We Can Do Hard Things- Answers to life’s 20 questions by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wamback, and Amanda Doyle has been touted as the guidebook we all need for life. I no doubt after reading it can understand why. This book breaks important concepts down into chapters and has some of the most beautiful reminders for life. To purchase this book, click HERE.
Below are the concepts and quotes that had a significant impact on me:
We had to lose those parts of ourselves to survive in families, institutions, and societies that denied us access to our history, power, and innate wisdom. We’ve been losing and losing and losing parts of ourselves for our entire lives. So of course we are not fully present now. Of course we are not able to be present in an authentic, whole way.
Now I’m pushing the boundaries I’ve set for myself so that I can settle into a new acceptance of who I am.
We notice- before we even have language- what makes him smile and come close, will make some frown and turn away. We notice- and we keep noticing- and then we adapt to survive. We magnify the parts of ourselves that earn us love and protection, and we hide what doesn’t.
In my family, there was one person whose emotional fluctuations dictated everyone’s experience. This dynamic teaches the child to be highly attuned and vigilant to others emotions to keep the peace. It’s called emotional monitoring; and it involves living your life as a fixer and hyperactive awareness of everyone else’s experience.
I LEARNED WHAT EARNED ME LOVE AND WHAT DIDN’T.
Attraction in adulthood is an activation of our earliest attachment patterns. That’s all attraction is. Our body is saying: I know how to be the corresponding puzzle piece to this person.
I played a role in my family to keep the peace.
The way to prove to the world and to myself that I am okay is by performing, accomplishing, and excelling. One of my deepest wounds is a fear of not being known.
Family Roles
- Hero/Perfect One– responsible, good grades, belief if I was perfect then family’s problems would go away
- Scapegoat/Rebel-said what no one else would say
- Parentified Child-deep responsibility to empathize and provide comfort to the adults in the family. Act like a “little adult” for others to confide in and expected to tend to their emotional experiences.
- Peacemaker/Mascot– defuse family conflict, a “middleman”
- Lost Child/Easy One– easygoing to reduce the stress on the grown up.
- Identified Patient– family’s reason for having problems.
I no longer want to be a hero. No one can love a hero, because heroes aren’t real. Stepping out of a role takes time. It’s a million little choices that feel excruciatingly uncomfortable before they feel like freedom.
Trauma is not conscious. It’s your body saying: “ This particular thing that happened is too much, too fast, too soon, or too long without enough repair”. Untended trauma responses are not defective; they are protective.
Let’s say you are going to get donuts and you get into a car accident. Your brain will encode all the details around you. It encodes all of these details as potential threats because you’re going through a traumatic incident. So in the future you might see a donut and feel panicky. That is how your brain works. This is the adaptation that our brilliant bodies have come up with to try to keep us alive.
It’s always the psychological abuse that’s more insidious.
We know that from age 8-12 we begin to split- we hide our real self, and we become something else to present to the world.
As people gain access to their exiled parts, they want to start to paint, they want to start to play. They get access to these things that they had locked away.
We have these parts that have worked so hard for so long and have done a really good job helping us survive. They just have old information. They just don’t know that we’re safe now and all the rules are different.
You were just a little kid, and you took on the responsibility, probably for your family, for the rest of the world, because you wanted the best for everyone. So you put your own happiness into the furnace. And you were just a little kid. So how do you feel toward this little one who was trying to help their parents be happy, help keep the world on its axis? How do you feel toward that person now?
That is how women feel when another woman goes off the menu and she seems to have this delicious, creative life in front of her. We look at her, and we think: Well, it’s too late for me, because I already ordered. So instead of admitting we feel cheated- WE GET ANGRY AT HER.
We tend to attribute racial violence to white men and ignore the role of white women, but all whiteness is about power. When white women are challenged about race, we often become so stunned and defensive that we cry. We evoke sympathy to avoid accountability.
I spent a year researching myself for my 60th birthday and something I discovered was that I am brave. I’ve always been brave, I hadn’t realized that. (Jane Fonda)
I know I’ve lost myself when I’m trying to fix other people.
Anger is the armor I put on to cover my fear. When I’m really fired up, Abby always asks me what I’m so afraid of.
We are always using our kids and friends and partners to regulate ourselves, but that’s using people. No good. Our regulation is our responsibility.
