Rogue Waves and Other Tragedies

According to NOAA, a rogue wave is one that is "large, unexpected, and dangerous." It's the result of a particular kind of focused combo swell, perhaps when ground swell waves from storms interact with currents or different swells add up in constructive interference. When we are out surfing, occasionally we'll see a much bigger wave wander through on an ordinary 2-3' day. You know when something is coming, because the more observant surfers will start paddling out all of sudden. When the pack is moving, best to move with them or get clobbered.

Sunset, South Carlsbad State Beach, low tide, the sky reflects off of the thin layer of water left by the receding tide.

I got clobbered the other day at Blackies. Close out waves and I was in just the wrong place -- couldn't get out of the impact zone -- and a sizeable wave picked me up sideways and slammed me down. My surfboard's fin slapped the top of my foot leaving a deep cut. Right then, I knew it was probably bad. Fin hit really hard. The water was cold, so it took a minute for me to feel the effects. I got that wave of nausea you get when you've been hurt badly enough. The cut didn't bleed right away, but I told the girls I had to paddle in. I didn't want to barf in the water. Surf Sister Jenny said I turned a bit green and I just lay down on the beach for awhile until the nausea passed. Cracked open the first aid kit for the first time. It's now three weeks later and the cut has not closed entirely yet. My whole foot has been swollen for awhile. Probably should have gotten stitches. Though it didn't look bad on the surface -- it's a small cut -- it was pretty deep.

The stuff with BTG and Dad's death last month was a huge wave -- large, unexpected, and initially, seemed dangerous. The effects of the rogue-wave-sized, combo swell of events I wrote about last time are just now starting to subside. It is six weeks and four therapy sessions later and the fuzz in my brain is finally starting to clear. What have I taken away from this experience? If I'm using the conditions of my life to wake up, then what have I woken up to? Generally, a bigger picture, a larger perspective. I understand more deeply how my trauma affected me as a child, then lead to further traumatic experiences as I got older. I could see a new set of stories, really fucked up thinking, of devastating beliefs that were running my life from an unconscious place. I understand the conditions of my upbringing again, with more understanding and subtlety, and less blame. I can see the cycle of abuse, how our traumas all add up over generations. And I can see how my strategies worked. I understand how to heal these things: both body and mind need to be involved in the context of healing relationships. The work it takes to heal attachment issues takes a long time. Though my strategies got me through this rogue wave of emotion, I'm in this for the long haul. Repair is ongoing.

I realize again that my childhood didn't look bad from the outside. Just like the cut on my foot -- didn't look that bad. What's going on inside, though -- the cut went pretty deep. I am reminded again and again that my thoughts and beliefs have been shaped by an environment that was not safe. It is a lifelong process to untangle myself from this mess. I can see myself repeating things, but we're spiraling. We're getting deeper every time. Deeper in and deeper in, it sucks more and more, honestly. Rock bottom keeps getting lower; the churn keeps getting wilder. And with every bottom I hit, I can release more and more. Every bit of healing brings a new wave of grief, and I keep going. Keep practicing. Keep using strategies. It's a spiral.

Several sources of information line up on the kinds of strategies that heal attachment wounds. While what works for any individual might be idiosyncratic, there is general agreement on a number of interventions: regulating the body, working with the mind, and having healing relationships. Body- Mind - Relationships. And I seem to be working them all. For me, I have also found support from the ideas of Buddhism. There are a number of Buddhist ideas which seem to align with and support the ideas I find in psychology, and it is this combo that has been so nourishing. Healing helps me fulfill a purpose I have in the world, so I will keep going on this path as long as I can.

Body- Mind - Relationships

During this atonement with the father situation, I really saw my body's reaction to my stories. A study of trauma and the body said, "The client’s attempts to recall or acknowledge traumatic events may precipitate ‘remembering’ in the form of physical sensations, autonomic responses, and involuntary movements." I was terrified when I saw those links on BTG's computer screen. I froze. My heart raced. My insides fell away from my skin. I felt all tingly. I dissociated. My body and brain shut down out of fear. All kinds of messages started running through my mind. I thought I couldn't trust anyone I had invited into my life, because I had the belief that I make fundamental mistakes with people -- I misjudge them. I remained terrified when I met with BTG -- even though the appointment was on zoom, I was shaking with terror. All of these physical reactions occurred automatically and prompted a set of associated thoughts.

I used to think my body would never lie to me, and on one level that's true. I can notice how my energy shifts in response to certain events, activities, or conversations. Emotions are information. Anger cues me to my sense of justice and boundary violations; sadness to the loss of something I love. I notice my reactions to stuff and that gives me information about how to navigate my life. Paying attention to big feelings gives me clues to where I'm stuck.

