks, the more able we are to love and care for self. Break-ups are an opportunity to turn back toward self and deepen our healing, self-love, and self-knowledge.

    Here are some ways we can practice loving ourselves and recentering in Self in ways that will support us as we heal and consider when we’ll be ready to try practicing this kind of love again:

    Lean on your supports, and spend quality time alone

    When any attachment is broken, we experience unique kinds of grief. Surprising thoughts and feelings may arise, or ones that are all too familiar. 

    When we’re less experienced in loving and losing, we may believe those thoughts too readily, thoughts like “Love is a lie,” or “I will always be alone.” As with any multiple choice test, any thought that involves the word “always” or “never” is probably false. But it is hard to uncouple those thoughts and the intensity of pain that we must feel to work through, and we may want the supportive witnessing of other loved ones.

    A break-up is a particular opportunity to look at the ways we’ve depended on this person to meet our social and emotional needs. So many needs for experiences like touch, emotional connection, validation, and togetherness become sexualized because we are led to believe that only sexual and romantic partners can fulfill those. 

    This is particularly true for men in this culture, who are subjected to such scrutiny when they have needs for physical or emotional connection, even when they try to meet their own sexual needs. In other cultures and points of history, men were able to be physically and emotionally affectionate with each other, holding hands while walking in public and writing impassioned letters to each other. 

    Photo by Priscilla du Preez courtesy of Unslpash

    But since at least I was a child none of that is acceptable without others insinuating there being a sexual or romantic component. This complicates the ways gay and straight men understand their own needs for belonging and connection. A desire for sex may simply be a feeling of loneliness and desire for any kind of connection. A genuine emotional connection could be mistaken for a potential romantic or sexual experience. 

    None of these forms of relationship, in practice, have obvious lines drawn between them. Ideally, the relationship would unfold between the individuals according to their wants, needs, and boundaries, and take the shape that supports them both. The problem is simply the inability to reflect upon what needs each kind of connection serves—what does sex mean to me? What kind of emotional support is meaningful? Whose validation “counts”? As we become clearer on our answers to these questions, it becomes easier to talk about these with others, and then to figure out what kind of relationship we’re having together. 

    When we’re not clear or not willing to discuss, then our relationships tend to be riddled with covert tests and games and deeply complex internal dramas that affect the unfolding of the relationship. 

    All this to say, when a breakup occurs, you might consider reaching out to your support network for the kinds of comfort and connection you got from your ex. Even better, reach out to as many people as you can, and think of new people with whom you might want to deepen a relationship.

    Reaching out for emotional support when one is already in pain is very scary, so take some time to identify what those fears are and how you can help that scared part of you plan for risks. You might be afraid of being disappointed, that a person won’t be available to you when you need them. You can make a plan for how to care for yourself when disappointed, but you also might consider that this is an argument to reach out to even more people. 

    Adults have a variety of valid reasons why they cannot be emotionally available to each other the moment a person needs the connection—so if you can reach out to five people and connect with the one who can be available, or if you can reach out and schedule time when your person is able to emotionally available, that is going to help decrease the likelihood of disappointment.

    Along with that, plan time to be with yourself in an emotionally present way. You might decide to spend an evening alone to journal, or a weekend day going on a walk. Think about the things you enjoyed doing that perhaps fell by the wayside with your partner in your life, and see if you can pick those back up. Think about things you’ve always been curious about, and see if you can make time to do it.

    Sometimes people struggle to love and spend time with themselves because of the dreaded fear that this means they are a “loser” or some other variation of being a social failure. Certainly this time is going to require you be present with your pain and these stories, but you might be surprised at how gentle it ends up being.

    Consider instead that you are spending time with the one person who is truly going to be here with you for you your entire life. You might not like that person right now. You might not even know them that well. You might be afraid of them, and have good reason to think they won’t be there for you. At the same time, you can begin building trust in yourself, getting to know yourself, discovering what you appreciate about yourself.

    One possibility is that you may well grow in confidence, self-love, and self-acceptance, which will make your life a lot easier. Another possibility is that you begin to engage in a life you truly enjoy, and increase the likelihood of meeting other people who also enjoy the same things. Then you will find friends and partners who match the life you want, rather than worrying about matching your life to the friends and partners you want.

    Photo by Neil Thomas, courtesy of Unsplash.com

    Cultivate what your ex provided for you

    One implication of Jung’s psychological conception of the Self and its complexes is that we are all capable of wholeness, or are already whole but identified with only small parts of ourselves and blind to the rest. 

    In my adult life, I’ve worked with this suggestion as a practice for finding what in me is unbalanced or missing and working to develop it—or, in many cases, helping my other parts get out of the way for that innate capacity to emerge. “Individuation,” Jung’s name for his process of psychological maturation, actually means “becoming whole” and not “becoming unique and separate” as one tends to assume today, although the process includes both experiences. For it seems that becoming whole doesn’t mean that we all end up the same, exactly, but that we discover the mixture of wholeness that we are. 

    Those whom we desire and whom we hate are mirrors of the wholeness that we are but are as yet unable to own. It’s the enormity of feeling that tends to be a clue. The person who gets under my skin within minutes of seeing them, or the person that I start feeling awkward and insecure around, or the person that I fall madly in love with—I may start by seeing something in them that I despise, admire, or love, but these qualities are also within me.