The reason I’m resentful is not because she needs to stop resting. The reason I’m resentful is that I need to listen to the part of myself that wants to rest.
When bids to connect from people you love feel like burdens, it’s time to pay attention.
I’ve learned that it’s so important to talk it out, even if I don’t have the words.
The definition of fun changes as we change anyway.
It is really important to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
I don’t think that life is supposed to be a thing that just feels good all the time.
There’s a lot about our child selves that we blame. We blame them for these things that they went through. But now there’s just a softness I want to hold for her because she didn’t know. She didn’t know a lot. She didn’t know that she had grief and trauma. She didn’t know how to communicate the things she needed. I need to be softer toward her and toward myself.
Every single version of yourself was using exactly what you had in the moment, to do the best you could with what you knew. So forgive all of your old selves. Embrace and celebrate every single version of yourself who worked so hard to survive. And did.
Crying is organic baptism. I think we should be wary of churches and temples that keep us from laughing.
Healing is a love offering to the world. When we heal ourselves, we start to heal the world. When we see ourselves, we start to see other people.
Together, the ocean and I spend the morning emptying ourselves of toxicity, clearing ourselves of all the junk that careless people and systems have littered into us. The ocean is getting it out through her waves, and I’m getting it out through this long walk I take every morning to allow the gentle inner rising of things. I think we keep ourselves so controlled and busy that what needs to rise and be acknowledged in us never rises. If it doesn’t rise, we can’t let it go. So in the morning, I let it all rise.
HEALING MYSELF HELPS ME HEAL THE WORLD. YOU CAN’T HEAL THE WORLD WITHOUT LOOKING INWARD FIRST.
It’s interesting that these practices are all about releasing, letting go. Writing, breathing, crying- that’s all release. They are all different ways of not holding it all in. When I’m facing a mental or emotional block, there has to be a physical element to solving it. It’s like my brain puzzles only get solved when I start moving my body.
The changes I make on the journey to self-love are quieter. I can trust me to take care of me. I can trust me to love me through anything. I can trust me to see me to the other side of anything.
Remember when we were kids and we knew what we wanted? Even if we couldn’t do it, at least we knew what we wanted. What happened? Why don’t we know what we want anymore?
One thing I know can be trusted is that I have something inside of me guiding me.
Science shows us that intuition operates through the entire right side of the brain and through our gut- that’s what it’s called gut instinct. The answer for things is in the center of you. It’s in your gut, it’s inside the deepest, quietest, usually most disavowed part of ourselves. And that part isn’t thinking.
Experimentation is encouraged (as a stage performer). I found out that, oh this is kind of who I am. It’s okay to get it wrong, because it’s all going to take you closer to where you need to end up. Authenticity is not a destination, it’s an orientation and what matters more is that you’re showing up.
In moments of uncertainty, boys are trained to look inward for their own desire; girls are trained to look outward for others’ permission and consensus. We forget how to want when we learn how to please.
(Try this new language:) I want….I need…I feel….I am…
IT’S A COOL EXERCISE TO IMAGE THE TRUEST, MOST BEAUTIFUL OLDER VERSION OF YOU.
In your life, practice moving toward things that are full-body yeses.
When we try to decide what we want or don’t want, we always go to our mind to try to figure it out. But what I have discovered again and again is that it’s never there. I need to do the body thing to figure out what feels warm or cold- spacious or restrictive.
We must start accepting what what we can imagine, we can also create.
I think my most important work is to show people what they already know but are afraid to know. It’s okay to want what you want. You have permission to do the thing you want. Because wanting to is enough. You are allowed to act on it.
I want to be the president of my life, the governor, the mayor of my town. I don’t want to have to answer to anyone but me. I want to live honestly and make honest choices for me. I can’t have the noise from other people, it’s too much. I need to listen only to me (Sarah Paulson)
If you’re unsure about whether or not to do something, imagine standing on a high diving board over a pool on a very hot day. Is the water sparkling and blue but you’re scared because it’s a really long way down? Or is it a pool of stinky toxic sludge and you’re just revolted by the idea of going down? If it stinks, don’t do it. If the water is calling to you but you’re scared to jump because it’s a long way down, then you’re having a conflict between the longing for the water and the fear of the fall.
The instructions are there. They’re there inside the rage. They’re there inside the dejection and the limpness and the suffering. The suffering is teaching you the instructions for your life. And here’s the cool thing: Nobody else has them. The only way you’re going to ever find them is if you go in and get them from inside yourself. Your instructions are nowhere else but inside you.