Also, I can get a sense of what has meaning for me by attending to what I have no trouble doing -- what my body moves toward easily and with joy (like surfing). Dr. Lindsay Gibson on the Being Well Podcast said, "There seems to me to be an innate something about each person that is intrinsically very individual and that we might say is the authentic self. And when we are in the authentic self, we have vitality, we have energy, we have an ability to have feelings for other people, we have the capacity for joy. But most of all, we have a good spontaneous energy to us, where it feels like we're all of a piece.... [G]radually, [people] are able to be more themselves and to respond in this more lively, spontaneous way." Gibson tells us to watch our energy levels. Our energy rises and falls in response to a situation or conversation -- we are either invigorated or drained. She says to pay attention to those feelings. They are great teachers.

But on another level, my body's reactions are a product of patterns of thinking established by my history. According to therapist Dr. Pria Alpern, "...traumatic experience is encoded subcortically, such that the nervous system organizes present experience through patterns shaped by the past." Dr. Dan Siegel writes, "We propose that a set of patterns exists in which a collection of subcortical motivational networks forming early in life sets the stage for difference in three reactive tendencies that an individual will have a propensity to experience. These subcortical regions -- related to emotion, motivation, and attention -- interact with the cortex above them in a 'bottom-up' way to influence the whole of the embodied brain -- the nervous system distributed throughout the body, including its head - and shape our inner subjective sense of what matters and where we focus our attention."

My experiences have shaped me, not only the way I see things, but what I actually see, and physical and mental reactions arise together. Thoughts and emotions are connected, physical reactions are conditioned by the mind -- just like Pavlov's famous dog. My body has its own way in to my trauma, so my body had to be involved in the therapy. Drs. Alpern and Siegel suggest that the combination of "top-down and bottom-up" approaches be used to heal. I spend a lot of time doing activities that keep my body regulated: yin yoga, swimming, surfing, walking, weight lifting, and hot baths. I can't just think my way to healing, my body needs to be involved.

I also can't reorganize my mind on my own; I have to regulate my body and have a new experience with other people in the present to help me reorganize it. After I saw BTG's bookmarks, I was freaking out and I couldn't regulate on my own very well. I needed help. Talking to friends helped me calm down first, and then the therapy session with BTG helped me come back to center as well. My body needed to regulate through co-regulation with another person, then I could open up to a new way of thinking.

During our session together, BTG stayed steady and cared for me as his client. He gave me agency to take a break and responded positively when I asked him to go first in the conversation. Many other men before him had hurt me, but he behaved much differently: he apologized and took responsibility for the breach. A new experience. As I told him the stories of my past hurts, he remained solid and curious, empathetic. He asked questions and answered mine. He stayed with me in the mess and helped me get through it.

Dr. Alpern wrote of a therapist-client encounter in which the client was triggered by the therapist's sweater in a session. The therapist was wearing a sweater that was similar to the one her attacker wore. The client sat down for the session and froze. Alpern writes, "Jennifer’s therapist does something simple yet clinically adept. He does not argue with her fear or rush to interpret. He doesn’t retreat. Instead, he acknowledges her fear and invites curiosity. He asks if she would be willing to orient toward him and notice what happens in her body. Almost immediately, Jennifer reports feeling more frightened and more paralyzed. She also notices that she cannot feel her body. And this is the pivotal moment, because rather than becoming consumed by her experience, Jennifer begins to observe it. Ogden and colleagues describe this shift as moving from 'having' an experience to studying its organization in the present moment. Jennifer’s therapist slows the pace and continues to invite mindfulness and choice to the moment, helping Jennifer remain within her window of tolerance."

Thanks to my mindfulness practice and previous therapy strategies which expanded my window of tolerance for emotions, I was able to observe my behavior in the weeks in between the breach and the session. Then, BTG gave me a new experience in that first session after the breach that satisfied all of my worries and helped me calm down. Like the woman in Dr. Alpern's article, I left "that session with something new, a corrective experience of agency and safety within relationship." And in subsequent sessions, BTG and I have continued to discuss the events and their effects. I have been able to explore in safety: feet in the present moment, looking back to understand what happened.

Dr. Alpern again, "Crucially, this exploration must unfold while the therapist maintains social engagement during the session. The therapist’s voice tone, pacing, and responsiveness signal safety even while Jennifer’s defensive system is active....The therapist’s sweater makes visible how easily the past enters the present, and how much of the work depends on the clinician’s capacity to stay curious and collaborative. No intervention succeeds here without the therapist’s own nervous system remaining available as a point of orientation and co-regulation." Because he remained calm, I could be whatever I needed to be initially in the session, and then calm down by the end. Because I have someone sticking with me during this process, I can finally experience co-regulation.