    We seek to become whole through seeing in others what we want to own for ourselves, or are reluctant to own. In the cases of intense anger and hatred, spending time looking at the ways I practice the same quality or participate in the undesired patterns is how I become whole. When I find someone particularly condescending, a know-it-all, robotic, aloof—I’m skewered. It’s not that I need to like them, but if I can start having more kindness for the ways I’m a know-it-all, I’ll be less irritated by fellow know-it-alls and even better able to stop myself when I fall into the habit. 

    When we have loving acceptance for our parts, our parts begin to trust us more, and so we develop a practice of deep relationship that looks on the outside like control. When we strive to control ourselves, our parts cannot trust us to listen or consider their needs, and so we develop a practice inner conflict that looks on the outside like self-sabotage.

    When it comes to breaking up with our beloveds—or, for that matter, crushes on people we’re too activated to do anything about—it’s worth taking time to explore what it was we desired in them. Why did this person of all the billions of people in the world get me so wound up? What did they give me that I’ve been wanting so badly? 

    This might all be really heady, and your answers might be “sex,” “we went to the gym,” or “I liked their parents.” That’s a fine place to start. Keep going deeper – what did I like about doing this together? What was different about being with them versus another person? What qualities did that experience have? How did it feel?

    This is another process that could be done multiple times and take time to unfold, and will be different as we grow into different relationships. For me, I’ve often found it difficult to relax and have a good time, and I’ve tended to cling to people who seemed especially fun and spontaneous and prioritized enjoyment. I value my steadiness and discipline, so I’ve never been able to fully embrace their ways of being. But after one break-up, I reflected on the ways I loved my partner for taking me to concerts and theater shows, and started making more efforts to track bands I wanted to see live and buy tickets.

    We can and ideally will do this practice in long-term committed relationships as well, for that is one of the ways that we mature together. When we’re still with our partners, it’s easier for us to continue leaning on them to provide the quality we want for balance—but that starts to get wearying and problematic, especially when they’re leaning back. 

    If one partner always feels like they have to be the steady, unemotional “rock,” and another partner feels like they have to bring the passion, intimacy, and enthusiasm, both may begin to feel stuck and resentful in their roles. The passionate ones usually would love to see more enthusiasm from their rocks, and the rocks often would love to trust that they don’t have to be the one to hold it together all the time. 

    What’s scary is that our relationships tend to become less stable when one, or ideally all partners begin to integrate the unowned qualities. Reliable scripts no longer work. Old agreements are up for renegotiation. As our identities are invested in being a certain way, and we learn that we could be many ways, it’s normal to spend time wondering who we really are, and if we chose our partners based on stories that no longer apply.

    When we can do this work in partnership, it feels slower and messier, but each partner becomes freer to grow in a new way, and potentially together they can mature into stronger partnership and new adventures. When we do this after a break-up, we have more ground and freedom to direct our growth and consider the kinds of partners we want in the future. If there’s a pattern that keeps playing out, doing this work could help you break out of that pattern into something new—or help you to realize when you are starting the pattern again with someone new.

    Often I think of this image of partners leaning on each other. If everyone is leaning on each other, there is a collapse when one partner needs to step away. If everyone is pulling away from each other but trying to stay connected by holding hands, again a collapse occurs when one wants to step away or even move closer. But if each partner can support themselves and then reach out to hold hands, there are more options for movement while staying connected.

    Most of us cannot imagine giving ourselves the kind of loving, kind acceptance that we hope our partners will give, and it does take practice and support to develop. We all experience feelings of loneliness and relationship ruptures that require self-reflection, whether we have one partner we spend all our time with, or multiple partners with whom we can connect. We learn the practice of loving ourselves through experiencing being loved, but cultivating this ability to love ourselves as deeply and skillfully as the love we desire is worth at least one hundred partners.

    Create a version of the story in which you are okay

    In a process of grief and especially when there is heartbreak and sorrow, we tend to create a story about what happen. Frequently several stories, contradicting and painful, in which we seek to identify what went wrong. This is a highly productive practice in that it helps us to create structure around our pain and distill the lessons that will help us live into a better future, but we can also get stuck in stories of blame and pain that do not have much room for growth.

    Sad pug is sad, photo by Matthew Henry courtesy of Unsplash

    When our young ones are hurt, they want to find blame. If we think of this as a normal developmental thing, it makes sense. Children need some sense of order and causality for safety, and in the process of learning to navigate the world start coming up with stories and rules to make sense of things. This tends to involve blame, making things someone’s fault. 

    Blame itself goes both directions. Either it’s your fault or my fault. That’s the other hallmark of young thinking, that simple dualism. As adults, we may be able to understand that life is more complicated. We might watch two of our beloved friends’ relationship collapse and understand that both have valid reasons to be mad at the other but feel like it’s impossible to take “a side.” That blame and side-taking is a young need, and in its way it’s valid—my young parts need to know that people will have my back if I need them. 

    My adult self, however, knows that when my relationship with a loved one falls apart, I still have to figure out how to coexist in the same world as them. Our friends and interests may continue to overlap, or simply living in the same town means we’ll run into each other again. For people in very small communities or subcultures, asking people to take sides could be very destructive or backfire horribly. 

    In the process of healing from a breakup, we may need to begin with a blaming story. If you’re like a lot of people I know, you’re likely to go through a lot of blaming stories, sometimes cycling through several in ten minutes. It’s all his fault, if only he’d done this instead of that. But then he only did that because I was so mean to him, so it’s my fault. But then that was actually a lie, I found it, because he did that before I was mean to him so it’s his fault. 