Go in your room, get out a piece of paper, and write “Here is what I am sick of. I hate this.” Write it all down. It is liberation through pain and rage. Let the soft animal of your body come out and let it love what it loves. You express everything it loves and write it down.
You always know it’s enlightenment because it always tastes of freedom. Always. It may hurt. It may make your family hate you. It may terrify the crap out of you. But it will always feel like freedom.
You don’t quit just because it’s hard for you; you quit because it’s just not for you.
Leaving and rocking the boat is hard, but so is staying and slowly dying inside. Which hard are you going to choose?
Often, when making decisions, I try to put myself on my deathbed and consider whether I’ll be happy I did it, sad I didn’t do it, or whether it will even matter.
We choose long-term suffering instead of short-term pain. It’s a strange choice.
Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking it’s our job to constantly convince everybody on our little island, in our little world, to love and respect and accept us and our family. No, thank you. I’m not spending another minute of my life hustling or convincing anybody of my or my kids’ worthiness. If you don’t respect and love us, you’re not even invited on our island. We’ve got a pretty strong drawbridge these days.
The hard part of setting boundaries is not the setting of the boundary; it’s withstanding the discomfort of whatever happens next. It’s hard. But it’s the type of hard that is worth doing. The guilt you feel after you set a boundary is not actually yours. It does not belong to you. Imagine it as a faulty check engine light on your car dashboard. Just let it be in the background.
We’re responsible for telling our truth with love. We are not responsible for the way the world receives our truth.
There is an image of a woman who has just leaped off a cliff. Behind her is a big hand- the hand of the universe- which has pushed her off the cliff. There’s a second big hand beneath her; it’s about to catch her. That is the other hand of the universe. The universe pushes you off the cliff, and the universe will catch you before you hit the ground. But the fall is still so scary that it’s tempting to panic, turn around, and try to claw your way back up the cliff. That climbing back is trying to unknow what became clear to you once. Your knowing has led you to do something so scary and hard that you wonder if it’d be easier to go back and pretend not to know. But the thing is, you do know. So you gotta let yourself keep falling.
If we don’t understand that grief is going to be a part of change and that loss is going to be a part of change, I don’t think we can successfully evolve. We’re not doing people a favor by pretending like there’s going to be no loss in change. Change always includes a series of sometimes small, and sometimes large, deaths.
Let me fall if I must, the one I will become will catch me.
The new me is the treasure. She is the prize. And she is always, always worth the hell I paid to become her.
I had a moment when I had to decide whether to return to my broken marriage or honor the self that rose up when I fell in love with Abby. The question wasn’t: Should I go back to my marriage, or should I love Abby? That was not it. It was: Should I go back to my broken life where I’m slowly dying so that I don’t rock the boat, so I keep everyone else comfortable, so I continue to honor everyone’s expectations of me, or do I break everybody’s hearts, hurt my kids, blow up my little perfect-on-the-outside family so that I don’t have to abandon myself again? Do I abandon everyone’s expectations of me and honor myself, or do I continue to honor everyone’s expectations of me and abandon myself? It felt like a life-or-death situation. It was. It was about whether I was going to let myself-my real self-live. I almost decided to go back to my broken life so that I didn’t have to hurt my children. Then I had this moment with my daughter when I looked at her and I thought: Oh my God, I’m staying in this marriage for my little girl, but would I want this marriage for her? And if i would not want this marriage for my little girl, then why am I modeling that bad love is good enough and that abandoning yourself is good parenting? I decided to be a model instead of a martyr. I decided to live. I hope she does, too.
Oh, I have to let this go even though I’m breaking my own heart.
When we choose loyalty to people with old ideas that hurt us and our children, aren’t we being disloyal to our kids? To ourselves? Choose carefully to whom and what to be loyal. I imagine your ancestors are singing when you become a cycle breaker for your entire lineage.
You taught her what she deserves from people.
We’ve got to put down what was never ours to carry so we can start living light and free. We deserve that.
Other people have been told that they can’t be free or happy. When they see you being free and happy, they get really nervous because they have to hold a mirror to themselves. They wonder: Maybe I’m not as free and happy as I thought. What I always try to remind myself is: This is not my fear. I say that to myself, This is not my fear, and then I go find other people who are investing in love over fear.
