“I can’t get things done that I really need to do, I always get distracted.”

“I seem to have two speeds, go go go, and crash and burn, complete stop.”

“I don’t really understand how to relate to people I don’t know well. I go to parties and, unless I have a task I set myself, like helping in the kitchen, I just feel awkward/anxious/overwhelmed.”

Those examples may all feel very different. All of them could lead one to believe that there’s something that needs to be fixed. While these might not be issues that lead clients to want to work with me, my ears perk up when I hear them in folks’ stories.

They’ve actually all been true for me. I remember having to talk myself through parties in my teens and 20s (and 30s), “It’s okay if you just sit quietly, you don’t have to talk to people if you don’t feel like you have something to say.”

Throughout my life I’ve occasionally had what I refer to as “meltdowns”. Sometimes it’s a bout of crying uncontrollably, with no clear reason why. Sometimes it’s just the need to take myself to bed early (or in the middle of the day), with the question hanging, am I sick? Well, no… but I can’t function. That’s the two speeds, gogogo and stop. An expression coined by my mother, so that gives you an idea of how far back those tendencies go for me.
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It breaks my heart when I hear a client say, “I’m broken” or “I think there’s something wrong with me”. It happens far too often.

I remember feeling the same way. The first big wave of deeper emotional work I did was back in my late 20s. Some of the patterns in my relationships became so obviously painful, I just couldn’t muscle through and pretend everything was okay anymore.

I remember saying just what I hear from my clients. “I think I’m broken. I’m too wounded.” I felt like I was dirty. (Thank you, shame). My inner critic grabbed onto the work I was doing with healers and teachers and used it against me when I didn’t change as fast as I thought I should.

It took awhile for a core truth to sink in with me, even though it was spoken to me many times. I say it to you now. See how it feels to read this —

There is nothing wrong with you. There never was.

You suffer, and that suffering needs to be met skillfully. But, the suffering is not a sign that you are broken, it’s a sign that you’ve forgotten who and what you are. You can remember that, and hold the suffering parts of you tenderly. Learning to do that is healing.

When things happen to us as children that give us the message that we don’t matter, or that we’re unworthy, we believe it. We’re children! We don’t have the capacity to rationalize someone else’s behavior and know that they didn’t have the skills to treat us, a child, with gentleness.
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It is so understandable to feel impatient with our healing. It always tugs on my heart when a client asks me “How long will this take? When will I feel better?” When we’re suffering, we want to feel better! Of course.

When some kind of trauma is involved, whether from childhood, ancestral patterning, or societal pressures, the suffering is a pattern in your nervous system. It’s in your body. This is why we often see health challenges of various types show up when we have unresolved wounding. In my practice I see a fairly wide range of chronic conditions, often autoimmune in nature, along with unmetabolized trauma. Digestive issues are common, too.

Sometimes the suffering shows itself more in emotional patterns. Relationships that always seem to end up the same way — badly. Anxiety that comes up in predictable ways, in response to a boss asking for a meeting, or a spouse making a fairly innocuous request. Even though there’s no particular reason you should think something bad is about to happen, your heart may start to pound. You might feel like running away, or arguing. That’s flight, or fight. It’s a nervous system response. And, it’s likely a nervous system response that is a memory that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the moment.

Without going too much in depth into the mechanisms of healing, it’s important to know that for the healing of traumatic residues in the nervous system to go deeply and last, the process needs to go slowly. I’ll say that again. Healing trauma needs to go slowly, or the nervous system will be overwhelmed and we risk being retraumatized.
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I have a few clients that are struggling with needing particular kinds of support in the world. Needing social or disability services that are not easy to get.

Many people have heard me say that the nuclear family is a failed experiment. This normalized expectation for us all to be “independent” is warping our humanity. I view the process folks have to go through to receive services as part and parcel of that. Folks have to “prove” that they’re incapacitated in quite dehumanizing ways to receive basic support. And, usually they have to prove it over and over again.

Given that many folks needing assistance are also living with a history of trauma that may actually be causing the need for assistance, we really have a system that is severely off the mark. A system that compounds the injury it professes to try to salve.

A couple of examples – if someone is suffering from TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), making them responsible for filling out complicated forms to receive assistance is cruel. To offer them assistance filling those forms out with a worker who is not trained to understand the needs of someone who is not neuro-typical, who is impatient or shaming, compounds the cruelty.

I have a memory, early on in my Lyme diagnosis and treatment, of a certain receptionist in my doctor’s practice. I had some fairly significant neurological symptoms — short term memory loss, brain fog, slowed down thinking processes. This person was sharp toned, impatient when I had a hard time remembering the names of supplements I needed to order, or putting together disparate pieces of information about my treatment plan. I remember feeling ashamed, and nervous about having to talk with them.
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There’s a tendency I see with clients, friends, family, and myself. I think of it as the training of the Industrial Revolution, and of Capitalism. I’m not launching into a political lecture here, but I do need to name this orientation as systemic, partially as a way to depersonalize the suffering. Meaning… it’s not your fault you suffer in this way.

We feel guilty for needing help. We carry the deeply embedded message in our collective psyches that we are supposed to be completely self sufficient in all things. We are supposed to be able to handle whatever life hands us. Financial difficulty, mental health challenges, the stress of unreasonable demands at work, isolation in the nuclear family, illness…

I know I feel some level of unease, which is really the tip of an iceberg of shame, when I have to acknowledge that I’m not doing well. All the messages that flow through are utterly disempowering — I have a strong spiritual practice, I should be fine all the time. I’m a counselor, I help other people, I should have all my ducks in a row, and shouldn’t need help myself. I am so fortunate, I have a nice house and food on the table, what am I complaining about?

Our ancestors lived in tribes. Humankind is genetically wired for connection and interdependence. There are many reasons why that isn’t a reality today in white western culture. That’s not what I want to focus on here, though. The question is — what do we do about it? We are set up to stay separate in so many ways by our own habits, and the expectations of others!
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I led a group recently focusing on the Inner Critic. You know, the part of your psyche that picks apart everything you do, everything you are, and tells you you’re not good enough? I wrote about that last January. It’s a painful, pernicious voice in your head. We all have an Inner Critic, shaped by the culture and experiences we grew up with.

That voice in your head can sound like the Voice of God, All Knowing, Absolutely Correct About All Things.

I had a client once who would say, “But, what if my critic is right?”

It can be a subtle thing to discern in working with this part of yourself. The fact is, your Critic may indeed be right about the things it attacks you with. You may, in fact, be… fat/skinny, shy/loud, “too old”, mistaken about things, not very “beautiful” (by media standards), not a perfect parent, etc.

How do you find the part of you that knows that these “awful things”, that may or may not be true, are not as important as your Critic makes them out to be?
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