Voices of intergenerational trauma and trance

At times, the wisest, most skillful, and most compassionate action is to establish a boundary with another person. To stand up and assertively say No. To move in an empowered and swift way to protect our own integrity. To privilege our own autonomy and interiority. To meet narcissism, abuse, and neglect with a fiery, fierce, and direct response.

This is not only the case with “external” others – other people in our lives – but also with the multitude of “internal” others who surge out of the psychic underworld and take form as voices and figures of the interior landscape.

You might recognize them by their predictable refrain: “There is something wrong with you. You have failed. No one will ever love you unless you change and become someone different. You are not okay. You have fallen short. You have done life wrong. You are no good. You are uninteresting. You do not belong. Your sensitivities and eccentricities are not welcome here.”

These are the voices of the past, the shadow of a culture of materialism and greed, of the lineages of transgenerational trauma and trance. The voices of disembodiment, insensitivity, of a societal and global ego that has fallen out of communion with the natural world, the body, and the imaginal realms.

These internal visitors to an open, sensitive nervous system must also be met with the boundaries of discernment. To realize those moments when we fall out of the wisdom-presence of the here and now and into the time machine of the “there and then.”

To engage in dialogue with these figures and to proclaim our own basic goodness. To stand on the rooftops and declare that sensitivity is not pathology, that the shaky tenderness is not pathology… but path.

To not merely accept their conclusions, reality tunnels, and the lenses through which they have come to see things. But to cleanse perception with clear-seeing and the wildness of love.

To take the risk of telling a new story, dreaming a new dream, spinning out a new tale, weaving new cloth. And to allow ourselves to be turned by the great Weaver Herself… as new vision is revealed, as we become that vessel in which she can come alive here again.

Photo by Rene Bernal

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

Learn more about my online community, Befriending Yourself: Finding Safety and Rest in Difficult Times

On psychotherapy

I’ve been asked recently how I work with a person in therapy. Of course, each situation is unique and in large part a matter of (al)chemical interaction and our intersecting worlds of emotional, somatic, and imaginal experience.

If someone is struggling with trauma, drowning or flooded by unbearable feeling, we build resource in the nervous system, bottom-up by way of metabolizing sensation in the body, recognizing micro-moments of dysregulation and exploring ways of coming back into ventral. Safety and connection. I’m here with you. We will do this… together.

With borderline or narcissistic organization, we build structure in the sense of self, where there have been profound deficits and consistent empathic failure, a seemingly infinite number of relational ruptures with little or no repair.

In these situations, we would not lead with transpersonal work such as active imagination, shadow, or resting in open awareness, but first build the requisite safety or structure, and repair the pathways of relational misattunement.

For someone relatively regulated and more neurotically organized, we would explore the transpersonal bands, with an emphasis on uncovering and shifting one’s center of gravity into the embodied experience of open awareness… focusing not as much in establishing resource or emphasizing safety.

But underneath it all, it’s clear I know little about the soul, how it heals and unfolds. The person in front of me is vast and majestic and I can only stand in awe at the power and beauty of one human heart as it longs to return home. To attune to and be a companion within that level of mercy and grace.

In the end, in my experience, it’s not techniques that heal. It’s love that heals. Techniques are fine, but it is the relationship between two nervous systems and the love that infuses that which allows the techniques to come alive, if and when they do. Love first, techniques second.

The nature of what this love is must be discovered moment to moment as it emerges in that vessel where we dwell together and is the neural and spiritual scaffolding that opens a light into the darkness.

Photo by Adrian Campfield

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here. 

A safe home where the brokenness can reassemble

In speaking with a friend, I was reminded of the deeply embedded bias in our modern world to the solar, happy, and upward, where the lunar, earthy, and descending current is split and fragmented. 

When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, or down, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that we must act urgently to fix them.

Before we know it, we’re scrambling to put them back together again as we impart our favorite spiritual techniques and processes, hurling at them our favorite metaphysical beliefs,” laws,” and “secrets.” All the while falling out of attunement to the holiness of the Other, to their own psychic integrity, and to the raging authenticity of their internal world.

Even as we wish them relief, we may be called into deeper territory. There may be a profound wisdom in the images and somatic data, important communication from the soul which is serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive. 

As we slow down, we might discover how much of our “fixing” activity arises not from true compassion but from an unresolved relationship with the darkness within… and from the ghosts of our own unlived life that spin in the relational field.

Perhaps the kindest thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, empathically attuning to their immediate, embodied experience, and stay close… and remove the burden that they come out of their pain, feel better, transform, or heal in order for us to stay near. 

Perhaps they do not need to be healed in this moment, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds… a safe home where the shards of a broken world can reassemble.

As we turn to embrace our own unmet disappointment, grief, and despair, we remove the burden from others to tend to this material on our behalf, providing that safety which allows us to come closer to one another.

And then what is left is love, that mystery-substance which seeds the interactional field when two or more gather by way of empathic circuitry, bursting forth into the four directions.

Photo by Patrick Hendry

Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here. 

To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here.