    This process is really painful and confusing and helps us to really look at what we may call our “parts.” Rather than trying to come up with the “real story” right away, you might consider taking time to journal all these different stories and letting those different parts have their perspectives heard.

    “A part of me feels angry and lied to.”

    “A part of me is desperate for her to take me back and wants to call and beg her right now.”

    “A part of me is relieved that I never have to see them again.”

    Allowing and acknowledging this multiplicity may feel scary and overwhelming at times, but it’s a lot more normal than we think, and giving ourselves permission to have contradictory reactions is deeply soothing. It helps us stop feeling a sense of urgency that we have to figure out “the truth” or “the right answer” and take action. It is, in fact, learning not to take sides within my own internal battles, but to listen to each part of me and understand and validate the feeling, while allowing all these other parts to have validity as well.

    Over time, as we tell these stories, we may begin to arrive at a kind of narrative that is more nuanced and less reactive. It gives us space to have our valid feelings about what happened, but it also creates possibilities for growth and different actions in the future. Blaming feels powerful but may put us in a state of powerlessness—if it’s all something you did then I don’t have any influence. And if it’s all my fault then I don’t have any grace or space to have boundaries. But when I can be honest about how we all participated, I don’t have to own everything that happened, but I can take ownership of my piece of it.

    This story might begin to look like, “I noticed early on that she wasn’t always honest and up front about her feelings, but I thought if I could be kind and patient then she’d start to open up and trust me more. But I wasn’t honest with her about how much I didn’t feel I could trust her, so I started asking these annoying and intrusive questions and had less and less patience with her, so she became even more guarded.” 

    It’s worth checking out our stories with trusted friends or professional supporters who are able to listen in a way that’s nonjudgmental and on our side but also supports our accountability. There are ways we can take blame or responsibility for things that are simply unacceptable, especially when on the receiving end of hurtful and abusive behavior.

    Part of the work we are doing is learning to identify our habits of blame and get feedback on what responsibility we are taking or not taking which ideally would happen with the person in question but often does not. Hearing “you did nothing wrong, this is all on them” is useful and appropriate at times, and we can accept that and continue to dig for a place where we can grow.  

    What’s most important is that we tell a story in which we can be okay in the wake of the collapse. A story like “love isn’t real” or “people will always hurt me” is not a story of okayness, though it may be one we have to tell for a while. A story like, “I got hurt, but I’m okay now,” may be one that takes more work to believe, but we can keep working on it our whole lives.

    Be gentle with yourself

    After writing this, and before its scheduled post date, I had a conversation with a person grieving a break-up who wondered how long the process would take. Writing this post is, in its way, an effort to give us something to “do” while time does its natural process of helping us to heal. It may give the illusion that we can speed up the process, which is wrong but in a way it is right.

    What we can best do is get out of the way of our psyche’s natural tendency toward healing. If all we did was sit in quiet, loving witness, watching our inner conflicts and pain without turning away and without trying to do anything, we could watch ourselves naturally repair and grow. This is very difficult for most of us.

    Trying to “do” or “fix” may end up slowing our process down. When we rush into another relationship, or we try yet again to have a conversation with our exes to get closure but end up re-enacting the toxic communication patterns, we are in some ways getting in our own way. Trying too hard to rush the healing process. But totally checking out and numbing also gets in the way of healing.

    These practices suggested above are, in their ways, practices to help us get out of the way of our own healing. In this recent conversation, I thought of what happens when I pinch a nerve. Part of my body goes numb or loses functioning, which is quite distressing, and may last a lot longer than I want. The parts of me that get nervous I’ve ruined myself or will never get the functioning back may want to obsess about repairing the problem, but there is only so much that can be done.

    While doing whatever therapies are relevant, we still learn to live with the numbness and reduced functioning. One day, I may notice that I haven’t noticed the pinched nerve in a while. Something that caused so much grief sort of disappeared when I wasn’t paying attention. Healing from heartbreak is like that, too. It’s so present, inescapably so at times, and then one day we realize we don’t remember the last time we thought about it.

    Striving for a definitive resolution, unfortunately, does not work. Patience and continuing to live does.

  • Self-Love for Men

    NOTE: This is a post that’s going to talk about masturbation, porn use, and the practices of “edging” and use of substances like poppers to facilitate longer masturbation sessions.

    I do not specialize in sex therapy or behavioral addictions but I have completed courswork in the diagnosis and treatment of both, and I am a person who supports people who want to find what is healthy sexuality for themselves, many of whom are in recovery.

    The diagnostic constructs of “sex addiction” and “porn addiction” are contested, particularly in factions between sex therapy and addictions professionals, and these conflicts have escalated in ways that I find frankly unprofessional and baffling, and we lose a lot because of the polarization. My position is that I am pro-consensual sex, I am not anti-porn, and I also find there are people with sexual behaviors that feel problematic, compulsive, or destructive to them and need help working through this regardless of what we call it.

    Men who have become habituated to constant masturbation, anonymous sex, sex on meth, or masturbation while watching porn or using poppers report to me that it can feel very difficult to enjoy or even imagine having sex without those supports. What is discussed here may be one component to support recovery in conjunction with working with a trusted sex therapist or behavioral addiction counselor who will listen to you and work with you to define and work on your recovery goals. For some, this discussion may not work in alignment with your recovery needs and goals, and I encourage you to stay with what does.