STOP TAKING ON WHAT IS NOT YOURS. I am learning that it’s my job to make myself okay. It is not my job to control other people’s decisions and lives so that I can feel okay. The question is: How do I be okay without using people to get me there? How do I make myself okay?
To let go of something no longer meant for me meant that I had the ability to grab on to something new and beautiful. I’m so grateful that I learned how to quit.
Nobody is going to protect me but me. That’s my job. When something stops working for me, when something actually starts to affect my peace, it’s my responsibility to stop and start something else. It’s the definition of the word responsible, meaning “able to respond”.
You do have to decide if you like yourself around that person. And if you don’t like or trust yourself or feel calm or safe, then that’s enough information.
It truly is the most heartbreaking paradox of life that, if you are lucky, your children will not need you- but what you want most in the world is for them to need you.
“Don’t fight it, don’t fix it, don’t figure it out”.
HOW DO I GO ON?
I know I’ll find a way to go on, but right now I just don’t know how. I’m scared I’ll never feel real joy again, like unburdened happiness is just over for me.
The missing takes up all of me.
It is not about making the weight lighter, but simply learning that we have the capacity to carry it.
You don’t have to believe you’ll be okay to make it true that you will be okay- in fact, part of grief is that you can’t believe it. You can’t believe that you can live without your mother. It’s just one step at a time, one day at a time. And then you realize that even though you can’t go on, you are, and therefore you can.
(After your mom died) You wrote an email to all the people who were reaching out to try to support you. You said, “Listen, I’m not writing any of you back. But I still want you to write to me. I still want you to reach out and invite me to things. But I need you to expect that I’m not going to write you back right now. I’m not going to be able to reciprocate, but I feel you”.
Permission to just let grief lead is a big, big, big part of the healing process.
You can spend your time worrying about whether you’re doing it right or wrong, or you can just let yourself feel. That cracked me open.
I’ve heard it said that all true grief has a weird element of rejoicing underneath it, because you’re rejoicing at how much you loved that person and how impactful they were.
Grief is a bill that has to be paid eventually.
As far as I can tell, grief is forever. Grief is the repeated experience of learning to live in the midst of a significant loss.
That’s the thing about grief. It doesn’t always show up as sadness and wailing and depression. Sometimes it’s just love and peace and inclusion.
(Christen Press) When my mom passed, i got good advice from a friend . The moment she died, she was with him forever. When people are alive, you have to physically go to see them in order to spend time with them. But when someone’s no longer alive, you never have to travel to see them. They’re always there. That articulation is exactly what my experience has been. My mom is always with me. When you’re omnipresent and when you’re transcendental, which I think is what happens when someone passes, there is no longer a limited human nature.
People who have the sadness can become warriors for truth and beauty and peace and love. If I’ve honored that inner aching sadness, stayed with her, paid attention to what that sadness has done inside of me, when that future self steps out and does something brave and amazing to help close the gap, I can look at her and say: There she is. I recognize her. She was rising up inside of me before she was outside of me.
Alchemy: it’s about taking the thing that you’re most afraid of and transforming it into something meaningful and useful, maybe even beautiful. Alchemizing pain into something creative has become a guiding principle in my life.
People always say, “There are no words”. That’s not true. There are words. You just have to sit and think about what they are.
Adult Glennon has worked so hard to create a life in which little girl Glennon feels safe enough to come out and exist. It’s amazing to see adult Glennon become the person that little Glennon always needed to show up and fight for her.
I think that the big hope we can have for ourselves is having lives that are beautiful and meaningful and true. That we can suffer devastating loss and still carry it.
You can’t shut yourself off to grief without also shutting yourself off to joy. You have to think of it like a kink in the hose: If you stop the flow of sadness, you stop the flow of happiness at the same time.
The adults in our life- who we depend on for our survival- really start to make us doubt the things that we know intuitively. Do I stay connected to my body, or do I preserve the relationship that I’m in? The ability to be in relationship with people who approve of us and love us is so essential to our survival that we will sacrifice what’s happening inside of us to make sure that we are safe relationally. I’m not in the moment that needs to be white knuckled and survived in the same way. I am with people who love me, who want to help me meet my needs. And it is okay fo me to be seen in the fullness of who I am now.