Self-regulation comes from co-regulation. Siegel found that "higher cortical structures could 'learn' the skill of inhibiting the lower subcortical regions with parent's connection and support." Even when my amygdala is still sensitive, I can bring my prefrontal cortex online to regulate my emotions through such support. "Name it to tame it" is one of Siegel's strategies, among many. Siegel writes, "[Children] with authoritative parents, caregivers who tuned into the child's particular temperament and experience, could learn, with their parents' support, how to feel their fear and move out into the world despite its presence internally." Everyone needs to learn how to soothe themselves. I'm just learning it a bit later than normal.

Once regulated, then I can move toward understanding. Once my body is feeling calm and safe, we can involve my mind. One of my big worries in this situation was, "Why do these things keep happening to me?" I thought I had some fundamental flaw that kept attracting hurtful, narcissistic people. BTG talked about "safety meters"-- my safety meter is broken. People who have been raised to be securely attached feel a kind of safety from relationships that are inherently non-harming and full of epistemic trust. Securely attached people know in their bodies what safety feels like: unconditional love and acceptance also leave a mark on the mind and body like that wax seal stamp I mentioned in the last post. When difficulties arose as kids, they had caregivers who soothed them and helped them cope, so they learned how to cope in a healthy way. They internalized the strategies taught to them and made them their own.

Dr. Dan Siegel defines secure attachment as feeling safe, seen, soothed, and secure. Caregivers provide a safe home, literally free from physical danger. They attune to their children's needs, mirroring their inner worlds, and then soothing them when hurtful or scary things arise, teaching them how to cope with such threats. Security means the child knows they can count on their caregivers to provide this kind of environment consistently. Securely attached people are more likely to experience a sense of what Siegel calls wholeness, which he describes as a feeling of "coherence, completion, contentment, or connection." Securely attached people have safety meters that lead to safety, "of feeling at ease and content, of being connected." Unfortunately, my safety meters have been trained to lead to danger, in Siegel's words "dis-ease and disconnection."

From my early conditioning, I was stamped in quite a different way. Siegel discusses how infants have needs in three domains: agency, bonding, and certainty. When those needs are frustrated in some way -- not met at all or inconsistently met -- and not eventually soothed or ruptures repaired, then anger, separation distress, and fear arise. These patterns of response turn into adult patterns of relating to the world: attachment. I learned that men don't stick around, that others' needs are more important than mine, that I'd better be perfect to gain any attention, that abandonment and emotional neglect were normal. I was not important. Because my home base was corrupted, I read danger and dis-ease as normal, as safe. I lived with people who didn't not help me feel seen and heard or soothed. So my body doesn't know what that feels like. I was on constant alert and felt like I was the only one looking out for me. Of the many contradictions I grew up with, that has been the most devastating one: danger feels safe.

I grew up knowing that "parents love their children," but my experience of love was abandonment and emotional neglect. So my safety meter for relationships is busted. That's why those harmful relationships kept happening -- I invited danger in, because it felt normal, felt like home. I felt like shit about myself, so I stayed in relationships where I was mistreated, confirming my lack of self-worth. It just felt normal.

Now, I can recognize this. Having a broken safety meter is not an inherent trait, but something I learned. So I can unlearn it. Relearn something else. I can know that kindness is going to feel uncomfortable and I can expand my window of tolerance for this, too. (How absolutely shitty. To be so unfamiliar with kindness that I am uncomfortable with it.) The surf girls, BTG, and Surf Sensei have been instrumental on this front: they are kind and interested in me. It is a new experience, this kind consistency. Regulating my body allows me to take in this new information. Mindfulness helps me be aware of when I'm triggered, and self-regulation allows me to practice relaxation in the face of what I perceive as danger. That combo allows me to take a pause to evaluate whether or not a situation really is dangerous. Trigger occurs = I notice = I cue my body to relax = then my mind relaxes = more reality visible. My beliefs cause my body to react; in the pause, I can reality check those beliefs.

I can understand the difference between danger and safety by looking at relationships and behaviors that make me feel good and ones that make me feel bad. I can watch my energy level, as Dr. Lindsay Gibson wrote in her books on emotionally immature parents. I can use my mindfulness skills to notice when I am invigorated, energized by an interaction and when I'm drained or disappointed. And most importantly, I can know that one disappointing interaction does not mean total danger, run for the hills, or the end of the relationship. Being steadier myself, I can put the single interaction into the larger context of the whole relationship -- not ignoring anything, but putting it in context.

BTG and I continue to process relationships and events in therapy. What actually makes a healthy relationship? What does safety feel like? We work with my mind at the same time I'm working with my body. And with every difficult social interaction soothed and processed through accurate reflection in therapy, I feel calmer. My body relaxes. There's this place in between my shoulder blades that releases. Reality feels more solid. I can trust myself more and more. Secure attachment is a feeling -- a feeling of solidity, of strength. Wholeness. At ease. Content and connected. Body- Mind - Relationships.