    Lately I suspect that many men, and likely others, do not really practice enjoying themselves sexually. What most of us do is “jerk off,” either as a habitual routine thing or a repetitive, hours-long epic experience that involves porn and ritual acts to try to maximize orgasm. Jerking off serves many functions: tension release, dealing with arousal, or avoiding uncomfortable things we’d otherwise feel we need to do.

    I’m not involved in communities that practice “NoFap” or “No Nut November” but what I do know about them, I think there are some places where we might agree. The kinds of masturbation that we tend to do may end up being deadening, time-wasting, and diminishing. Green Day sung about this in their song “Longview” in which the singer describes an apathetic, listless, declining life that’s momentarily interrupted by the thrill of masturbating, “bite my lip and close my eyes / take me away to paradise” and then dropping back into boring, deadened monotony.

    The rituals of watching porn, using poppers or otherwise getting high and edging for hours may be thrilling the first time or two but may quickly fall into the time-wasting habits that end up separating ourselves from our sexuality. Often I think of a maxim from the Jackie Chan breakout film, Drunken Master, in which the young Chan is apprenticed to learn a style of martial art that draws upon the fluid and adaptive movements of a severely intoxicated person, both to confuse the enemy and to deliver effective blows. At times, to practice the art, the apprentice drinks to intoxication, but always must contend with his Master’s warning—”Water floats, but also capsizes boats.”

    While perhaps not everyone will appreciate the relevance of deep wisdom from a comedy/martial arts film, this phrase has often spoken to me of the tender balance of walking the middle way of substance use. We gravitate to them because they open us up beyond our regular behaviors and judgments, allowing us to have experiences we wouldn’t otherwise. Yet the line between floating and capsizing is quite hard to discern and easy to cross.

    Porn is not a substance in the same way as alcohol or poppers, yet to me looking at it as such offers interesting insights. Porn may be a fun way to stimulate desire and expand our erotic imaginations, and it may also become something that takes over our sexuality and fills us with unrealistic expectations that make it difficult to enjoy the un-choreographed and un-edited realities of sex with other people.

    Lots of men I think have gone through periods of problematic behavior that may not rise to the level of an addiction or dependence. One question that I find really useful is to think about a behavior that you do on a regular basis, and then tell yourself that this week you won’t do it once. Notice how you feel. If you feel anxious, afraid, angry, uncomfortable, or otherwise wonder how that would even be possible, it is worth exploring deeper what purpose this behavior is serving and if it’s in some way keeping you from being the person you want to be.

    I couldn’t think of an image that wouldn’t seem excessively lurid for this post, so I did a search on “sensual cactus” and got this picture. You are welcome. Photo by Lieselot. Dalle courtesy of Unsplash.com.

    All of this is different than the kind of sexual self-experience I’m wanting to talk about, in which you take time to be with yourself, to really experience yourself without distractions or intoxicants, to find out what your body likes sexually, what kinds of fantasies you have, what kind of touch is pleasing to you. This kind of self-sex is about connection and presence.

    I define connection as being about being fully and consciously present in my body, with my experience, and able to be with you being fully and consciously present in your body, with your experience. Harder than it sounds. This connection becomes possible with the supports of confidence, vulnerability, and relational safety, all of which are supported by embodying those with and for myself. If I know with confidence that I will be okay no matter what happens, and all my feelings are okay, and that I can protect myself if needed and care for myself if needed—or that I have people available to support me with all this—then I can be fully present and connected.

    When it comes to sex and our bodies, some of us get glimpses of that state of being when we’re children who haven’t yet internalized all the conflicting messages of sex in our cultures. When we simply have bodies that have all these sensations and we’re curious about them and they don’t “mean” anything. Eventually, most of us lose contact with this state of innocence and presence as we’re taught a whole host of ways we’re supposed to think and feel about our bodies under threat of shaming judgment, ridicule, or exile.

    All of these messages and the emotions that go with them still live in our bodies and affect our relationships with them. Yet the sexual need exists, for many of us, and seeks satisfaction one way or the other. For some of us, we don’t desire sex and believe that we are supposed to want it. These and other influences may cause us to find solace in ritual, porn, substance use, and so forth.

    What does this do to the way we pay attention to and experience ourselves? This is something perhaps worth exploring for yourself for the next few weeks. When you are having sex, where is your attention? When you masturbate, where is your attention? What do you notice? What do you attend to? Are you focused solely on rubbing your genitals until they hit the joy buzzer? Are you constantly clicking on different videos trying to find the right one, or just barely avoid getting the right one, to hit the buzzer? Is your attention so much on the porn or the fantasy that you’re not really in your body?

    When I am feeling sexually connected and really enjoying it, I feel that my attention is in my body and able to take in a range of sensations. When I feel stressed or pressured to perform, my attention is usually on my partner’s body and the parts of me that are worrying about whether they’re having a good time. In a state of connection with another person who can hold the connection, there is this beautiful exchange of pleasure and energy and fun.

    Exploring this state of self-sex is both simple and highly challenging, as most simple tasks are. Take time, alone, to be sexual with yourself. Find a comfortable spot where you can be relaxed and uninterrupted and consider having no screens in the same room as you. Do this sober, without porn or poppers or other external intoxicants.