The BMI was designed by a statistician, sociologist, and astronomer looking to construct the “ideal man”. He gathered data on the height and weight of white men in the French and Scottish militaries in the 1800s. Around the turn of the twentieth century, American insurance companies were looking for ways to charge some policyholders more, and the BMI offered a way to say, “This is the level of fat where we will charge you more”. The BMI has nothing to do with your health. It’s never been meaningfully tested or adjusted in any real way. It categorically does not work for Black and Brown people. It incorrectly predicts health risks. And even among white people- the people that it was “designed for”- its high-water mark of being able to “detect obesity” is only 50%.
When we control ourselves, we lose ourselves; and when we lose ourselves, they control us.
If you want to understand any problem in America, you need to focus on who profits from the problem, not who suffers from that problem.
Should we perpetuate constricting narratives or are we able to say: “Whoa, that’s not an okay narrative to pass on about a body.”
Fear of self or fear of the other never comes from our truest self. That kind of fear comes from conditioning. Who taught me that my neck’s not supposed to look like this? Who benefits from my believing that?
People without a strong inner locus of self-trust tend to look for outer loci of control.
We grow and we learn, and slowly and suddenly, things we’ve done forever feel silly.
We fiercely control our bodies. We only control what we don’t trust. Your body is not your masterpiece. Your life is.
When you meet someone and you feel like you’ve known them forever…Oh! We are from the same soup in the cauldron! We are made from the same ingredients, the same soup.
I never shared what I was in the middle of; I never shared my uncertainty, my messy middle- just the before and after. That’s not actual vulnerability, it’s packaged vulnerability. People can’t help you with your stuff if you only share what you’ve already solved. Offering packaged vulnerability is like planning a road trip with a friend with the goal of spending time together. Then, instead of jumping into a car together, you book a flight and tell your friend you’ll meet her there. Okay, but you missed the togetherness, the bonding, the connection, the working it all out together. You missed the whole point.
If you open yourself up to receiving help, your people will show up and make things okay.
Honesty in friendship is the greatest act of love.
My friend’s husband was talking about a friend who lived in his neighborhood who he can never get in touch with and who never reaches out to him. I got to thinking: That is not a good friend. That is maybe good company. Good company is someone who company you enjoy and you like them as a person. But a good friend is: I’m committed to you. I’m invested in you. I try to follow through with that I say, to show up in your times of need, to show up in your times of joy. It’s intentional, and it requires effort.
We were just two complicated, individual, flawed people after all.
I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced lightning love. So i get it. But do you know what else lightning does? Lightning occasionally burns down your freaking house along with everything you love and treasure inside. That’s what my lightning love did to me. We do harm when we paint that as the highest form of romantic love. Because it’s not the best kind; it’s just one of the kinds. And it implies those of us who’ve chosen partners for other reasons as settling for lesser love. The love that I have now is a comforting summer shower. It’s a light, warm rain. It’s a cozy sunny day. You’re sitting on your front porch. You’re cuddling with your people. You’re playing cards. And you have this certainty of knowing that this ordinary thing is the most precious part of life. I chose coziness and comfort and warm summer rain for myself. And that love is not settling; it is magical. I’m being healed under that light.
Love is holding your partner’s fear gently, even when they don’t make perfect sense to you.
Behind criticism, there is often a wish, a longing; behind anger, there is often hurt. When we criticize our partners, we express unmet needs or unfulfilled desires. It’s a common way of asking for something, but criticism will typically result in the opposite of what we really want, which is: to be told we are loved. To ask for what you want may be much more productive than to complain about what the other is doing wrong.
There is an empty space between us. I suffer from that empty space and I don’t know if you do too. I sometimes feel like I don’t really know what’s inside of you and what makes you tick, and I don’t feel that you know what happens inside of me. Maybe this is the marriage that you know. Maybe that’s what you grew up with. Maybe that’s how you saw your parents. I saw my parents that way too. But i promised myself that I would have better; i would have more. I hope you hear my longing and this not as criticism. I’m lonely and I can’t imagine that if I feel this way, you think we’re having the best of times.
When I catch myself not bringing up conflict, I am like: Oh, red flag. That’s an apathy that atrophies the relationship, whereas working through conflict is an investment that shows faith in the relationship.
People who try to live without any conflict, who never argue or mourn, tend to implode sooner or later- as any psychologist will tell you. Living without conflict is like living without love: cold and eventually unbearable.