Seeing Myself

We only learn what we feel, the names of the emotions that match the physical collection of sensations we feel, by the mirroring we get as children from our caregivers. When I'm crying as a child, my mom asks, "Why are you sad?" That's how I learn crying = sadness. Part of insecure attachment is emotional neglect, so emotional development takes a big hit with insecure attachment. Researcher David Elliott said on the Therapist Uncensored Podcast, "So people who have insecure attachment will tend to either overregulate emotions, like kind of shut down and say, 'I don't feel. I'm a rock.' They stay away from emotions. Or will tend to be overwhelmed by emotions. They have difficulty regulating emotional experience and tend to get confused and disorganized and overwhelmed and lose perspectives. So we find that as we treat the attachment difficulty, the greater internal organization and greater emotion regulation capacity become, and that in and of itself brings more well-being to someone's experience. They are not so scared of emotions, not so overwhelmed by emotions, and also if they haven't felt emotions very much, able to feel something safely and more comfortably.”

Insecure attachment also interacts with trauma. Elliott again, "What we find is that for people with complex trauma, particularly, or people we see aren't doing well with some of the more traditional trauma treatment approach, if we treat the attachment difficulties first, then often not only does the emotion regulation skill develop and the internal organization and structure of mind develop, but the trauma itself might resolve just through the development of those internal capacities. The post-traumatic condition might resolve. And then for those people for whom it doesn't resolve through the attachment work, then it's possible to go to the cognitive processing approach for trauma treatment in ways that can be very efficient and the person doesn't get overwhelmed by it and notices gains quite quickly.”

And this makes sense to me, because I see my attachment issues as being the result of being just left on my own to soothe any stress and sort the world out. Babies and children cannot do that themselves. And there is lifelong training in simply being a woman that complicates this issue, too. I have been shaped to appease and please, make myself smaller, be nice, and never cause trouble. My needs haven't been met and I have been discouraged from getting them met. My caregivers were unaware of providing an environment of secure attachment through emotional mirroring -- they didn't know better -- and patriarchy made it worse.

BTG has helped me by being that consistent attachment figure who can co-regulate. I sometimes notice BTG is modulating his voice and pacing in order to help me calm down in a session. I think, "Oh! There he goes. I must be really upset." I can see his response which then allows me to see my own. It goes in that order. Because I'm so used to ignoring myself and my own internal states, I see what he's doing before I see myself. In this way, I learn to care for myself. Elliott again, "You are caring for this young self in such loving, supportive, attuned ways that haven't been done before. So that in a sense is treating the trauma potentially. Like it really is filling, like it is directly treating the trauma.” BTG is helping me build a secure base to stand on, to feel more secure, to see and treat myself with care.

Developing Security

The essentials of secure attachment are: felt safety, feeling seen and known, felt comfort, feeling valued, and felt support for best self. I am experiencing these things more and more. The authors of the text Trauma and the Body talk about three pillars of secure attachment. The first is the relationship with the therapist, as well as using our imaginations to create an ideal parent figure. Both my imagination and real work with BTG create an internal model of what secure parenting would look like, so I get to feel something different. Just like we did with the bookmarks breach, I had a different experience of what a "good parent" could do. Additionally, using self-compassion practices, I have imagined my small self in various troubling situations, and I have soothed that small self by running a movie in my head about what could have happened that would have been better. I have imagined what would have helped in that situation, and soothed myself imaginatively: the ideal parent figure protocol.

Second, we work with my mind. Developing what psychologists call metacognition and mentalization, what Buddhists might call mindfulness and compassion, is the ability to be aware of your own and others' minds and mental activity. I understand what I think, how I think, and how others think through processing different situations in therapy. Observing my own thoughts and emotions is an indispensable skill in this process, as is understanding how other people think differently from me. Mentalization is a constant strategy; I imagine a wider range of what other people could be experiencing apart from my own limited perspective. Constantly scanning my surroundings for potential threats limits my ability to see things accurately and to imagine that other people have non-selfish motivations for their behavior. I have been seeing everything through the lens of safety instead of joy. Mentalization allows me to see differently now that I feel safe.

And third -- this is where surfing and the sisterhood come in -- developing collaborative capability with others. Elliott includes "being in cooperative interactions with others, sharing a goal and working mutually toward a goal" and generally being with people in an interactive, positive way. Professionally, I am amazing at this. In relationships with specific, delineated boundaries, I am really great at collaborating and nurturing supportive communities. However, I haven't had a lot of opportunities to do this personally on an equal basis with others in the wild, because I haven't felt brave enough to share my full self. In personal relationships with uncertain boundaries, I have disappeared myself and deferred to others, meeting their needs until I can't anymore. Then I've bailed.