    Then explore touching your body, noticing what kinds of touch your body enjoys. Engage with yourself sexually the ways you desire to be engaged, in whatever ways are practical—using your actual imagination helps with this. Try to stay in your body and take in the sensations you’re giving yourself. 

    Notice what comes up and what gets in the way. Whatever it is, those things affect your sexual relationship with others too, in some form. Consider journaling about these afterword.

    You don’t have to do this all the time, but consider doing it occasionally. This could help us be more aware of when and why we’re using other substances for sex, and help us to better understand whether that enhances or detracts from the experience. Again, this is not about saying whether one’s regular habits are “healthy” or not, but helping you to know when you’re connected to yourself or not.

    This practice will be uncomfortable for a lot of people. Straight men in particular get exposed to a number of weird messages about sex that on one hand make it this really important thing that they have to get all the time and on the other hand make it really hard to actually enjoy. Really taking pleasure in being sexual with one’s self without the mediating influence of porn seems to be provocative. There may be internalized beliefs that one is low-status or a “loser” if they’re not having sex with another person. One fear that occasionally comes up is it’s somehow “gay” for a straight man to enjoy his own body.

    Neither of these really make that much sense and seem steeped in an insecure adolescent fear of being judged and outcast and so preemptively accusing others of what one fears he is. What would be wrong with practicing desiring ourselves to the extent we want to be desired?

    Is the desire to be approved of by your friends interfering with your ability to get to know yourself and really learn to understand what you like and desire, and enjoy being in your own body? Do your friends need to be involved with what you do alone in your own time? Wouldn’t being able to care for your own sexual needs help you to feel more confident, at ease, and less desperate when finding someone else to share yourself with? If you’re still a teenager, your friends don’t have to know, and if you’re an adult man, now’s your opportunity to take the wheel of your life back. 

    It’s also worth noting that some reasons are religious prohibitions on masturbation and sex outside of a committed relationship, and if those are your values, I assume you would not be interested in this exercise and wish you well. If you are curious about another way to think about the spiritual relationship between sex, life force, and self you might consider reading my book.

    In recent years, certain groups have promoted abstaining from masturbation altogether as a way to increase testosterone, gain self-mastery, or increase motivation to get out of the house and look for partners. There is certainly merit to this approach as well—conscious abstinence or conscious engagement are both ways of helping us know ourselves, cultivate will, and build confidence. Self-sex ideally would not be the center of one’s life at the expense of other important facets of ourselves. What’s important to me is that we’re abstaining or engaging with an intention, not because masturbation is “bad” for some vague reason.

    Sensual cactus!!! Photo by David Sola courtesy of Unsplash.com.

    My one concern about abstaining from masturbation to motivate seeking partners is that I think men would be well-served to consider horniness as a state of intoxication under which they are less likely to make clear-headed choices. (Note: I am not suggesting this as a literal scientific or legal truth, although I would be curious to see research on the matter.) Men make a lot of choices we later regret when horny, especially when horny and tired, lonely, drunk, stoned, or otherwise intoxicated. We may be less likely to hold our boundaries and standards or more likely to pressure others and disregard their boundaries.

    There is a common wisdom that one should not go to the grocery store while hungry because you’re more likely to buy food you’ll later wish you hadn’t, and to be honest I advise men to use the same guidelines when using apps or going to bars while horny. If you’re looking for sex, go for it. If you’re looking to have fun and meaningful connection, might as well take care of yourself first. 

    This idea of horniness as a state of intoxication brings us back, again, to being intentional in relating to ourselves sexually. Whether abstaining and harnessing that energy toward other tasks, or engaging to make sure we have meaningful and pleasurable experiences, these willful acts help us to feel more loving and appreciative of ourselves, and more confident. All of these qualities are great to have whether we’re in committed partnerships or on our own. Rather than pinning all our hopes for sexual and romantic fulfillment on other people, when we cultivate this for ourselves, we’re actively creating the life we want.

  • We Heal When We Feel Our Guilt

    Witnessing as healing, as vengeance

    Once, a person I saw as a mentor hurt me. Our relationship had begun in a friendly, amiable, affirming way, but over time began to feel coercive and pressuring. Wanting to protect his feelings, I gently refused and expressed discomfort when he asked things of me I did not want to do, and in response he said the right things, but his actions showed my boundaries would not be respected. The situation felt intolerable, particularly as a person who easily sees the best in others and has a tendency toward people-pleasing to avoid conflict.

    When we were about to spend time together, I would rehearse the ways I would stay centered and focus our interactions on what I liked about our relationship, but in person I felt my boundaries and concerns dissolving under the very skills and expertise that I wanted to learn. Walking away, I felt good and told myself I was okay with everything that happened, but within an hour I would fall into anxious nervousness, shame, and wondering how to avoid this happening again. A part of me saw him as holding an enormous charisma that overrode my will, and it was hard to shake though I used every tool I could. Every tool except for telling others what was happening outside of my closest people.

    Eventually I broke off contact, but later ended up in another shared community space. I told myself I would be fine, but I felt wracked with shame and a quavering sense of terror every time we inadvertently made eye contact or had to speak. With the support of my therapist, I began telling my story to others. This validation of the ways I’d been manipulated helped me to ground myself in recognizing what was happening wasn’t okay and to see how much I had been doing to protect this person’s feelings at the expense of my own.