I get lost arguing facts. I try to keep us out of the facts and into feelings by getting simple and vulnerable. I say, “My feelings are really hurt. Period.” or “I feel abandoned”. It cuts straight through it. It’s hard to argue with a feeling.
Things almost always have an understory. The dishes represent something else. If we can figure out what the understory of our conflict is, we can get closer to resolution.
Apologizing takes strength, security, and confidence.
If you are in the privileged position of just taking items off the to-do list, it means you are not a cocreator, architect, and carrier of the ticker. And you need to be.
SEX
This is why people are attracted to strangers- because they’re new, because we don’t know them. When we don’t know someone, our mind can be curious and fill in the blanks with every good thing; whereas with the people we’ve been with forever, there are no blanks. We’ve already colored in that whole page and have been looking at it for a long time. We have all our data, so there is nothing to be curious about. We need to do new things in order to open our minds to the possibility that we don’t know everything about our person and that our person doesn’t know everything about us.
If I were to ask you to finish the sentence I turn myself on by…When I take care of myself (be spending time with friends, time in nature, going dancing, listening to music, singing in the shower. When I’m in touch with my aliveness and with my inner beauty. If you don’t have any of that aliveness or receptive energy inside of you, your tank is empty.
Hotel sex is the best because there’s nothing around you to remind you of your crushing mental load. In a hotel your brakes are more likely to be turned off, and you can be more responsive to your accelerators.
I need to be able to turn off in order to turn on. To be out of your head and into your body.
When things are new, it shoots out dopamine. And when things become less novel, there’s less lighting up of that area. Of course love doesn’t equal desire. They’re not synonymous with each other.
Ask yourself if the sex you’re having is worth craving. If the sex you’re having isn’t pleasurable, it makes zero sense for you to crave it.
PARENTING
How will we ever teach our kids how to be human if we never let them see us being human?
Maybe our sacred duty is to carefully nurture the kind of loving, healthy, open soil that allows them to slowly grow. And we- in reverence and awe- get to watch them bloom and protect them from storms as they grow stronger and more beautifully, perfectly themselves.
I get the joy of just radically loving him exactly as he is. I am doing my best to make sure he’s okay in himself.
That is the ultimate taming- the idea that we have to live not to disappoint our parents. If you’re scared of disappointing your parent, that means you’ve already “appointed” them the guide of your life. So to disappoint is actually dis-appointing them and re-appointing yourself. Who do I need to disappoint today so I can reappoint myself as the guide of my own life?
The hardest thing about raising a middle schooler is that it triggers the unhealed, sweaty 7th grader inside of us who’s got the tray in their hand and doesn’t smell quite right and doesn’t know where they’re going to sit. We so desperately don’t want that for our own children. That feeling is still so raw that we almost can’t take it if we have to watch it unfold again. Helping our kids feel like they belong can be as simple as, “I see you, I love you, and you will always belong here”.
Resilience really comes from having felt like someone was there for you in your hard moments.
It’s not our job to protect our kids from their pain. It’s our job to let them sit in it, sit beside them through it, and just say to them over and over again, “I see your fear and it’s big, and I see your courage and it’s bigger. We can do hard things”.
We’re thinking about that moment where we lost connection, and we want to talk about it. That actually changes the memory, instead of me having to wait until I’m 47 to change the memory with a therapist. Repair is like photoshopping life. It’s actually changing the memory for our kids as they go forward. We are adding accountability and closeness to the memory. So repair is essential. There’s this beautiful reparenting healing that can happen when we give our children what we never got but really needed.
Children need their parents to see them, help them understand what feelings are, and help them understand themselves. But emotionally immature parents struggle to self-reflect. They tend to be defensive and self-centered, interact very superficially, and they aren’t capable of empathizing. They won’t go back and attempt repair by apologizing or sharing empathy for something they did that was hurtful. And that ability to repair is so crucial to any kind of relationship, especially the parent-child relationship. Kids of emotionally immature parents learn that they have to supply the empathy to the parent, so they stretch to develop a level of empathy that they’re not prepared for. They become vigilant. They feel emotionally lonely.
Children’s task will eventually be the same as hers: to somehow find peace and freedom, even with this person in their life.
Maybe parents who shut us down noticed our powerful spirit and were afraid the world would reject it, so they tried to squelch it first.
When we model martyrdom as love, we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. That is why Carl Jung suggested: There is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent.