Here in California, I've been more my authentic self than I ever have before, and I've found acceptance. I'm still working on my reactions when things change in relationships, but I've come a long way. I am more at ease with people, more able to ride the waves of changing relationships, more able to just be with myself and others no matter what is happening. Siegel names what he calls "three facets of wholeness" and they are "an integrative, harmonious, receptive state of being." Siegel says of these three facets of wholeness:

• Coherent: "A state of being that is receptive, open, and capable of holding in awareness a wide range of emotions, thoughts, and memories with clarity and stability."

• Connected: "An experience in which the sense of self expands and a feeling of being at ease and connected to 'something larger' than an individual identity emerges....an expanded feeling of one's identity and belonging, an integrative self we call "intraconnected....' akin to the states of transcendence that emotions of awe, compassion, and gratitude are said to evoke."

• Content: "A flowing experience of harmony. This use of the term 'whole' suggests that as a complex system emerges with a self-organizing process, a synergy arises in which 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' and has the qualities optimal self-organization: flexibility, adaptability, coherence, energy, and stability."

A Buddhist Psychology

Siegel's wholeness seems like equanimity, if not awakening or enlightenment. Sounds a lot like Thich Nhat Hanh's interbeing. Sounds a lot like no self and causes and conditions. It sounds like Dogen's "to know the self is to forget the self." Sounds a lot like Buddhism. Mindfulness, karma, dependent origination...all ideas that have corollaries in psychology.

The Buddhist ideas of karma and dependent origination are helpful to me here. Karma is not really about some cosmic justice system, but of the habitual thoughts and emotions that we practice every day that lead us to think and feel in the world in certain ways. If I never felt seen and heard, then my worth as a person was not reinforced -- I have a belief stamped into my mind and I go about living and acting in a world as if I'm a person who is not worthy of being seen and heard. That wax stamp leaves it's mark, and I continue to play out the meaning I made of it. Socializing with the surf girls and therapy with BTG are both leaving a different set of impressions, so I am able to act differently in the world. Using these strategies for building secure attachment, new karma is being built day by day. Karma might just be the unconscious patterns my mind develops over time -- the subcortical neural patterns of behavior Alpern and Siegel talked about.

Dependent origination is a related idea: that nothing in the world exists independently, but is the result of an interrelated set of causes and conditions -- a self-organizing set of causes and conditions. Our lives exist in a specific context born of other specific contexts. Things are constantly unfolding. What we believe is the result of our context. It reminds me of this old idea from when I studied Gifted Education. Françoys Gagné is a researcher who thought about how we develop the gifts we are born with into talents. One of the factors he considered were the catalysts of our growth. Catalysts were environmental and interpersonal factors, like the culture we were born into, the educational opportunities we had, our own drive and motivation, intelligence and conscientiousness. These catalysts could be positive or negative, strong or weak. It was the combination, the direction and strength of our catalysts that turn our innate gifts into talents. Catalysts are the wax stamps. We are affected by them in many ways, creating or undermining success in the world. And in Gagné's model, these catalysts all sat on a bed of chance. Everything was the product of a particular context, the causes and conditions of our lives -- maybe not random, but definitely not in our control. Definitely not personal.

Self-organizing causes and conditions. There is no underlying purpose or puppeteer guiding this process: shit just happens, then other shit just happens. I am not to blame for my circumstances and no one else is either. We are all interacting with our environment, responding to existing causes and conditions and creating new ones. Much of this is outside of our control. Karma and dependent origination mean I can stop blaming my parents for my crap. The conditions of my childhood are no longer present and I can respond to my new context instead of reliving the old one. I can see the first and third pillars, working with BTG and playing with the Sisterhood, as creating a new set of conditions. I can begin to heal these wounds in a very concrete way by living in this new context and taking it in how it feels now. New karma is being built now, with every new interaction creating new impressions on my mind. I can take it in.

Releasing the Illusion of Control

These Buddhist ideas and the second pillar of attachment, metacognition, helps me let more of my stories go. William Waldron wrote about yogacara in Making Sense of Mind Only, “Much of early Buddhist thought and practice is thus aimed at understanding how it is that we so grossly misunderstand the world and ourselves, and how we can learn to overcome these illusions by seeing things more clearly and behaving accordingly.” We are unreliable narrators of our own lives: we take in information all the time and draw conclusions about that information. Those conclusions are often inaccurate. Without someone to guide us to a larger perspective, to different perspectives, we tend to focus on our interpretations selfishly. We get stuck in those self-centered ways of thinking and being until we have a new experience that no longer obeys our internal assumptions. These are the central premises of the Constructivist approach in Psychology: we are always learning, and what we learn is very personal and depends on our specific situation.