    A confluence of circumstances created the opportunity for the two of us to have a facilitated confrontation. It was the kind of restorative justice process that is dreamt-of and so hard to accomplish. We showed up, and the facilitator was both skilled and aware of how power skews what seems like a neutral relationship. I told my story, and the facilitator met my ex-mentor’s deflections and dismissal with firm, kind accountability and encouragement. 

    As I watched, I saw my ex-mentor’s countenance start to soften, and tremble, as his defenses against pain relaxed and he began to feel his guilt and shame over what happened. At the same time, I felt my own heart lighten as I became unburdened of all I carried. I walked into the process trembling in fear, and walked away feeling joyful, light, and free. There was no more for me to carry, no desire for further retribution, nothing.  

    The seed of vengeance may simply be in the longing for having one’s hurt witnessed and validated by the person who caused us harm. An instinctive knowing that this could bring healing and relief. But so rarely are those who have caused harm able to bear the feeling of their own guilt and shame. Instead they defend against it, minimize it, reject it, or compel others to hold it. Lacking that outlet for healing witnessing, vengeance becomes that venomous instinct to cause them a hurt that will match the hurt we feel, escalating rather than healing discord. 

    A person facing away from the camera, head down, holding a flower over their shoulder. Photo by Hadis Safari.

    What we want and what we owe

    Perhaps the fear of guilt is that it aligns with a sense of obligation that is greater than the gratification of our own wants and needs. The feeling invites us to reckon with the conflict between others’ needs and expectations and our own desires. So much goes back to power and its uses. Guilt is that which weaves us into just and beloved community. Guilt knits communities together, and it may be wielded abusively by someone with power and authority who feels threatened by the needs of another. We may give a gift out of love, and then use that gift as a hook later when we feel angry or scared, as a way of coercing the person to take care of us. 

    Guilt may be an inner prophet who calls us out when we’re out of integrity and need to make rectifications. It is appropriate to feel guilt for committing, participating in, or allowing harm or injustice to occur. Guilt spurs us to make things right and grow as people. Yet those who cannot tolerate guilt may demand forgiveness as though it’s owed to them, and crumble when it’s not given. Such a demand asks the harmed person to do their emotional work for us rather than letting us suffer and work through our own guilt.

    Meanwhile, many of us have been trained not to allow others to feel guilty, ashamed, or in pain. We are all too ready to spare them their guilt and remorse, consoling ourselves with a story about our strength or virtue. Forgiveness may be granted before the offense is even known. When we hesitate to take on the pain ourselves, we feel our own pang of guilt. We may tell the story that by letting them be accountable and feel their guilt, we are torturing them. Yet all we are doing is letting them feel their own feelings.

    Ironically, in those moments, if everyone involved was willing to simply practice feeling their own guilt and allow each other space, there would be greater healing than the urgent efforts to fix and shut down pain.

    As animals who crave connection, we seek it through its many guises: approval, love, sex, enmity, vilification. At times it does not matter what the connection is, whether it feels good or awful, so long as it exists and we know we exist. Shame, however, is an emotion of disconnection. It is the emotion that tells us we have been severed from the group and are in danger of death, social or otherwise. 

    As we’ve learned thanks to Brené Brown, Shame says, “I am bad,” while Guilt says, “I’ve done something wrong.” Yet in our flattening, moralizing way, the overculture of the United States collectively believes that only bad people do bad things, and therefore to feel guilty is to prove the story of shame. This is to our detriment. We are all capable of causing hurt and harm, and likely will at some point in life. When we cannot tolerate the guilt and repair process of hurting another, our hurting tends to escalate. Defenses against feeling guilt render us more indifferent to others’ suffering.

    In a cyclical model of time and development, metaphors of spiraling and pendulums are useful for contemplating how growth occurs. We turn into one direction until we’ve gone as far as we can, until it begins to hurt and impede our growth, and continue curving to the other side of the polarity. 

    One possible journey: We experience pain when we’ve hurt someone in the process of following our own desires, and start feeling a sense of guilt whenever a “selfish” impulse arises. Over time, however, we find ourselves hemmed in by guilt and always prioritizing the wants and needs of others from that feeling of obligation, setting aside parts of us. Eventually we feel the chafing of making ourselves smaller for the comfort and satisfaction of others, and reject guilt, shame, and obligation in favor of prioritizing ourselves. 

    Another possible journey: We see the smallness in the lives of people around us who submit themselves to relationships that look painful and loveless, and vow to put ourselves first. We deny and refuse anyone who expresses hurt or upset with us, fearing the loss of autonomy and control, until one day we hit a limit. Perhaps we feel utterly alone, with no one special in our lives. Perhaps we are held accountable in a painful and undeniable way, that fantasy of independence shattering when the harm we’ve caused finally catches us. Eventually we begin listening to that guilt and longing for connection, learning how to remain ourselves and respect the needs and feelings of others.

    We reach the edges and continue curving back, each oscillation becoming more refined and skillful. Soon those vibrations seem almost invisible from the outside as we gain greater mastery and inner complexity, learning we always have a range of responses to every moment, and each response offers a gift and a limitation.

    A spiral staircase with lights hanging down the center. Photo by Ryan Searle.

    Autonomy and intimacy

    So long as we treat emotions as things done to us, injected into us, we allow ourselves to be under the power of others. At the same time, we are capable of feeling others’ feelings and taking them into ourselves, and experienced and instinctive manipulators know how to find the people who will do this for them. In the swinging between autonomy and intimacy, we have all we need within us to practice discernment between what to give and what to retain.