ANGER
Anger can be a form of self-protection. A child who didn’t have any primary caretakers was living in the hospital. One of the nurses went away to get married and came back and instead of saying they missed the nurse, the child yelled that he hated her. The child had no hope that if he expressed his needs, someone would actually fulfill them. So his only way of protecting himself was through vengeance- to make him feel less weak and less vulnerable.
His lack of response triggers in me certainty that I am alone in this, that it’s up to me to figure it out. Now I’m completely gone, dog-paddling through a sea of cortisol.
(Brene Brown) When I’m afraid, I get angry. I can be scary when I’m scared.
At the end of the day, you’ve fed everyone else and you’re left hungry.
Anger is just a feeling that tells you what you need. For many of us who have a hard time with boundaries, we actually probably don’t know how to feel anger in our body.
FORGIVENESS
How can I keep putting myself in this situation that my body is begging me to understand is not safe? He betrayed me- but my biggest problem is that I keep betraying me. The only one who can change what’s happening right now is me.
When I’m trying so hard to forgive, what I’m really trying to do is make it all make sense. I just want to make the way they treated me make sense so I can understand it. That’s not my job though. Understanding the why of their behavior is the other person’s job, not mine.
It’s helpful when the person who hurt us is genuinely sorry, but forgiveness doesn’t require their participation. We don’t have to sign off on the same version of what happened. Forgiveness is an inside job. It’s just deciding that, by letting somebody else off the hook, I’m really letting myself off the hook. I can just exhale, lay the whole thing down. It’s too heavy to keep hoisting up and carrying around every day. I’m responsible for me. That’s it. I’m not responsible for what someone else does, says, thinks, or chooses. I am responsible for my words, my responses, what I decide to believe, what to hang on to, and what I release. That’s mine. So it’s not true that we’re powerless. It’s tempting to lean in to a victim model; it plays better. It’s easy to be sympathetic toward a victim. It’s easy to rally the troops to your side. It’s neater. But this approach lacks nuance. Forgiveness is personal. It’s mine. It’s entirely mine to sort out.
If we don’t choose forgiveness- it truncates any further work we’re going to do on ourselves. The longer I carry the story- which is: This is your fault, you have harmed me, and I am pissed- the longer it prevents me from genuinely and honestly facing my own stuff. I can’t do both. It’s either all your fault, or I get to also face my responses and patterns. The question is: Am I ready to move into the work that’s going to be required of my own heart and soul? Forgiveness is the path to that moment.
Choosing to not forgive keeps me vigilant. It keeps the narrative of ‘this lack of vigilance, look where it got you. Unforgiveness is a cousin to resentment, bitterness, and fury. After a minute, it’s corrosive to my insides.
Forgiveness is between me and me. When I forgive, it’s to set myself free. Forgiveness is not accepting what they did; it’s accepting that they did it. They are responsible for what they did, but I am responsible for the power I give them because of what they did. I can decide to take back responsibility for my life and my future.
When you can’t be connected in love, it can feel like it’s better to be connected in any other way than to not be connected at all. Harboring unforgiveness is the shitty consolation prize to real connection.
HOW TO APOLOGIZE– REMEMBER TO COME BACK TO THE BEST VERSION OF YOU; YOUR INTEGRITY.
- Accept the harm of your action- we have to face the fact that: today I caused someone else pain and I have some cleanup work to do. You have to acknowledge that fact without talking about what you intended and what you meant. A hurt person doesn’t care what your intentions were. Just own what you did. If the harm happened publicly, the ownership taking needs to be done publicly, because the harm was done to more than just the person who was directly offended. It is saying, “I was not my best self, and I need help getting back on that path of where I want to be”.
- PREVENT YOURSELF FROM DOING IT AGAIN. CHANGE.
What are you going to do so that you don’t keep doing the thing that caused harm? What is at the root of the behavior?
- MAKE RESTITUTION. MAKE IT RIGHT.
What is owed to the person who was harmed? You find out what people need by asking them. If you decide FOR them what appropriate amends are, you’re not centering their personhood and their needs; you have to ask them, and then you have to accept the consequences.
- APOLOGIZE
We don’t want your words until you’re already done the fixing.
- MAKE DIFFERENT CHOICES NEXT TIME
You can hurt someone and say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” More than not having meant to, one of the most important things in reparation is the ability to recognize the harm done and understand where the other person is coming from.