I understand the bigger picture of my parents' story and how it has impacted mine, how it didn't start with them, but with those who came before them. Who knows where it actually started? The causes and conditions we live with are constantly changing, interacting, unfolding. There is no predetermined order to them -- it's just a bunch of causes and effects bumping into new causes and effects. I am a product of the events that shaped my life, but it was absolutely not personal. None of this was about me; I am not to blame. And if I am not to blame for the causes and conditions that shaped me, then no one else is either. While this may seem anti-agency, it's actually the opposite. I was taking the blame for EVERYTHING. Now, I can more clearly see what I can control, what IS within my power, and what definitely isn't. I am finding that there is very little that I control.

I know my maternal great-grandfather was a horribly abusive man. What effect did that have on my grandma and her choices? What effect did that have on my mom? What conditions made my great-grandfather so abusive? I know my paternal grandparents got divorced in 1947 when my dad was only three years old. What effect did that have on him? He was raised by his mom and aunt, an only child in this Italian Catholic family. How did a divorce land there? What was it like to grow up without a father himself? He had no model for how to behave as a dad. How far back does the cycle of abuse go?

A conversation from the movie After the Hunt.

Alma: I feel like deep inside, I always expected this. I expected the rottenness in me to be seen by other people right before I managed to expunge it.

Hank: Spoken like a true woman. Never felt myself to be rotten at all.

Alma: Spoken like a true man.

Both my parents grew up in an age of patriarchy, sexism. What has that atmosphere taught me about women? About men? Their inherent nature and their roles? What beliefs have infected me from this system? What effect did traditional gender roles have on all of us? My dad expected to not have much to do with his family; he was the breadwinner. My mom expected to leave her job and be a mom. Both might be unsatisfying, unnecessarily limiting. We'd all benefit from more freedom to be who we want to be, unencumbered by other people's judgements and limitations. I internalized those judgements and limitations and it ran my life. It was a rogue wave I couldn't escape and it definitely picked me up and dumped me sideways. It is amazing to me how deeply these assumptions and beliefs embed in my psyche. If I didn't take the ridiculous risk of modeling a bikini, then I might still be unaware of much of this. I wonder what remains below my awareness even after all of this.

Freedom

Matthew Brensilver said at a retreat once, "The Dharma is really a process of self-familiarization. And from one perspective, we do know ourselves and from another, we really do not. Or we know some things, but we know the wrong things, and we're wedded to stale versions of our autobiography." We are unreliable narrators of our lives. This whole period of my life is my experiment in getting free of my conditioning. It's incredibly hard, and I have had a great deal of time and freedom to focus on the healing. I don't have a family of my own to consider. I don't have other people's needs to contain my search. And I have good insurance that pays for the majority of therapy. I am privileged to be able to pursue the spiritual path according to my own desires. My parents weren't so lucky, maybe. Atonement with the Father means that I can see and accept this reality. I can understand the influences and let them go. This round of the spiritual path is nearing its end. I might be able to let all of this go. What a boon that would be: to have rewritten my story enough to integrate and accept it all, so I can let it go.

Context is everything. Causes and conditions. Right now, moving forward, what story will I write? What is my agency? Can I ever get fully free of these stories that seem to run my life? What can I control?

I can control my efforts toward expanding my awareness. My big initial emotional reaction to these specific, rogue wave events lasted a full 10 days, and I'm still processing, but within that time, I also saw some movement toward responsiveness and awareness inside this massive wave of difficulty. This one has taken some time, but my level of mindfulness has amazed even me. I observed it all, and observation led to intervention. That I was able to use self-compassion practices when deep in the mess was a lifesaver. Soothing my body with compassionate touch and voicing kind internal messages really works. Kindness was a default setting this time, a feature, not a bug. For this recovering perfectionist and hyper achiever? That's quite an accomplishment.

I can control how I regulate my body, the strategies I use to maintain equanimity on a physical and mental level within my context. I acknowledge that I am incredibly privileged in my context: I have managed to find a job that gives me housing in Southern California with nice weather year-round, a university rec center nearby with a pool, and an ocean within a 20-minute drive. I have the time and money to afford these privileges. I don't think I ever realized how much I need exercise and nature. I am someone who can sit for hours in front of a computer writing these entries, hours sitting in front of a book or a Netflix binge. I really need to get out and move when I'm feeling badly, and I know now that I need to move proactively to mitigate feeling badly.

I need the ocean. I need to be in that cold water every week. I need to feel my feet in the sand, feel the sun on my chest. I need to ride a wave every once in a while to remind me that we are all little blobs of flowing being here on earth. The water teaches me that nothing is solid, not even me, and I can flow with the conditions, no matter what they are. My ride is a product of causes and conditions that had nothing to do with me. I can do my best to stay on the wave. Things are really not personal. Body AND mind. I need to work with both in the context of supportive relationships.