    Start within. Start breathing and imagine you find the core of aliveness, the belly center that gathers in your vitality, your passion and will, the core in which the fires of life burn. This is the center that has been with you since you were a feral child taking pleasure in the brightness of the colors of the sky and grass, disgusted with the textures of food, who played and kissed with innocence. Sense how that is in you today.

    Imagine you find the core of relationship, the heart center that gives and receives social connection, that feels the web of relationships and your place within it, that senses how others feel toward you and you toward them. This energy reaches out into your environment with breath, communicating yourself into the world, and draws that connection back into yourself as guidance. The emotional field is the field of relationship, and this is the center that knows how to navigate this realm. Sense how that is in you today.

    Find the core of potential, the head center that receives knowledge from the visible and invisible worlds, that gathers it into the cup of the skull and filters it through the nervous system. Here is the throne of that which we may call the higher self, the deep self, that which can see further and broader and deeper. That which sees the bigger picture, sees what is possible, that can bring us into radical, intentional, and beautiful action. Sense how that is in you today.

    Imagine a circle around you that contains all you know yourself to be, all that is your responsibility. Imagine that as a cellular wall, a membrane, a fence, a bubble through which we can take in what we need and push out what does not belong to us.

    With this connection, let us return to guilt and shame. That connection of the fires of the belly, who knows my innate worthiness, and the chalice of the head, which can see further, helps us to look at the matters of heart and connection with more discernment, self-compassion, and dignity. Without the head and the belly, those ruled by the heart center may be wholly subsumed by concerns about others’ opinions and approval.

    Too often feeling guilt causes us to crumble and feel as though we must utterly abase ourselves for forgiveness or reject the accusations of harm. Again, guilt bound to shame, a combination that says “I am bad because I did something bad.” When this story is alive, we feel our worthiness and capacity for future happiness are based on the forgiveness and opinion of the person we’ve harmed. Which, you might think would make us more inclined to be kind to them, but more often than not elicits all the defensiveness, denial, controlling, seducing, and further gaslighting that only compounds the harm.

    Let your guilt be here fully, in your sphere. Let yourself know that no one owes you forgiveness or the opportunity to make amends. This guilt belongs to you, it is telling you who you are and what you are capable of. More importantly, it tells you who you want to be. What does your guilt say to your belly? Your heart? Your head?

    When we struggle with harming others we can feel at a constant impasse. “I want to be better but I keep fucking up!” We may get anxious and overwhelmed, afraid our friends and family will get exhausted by our failures and walk away from us. What we may not recognize is that it’s our avoidance of guilt and defensiveness that is the most alienating. The capacity for forgiveness is quite expansive when the guilty person demonstrates genuine remorse, contrition, respect for the hurt person’s healing process, and commitment to change. 

    All of this is helped by simply feeling our own guilt, before doing anything about it, and while we work to make amends. Pain spurs us to change, and guilt is a pain that says what we are doing is unacceptable. We have no reason to grow when we assuage, avoid, or numb our pain. 

    Those who have been harmed do not owe, and cannot be expected to provide, kindness. Some may be able to offer that, but spend much energy protecting and supporting one’s own hurt. Pressuring someone to provide forgiveness or kindness to assuage your guilt only compounds the hurt and slows down the outcome you want. Better to slow down, express remorse, and give the hurt person the space and power to determine how they want to interact with you in the future, what they want from you.

    In the meantime, we can work on listening to the lessons of our guilty feelings and continue to grow and live our lives.It is impossible and unwise to stop living entirely while processes of accountability unfold, but it is useful to get support from a class, a community, a support group, or trusted friends and mentors to help us work through our conflicting thoughts and feelings and figure out what boundaries are appropriate. Even better if these supports are not people who unfailingly take our side and tell us we’ve done nothing wrong, but who help us to sort through our behaviors and figure out how we can do better.

    Finding our place within collective and ancestral legacies

    I grew up a white person in a country built with on the supremacy of white people, and lived in a Midwestern state that at one point actively embraced the politics of the Ku Klux Klan. So I was surrounded by explicit and implicit racist thought and action, some of which I recognized. Yet even when I actively rejected white supremacy, I was not fully aware of the extent to which racism informed my words and actions. When my friends of color started to push back and call me out, I did not respond graciously. I made it harder on them. I dismissed their experiences or focused on my own feelings rather than acknowledging the hurt.

    Over time, I realized those who called me out were acting in self-care for themselves and respect for me. They cared enough about themselves to not let me be a shithead around them all the time, and they cared enough about our relationship to invite me to work on it and change rather than walking away. Many, I suspect, did walk away. 

    Listening to my guilt rather than defending, taking time to stew on my feelings and try to see things from their perspective, helped me to radically reorient my humanity. I aspired to be a person who is kind, just, and in integrity, and guilt showed me how far apart was the distance between that ideal and the ways I’d been practicing relationship. It continues as a spiral process of progress, regression, curiosity, discovery, hurt, regret, and accountability.

    Most of us living in the United States who are not one hundred percent Native or the descendent of enslaved people owe our existence to the forcible taking of land, property, and personhood of others. We benefit from hurt that continues to live in the bodies of the descendants of those harmed, in the inequities of policing, income, wealth, and access to healthcare, clean water, food, and safety. Yet those that benefit most from this wonder, “Why should I feel guilty?” 