*The intellectual part must recognize: I understand that you’re a different person than me who has a separate experience from my own. I see now that it doesn’t matter what I intended; it matters how I impacted you.
*The emotional part must acknowledge both: I understand that I hurt you and then also look inward and start the work of inner change.
*Repair comes from tolerating our own imperfection. “I did something to you, and you are hurt”.
HOW TO GET UNSTUCK
What we learn as we’re growing up becomes our software. When we catch ourselves doing something that doesn’t align with our current values, it’s because there’s an old code in our software that we haven’t done the work to update yet.
When my body tells me the truth, I’ll believe it. I trust myself now, so I will no longer suffer voluntarily or silently or for long. I will not stay, not ever again, in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.
I do less instead of more. I want to lead my life instead of reacting to it. I remind myself that strangers are not the bosses of me.
When you think, “why am I doing this thing that I don’t want to do?” or “I keep doing this thing, and it’s not aligned with who I am”, that’s how you know it’s an old pattern that you’re finally ready to be free from.
If you learn to stay with you, over time you realize that your discomfort is the greatest gift, because it points you toward all the tender, hurt places you need to heal- and you heal them. Yourself. And that’s how you learn to trust yourself. You become a person who will love yourself through it all. You become your person.
Take a deep breath, slow down, and understand that this rest work is a meticulous love practice. Resting is a generative state. You generate ideas, you are connecting with your body.
WHAT IS THE POINT?
The child won’t be a child forever. They won’t be alive forever. We know all of that when we’re seeing these moments of beauty. So we’re holding these two truths at the same time: this amazing, precious child and the fact of impermanence. And that’s what makes us cry. We can get into a mysterious state where we’re aware of the tragedy of life but also that life is so incredibly beautiful and that it’s all wrapped together. The tragedy and the beauty is happening simultaneously at every moment.
If there’s any secret to life, it’s that being human is not about feeling happy- it’s about feeling everything. All of our feelings are for feeling. Even the uncomfortable ones, even the hard ones- they are all for our becoming.
I have been exhausted and terrified and angry. I have been overwhelmed and underwhelmed and debilitatingly depressed and anxious. I have been amazed and awed and delighted and overjoyed to bursting. I’ll tell you what I’ve been: I’ve been alive.
To be human is to be deeply connected. To be aware of that connection is the most beautiful thing. And it’s also the most terrifying thing. It’s loving someone so deeply that you cannot live without them- and it’s having no control over whether you will have to. To love someone that much is only terrifying because it’s beautiful. And it’s only beautiful because it’s terrifying.
Some people take that pain and, for a thousand reasons, might not be able to integrate it. They take that pain out on other people. And the cycle continues. But there is this other pathway, where people transform that pain into something different, something beautiful.
I don’t want to live everyday as if it’s my last. I want to live everyday as if it’s my first. To wake up with awe and curiosity and wonder of a newborn baby. It often looks like the simple things. It looks like play. It looks like taking my dogs for a long walk in the woods. It looks like curling up with a good book and allowing myself the luxury of unstructured time, where I can tap into my curiosity just for the hell of it, not with any expectation. That’s how I’ve been navigating the uncertainty, by taking the pressure off, following the threads of my curiosity, and cultivating the things that bring me joy.
Chasing and finding the prize has been easy for me. Staying and finding the prize has been harder.
Faith is the hunch that it was all supposed to be more beautiful than this. The magic of a monstera plant is that it lives in a rainforest, so it has learned to grow through darkness. Other plants grow only toward the light, but a monstera knows how to grow first through the darkness- reaching, reaching- because it senses what it cannot yet see. It knows the light is out there somewhere- if it just grows long and strong enough in the dark.
I do sabbaticals for myself, and the only practice is doing exactly what you want next.
(parenting) I just want all the years. I know I’m not going to be able to really do anything for her, but I just want to be there to be a witness to her, to encourage her, ro run beside her, to constantly tell her what a wonder she is to me. And then, when she’s done with me and retreats to her people, to never stop celebrating her in my heart. Knowing, “That’s my kid. I’m here for that one, and only that one. The clarity of putting my energy- while I’m here- exactly, and only, where I most want it to go.
I almost always write the word STET over suggestions. STET is a magical word in publishing- and now in my entire life- that means: LET IT STAND. It means: I hear your suggested change. But I meant what I said. I am who I am. STET.
Yum
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