I can also do my best to be aware of my beliefs and the behaviors they evoke, because I know how they impact the way I see things. Brensilver said, "We don't know the landscape of our neurosis. We need to know that really carefully. We need to know the limits of our equanimity. And so we become connoisseurs of both our goodness, but also our the habits that get us into trouble." I can keep engaging in the process of discovery. I knew my stories might get in the way of me believing BTG in that pivotal session, so I shared them. I have real difficulties with relationships. I'm like an emotional mendicant going from person to person trying to get something I needed as a child but never got. I can understand that tendency better and work some strategies instead of bailing on a relationship at the first sign of difficulty. I can recognize what patriarchy has taught me and question those lessons.

A saying from the Talmud goes something like, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Lisa Delpit wrote, “We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment - and that is not easy. It is painful as well, because it means turning yourself inside out, giving up your own sense of who you are, and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of another’s angry gaze.” Excavating my beliefs is the key to healing. I regulate my body. Engage with healthy relationships. And I can change my mind. Body - Mind - Relationships.

But why? Why do all this work?

Fresh wound from my fin.

I really didn't know how deep the cuts of my childhood and other tragedies went. Abandonment and neglect have different developmental trajectories than abuse; they are problems of absence. It's hard to get a handle on what wasn't there, what you didn't get. Abandonment and neglect are a pretty powerful combo and I can see how powerful by the way I behave today when in the presence of kind and healthy people. I see how messed up I can be when faced with kindness.

Every time I go home, I realize just how fucked up things are, and probably were while I was growing up, which makes me realize that there's no way I got out of my childhood home without damage. This prompts a weirdly vicious-virtuous cycle. The healthier I get, the more stark the fucked-up-ness gets, the deeper I realize how damaged I am. More damage, deeper flaws. There's always a period of time in which I feel like I need to be removed from society. I isolate myself. And then I go back to the safe people I have met for some love and company, and continue to work with BTG to get healthier, to sand the rough edges of my troubled soul smooth. It's a wave -- healthy to realizing how unhealthy to isolating to starting again. Up and down. I keep going. I'm learning to ride these waves.

I keep going because of a guiding story that I'm reluctant to let go of: a vision of sanity, equanimity, and healing -- for everyone. In No Time to Lose by Pema Chodron, she writes about Shantideva's The Way of the Bodhisattva, a guidebook of sorts for how "to live sanely and openheartedly." There is so much harm being perpetrated in the world. I want to take care of my part of it. Pema writes, "It is the essential guidebook for fledgling bodhisattvas, those spiritual warriors who long to alleviate suffering, their own and that of others. Thus it belongs to the mahayana, the school of Buddhism that emphasizes all-inclusive compassion and the cultivation of our flexible, unbiased wisdom mind." By alleviating my own suffering through meditation and therapy, I reduce the amount of harm I do in the world in two ways.

One, I create less suffering myself. I do my best not to hurt others. I try to act more mindfully in the world. While there are some holes in this approach -- I cannot control how my actions land on another person and every action has the possibility of positive, negative, and neutral consequences -- I'm doing my best. For example, I came into therapy because I was getting really angry at work. Through the process I've done, those buttons are a lot less sensitive. So, theoretically, I am creating less harm in that area of my life, because I'm not acting out as much, delivering harmful words or actions -- or even having harmful thoughts.

Two, I reduce how much I perceive other's actions as harmful. "Harm" is an interpretation of an action that requires two people (at least), a giver and receiver, in a specific context. As the receiver, I can take things less personally and be less reactive. I can receive things as not harmful; I can see them as a result of suffering. While whether I can control the giving of harm is questionable, I can definitely exert control over what I interpret as harmful for myself. And it all depends on the context. What sounds awful in one context can be something quite different in another. What is harmful in one mind, might be neutral in another.

For example, BTG and the bookmarks. Different people would jump to wildly different conclusions when seeing that list of bookmarks. Some people might not react at all, just wonder what he was studying. I wondered a lot of things based on my conditioning. Was it something he did on purpose to escape therapy with me? Was he really in the market for a sex doll? Was he lonely and alienated from his family? Or was it just a mistake? Were the bookmarks professionally-related? If I had stuck with my original hair-on-fire interpretation, then the situation would have led to long-term harm for me, and possibly him. I would have left therapy; I might have reported him to the state. Tempering my reactions allowed me the possibility of healing. Being able to give him the benefit of the doubt and stick with the situation allowed a different result. This initially horrible-sounding situation was for my ultimate benefit. Incredibly painful and difficult, and ultimately, beneficial.

Dr. Gibson on the Being Well podcast shared a story, “There was a story about a guru and his disciples, and one day his disciples come to him and they say, oh, master, you've led us to enlightenment and we're so lucky. But what about all the other people in the world who never got to meet you, never get to hear your message? How will they learn? How will they evolve? And the master said: by the whips of pain.” Pain and fear have been wonderful teachers.