    If I were given a beautiful painting, and then learned that painting had been stolen from someone else, that would be a complex ethical issue. Perhaps I myself did not do the crime, but now I know the crime has been done and harm exists, and I have an opportunity to participate in rectifying it or continue perpetuating it. To admit that we do feel guilt means knowing that our pleasures and eases have been paid in blood. We confront in stark terms the depths of conflict between personal comfort and satisfaction and that which we owe to others.

  • The Ripening of Grief and Loss

    Harshness engenders beauty, as the dying time of fall creates ornate deciduous tapestries of color, as a thirsty vine drives flavor into the fruit, as the heat of the sun bakes heat into the pepper.

    Such a sweet harvest then comes from bitter toil, from moments of frustration and despair. We are fated to follow this wheel of seasons, even as we tilt them off-kilter. Every autumn is every autumn. We remember back to who we were last year, who was with us, what we shared. We feel the absence, and feel what has grown in its place.

    Common wisdom for grief is that the first year is the hardest. First we feel the absence of the present, we feel those routines and moments where once we’d have connection and now are only reminded of loss. Anticipated plans and opportunities pass by, and we grieve what sweetness we might have tasted together. An apple we could have shared that now rots on the ground. A familiar seat now filled by another person.

    The second year has its own challenges, for now we are living in a time separate from the year which contained the last moments of what was. We are still passing over the same landmarks, the same anniversaries, but feel the gap between them. Not this spring but last spring we were holding hands. Not this winter but last winter we ate around the table together.

    Harvest is bitter and sweet, as is the taste of grief. How can one turn off love in the heart after being so completely smitten? How can one negate the existence and presence of another? Yet we are skilled in the arts of covering over our pains. We swathe them in new clothes, new lovers. We bury them in food. We withdraw. We drink them to sleep. The lucky and strong among us simply let these pains be felt in their fullness, and continue the tasks of living, knowing one day we’ll be ready for life again and wanting it to be in place when we return.

    Grief has no season, but winter is a rich season for grief, when there is nothing left to tend and nothing to grow. What was can hold the space, can hold the soil in place, can feed the worms and rotting ones while we shelter in comfort and quiet.

    There is no shame in loving and no shame in losing. We journey together until we no longer can. Some seasons of growth are longer than others, but in the end this is a world of ripening, harvest, and decay. Blessed are the ones who taught us with their hands, their mouths, and their hearts how to love more deeply and more courageously. Blessed are the ones whose absence still marks our hearts.

    The breaking of the heart is a pain that feels impossible to endure, and yet to let it be felt to completion, to let it heal in its own time, brings us to a bigger heart. A stronger heart. A more spacious heart. A heart capable of loving others and remaining true to Self. That breaking heart, that grief, is the slow death of those young dreams and visions that kept us too small, too possessive, too jealous and reactive.

    Maturation is a kind of death, when we begin to see how our stories and behaviors are appropriate for a child but not for a person striving to be in their own power. There is nothing “bad” about being childlike, and there are ways of being that children are by necessity which does not make sense for relatively autonomous adults.

    A child may need to rely primarily on a few people to meet their needs, and may become overwhelmed and give up when things get hard, and may feel scared and abandoned when someone they love and need withdraws from them. These experiences may become fixed in us as parts that hold to those child experiences. “I can’t do it.” “It’s too hard.” “It’s unfair.”

    We may strive to give these parts to receive the loving healing they needed through our romantic and sexual relationships, only to find those woundings reactivated. While an adult mind might understand that even when someone makes a promise they may need to renegotiate it, the child self may feel that old devastation and rage at being failed, undergirded by a sense of hopeless dependence. That, “I cannot do this for myself, I need you to do it, and you failed me.”

    Abandonment is a particular example of this, in that it makes complete sense for a child to become terrified by being abandoned by their caregivers, but for most of us who grow into relatively functional adults, abandonment is more of an emotional experience than the existential threat we may feel. It’s painful, and may be scary, and disappointing, and certainly can kill a relationship if our lovers fail or run away when we need them. But to be abandoned by an adult in an adult relationship is rarely a death sentence, unless there are really specific dependencies in the relationship and the partner does not have other resources.

    When our emotions feel startling huge and out of proportion to what’s happening, often they are experiencings of child wounds, with their young and painful stories and fears that have not been processed. And when we feel them, instead of blaming others for them, we can start to turn our nurturing, loving hearts and open minds to attend to these hurt children. They are worthy of love and care, and often our loved ones are struggling with their own hurt children who need attention, so it is useful to learn how to offer that to ourselves.

    An autumnal tree and bushes with mixtures of green and bright red leaves. Photo by Anthony Rella.

    And with that nurturing attention, that healing validation that these young parts need, there is a grieving that comes at all that was lost. All the hurt that happened to reach this point. All the ways we failed ourselves and our loved ones. All the treasured stories that turned out to be illusions. All drying up into beautiful varicolored leaves, preparing to be let go so that something new can grow. Once these stories and hurts served us, gave our identities form and purpose, but something within us is growing larger and ready to grow something richer, sweeter, fuller.

    That spaciousness of heart comes when its breaking helps us to see ourselves as we truly are, to love every inch of that, to be at home in ourselves.

    We break open into this spaciousness, preparing for the time when spring grows something brave and new in the remains of what was.