safe enough
I spent this morning reading about our brains and how “what fires together wires together.” Which is a phrase and an idea that I’ve known for years. What I learned that was new this morning, however, was that our brains need the “just right” amount of stress in order for us to grow, to heal.
If we have too little stress, we stagnate and become bored. There is no growth. If we have too much stress, then we are overwhelmed. There is no healing.
Our human growth dilemma is how we can find the space, the pause, the breath between the just right and the overwhelm. Indeed, this is what I believe is our lifetime’s work. We do this by learning practices - yoga, journaling, meditation, prayer, walking etc…that enable us to find that pause with greater ease and for longer moments in time.
With this in mind, I reflected on my own healing journey - the one since discovering that my husband (now ex) was a sexual predator.
I used to say that he was a sex addict, which was his official diagnosis and no doubt in some sense true. But I have come to believe that there is misogyny and white supremacy in that label that doesn’t truly account for the trauma inflicted on those around them.
That label, which seemed to give him, and others like him, a way out. One that minimizes just how deeply and grossly I was disemboweled by being in a relationship with him. I have spent years trying to mend my organs - my heart, my mind, my nervous system.
In other words, I have struggled to find the space between just the right amount of stress and the overwhelm. I still struggle.
Such moments are commonly referred to as triggers. Like a gun, such moments activate my nervous system and, since what once fired together is still wired together, there is an explosion of confusion and then terror and then I fall down the rabbit hole of “something really bad is happening.”
Mostly that my husband has a secret life (like my ex) and everything I have believed to be true about him is a lie and there is a blend of terror and shame over having been wrong/blind again that is almost impossible to endure and stay alive and inside my skin.
I want to tell my clients, who are also divorced from sexual predators, that such triggers go away. I want to say it and they want to hear it but it would be a lie.
BUT. What I do tell them is that I have become able to create that pause, space, breath between the event that has activated my nervous system - that has caused my brain to fire - and CHOICE about the story I’m going to believe next.
That’s what space gives us. CHOICE. And that choice helps us rewire those pathways in our brain. Over time this gets easier but there are still moments when I can’t make that choice because - in such moments - it's really not a choice at all.
This may seem contradictory but I think this contradiction lies within the ancient argument over whether or not we have free will. There is a blend in human healing of trauma. One part is made up of what has happened to us that creates harmful behaviors - to ourselves and others - that often feel beyond our control. The other part is our agency to do our very best to heal anyway. As humans, we live in this tension.
And in order for us to be able to create the space, to make a different choice to heal, we MUST have safety. We have to be in an environment where we feel safe enough to have another choice to make. We must have access to a different story (explanation) that we choose to believe about what’s triggered us.
For me, when I was attempting to stay in a relationship with my ex, there was not enough evidence to ever produce a different story. There was no safety. There was no possibility of another story.
As I am writing this now, I am feeling that I am starting to dissociate and leave my body. Because there is something happening at this moment that has started to fire those old wires.
Breathe, Jenni, breathe. Feel the sun. Notice your body. Orient yourself to your surroundings. Maybe these words are helpful for you, the reader, as well.
Also, for me, I eventually had to stop seeing clients who were at the early, raw stages of healing from being in a relationship with a sexual predator. Because at that stage, we are desperate (and that’s not a strong enough word) to make sense of what has happened to us. This often manifests as an insatiable need to tell our stories. We need that to heal.
However, what I realized is that listening and holding space for these women’s stories was just giving my brain (my wires) that there was more and more proof that something bad was actually happening whenever I was myself triggered.
One of my therapists explained to me that I was only hearing the stories where there WAS something bad happening and not hearing the thousands of stories where there was NOT something bad happening.
So, I chose to stop. For my marriage. For my family. For me.
After a very long pause, I am picking my work back up again. I am opening the doors of my practice to women who are ready to become radicalized. Stay tuned for more of what that means.
As a note of caution, infused in all my work going forward, will be a call to accountability for white supremacy and the interplay between that and how black and brown women live in a world where they are constantly in danger and often bombarded with proof that they are not safe.
It is my own white privilege that has allowed me to sit here in my beautiful home, in a mostly all white neighborhood, peaceful and at ease on Sunday morning and with enough safety to wonder and write about these things.
And that - for white women - there is still such privilege in the fact that we have a choice at all.