On the lovely Instagram account @steppingthroughfilm, Thomas Duke interviewed Will Smith on his new show called Pole to Pole. Smith said, "One of the things I learned doing this show is that fearlessness is not a real thing. It's not for me, at least. It's not that you become fearless. It's you get comfortable doing things while you're terrified. Right? So it's like training to relax into existential horror and still move into the cave, still move into the ocean. Still step forward into this grand mystery. I don't quite enjoy the feeling of being scared, but I have recognized that when I'm scared, it almost acts like a dissolvent for anything within me that's fake. When I'm really, really scared, and I learn how to practice breathing, and settle down, and relax, all that's false about me burns away. So I get a really good look at myself when I'm terrified. So I I definitely lean into those scary moments for the self discovery of it all."

There appears to be no way around this reality. If we are avoiding the "existential horror" of it all, if we try to avoid going into our own internal darkest caves, then we live a shallow life. We continue to do harm unconsciously. The deeper we go, the more comfortable we get with everything life hands out to us. When we can dive into our own depths, we learn that there is much we can handle. We not only become solid for ourselves, but also a solid source of support for others. Coherent, connected, content.

Pema wrote, "We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice." So the goal of the healing here is to soften, to be free, to be less afraid and more kind, for the benefit everyone, not just myself. When I am in balance, more peaceful and patient, then I can be more helpful and stable for others. I can add less harm to the world. If more people were securely attached, then we might live in a very different world. Can you imagine? If everyone could regulate their emotions before acting on them? If everyone were less afraid? More open?

Jack Kornfield wrote, “Mindfulness is both healing and liberating. Learning to meet our complex world and our own changing mental states with mindful loving awareness and courage allows us to find spacious, clear and healthy responses to life, rather than be caught in habitual reactions and struggle.” Davidson and Goleman wrote in the great book Altered Traits, "The original aim of mindfulness focuses on a deep exploration of the mind toward a profound alteration of our very being....Beyond the pleasant states meditation can produce, the real payoffs are the lasting traits that can result.” I am reassured that continued efforts to become aware of my mind patterns can lead to lasting change. Davidson and Goleman write, “…there were methods that could transform our minds to produce a profound well-being. We did not have to be controlled by the mind, with its random associations, sudden fears and angers, and all the rest – we could take back the helm.”

The Buddha taught that there is suffering, the cause of suffering, and that there is an end of suffering, and he showed us the path to end suffering. So I can suffer a lot less. This bookmarks situation teaches me that the situation itself is neutral -- ok, maybe not entirely neutral; this was a pretty explosive situation, perhaps a bad example of neutral, but the situations themselves are often neutral. It's our thoughts about them that create the suffering. And so, as long as I know myself, the suffering can be greatly reduced, not eliminated, but greatly reduced. I could have given the benefit of the doubt originally. I could have not freaked out. But I was reacting out of my conditioning. So now that I'm aware of that conditioning, I can work with it.

But honestly, the thing that got me through this was having partners in the mess, having people I could count on, who I knew had my best interests at heart, including BTG himself. That got me through it. I know I have people I can count on now. When I was younger, I didn't have people who I could count on. So the world was scary, and my caregivers were part of what was scary. So I never could find my footing. I could never feel safe.

So, now, I have a little feeling of safety. I have a little ground to stand on, even if it is a surfboard gliding unsteadily on bumpy waves. Rogue waves come at us all the time. Can I ever keep myself entirely safe? The answer is no. None of us can. This is a dangerous place. We live in a very, very dangerous place; nowhere is safe on this planet. So I can never keep myself safe alone. That's why we band together. That's why we need community. Because together, we can create a sense of safety within the mess. As long as I have partners in the mess, I can get through anything. A new set of safer people has shown up. Along with an awareness of myself and my issues, this is the way that we get through life. This is the way I can continue. Rogue Wave crap can hit us at any second. And the only way to get through it is together. Relationships. Sangha. Sisterhood.

Many people who are into Buddhism are there for the enlightenment. I'm not sure what that means -- there are so many definitions -- but that's not my goal. Wholeness sounds nice. My goal is to be as peaceful as possible, as authentically myself as possible, as sane as possible, so I can serve the world more whole heartedly. This whole BTG/Dad ordeal has taken me a long way toward that goal. So many false identities and defenses are compromised now. So many fears allayed. Walls continue to fall; the filters in front of my eyes continue to fall away and I can see more clearly what actually is. How empowering! To not take everything so personally. To not live in fear. This doesn't render the world safer, but renders me better able to navigate it. "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf," said Jon Kabat-Zinn. I'm getting there.